Conference Program

In the midst of collective experiences of uncertainty and instability, how to educate new generations of citizens has become an increasingly contested question in technological societies. This piece asks how social actors—parents, educators, policymakers, and technologists—problematize the relation between digital technology and educational institutions and the ways in which this relation helps shape the human subject. It traces how these actors collectively respond in attempts to set this relation ‘right’ and the ways in which their responses reconfigure subjectivity and relationality in technological societies.

This presentation builds upon an early version of one of my dissertation chapters, which focuses on how people come together around the educational philosophies and practices of Rudolf Steiner in efforts to make the social and technological conditions of subject formation through conventional forms of schooling into a concern worthy of public attention. This chapter traces how people committed to Steiner’s pedagogy in Switzerland responded to the advent of the internet in the 1990s, the widespread use of mobile phones in the 2000s, the introduction of smartphones in the 2010s, and to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence in the 2020s.

This piece contributes to this panel discussion by attending at once to the novelty of the mutual formation between algorithmic environments and the human subject, and to historical trajectories that have helped give the contemporary societal fabric its form. It aims to open avenues for continued and deepened dialogue between scholarship in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), history and philosophy of education. This piece brings together, on the one hand, a leading edge of scholarship in STS which builds upon and extends the Latourian notion of constitution (Latour [1991] 1993) and theories on bioconstitutionalism (Jasanoff 2003, 2011) to characterize constitutions of the human with science and technology in modern societies (Sunder Rajan 2011; Laurent 2017, 2024, 2025; Boenig-Liptsin 2024; Boenig-Liptsin and West Bassoff forthcoming). On the other hand, this text complements historical and contemporary accounts of education and technology by—in a dual sense—bringing ‘and’ back to life. It extends historical accounts of education technology (Cain 2021; Watters 2021; Flury and Geiss 2023; Trumbore 2025) by focusing on the lived experience of ordinary people, attending to the changing conditions of teaching, learning, and living with digital technologies as they were experienced by social actors committed to the educational philosophy and practice of Rudolf Steiner. Whereas earlier scholarship primarily focused on how technological artifacts entered the classroom, my project understands technology as social relations (Haraway 1997), as sets of techniques, practices, and epistemologies that are constitutive of ways of life (Latour 1987). Understood in this way, this chapter traces relations between education and technology in ways which extend histories of education technology (see also Boenig-Liptsin forthcoming) by engaging ethnographic and historical source materials, privileging the situated experience of people living in particular social, cultural, political, and historical contexts, and by drawing on key theories and methods in social constructionism and phenomenology.