When the Standard Moves: Capability, Habitus, and the Temporal Asymmetry of Postdigital Educational Justice

Educational institutions repeatedly change the technological conditions of participation: they procure learning platforms, redesign assessment, and introduce rules on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Students differ in their previous opportunities to learn how to adapt to such changes, and these differences can reproduce educational inequalities even after earlier gaps have been reduced. Combining Sen’s capability approach with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, the article argues that postdigital educational justice is also a question of unequally distributed speeds, and that the tempo to which learners must respond is set largely by institutional decisions rather than by technology alone, which makes it a political matter. The institutional side of this tempo is reconstructed analytically. The concept of habitually practised transfer competence names the capacity, acquired over earlier changes, to work out what an institution counts as competent once its tools and rules have changed. Where changes are assessed before students could practise, differences in this capacity can be expected to be reproduced at each change, so that gaps can reopen rather than close. The article proposes a pluralist criterion, combining a threshold of participation with relative standing, to determine when unequal speeds are unjust. It also outlines a longitudinal research programme through which the argument can be tested.