COVID and Digital Transformation of Education: International Organisations’ Sociotechnical Imaginaries for futures of education

This study explores how COVID narrowed the visions of education futures of UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank to one dominant vision, centred on the digital transformation of education, comparing the way these organisations have embedded and resisted the predominant vision. To advance nuanced analysis, Jasanoff and Kim’s concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ is adopted as an analytical frame alongside comparative thematic analysis of policy documents and semi-structured interviews. The findings of this study suggest that while UNESCO advocates a humanistic, redistributive vision led by the ‘social’ and their sanctions for digital public education infrastructures, the OECD and the Bank promote techno-solutionist imaginaries anticipating the agency of technologies for personalised, equitable, interoperable, and cost-effective education. Revealing the discrepancies between their humanitarian narratives and proposals for digital education infrastructures, I argue that international organisations – especially the OECD and the World Bank - have become neo-empires of our mind, spreading a narrowed vision of skills-focused education as a solution to economic problems. Despite their transformative aspirations, these neo-empires have reproduced historically compromised linear socio-technical imaginaries of technological civilisation towards digital revolutions, endorsing technical, evidence-based practices for the future of public education.