[Commlist] cfp: Special Issue - Post-Platform Education: Reimagining Digital Ecosystems in Primary and Secondary Schooling

CFP: Special Issue - Post-Platform Education: Reimagining Digital 
Ecosystems in Primary and Secondary Schooling

Journal: Learning, Media & Technology

Guest Editors: Lucas Cone and Niels Kerssens

In recent years, European schools and classrooms have become 
increasingly dependent on Big Tech ecosystems and their promises to 
seamlessly interconnect physical devices, educational software and apps, 
and cloud services. With companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple 
tightening their grip on classrooms’ transition into digital 
environments, Big Tech is asserting control over the material 
infrastructures, discursive framings, and economic logics undergirding 
educational digitalization. As noted in recent scholarship, the process 
of platformization provides a useful conceptual tool to describe the 
implications of this dynamic, namely the transformation of educational 
content, activities and processes to become part of a (corporate) 
platform ecosystem, including its economies (data) infrastructures and 
technical architectures (Kerssens & Dijck, 2021; Srnicek, 2016).

In educational research, the broad field of study encompassed under 
the sociologies of education has proven to provide especially fertile 
soil for critically analyzing the roles and effects of digital 
technologies as they become entangled with educational ideas, 
professional practices, and school materialities (Selwyn, 2019). 
Applying the analytical lens of platformization, recent work has 
examined Big Tech influence in public education, including the power of 
corporate cloud companies and infrastructures in educational governance 
(Cone et al., 2022; Kerssens, 2024; Kerssens et al., 2023; Williamson et 
al., 2022). One strand of these studies has engaged specific platform 
brands such as ClassDojo (Manolev et al., 2019), Google Classroom 
(Perrotta et al., 2021), as well as various country-specific platforms 
(Gorur & Dey, 2021; Hartong, 2021), exploring how users and pedagogies 
are configured in and through the platforms’ technical arrangements 
(Sefton-green & Pangrazio, 2021). Others have taken up the political 
economy underpinning platformisation, probing how and to whom data is 
generated, circulated, turned into assets as it moves across platforms, 
governmental entities, educational institutions, teachers, and other 
actors (Birch & Muniesa, 2020; Komljenovic, 2021; Pangrazio et al., 
2023). Another strand of research has examined how platformization 
affects the day-to-day relations of teachers and students in schools and 
other lived, institutional settings (Apps et al., 2023; Cone, 2023, 2024).

Yet as the monetary models, materialities, and embodied effects of Big 
Tech education come under increasing scholarly, political, and 
regulatory scrutiny, the apparent disaffection permeating much of the 
literature on platforms and platformization begs the question of how and 
where to look for alternatives – both from a practical, administrative, 
pedagogical, and ethical viewpoint. Specifically, recent years have seen 
a growing body of calls for critical scholars, activists, and teachers 
to explore possibilities for reimagining digital education ecosystems 
that can challenge the status quo of the platform as the infrastructural 
and pedagogical default for educational digitalization (Selwyn, 2022; 
Selwyn et al., 2020). With this special issue, we seek to give space for 
empirical presentations and theoretical frameworks that can nurture such 
forms of questioning of post-platform education and thereby mobilize the 
global educational research community around the critical study of 
platformization – not to reject but rethink the use and potentiality of 
digital technologies in education (Macgilchrist, 2021). The special 
issue invites papers that explore possibilities for grounding digital 
technologies in primary and secondary schooling in other forms of 
pedagogical and sociological reasoning, infrastructural arrangements, 
and forms of governance. This can include, but is not limited to studies of:

•Alternative infrastructures and economic arrangements for digital 
educational governance of primary and secondary education, hereunder 
explorations of the promises and pitfalls of alternatives based in 
open-source or other non-proprietary models for digital design and 
development

•Digital degrowth and other critical theoretical resources for thinking 
with and beyond platforms in ways that foreground other values and 
criteria of evaluation in schools

•Studies of power asymmetries and inequality in EdTech development and 
markets for school education, hereunder alternative forms of 
market-making and feminist design practices

•Collective forms of mobilization against big tech across different 
stakeholders (teachers, unions, politicians) and levels (institutional, 
sectoral, national, transnational)

•Countervailing discourses and framings of EdTech, especially in light 
of current digital backlashes unfolding in different regions

•Postdigital concepts and design processes that recognize educational 
realities as messy and historical rather than ahistorical problems to be 
solved

•Sociotechnical imaginaries of digital education based in post-platform 
pedagogies or other models for re-imagining digital ecosystems in schools

•Institutional interventions based on extending the terms and interests 
connected to post-platform education

**Submission Instructions**

Abstracts of maximum 500 words must be sent to Lucas Cone ((lc /at/ hum.ku.dk) 
<mailto:(lc /at/ hum.ku.dk)>) and Niels Kerssens ((n.kerssens /at/ uu.nl) 
<mailto:(n.kerssens /at/ uu.nl)>) before January 31st2025. We encourage 
original research articles based either on empirical or conceptual 
analyses of issues pertaining to the call. Authors of accepted abstracts 
will be invited to join an author workshop before the deadline for full 
paper submissions. Additional information will be provided for accepted 
papers about how and where to submit the full paper. All papers should 
be aligned with the journal's Aims and Scope 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cjem20/about-this-journal>. The 
special issue is set for publication during 2027. Accepted articles will 
be published online first. No payment from the authors will be required.


Decision on abstracts: *February, 2025*

Full manuscript submission deadline: *June 30, 2025.*

For more information on the CfP and submission guidelines: 
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/post-platform-education-reimagining-digital-ecosystems-in-primary-and-secondary-schooling/ 



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