Learning Analytics and the Empowerment Paradox

The discourse of educational technology within Higher Education is imbued with notions of technology’s capacity to empower its stakeholders, and this is particularly evident in the promissory narrative surrounding Learning Analytics. Learning Analytics represent a significant area of growth and investment, with universities introducing sophisticated data infrastructures to track engagement, monitor activity, enhance attainment, and boost retention. Nevertheless, claims of empowerment do not go unchallenged, and a growing body of critical work highlights the inherent complexities surrounding Learning Analytics and power. Using a Foucauldian lens of governmentality and subjectification, this study examines how empowerment is constructed in sector discourse and how it is enacted, negotiated, or resisted in everyday lived experience. The study adopts a multi-organisational design, combining a Critical Discourse Analysis of sector texts with an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of lived experience. Drawing on sixteen documents and nineteen interviews across seven UK universities, the study traces how sector rhetoric translates into concrete artefacts and rules-in-use. It specifies the institutional conditions under which Learning Analytics are experienced as supportive rather than disciplinary—namely, arrangements of knowledge, control, and voice. In doing so, this thesis contributes to the critical study of educational technology by reframing Learning Analytics as a governance design problem and offering practical implications for care-first, participatory configurations of Higher Education.