Education Governance and Artificial Intelligence: A More-than-Human Perspective for a Weak Education Governmentality

The entanglements between education and artificial intelligence (AIED) are nowadays a key trait in the (re)definition of educational governance, policies and practices. This chapter explores some folds of those entanglements, adopting a particular take on governance as governmentality, that is as a set of discursive practices involving the mobilization of specific gazes upon education, of distinct horizons of intelligibility and morality for it. Moving from a more-than-human perspective and challenging any assumption of a total exteriority between technology and the human, the chapter analyzes a specific case, which unfolds around the fictionalised use of specific generative AIs in a school, classroom and human-AI cognitive and affective assemblage. Approaching our fictionalised case as a historical singularity of ‘education governance as governmentality’ and an exemplary space of epistemic, power and ethical relations, we explore and discuss some of the chains and relays that join up the mundane and minute ‘educational experience’ in that classroom to wider processes of education governance, datafication, learnification and EdTech market-making. In concluding the chapter, we both develop a critique of functionalist and exploitative forms of more-than-human education and education governance and claim that a ‘dangerous but valuable’ way for staying with AIED in education comes from turning down the hybris of control and striving for the concrete utopia of a weak governmentality of education, where technology contributes to the opening of crossroads in which new beginnings and different directions become possible for any techno-human cognitive and affective assemblage.