Centre colleague Ben Williamson is coorganising the first edition of the European Conference on Critical Edtech Studies (ECCES), which will take place at the Zurich University of Teacher Education on 18-20 June 2025. The organising committee includes Mathias Decuypere(Link leads to external web page) (Zurich University of Teacher Education), Sigrid Hartong(Link leads to external web page) (HSU Hamburg) and Jeremy Knox(Link leads to external web page) (University of Oxford).
The Conference theme will be: Defining the Field, Envisioning the Future.
The ECCES conference is particularly dedicated to critical scholarship around the following areas:
- Technological Artifacts: Educational platforms, apps, AI, VR, data visualizations, and other digital tools.
- Policy and Governance: The role of governments, institutions, actor networks, and particular discourses in shaping edtech development and adoption.
- Political Economy: Business practices, capitalization, assets, value creation, corporations, EdTech industry, startups, edu-businesses.
- Social Justice and Diversity: The impact of edtech on marginalized communities, the (re-) production of inequalities, and how edtech is (not) addressing heterogeneous or postcolonial audiences.
- Learning, Pedagogy and Assessment: Types and visions of learning, teaching, pedagogy and assessment enhanced or inhibited by interfaces, data analytics, and algorithmic modelling.
- Ethical Considerations: Privacy, surveillance, and the ethical implications of data-driven education.
- Methodological Approaches: The various ways in which Critical Edtech Studiescan investigate and contribute to (re-)shaping edtech, including evolutions towards more participatory and co-design approaches.
- Sustainability and Planetary Futures: The environmental impact of edtech, how it matters, and how it can be mitigated.
- Histories of EdTech: patterns and repetitions, hype cycles, persistent discourses, antecedents and early traces, hidden histories.
- Future Visions: Speculative futures, utopian and dystopian scenarios, alternative pathways for edtech development and education policy, literacy frameworks for professionalization.
The organising committee is currently accepting individual paper abstracts of 250-350 words. Abstracts must be sent to ecces@phzh.ch by the 15 December 2024 (8pm CET).
Further information on the requirements to apply and the full Call for Abstracts can be found here: ECCES Call for Abstracts.