COVID and International Organisations’ Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Digital Transformation of Education
Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: This study explores how COVID, as a key crisis moment, narrowed the visions of the future of UNESCO, the OECD, and World Bank to the predominant global sociotechnical imaginaries of digital transformation of education, exploring the politics of crisis in the transition to digitalisation of education. The analytical framework of sociotechnical imaginaries is adopted to analyse policy documents and semi-structured interviews. The findings of this study suggest that while UNESCO advocates humanistic, redistributive, resistant imaginaries of digital transformation of education anticipating social agents’ roles in the democratic governance of equitable public digital education, the OECD and the World Bank envision liberal, techno-solutionist imaginaries of resilient, scalable, interoperable digital education infrastructures and ecosystems. Revealing the competing ideas of moral beliefs and causal certainty underlying these organisations’ imaginaries, this article argues that international organisations – especially the OECD and the World Bank - have become neo-empires of our mind, entrenching the crisis response of digital mode of education as the future of education. While powerful states pursue national interests returning from globalisation, the OECD and the World Bank appear to embark on another structural reform movement with neoliberal proposals for digital public education systems increasingly governed by companies located in these countries.
Author: Choah Park
Institution: University College London
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4415016498
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