The pervasive involvement of technologies in education has raised questions about the authority of digital platforms in shaping the future of educational practices. Through datafied surveillance, predictive analytics, automated teaching, digital platforms exercise their power not only on the infrastructures of pedagogy, but also on the political configurations of what counts as pedagogical knowledge (Cone, 2023). This paper aims at developing a research agenda to pursue alternatives to commercially driven logics underpinning current platformisation of education. In our proposal, this entails challenging habitual narrations of both humanism and technology-driven educational change to shift the focus from instrumental perspectives to collective and ethical stances (Pischetola, 2021). In relation to wonted assumptions of humanism, we argue, an ethical stance is characterised by its emphasis on the embodied and historical nature of digital education as something that requires situated judgements about the different forms of living that are coming into the world (Masschelein & Simons, 2015). Such judgments involve looking at the history of digital platforms and analysing both the materiality of what appears to be without material consequence – concepts, policies, tools, practices – and the discursivity of what appears to be fixed and passive – classroom settings, whiteboards. Pedagogy, in this view, becomes a posthuman practice directed toward drawing forth the forces at play in human becoming – rather than an attempt to realise certain pregiven ideas of becoming human (Biesta, 2011). As for assumptions around technology-driven change, our proposal to begin from pedagogy and ethics pushes beyond discourses that place technology at the vanguard of educational innovation, as this ultimately replicates modern ontologies and colonial epistemologies (Karumbaiah & Brooks, 2021). At every appearance of a new technology, utopian and dystopian narratives emerge – listing benefits and dangers, opportunities and risks, potentials and limitations – and by so doing, they avoid addressing more complex issues of distributed oppression, institutional materialisations of power, and exacerbation of structural inequalities. Post-platform schooling, we suggest, can be imagined only by understanding digital platforms as part of an ecosystem made of human and material actors (Pischetola & Miranda, 2020), and by exploring how technologies can become environmental forces for affirmative political transformation (Zembylas, 2023). On these grounds, a research agenda for post-platform education requires not merely investing in digital literacy, critical skills, and human empowerment, but also unveiling political and ethical stances that platforms present for education, with discussions about embodied intersubjectivity, responsibility, agency and justice.

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