Technology has evolved from being a marginal consideration to a key central strategy in shaping UNESCO’s approach to fulfilling its global education mandate. What began as a focus on ICTs to support access and capacity-building, has gradually expanded into a broader digital transformation agenda encompassing platforms, data infrastructures, and multistakeholder partnerships with global technology corporations (Giannini, 2022). This reorientation has been further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which UNESCO (2023; 2025) has repeatedly framed as an inflection point; one that exposed long-standing systemic fragilities while simultaneously opening new possibilities for reimagining how education systems are governed and made resilient. Within this context, digital technologies are increasingly positioned not as temporary solutions to crisis, but as foundational conditions for long-term system reform. These imaginaries articulate a broader vision in which social and technological transformations are co-produced, yet they also raise critical questions about the politics, priorities, and power relations embedded in this reorientation (Elfert & Yseden, 2023; Gorur, Seller & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019). This complexity underscores the need for a more critical, nuanced approach to understand the integration of technology into global education reforms.

This PhD study examines how UNESCO’s sociotechnical imaginaries of digital education are evolving through its entanglements with big tech actors, and how these imaginaries are reshaping its approaches to global education reform under conditions of crisis and uncertainty. It focuses on two post-pandemic UNESCO initiatives- the Global Education Coalition (GEC) and the Digital Transformation Collaborative (DTC). They were Initially established as emergency responses to widespread educational disruption in 2020 and have since stabilised into a more long-term arrangement. The GEC and DTC bring together more than 200 members, including international organisations, civil society actors, global technology corporations, and government bodies. Together, they provide critical sites for examining how digital education futures are assembled through complex interactions of policies and partnerships. The research addresses two key questions: (1) How are UNESCO’s sociotechnical imaginaries of digital education evolving through its partnerships with big tech actors, and in what ways are these imaginaries reconfiguring global education reform? (2) How are new roles, competing visions, and priorities negotiated within these multistakeholder assemblages?

The study approaches the UNESCO-initiatives as sociotechnical assemblages through which particular visions of education, and its governance are articulated and operationalised. It draws from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to frame its theoretical background and mobilises key concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries, infrastructures and assemblages. The study seeks to contend that UNESCO’s education reforms, aligned towards digitalisation, are not merely reflecting pre-existing visions of an equitable and accessible quality education, but are also actively materialising desirable education futures. As such, this research study locates digital education beyond a set of tools, practices and policies. It views digital education as dynamic sociotechnical imaginaries, which get assembled, contested, and performed across scales and sites. The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries as defined by Jasanoff (2015, p.6) refers to “collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures”. These imaginaries, hence, are not simple narratives or visions. They are world-making forces which evolve as materialisations within infrastructures, policy-enactments, and get legitimised through institutional relationships (Furlong, 2014; Star & Bowker, 1999). UNESCO’s entanglements with big tech thus become reflective of how these imaginaries travel, morph and assemble in diverse contexts. This framing further implies that neither technology nor policy can be fully understood in isolation from the discourses, practices, and infrastructures that sustain them. In the context of this study, such a perspective is critical for analysing how UNESCO and its big tech partners configure digital futures through sociotechnical imaginaries that travel across borders and are locally contested.

The research is designed as an assemblage ethnography (Wahlberg, 2022), to enables the study of phenomena unfolding across sites, scales, and actors. An assemblage ethnography does not assume a bounded field. It follows how policies, technologies, institutions, and imaginaries are brought into relation and get stabilised. Within this methodological framing, documents are treated as key ethnographic sites through which UNESCO’s digital education initiatives are assembled and governed. This paper presents preliminary findings from the analysis of 21 key documents associated with the GEC and the DTC. This including vision-setting texts, operational frameworks, policy briefs, coordination documents, and event-related web publications. The analysis follows Asdal and Reinersten’s (2021) documents analysis. It reads documents not as neutral repositories of policy intent but as sites of action, coordination, and imagination, where documents exist as sociotechnical actors with performative capacity. These texts not only describe educational futures but also enact specific norms and logics that shape how digital transformation is understood and governed. In doing so, the documents help to translate broad visions of digital transformation into operational frameworks, partnership arrangements, and governing logics that travel across contexts, sites and scales. Conceptualising documents in this way shapes how the analysis proceeds. Instead of reading documents for what they say about digital education, the analysis attends to how documents operate, for example- how they bring together heterogeneous actors, establish shared vocabularies, and translate broad visions into operational forms. This emphasis on documents in action aligns with treating governance as an ongoing, distributed process that is performed through practices such as reporting, standard-setting or framework-building. The document analysis in this thesis considers two lines of inquiry- what documents say and what work they do. Within the GEC and DTC assemblages, documents function as mediators that align various actors, UNESCO, big tech companies, national ministries, civil society organisations, and local partners, around shared imaginaries of ‘digital transformation.’ These textual artefacts provide both linguistic and procedural infrastructures through which collaboration becomes workable, creating common reference points, standardising priorities, and shaping expectations (Gorur et al., 2019). Documents such as DTC’s Six Pillars Framework operationalise imaginaries of digital education by prescribing roles, delineating responsibilities, defining indicators of success, and embedding assumptions about capacity, infrastructure, and readiness into global-to-local practices (UNESCO, 2023). Such frameworks, hence, exemplify how documents can structure action, mediate coordination, and translate abstract visions into actionable forms.

The findings suggest that documents carry an articulation of resilience, which operates within a broader imaginary of crises. Pandemics, conflicts, climate emergencies, are not treated as aberrations but as catalytic portals for policy experimentation and system- redesign. In this framing, uncertainty becomes a productive policy resource. Within GEC and DTC materials, disruption is mobilised to legitimise data-driven coordination, leadership readiness, and “whole-of-system” digital transformation (UNESCO, 2025, p. 10). GEC-DTC workshops function as diagnostic spaces where future aspirations are aligned. Their operational framework introduces new conceptual and material infrastructures that embed resilience into connectivity thresholds, data flow cycles, and regimes of continuous experimentation. The analysis further shows how documents subtly order authority and expertise within UNESCO’s multistakeholder arrangements. Guidance materials articulate partnerships through the language of readiness, capacity, and innovation ecosystems. It positions big tech actors as innovation leaders and technical experts in an anticipatory governance logic (Lakoff, 2015), which is oriented towards managing future uncertainty. These distinctions stabilise an uneven distributions of agency. They legitimise a governance logic where platforms, standards, and frameworks provided by big tech increasingly shape the landscape of global education reforms. The study contributes to critical debates central to the ECER 2026 theme concerning the changing conditions of knowing and acting in education. By foregrounding UNESCO’s entanglements with big tech, the study contributes to critical debates on global education governance, international development, and the political role of digital infrastructures. It responds to calls for closer examination of how the global tech industry influences public education systems, particularly in the wake of post-pandemic digital acceleration. The research demonstrates how sociotechnical imaginaries do performative work in shaping what education reform becomes, especially within narratives of crises and uncertainty. It also reveals how global aspirations for inclusion and resilience are increasingly infrastructuralised through partnerships, and data-driven logics.

Elfert, M., & Ydesen, C. (2023). Contemporary Agendas and Shifts in the Global Governance of Education. In Global Governance of Education: The Historical and Contemporary Entanglements of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank (pp. 193-219). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Furlong, K. (2014). STS beyond the “modern infrastructure ideal”: Extending theory by engaging with infrastructure challenges in the South. Technology in Society, 38, 139-147. Giannini, S. (2022). 20 UNESCO AND THE FUTURES OF EDUCATION. In Education: A Global Compact for a Time of Crisis (pp. 361-378). Columbia University Press. Gorur, R., Sellar, S., & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2018). Big data and even bigger consequences. In World Yearbook of Education 2019 (pp. 1-9). Routledge. Jasanoff, S. (2015). Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, 1-33. Lakoff, A. (2015). Global health security and the pathogenic imaginary. Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, 300-320. Star, S. L., & Bowker, G. (1999). Sorting things out. Classification an its consequences The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England. UNESCO. (2023). Transforming education together: The Global Education Coalition in action. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000384812 UNESCO. (2025). Celebrating five years of impact and driving action for SDG 4: The Global Education Coalition. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000393086.locale=en Wahlberg, A. (2022). Assemblage Ethnography: Configurations Across Scales, Sites, and Practices: Post-Structuralism. In The Palgrave handbook of the anthropology of technology (pp. 125-144). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.