More-than-human education governance and AI: analytical tools for policy

Dr Francesca Peruzzo, School of Education, University of Birmingham

Abstract

Education governance is being reorganised through the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), data infrastructures and automated decision-making. Rather than treating AI as a tool that enhances human policy rationality, this talk adopts a more-than-human approach to analyse how platforms, algorithms and data reconfigure agency, cognition and accountability in education systems. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies, New Materialisms, and education policy research, I introduce post-anthropocentrism, symbiosis and affectivity as three analytical tools to diagnose how AI participates in governing beyond the human. Using cases from England and Italy, I contrast extractive and inequitable algorithmic assemblages with convivial, community-led experiments, making the argument that AI produces cognitive-affective configurations of governance that cannot be understood through fairness, efficiency or human-centric policy frameworks alone. A more-than-human approach offers a way to theorise these transformations and opens space for more democratic and convivial futures in Critical EdTech Studies and education policy.

Bio

Francesca Peruzzo is a Research Fellow in Educational Equity and Policy at the University of Birmingham. Her work examines the intersection between politics, policy, education governance and inclusion, using in particular post-structural and new material approaches. Expert in critical ethnographic methods and network governance, she has published widely in the field of ableism in higher education and champions co-production, and she is co-investigator in the Office for Student funded project Disparity of Support (2025-27). Francesca is co-editor (with Paolo Landri) of the forthcoming Shifting landscapes in digital education policy: More-than-human education governance and new materialisms (Springer, 2026) and of Students, teachers, families, and a socially just education: Rewriting the grammar of schooling to unsettle identities (Lived Places Publishing, 2023) (with Julie Allan).

Joining Online
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