Theorizing affective chronopolitics of AI in higher education: A multi‐level analytical framework

This conceptual paper extends existing theorization of affective chronopolitics to examine how AI technologies become implicated in the governance of educational subjects, institutions and imagined futures in higher education. In particular, we argue that AI‐mediated temporalities may involve different manifestations such as immediacy, anticipation, acceleration or delay, while their affective dimensions may encompass anxiety and fatigue as well as relief and hope. Building on scholarship on chronopolitics, affect and educational governance, we develop a multi‐level analytical framework spanning the micro level of lived experience and subject formation, the meso level of institutional organization and responsibility and the macro level of policy imaginaries and governance. The framework foregrounds how AI technological capacities become translated into affective‐temporal norms and how their benefits and burdens are unevenly distributed in higher education. We suggest that this framework offers a heuristic for empirical research into how AI reorganizes affective and temporal arrangements in higher education.