Technical agonism: embracing democratic dissensus in the datafication of education

The critical study of digital platforms and infrastructures: Current issues and new agendas for education technology research

“…Current discussions in the field of critical platform studies in education are showing a strong interest in technical democracy as a paradigm for increasing public engagement and ethics (Thompson et al, 2022). To a certain degree, these discussions revolve around the implicit type of democratic participation to embrace: a pragmatic one that, while open and critical still operates within the boundaries of deliberative consensus, or a more radically pluralistic position that emphasises antagonism, dissent and the formulation of stringent criteria to identify risks and harms (Holloway et al, 2022). It is not this paper's goal to analyse the differences and overlaps between these positions.…”