Conference Program

This paper aligns with the panel “Opacity, Subjectivity, and Pedagogy in Algorithmic Times” by examining how informational capitalism and algorithmic authority reshape conditions for trust, legitimacy, and sense-making among young people. Education, long entrusted with cultivating interpretative capacities and intergenerational connection critical to democratic subjectivity, now confronts chronopathologies that are eroding its very foundations.[i]

Today’s youth inhabit an unforgiving digital environment where interiority (attention, affect, desire) is converted into data, and their past is never permitted to fade.[ii] Social media platforms, driven by profit motives, construct a “digital unconscious” that archives every action in an endless loop, making forgetting and forgiveness increasingly arduous. While forgetting and forgiving are distinct –one can forgive without forgetting and forget without forgiving – the “digital unconscious” undermines both by trapping individuals in cycles of hyper-transparency and moralization, where every move is subject to scrutiny and social-judgement. For young people, this means fewer opportunities to reimagine themselves beyond their past actions or engage in the interpretive acts required for repair and renewal.[iii]

These capacities are essential not only for individual formation but for cultivating democratic sensitivities (patience, interpretative generosity, tolerance for opacity, openness to otherness) upon which collective-convivial life depends. However, their erosion exposes fissures in institutional legitimacy. In an environment where algorithms immortalize missteps and intensify provocations, how can educational institutions sustain trust, forgiveness, and the possibility of beginning again? Under such conditions, education’s role as a place for experimentation, failure, and renewal is squandered, threatening the very cultivation of sensibilities that make democratic life imaginable in the first place.

Yet education retains a crucial “reparative potential.” Drawing on an educational archive that includes notions such as skole, studium vs. acedia, and intellectus vs. ratio, this paper explores alternative temporalities to counteract the accelerating, punitive chronopathologies of digital life. These vocabularies, the paper proposes, help articulate how classrooms can cultivate the conditions necessary for forgiveness: interpretive generosity, symbolic room for error, and the temporal distance required to see oneself and others anew. Informed by thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva’s work on “forgiveness,” this examination highlights the importance of rethinking forgiveness in light of digital realities.[iv] Additionally, by engaging with Mark Fisher’s ideas on attending to “the strange, the unexpected, the weird, and obscured,”[v] this paper argues that education must create spaces for imaginative and ethical possibilities in an age of algorithmic foreclosure and the tyranny of transparency.[vi] By fostering experiences that exceed the logic of “total recall,” the educational in education can help young people recover capacity to orient themselves toward ambiguity, renewal, generosity and relational repair.

Ultimately, the paper argues that nurturing these capacities is indispensable for rebuilding trust and sensibilities required for democratic life in an age when both education and democracy are being rendered increasingly senseless and hapless. Education remains one of the last institutions capable of cultivating the interpretative, temporal, and ethical resources necessary for democratic futures in which forgiveness, and thus genuine new beginnings, remain possible.

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.

This study investigates the relationship between human agency and Artificial In-
telligence (AI) systems, focusing on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED)
dynamics and the growing crisis of technological integrity. As generative tools
become part of everyday life, a significant threat to independent thinking arises
from the hidden biases within autocomplete predictions ([8, 9]).
These suggestions are the real-time word or phrase hints provided by an AI
as a user types. Far from being neutral aids, they are weighted by the biases
of their underlying training data. In education, AI may systematically steer
students toward specific cultural perspectives, gender stereotypes, or Western-
centric worldviews ([1]).
When interacting with these systems, learners encounter a subtle but persis-
tent form of algorithmic nudging, leading to subconscious adoption of both the
logic and lexicon of these biased suggestions. This gradually reshapes a student’s
original intent, presenting a critical challenge for educators: ensuring that the
AI does not lead to standardized thinking, nudging the next generation towards
biased, polarized or ethically compromised worldviews ([4, 5, 6]). Given the
recent geopolitical landscape, the integration of Large Language Model (LLM)s
into national defense infrastructures and the resulting regulatory pressures on
private AI labs, (e.g., the ”supply chain risk” designation of entities resisting
military de-alignment). this study analyses the socio-pedagogical impact of
autocomplete bias. As training datasets may move toward a ”war-centric” ori-
entation, the predictive nature of AI may cease to be a neutral utility, and may
be a vehicle for cognitive heteronomy ([2, 7]).
The analysis identifies three vectors of technological misuse and their impact
on the educational landscape:
• Dangerous Data Polarization and the Martial Shift: With given opti-
mizations, a martial bias turns creative tools into devices for normalized
conflict. These algorithms trap students into narrow, reactive thought
echo-chambers.
• From Surveillance to Cognitive Homogenization: The black-box implemen-
tation of predictive analytics for student grading and the deployment of
invasive biometric surveillance in schools are often framed as optimization.
Learners are considered as data points to be managed rather than subjects
to be nurtured.
• Restoring the Ethical Covenant in Pedagogy: The educational stakehold-
ers cannot effectively engage with tools appearing clandestine vehicles for
state propaganda or militarized logic. The paper posits that trustworthy
and ethical AI is actually a pedagogical requirement for democracy.
In conclusion, this work advocates for a Sovereign Ethical AI in Education,
denouncing the risk of tools that may transform into silent devices for martial
indoctrination ([3]). It also calls for schools to become sites of Critical AI
Literacy, where polarized biases of modern technology are deconstructed. The
transparency and ethical non-negotiability demand can ensure that technology
remains an instrument for human flourishing, rather than a silent and polarized
architect.

From work to everyday life, AI profoundly transforms processes and social relationships in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Human interactions, economic structures, and even decision-making processes are undergoing an unprecedented metamorphosis. With the rapid growth and diffusion of Artificial Intelligence technologies, many countries have recognized the importance of developing a specific national strategy aimed at promoting the effective, regulated, and sustainable adoption of these technologies.

With particular regard to sustainability, the concept of transcalarity can represent a meaningful interpretative key for understanding how sustainability education from a transcalar perspective may foster the ability to recognize connections, interdependencies, and the consequences of choices made by individuals regarding AI, as well as by collective actors within complex systems. Indeed, AI operates simultaneously across multiple levels:
(i) Global: shaping information dynamics, technological infrastructures, and the scientific capacities needed to address sustainability challenges (climate, biodiversity, food security);
(ii) National and institutional: influencing educational policies, school curricula, and investments in digital skills;
(iii) Local and community: supporting participatory processes, environmental data management, and local monitoring tools;
(iv) Individual: affecting the ways in which learners study, contributing to the development of critical thinking, and shaping the relationship between individuals and technology.

Within this perspective, the paper aims to present and discuss the structural elements and the main educational outcomes of a new socio-educational practice designed to promote sustainability education in relation to the use of AI: the semi-immersive techno-aesthetic experience. This experience was developed within the international research project CairƐ (2023–2026), launched in partnership with Middlesex University London and West University of Timișoara.

The techno-aesthetic experience has been tested with approximately 450 children in Grades 4 and 5 of primary school. The experience allows children, working in small groups, to “enter” an aesthetic virtual environment (a “painting”) created in 3D and accessed using sensor-equipped goggles and a joystick.

The environment is specifically designed around the theme of Gaia Earth and presents two different virtual spaces: a mountain and its surrounding natural habitat (external environment) and, at a second level, the cave inside the mountain (internal environment).

Children explore the environment in order to search for clues related to the theme of sustainability and discuss their transscalar implications in groups (external environment), and to reflect on the specific relationship between trans-scalar sustainability and AI (internal environment). This reflection is also carried out through interaction with a humanoid robot integrated with AI.

The growing geopolitical disorder, characterized by the fragmentation of the information ecosystem and the progressive platformization of the public sphere, has profoundly redefined the conditions of possibility for democracy. As Habermas observed in his analysis of the structural transformation of the public sphere (Habermas, 1962), changes in communication technologies directly affect the forms of democratic deliberation. Today, artificial intelligence, while constituting an enabling technology, also represents a true epistemic and political infrastructure that shapes the formation of public opinion and the deliberative processes of individuals. From this perspective, AI cannot be interpreted merely as a tool; rather, it should be understood as a socio-technical device capable of organizing the relationship between knowledge, power, and the governance of information (Floridi, 2017). The structural transformation of the res publica now assumes a global dimension, within which AI contributes to redefining the boundaries of public information. In this context, education, as a foundation of democracy and a space for the formation of public intelligence, calls for a reconsideration of educational practices in light of digital tools that mediate knowledge, opinion, and participation (Panciroli & Rivoltella, 2023). Consequently, there is a need to develop forms of algorithmic literacy and critical awareness of communication systems that today organize access to information and orient - more or less implicitly - the cognitive and decision-making processes of citizens (Beer, 2017). Starting from these epistemological premises, this contribution presents an exploratory quantitative descriptive study conducted through a questionnaire administered to a sample of secondary school teachers in Calabria and Sicily. The study analyzes teachers’ level of awareness regarding the functioning of algorithms and artificial intelligence systems, the perceived effects of disinformation within the educational environment, and the emerging practices of critically integrating AI into teaching. The objective is twofold: on the one hand, to understand the degree of preparedness among teachers with respect to the transformations introduced by AI; on the other, to identify possible directions for the development of a democratic pedagogy of the algorithm, capable of integrating digital competencies, critical thinking, and civic responsibility into students’ education.