Abstract
Accelerating digitization, algorithmic computation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, along with the increasing automation of work, communication, and everyday life, are central to critical studies of technology and political economy, as well as to public discourse concerning technology’s role in creating futures. Ongoing transformations in technological capacity have also been scrutinized for their impact on experience, emotion, and culture. Building on David Theo Goldberg’s assertion that “tracking capitalism” creates pervasive dread, this article explores how the digital automation of education, specifically, generates forms of algorithmic anxiety that impact teaching and learning, constraining pedagogical visions of alternative futures. Algorithmic anxiety in education contributes to dread’s proliferation. If dread is the “driving social sensibility” today, and algorithmic anxiety a pedagogical vector of its spread, then a less dreadful education should center an imaginative struggle for new sensibilities.
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Graham B. Slater
Graham B. Slater is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Drawing from perspectives in critical theory and cultural studies, his research explores issues of imagination, desire, and utopia in the politics of education under capitalism, ecological crisis, and technological change. His forthcoming book Horizons of the Future: Science Fiction, Utopian Imagination, and the Politics of Education will be published by Routledge in 2024, and he co-edited Educational Commons in Theory and Practice: Global Pedagogy and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He is the Associate Editor of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.