Desiring-Futures in Education Policy: Assemblage Theory, Artificial Intelligence, and UNESCO's Futures of Education
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| Title: | Desiring-Futures in Education Policy: Assemblage Theory, Artificial Intelligence, and UNESCO's Futures of Education |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | David Rousell (ORCID |
| Source: | Educational Review. 2025 77(6):1754-1777. |
| Availability: | Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 24 |
| Publication Date: | 2025 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Descriptive |
| Descriptors: | Futures (of Society), Educational Trends, Educational Policy, Educational Theories, Artificial Intelligence, International Organizations, Climate, Policy Analysis, Imagination, Discourse Analysis, Politics of Education |
| DOI: | 10.1080/00131911.2024.2362176 |
| ISSN: | 0013-1911 1465-3397 |
| Abstract: | The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched its Futures of Education policy initiative in early 2020. The process sought to open a sustained global policy debate on educational futures in a world typified by climatological instability, social inequity, and political unrest. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblages, this paper explores how the Futures of Education initiative simultaneously produces, captures, and reroutes flows of desire by opening its policymaking process to global consultation. Following this line of thinking, the paper introduces a speculative method for critical policy analysis that utilises AI-powered tools to generate expressive images and imaginaries of education futures based on UNESCO's three stages of policy development. The authors argue that this method enables a step beyond conventional interpretations of a policy's discursive content toward a speculative analysis of its processual dynamics and expressive potentials. Ultimately, the paper underscores the generative possibilities of AI-assisted methods for tracking flows and expressions of desire within education policy assemblages under conditions of climatological and political upheaval. The authors encourage further experimentation with plugging emerging technologies into global policy assemblages to better understand how desire is invested into particular images and imaginaries of educational futures. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2025 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1486332 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwGMmbEzkKK0l_sigff8W9GZAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDEnZjOxxFXPyihGIdAIBEICBmz-GtWx81JtYYvHbrHwgjfJeS2EVXJxSUUy4dqL_p60pmXHAQoDfkNRxm6Ib9sq9Jq5-wWsv6HIk_F5fkwF3H7Ggx1hxUoGfc1tM_3tMqUWvcnRhoZk8RiHMqFS3Ykh4V4BmBLxeh29zBclK0EDCUCoyRf817g60lOnq4qV86aN0jw9zr1KHxEuhvw3h6cnu90MxMkS28Aw_uFlS Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0187499066;edi01sep.25;2025Aug26.03:00;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0187499066-1">Desiring-futures in education policy: assemblage theory, artificial intelligence, and UNESCO's futures of education </title> <p>The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched its Futures of Education policy initiative in early 2020. The process sought to open a sustained global policy debate on educational futures in a world typified by climatological instability, social inequity, and political unrest. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblages, this paper explores how the Futures of Education initiative simultaneously produces, captures, and reroutes flows of desire by opening its policymaking process to global consultation. Following this line of thinking, the paper introduces a speculative method for critical policy analysis that utilises AI-powered tools to generate expressive images and imaginaries of education futures based on UNESCO's three stages of policy development. The authors argue that this method enables a step beyond conventional interpretations of a policy's discursive content toward a speculative analysis of its processual dynamics and expressive potentials. Ultimately, the paper underscores the generative possibilities of AI-assisted methods for tracking flows and expressions of desire within education policy assemblages under conditions of climatological and political upheaval. The authors encourage further experimentation with plugging emerging technologies into global policy assemblages to better understand how desire is invested into particular images and imaginaries of educational futures.</p> <p>Keywords: Critical policy analysis; assemblage theory; artificial intelligence; climate change; education futures</p> <hd id="AN0187499066-2">Introduction</hd> <p>The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched the <emph>International Commission on the Futures of Education</emph> at its New York headquarters in September 2019. An accompanying website was made public in November 2019, which stated the aim of constructing a new global vision for the future of education that would be critically responsive to the global challenges currently facing diverse human cultures and societies. Coming to life just as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, the UNESCO Commission situated this aim in the context of increasingly global patterns of climatological, social, political, economic, and technological instability:</p> <p>With accelerated climate change the fragility of our planet is becoming more and more apparent. Persistent inequalities, social fragmentation, and political extremism are bringing many societies to a point of crisis. Advances in digital communication, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology have great potential but also raise serious ethical and governance concerns, especially as promises of innovation and technological change have an uneven record of contributing to human flourishing. (UNESCO, [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref1">59</reflink>])</p> <p>Building on previous policies, including UNESCO initiatives on lifelong learning and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Faure et al. ([<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref2">20</reflink>]) and Delors et al. ([<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref3">15</reflink>]) commissions and subsequent reports, and the working papers concerning <emph>Education as a public and common good</emph> (Locatelli, [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref4">36</reflink>]), the Futures of Education process sought to harness the power of education to respond to a changing world and actively transform the future. In pursuit of this aim, the Futures of Education Commission appointed a high-level international committee of thought-leaders from diverse fields and different regions of the world to establish a new social contract for education. The Commission also initiated an extensive (and ongoing) policy consultation and co-construction process which sought to "mobilize the many rich ways of being and knowing in order to leverage humanity's collective intelligence" (UNESCO, [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref5">59</reflink>], p. 1). This approach provided numerous junctures for public engagement and contribution to the policymaking process. These included the submission of written responses, visual artworks and images, and white papers, which outlined diverse perspectives and concerns on the future of education. Thus far, over one million students, academics, teachers, and other members of the global public have submitted contributions to the policymaking process (UNESCO, [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref6">59</reflink>]). Drawing on these submissions, the committee published their first public report in November 2021: <emph>UNESCO Futures of Education report – Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education</emph>. Constructed over two years, and spanning 186 pages and nine chapters, the document describes its contribution as a "forward-looking vision of what education and learning might yet become and allows us individually and collectively to become" (UNESCO, [<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref7">58</reflink>], p. 2).</p> <p>The Futures of Education policy initiative came to our attention in early 2020, just as COVID-19 was plunging global education systems and their concomitant futures into chaos. David (Author 1) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work focuses on co-creating educational responses to the climate crisis with diversely situated communities. Matthew (Author 2) is an educational researcher who uses critical policy analysis methods to focus on issues of school funding, globalisation and equity in schooling systems worldwide. Amidst the unfolding of a global health crisis, we were presented with the opportunity to create a new course focusing on education futures for a Bachelor of Education programme for initial teacher education (ITE) students at a university in Melbourne, Australia. We decided to design the course around Futures of Education as a key example of a global policy initiative aimed at reshaping the future. Our course readings, lectures, and online tutorial activities drew from our respective fluency with Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory (David) and Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis (Matthew), with the aim of equipping our students with critical concepts and methods for "plugging into" the Futures of Education initiative as it was unfolding. As part of our online assessment activities, we encouraged students to respond to UNESCO's global call for written submissions to identify the most pressing issues facing education over the next two decades. After class discussions and time researching and writing, each student submitted a 1000-word response through the UNESCO Futures of Education portal. This enabled students to plug into a live policy process and, in some small ways, contribute to the global debate about the role of education in creating a livable future under conditions of sociopolitical and environmental crisis.</p> <p>As the first semester of the course came to completion, we wondered how else we might continue to engage with the Futures of Education initiative as it surged into the future. To what extent would UNESCO's global consultation process impact on the policy's subsequent movements and trajectories? Would the consultation process open the Futures of Education initiative to new images of the future? Where and how might the desire for a different future become discernible as the policymaking process proceeded?</p> <p>This article takes up these questions by applying Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory to the study of compositional arrangements (fr: <emph>agencements</emph>) of desire being channelled through the UNESCO policymaking process. As Buchanan ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref8">8</reflink>]) explains, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise desire as "a free-flowing stream of intensities subject to processes of capture and coagulation which give rise to and constitute the entire world" (p. 38). This concept of desire flows through human and nonhuman bodies of all kinds, continuously forming new compositions of life, language, and subjectivity through the double articulation of <emph>content</emph> (the material arrangements of bodies) and <emph>expression</emph> (the intensive qualities expressed through these arrangements). Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise desire as productive and performative rather than acquisitive, utopian, or idealistic. Desire is not for something we lack (such as a person, object, or situation that is inaccessible in the present), but the very force that produces present and future events as particular arrangements of content and expression. Assemblage theory is therefore particularly suited to the study of policy futures as it enables us to focus on how desire is channelled, captured, and rerouted by policy to connect different bodies together and express particular images and imaginings of the future, or what we term "desiring-futures". This article contributes to current scholarship on assemblage theory and critical policy analysis by developing a speculative method of machine-assisted interpretation capable of tracking how desiring-futures are mobilised and expressed through UNESCO's policymaking process.</p> <p>In what follows, we begin by exploring some of the gaps that have been identified in current assemblage approaches to policy analysis which our paper looks to help address (Buchanan, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref9">6</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref10">7</reflink>]). We build a framework of interrelated concepts drawn from Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory, which we then use to construct a speculative method for drawing out the expressive qualities of the Futures of Education policy process. This is undertaken through the analysis of "core samples" taken from the Futures of Education initiative as it evolved over time. Each core sample offers a cross-section of a particular stage in the policy process, starting with UNESCO's original framing of the initiative, through the various stakeholder consultation stages, and ending with the final report. To track some of the key themes from the stakeholder consultation process and how they imagine the future of education, we turned to AI-powered word frequency and diffusion modelling to assemble a speculative method for grasping how different images and imaginings of education futures were mobilised during the policymaking process. Word frequency and salience modelling were used to track <emph>changes in content and salience</emph> across these stages, while AI diffusion modelling was used to generate high resolution images which mapped <emph>changes in expression</emph> as different images of the future were mobilised across the policy assemblage.</p> <p>In taking up this speculative engagement with AI-powered software platforms and their outputs, we respond to recent calls for critical education researchers to reclaim, reroute, and even hack the very algorithmic tools which governments and industries are deploying to anticipate preferred (e.g. profit-bearing) futures through education (Rousell et al., [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref11">47</reflink>]; Williamson &amp; Eynon, [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref12">62</reflink>]). As Webb et al. ([<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref13">61</reflink>], p. 294) ask: "what other habits and memories might AI calculate besides those already programmed to develop human capital?" We respond to this provocation by working with AI-assisted methods to produce images that diagnose certain expressive qualities being mobilised through the Futures of Education initiative. Our work with generative AI is not designed to replace current practices of critical, interpretive, and empirical policy analysis, but rather to explore machine-assisted methods capable of unearthing expressive potentials that exceed or overspill the discursive contents of language. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari's ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref14">14</reflink>]) assemblage theory to define expressive potential as the possible set of performative effects, actualisations, images, implications, and events arising from a particular arrangement of bodies, texts, technologies, and other contents of an assemblage. As we elaborate below, the expressive functions of an assemblage are never disconnected from its contents but are "doubly articulated" at one and the same time. In this respect, we follow Buchanan ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref15">8</reflink>]) to argue that the act of plugging AI-powered tools into the UNESCO policy assemblage changes the content of the assemblage while also changing its capacities for expression through performative images, texts, and other media.</p> <p>To this end, we acknowledge that our own historical experiences as critical researchers and educators shape how we ourselves plug into global policies and generative AI tools, while at the same time acknowledging that these policies and tools are never neutral or unbiased in their own design and operation (Newfield, [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref16">40</reflink>]; Tanksley, [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref17">55</reflink>]). The notion of "plugging in" is derived from Deleuze and Guattari and has been utilised in the formulation of speculative methodologies for educational research (Jackson &amp; Mazzei, [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref18">26</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref19">27</reflink>]). Jackson and Mazzei ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref20">26</reflink>]) describe plugging in as an act of "entering the assemblage, of making new connectives" which generate new and different relationships amongst heterogeneous components "and in doing so create something new" (p. 264). This is precisely why a <emph>speculative</emph> (rather than a conventionally interpretive) approach is used in this study: we are interested in the new expressive potential that is released when AI tools are plugged into policy, and how these speculative forms of expression provide new aesthetic and discursive interfaces for critical interpretation. The speculative method we develop over the course of this paper articulates this process across three phases of discursive textual analysis, AI-assisted image creation, and visual analysis and interpretation based on these images. Rather than looking to find hidden meanings or intentions within a policy as in conventional interpretive research, we are interested in how the policy opens new expressive potentials for speculative interpretation through AI-generated images. In this respect, our work contributes to the contemporary "speculative turn" in the social sciences (Ross, [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref21">46</reflink>]; Savransky et al., [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref22">51</reflink>]), art and design (Dunne &amp; Raby, [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref23">17</reflink>]), and the humanities (Kolozova, [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref24">31</reflink>]) by proposing a method of critical policy analysis which addresses the processual dynamics and expressive qualities of policymaking rather than only its linguistic content. By working with generative AI tools to create expressive images of education policy futures, we hope to add to the established ways of generating, circulating, and accelerating different images of educational futures (Rahm, [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref25">45</reflink>]) and provoke further experimentation with the "wild" possibilities of critical policy analysis (Lea, [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref26">33</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0187499066-3">Critical policy analysis (CPA), thinking with assemblage theory, and speculative interpretati...</hd> <p>The field of Critical Policy Analysis in education emerged in the 1990s after traditional rationalist approaches to policy studies began to lose popularity during the 1980s (Diem et al., [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref27">16</reflink>]). Early work in the field mostly drew on Foucault's ([<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref28">21</reflink>]) theories of discourse, dispositif and biopolitics or neo-Marxist cultural theorists such as Freire (see, for instance, Ball, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref29">3</reflink>]; Bowe et al., [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref30">5</reflink>]; Diem et al., [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref31">16</reflink>]; Fairclough, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref32">18</reflink>]; Kenway, [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref33">29</reflink>]). While these approaches remain popular in the CPA literature (see, Apple, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref34">1</reflink>]; Farrell et al., [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref35">19</reflink>]; Gobby, [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref36">22</reflink>]; Gulson, [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref37">24</reflink>]; Kenway, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref38">30</reflink>]; Piazza, [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref39">41</reflink>]; Sellar &amp; Zipin, [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref40">52</reflink>]; Sinclair &amp; Brooks, [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref41">53</reflink>]), critical policy scholars are increasingly using the works of Deleuze and Guattari and their contemporary influence to define, analyse and frame policy processes as "policy assemblages" (Gorur, [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref42">23</reflink>]; Koyama &amp; Varenne, [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref43">32</reflink>]; Savage, [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref44">48</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref45">49</reflink>]; Thompson, [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref46">56</reflink>]; Thompson et al., [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref47">57</reflink>]; Youdell, [<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref48">63</reflink>]).[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref49">1</reflink>] While previous approaches to CPA had focused primarily on discerning the discursive role of policy within human structures of power, assemblage theory relocates policy as both a <emph>material</emph> and <emph>expressive</emph> configuration of desiring forces across many different strata, territories, and modes of existence, both human and nonhuman.</p> <p>Within Deleuze and Guattari's ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref50">14</reflink>]) geophilosophy of assemblages, regimes of power and discourse offer certain ways of channelling desire but they are by no means the only ways that desire is captured and expressed. Their work asks us to consider the <emph>desiring-forces of the Earth</emph> (geology, meteorology) and the <emph>desiring-forces of Life</emph> (biology, ethology) as underlying strata that comprise any policymaking assemblage, alongside the subjective, discursive, technological, semiotic, and social formations (what they term the "alloplastic stratum") of human activity (p. 45). In this sense, we cannot simply analyse a policy's linguistic contents to discern its discursive rendering of underlying power structures in isolation from other strata. We also need to consider how the contents of the policy assemblage come to function as <emph>matters of expression</emph> which bring flows and formations of desire into articulation across multiple strata, codes, territories, and processes of semiosis and subjectivisation (p. 80).</p> <p>Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory has exerted an increasing influence on the field of critical policy studies over the past ten years, particularly in the Australian context (Thompson et al., [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref51">57</reflink>]) and the Global South more broadly (Pow, [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref52">43</reflink>]). Reflecting on this trend, Savage ([<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref53">49</reflink>]) argues that assemblage thinking in policy research has "exploded" over the last decade (p. 320). Elsewhere, there is also some evidence that assemblage theory may now be infiltrating global policymaking bodies (such as UNESCO) in recent years, although the extent and nature of this is difficult to discern because assemblage theory itself remains variously defined and, in some cases, lacks conceptual and methodological precision (Baker &amp; McGuirk, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref54">2</reflink>]). In view of this, and following in the CPA tradition (Apple, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref55">1</reflink>]; Diem et al., [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref56">16</reflink>]), we argue that an assemblage approach to policy analysis has the potential to address "deeper questions about politics, power and agency" which can subsequently "lead to the formulation of visions towards a better future" (Savage, [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref57">49</reflink>], p. 333). However, we also acknowledge that assemblage theory leaves the question of what constitutes a "better future" open to the free and wild play of desire in ways that older theoretical and methodological resources may have struggled to accommodate. We cannot, for instance, simply assume that policy expresses a desire for better outcomes when it could just as well express a desire for oppression, control, and the hegemonic assimilation of difference.</p> <p>Deleuze and Guattari ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref58">14</reflink>]) do not approach the study of assemblages in terms of predetermined or transcendent criteria for "good" or "bad" outcomes, but rather in terms of relative degrees of difference, intensity, speed, composition, and decomposition (p. 371). Whether expressed in terms of de/stratification, de/composition, or de/territorialisation, it is always a question of whether (and how) an assemblage <emph>holds onto the same</emph> or <emph>allows itself to be transformed by difference</emph>, and how such dynamics produce new and indeterminate effects (p. 357). Much depends on how different assemblages are plugged into one another at different times and under differing circumstances. Discerning the degree of difference held and expressed by an assemblage requires careful preparation and an artful calibration of "dosages" (MacLure, [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref59">37</reflink>]), because too much difference will blast the policy assemblage apart while too much sameness will freeze it in its tracks. Indeed, a key aim of this paper is to balance the task of honing the methodological coherence of a policy assemblage approach while simultaneously keeping our concepts and methods lively, speculative, and open to the uncertainty of what happens when policy and AI are plugged together.</p> <p>We also address two concerns with current assemblage approaches to education studies and the social sciences more broadly (see Buchanan, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref60">6</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref61">7</reflink>]; Thompson, [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref62">56</reflink>]). Buchanan ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref63">8</reflink>]) raises concerns in his recent book <emph>Assemblage Theory and Method</emph>, which looks to provide a comprehensive translation of Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory into an actionable method for social science research. Buchanan notes that much of the social research undertaken under the rubric of assemblage theory has focused primarily on the material ingredients or "loose parts" that comprise various social phenomena (p. 5). He suggests that the translation of the original French <emph>agencement</emph> into the English word "assemblage" has been misleading, and offers "arrangement", "desiring-machine", and "complex" as various alternatives which more accurately emphasise the role of desiring forces in connecting and holding assemblages together (pp. 18-20).[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref64">2</reflink>] One of the issues with treating assemblages as collections of loose parts is that the intensive forces of desire and expression drop out of the analysis, leaving only a list of contents and their extensive properties. Buchanan suggests that some new materialist and posthuman theorisations have exacerbated this tendency to treat assemblages as mere collections of (human and nonhuman) things (p. 67), rather than focusing on <emph>how</emph> particular forces of desire are drawn together to produce new effects and the specific conditions which enable this to occur.[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref65">3</reflink>]</p> <p>A second issue that Buchanan ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref66">8</reflink>]) raises is the tendency for the concept of "assemblage" to be used in isolation from the vast constellation of related concepts elaborated through Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy (p. 5). As Deleuze and Guattari ([<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref67">13</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref68">14</reflink>]) make clear, their concepts need to be understood as social creatures living in complex relation with other concepts that move and intersect with one another through incorporeal zones, territories, and even neighbourhoods. The lively sociality that concepts create when they continuously move with and against each other is what enables a relational philosophical approach, such as assemblage theory, to generate new and different modes of thinking and responding to events. This is why the task, for Deleuze and Guattari, is not so much to define concepts as to understand their zones of consistency and proximity (or neighbourhoods) in relationship with other concepts. With this in mind, our approach to mobilising assemblage theory for analysing the Futures of Education initiative involved the development of a working constellation or neighbourhood of concepts drawn from close studies of Deleuze and Guattari's ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref69">14</reflink>]) <emph>A Thousand Plateaus</emph> (see Figure 1), and guided by contemporary thinkers such as Buchanan ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref70">8</reflink>]), Colebrook ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref71">10</reflink>]), and Massumi ([<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref72">38</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref73">39</reflink>]). We see this less as a process of defining concepts as abstract ideas, and more so as the operationalisation of concepts as practical tools, even "methods" (Colebrook, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref74">9</reflink>]), that are responsive to the conditions of a problem in both its localised and nonlocal instantiations.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 1. A constellation of concepts derived from readings of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref75">14</reflink>]) which comprise and underpin our assemblage approach to policy analysis.</p> <p>In using these concepts as methods for examining the flow of desire through the Futures of Education policy assemblage, it became clear that conventional approaches to critical policy analysis would not be sufficient to grasp the protean nature of desire as a driver of educational futures (Pratt &amp; Rosiek, [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref76">44</reflink>]). Interpretive researchers in public policy often draw on documents and interview-based data to produce accounts of "policy worlds" (Savage, [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref77">50</reflink>], p. 16) which reflect the intentions and consequences of policymaking. Our commitment to assemblage thinking led us to search beyond traditional approaches for a speculative method capable of registering the shifting qualities of expression that a policymaking process generates over time. Where traditional interpretive methods focus on how meaning is generated through and by the linguistic content of policy, our approach aims to grasp how policy expresses different imaginaries of the future through a diversified range of aesthetic forms. Policy is not treated as a static object of interpretation, but as a moving field of shifting tendencies and expressive potentials. To address this, we turned to generative AI tools capable of translating textual data into visual images that express changes in how desire is channelled through the policymaking process over time.</p> <p>While the creation of art through collaborations between humans and AI has been evaluated for its aesthetic qualities (see Hitsuwari et al., [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref78">25</reflink>]), the use of AI to examine the expressive processes at work in education policy materials is new ground for researchers. The speculative method of critical policy analysis in this paper uses generative AI to produce expressive images based on key phases of the policy process. We then interpret how, in our view as education researchers, each of the AI-generated images channels and expresses current flows of desire into possible futures of education. Through this speculative method, we provide researchers with a new way to track how global policy assemblages can express particular images and imaginaries of the future which reflect investments of desire by a multitude of stakeholders. As Rahm ([<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref79">45</reflink>]) notes, "policies provide a map of anticipated threats and corresponding solutions for desired ... futures, and concurrently act to produce this future" (p. 1). We use the term "desiring-futures" to underscore the multiplicity of current investments of desire that simultaneously <emph>produce</emph> educational presents and futures. In this respect, we use "desiring-futures" to describe the productivity of desire instead of the phrase "desires for the future," which presupposes a negative dialectic of lack and fulfilment. Rather than representing the desire for idealised or utopian futures which are incongruent with current educational and economic trends (see, for instance, Levitas, [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref80">35</reflink>]), our use of AI-assisted imagery looks to express current investments of desire through educational policy initiatives which <emph>produce</emph> particular images and imaginaries of the future in the present.</p> <p>In view of this, we want to foreground that these AI generated images (in some ways like traditional interpretative critical policy analysis) are partial constructions of the environmental, political, social, and economic investments of desire that shaped the Futures of Education process. They do not mirror or reveal an underlying reality. Nor do our interpretations of the images represent an ideal vision of the future. Rather they are constructs that evolve from contested and fragmented webs of desire that flow through the large language models (LLMs) underpinning generative AI, as well as our own experiences as researchers and citizens. This means that as speculative analysts of these images, we are not neutral observers who draw out truths and facts. Instead, we plug into these images as part of a larger assemblage of policy development and enactment to engage in a speculative yet informed process of visual interpretation. These AI generated images, we argue, provide visual expressions of desiring-futures based on the views, investments and descriptions of those who participated in the global policymaking process.</p> <hd id="AN0187499066-4">The futures of education policy assemblage</hd> <p>As mentioned in the introduction, our primary research aim in undertaking this analysis is to understand how, and to what extent, UNESCO's global consultation process channelled new and contrasting visions for the future of education. To pursue this aim, we needed to develop a method capable of examining not only the components of the policy and their respective contents, but also the ways that these components came to express a desire for difference (or sameness) over time. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy, we built a method for taking "core samples" of the UNESCO policymaking process as it both generated and expressed particular desires for education futures over time. We see each core sample not simply as a corpus of discursive content but as a protean cross section of expressive events that cut across multiple strata (social, technological, biological, geological) and their varying scales and temporalities.</p> <p>Our approach to analysing the policymaking process began with identifying, naming, and laying out the parts of the policy assemblage. The first step involved collecting and reading a corpus of written material from across the various publicly available components of the Futures of Education website. These constituted the core samples that we identified in the policymaking process. We organised these core samples based on three key phases in the lifecycle of the initiative to date: 1) <emph>Setting the policy aims, parameters, terms, and approach</emph>; 2) <emph>The global consultation process</emph>; 3) <emph>The construction of a final report concerning a new social contract for education</emph>. Figure 2 shows how the core samples represented each of the three phases of policy development. From there we mapped the geographical and chronological progression of events within each of the three core samples, making note of when and where particular developments in the policymaking process were introduced, and who the key agents and stakeholders were at each juncture. We then compiled a corpus of written content from the components of each phase of the policy development, and fed this material into an AI-powered online word cloud generator (<ulink href="http://www.monkeylearn.com">www.monkeylearn.com</ulink>). Multiple word cloud results from each policymaking phase were combined and analysed for their most salient concepts and phrases. This word cloud generator uses machine learning to calculate how frequently a term occurs in a corpus of text, and then divides this by the total number of terms in the document. The algorithms can also detect collocations or phrases of words that often appear together. It then multiplies the term frequencies with Inverse Document Frequencies, which renders a relevancy score that indicates how often a word or phrase appears as well as its relative importance within the sample.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 2. Overview of Collected Data for the Three Phases of the Future of Education Initiative.</p> <p>This work provided us with an overview of the primary content across three core samples taken from the Futures of Education policy assemblage. At this point, we could have used interpretive discourse or content analysis to generate statements about the Futures of Education initiative and how its focal areas changed over time. However, this would have left us without any empirical way to draw out what Deleuze and Guattari call the <emph>forms of expression,</emph> as generated by the policymaking process as it developed across the three phases. In response to this problem, we explored the use of Midjourney GAN diffusion modelling software as a machine-assisted method for drawing out the expression of future visions of education as the UNESCO initiative unfolded. The following sub-sections present the results of our content-analysis and visual expression of desiring-futures in each key phase of the Futures of Education initiative.</p> <hd id="AN0187499066-5">Core sample 1: setting the policy aims, parameters, terms, and approach</hd> <p>Our first core sample begins with the launch of the Futures of Education initiative in September 2019 at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia chaired the process, which sought to include a broad, inclusive global engagement of educators, youth, researchers, governments, businesses and civil society. The formation of an international commission – which included influential thought-leaders from across the world from notable scientists and educationalists to social theorists – was the first step in the process. This assembly also announced the opening of the Futures of Education website, which laid out the stated context, vision, aim, approach, and agenda for the global initiative. Climate change, ubiquitous technologies, persistent inequalities, and socio-political precarity were framed as critical contextual factors in shaping the initiative. Concepts of plurality were also highlighted in the initial framing, including stated values of plural knowledges and an openness to multiple possible and preferred futures. The website also offered an open call for global consultation on education futures, along with an Ideas Lab consisting of white papers from leading educational thinkers across the globe. This consultation, according to the website, would culminate in a final report emerging from a range of work modalities that emphasised co-creation, a broad participatory and partnership structure, the inclusion of diverse perspectives, and the absence of pre-specified conclusions (UNESCO, [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref81">59</reflink>]).</p> <p>Our initial content analysis involved firstly constructing a core sample of text taken from the initial project website, including words used to describe the context, vision, aim, approach, agenda, and call for contributions to the consultation process. This corpus was then fed into a word cloud generator, the results of which are shown in Figure 3. The word cloud illustrates how particular concepts such as "education", "futures", "planet", "world", "change", "desirable", "plural", "knowing", "collective intelligence", and "becoming" were emphasised in the initial phase of the UNESCO policy initiative. It demonstrates how these concepts were central to how the policy initially presented its stated aims, agenda, and approach, effectively establishing the contents of the initiative as a machinic assemblage which draws bodies together around particular values and matters of concern. The fact that the initiative openly states its commitment to pluralism is telling here, as this commitment opens the assemblage to diverse knowledges and situated perspectives and invites contributions to the initiative from multiple contexts and walks of life. We believe the focus on "becoming" and the pursuit of desirable or "preferred" futures is also important, as this centres the role of desire as a vital force that will inevitably draw bodies together and shape the outcome, impacts, and effects of the policy assemblage in the world (Buchanan, [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref82">8</reflink>]).</p> <p>Graph: Figure 3. Word cloud generated from text content derived from Phase 1 of the Futures of Education initiative.</p> <p>The word cloud also provided us with an analytic stepping stone for beginning to explore the expressive qualities of the Phase 1 corpus. We turned to the AI-driven diffusion modelling software called Midjourney as part of a speculative method for teasing out the modes of expression being mobilised through the initial Phase. The use of this software required us to translate the corpus into a series of descriptive phrases and prompts which the Midjourney algorithm could use to generate an expressive vision of the content of the core sample. This involved an iterative process through which different possible descriptions and image rendering styles were trialled. We landed on the following descriptive prompt for the Midjourney AI which began to generate a series of intensely expressive images (Figure 4):</p> <p>UNESCO calling for humanity to re-imagine the futures of education under conditions of climate change, inequality, many ways of knowing, becoming, pluralism</p> <p>In our visual analysis of this image, the first thing we both observed was the depiction of a group of children standing in ankle-high water with their backs turned. We agreed that they appear to be facing a conflagration of some kind, and that the vertical structures suggest that urban buildings are being consumed by what looks like smoke and fire. They are wearing backpacks and matching clothing, which for us suggests that they are on their way to school. They are also wearing head coverings which we interpret as a shared sense of religious observance. Overall, from our situated perspective, the image reads as an allegorical expression of children facing a radically uncertain and dangerous future. While the water around their ankles provides a clear reference to rising sea levels and climate-related weather events, the burning city they are facing appears more likely to be caused by violent conflict and war. We do get a sense, however, that the children are standing together in solidarity as these crises occur around them. They are watching the city burn before their eyes, but we also note their body posture does not suggest that they are panicked or frightened. Rather, they appear ready to spring into action and take their lives into their own hands at any time. We asked ourselves: will their matching school uniforms, backpacks, or indeed anything they learned at school help them survive this crisis? This juxtaposition of formal schooling with the radical informality of crisis generates a tension in the image which, in our reading, accurately reflects a key contradiction at the heart of the Futures of Education policy assemblage. While Futures of Education looks to extend UNESCO's project of securing a quality education for every child on the planet, it also suggests that current standardised models of education are unfit to prepare children for the radically destabilised futures they are currently facing. It is precisely this problematic which UNESCO sought to address through the global consultation process which we analyse in detail below.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 4. Expressive image generated by Midjourney AI software using prompts developed from a content analysis of UNESCO's stated aims, vision, approach, agenda, and call for global consultation.</p> <hd id="AN0187499066-6">Core sample 2: global consultation process</hd> <p>The objective of UNESCO's global consultations was to generate a set of diverse perspectives on the challenges and opportunities for education and learning that might be anticipated, mitigated, and/or rerouted when looking towards the year 2050. According to UNESCO ([<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref83">59</reflink>]), over 400 focus group discussions were conducted involving more than 6300 participants; over 100,000 responses to a one-minute survey; 3,200 artwork and written submissions; in excess of 55,000 responses to social media polls; and more than 800,000 participants in events and webinars. The focus groups brought together thousands of individuals from more than 75 countries to collectively reimagine how knowledge and learning can shape the future of humanity and the planet. Participants included students, youth, educators, parents, government officials, and academics as well as business leaders, civil society and nongovernmental organisations. Meanwhile, hundreds of pieces of art were submitted via an online platform, with the majority by artists aged sixteen to thirty (UNESCO, [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref84">59</reflink>]). The artworks, which depict both hopeful futures as well as futures to be avoided were published in an online gallery. Similarly, the Futures of Education panel encouraged people from across the globe to submit written comments on one major issue for the futures of education through an online platform. These ideas were collated and published by UNESCO on its website via its global "hub of views" section. In total, more than one million people were actively consulted by UNESCO between 2020–2021. UNESCO made it clear that this consultation process was not just symbolic because all inputs were analysed and considered during the report drafting process, and that these consultations formed the foundation for the final report, which was published in November 2021.</p> <p>The sheer amount of material generated during the global consultation process meant that our corpus for this phase of the policy initiative was considerably larger. To assemble this corpus, we compiled text from each of the analysis reports prepared by UNESCO based on the key components of the consultation process. These included: 1) <emph>Analysis report of the online consultation modality: Your ideas on the futures of education</emph> (Yver Melchor, [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref85">64</reflink>]); 2) <emph>Focus group discussions analysis: September 2019–November 2020</emph> (University of Wisconsin–Madison, [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref86">60</reflink>]); 3) <emph>Focus group discussion analysis: Perspectives from the UNESCO Associated School Network's community of students, teachers and parents</emph> (Taking IT Global, [<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref87">54</reflink>])<emph>;</emph> and 4) <emph>Women, robots and a sustainable generation: Reading artworks envisioning education in 2050 and beyond</emph> (Jacobs &amp; French, [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref88">28</reflink>]). Taken together, these represented the analysed findings of UNESCO's global consultation process and served as the basis for the final report which we analyse in the section below. In developing our content analysis of these four consultation reports, we fed text from each into the word cloud generator which rendered the results shown in Figure 5.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 5. Word cloud results extracted from UNESCO's four global consultation reports.</p> <p>While each of the word clouds generated from the consultation reports produced different results, they also converged around particular concepts, phrases, and demographic groups. The perspectives of "teachers", "students", "children", and "girls" were foregrounded throughout the results. While the "future of education" was a consistently cited phrase across the four reports, questions around the "collective purpose of education" were emphasised by the focus groups along with concepts related to "environmental sustainability", "critical and creative thinking", "global solidarity", concern for the "future of the humanities", and the importance of "global citizenship education". The open call for written responses also presented a series of particular concepts of relevance, including a focus on "social justice", "COVID-19", "climate change", and "indigenous knowledge systems". Lastly, the call for artworks and creative submissions gestured toward specific focal areas related to "artificial intelligence", "robots", and "radical technological change", inequalities related to "gender" and "girls" in particular, pluralist perspectives and "points of view", the rise of a new "sustainable generation" of young people, and their call for a "societal rebirth". Drawing together words and phrases that were emphasised across the various components of the core sample, we interpreted and then assembled the following descriptive prompt for the Midjourney software to create an expressive image of the consultation results (Figure 6):</p> <p>Teachers and students learning through play, global solidarity, nature, justice, and technology under conditions of climate change, poverty, gender inequality, and artificial intelligence</p> <p>Our visual analysis of this AI generated image suggests a group of seemingly younger people are standing in what appears to be a classroom underwater at various depths. In contrast to the previous image, we note there are students with water up to their waists alongside submerged desks and other classroom items. Again, their backs are turned to us giving a sense of anonymity. Many of the figures' heads are bowed and their postures turned inwards, which for us conveys a sense of solemnity, loss, and trauma. They also appear to be facing a political or social campaign of some kind. The lack of natural light and the glass windows mostly covered suggests to us a sense of isolation or hiding away from danger. They are wearing largely matching clothing, which we suggest shows that they are at a school or an institution of some kind, although some figures are larger than others which could mean that this may be a more intergenerational, community-based gathering. The fact that several of the figures are standing rather than sitting, and facing away from the desks and towards the signage and banners, in our view points to a sense of alarm and that they have more pressing concerns than the day-to-day business carried out at the desks. In our visual analysis, the water's choppiness suggests that the flooding may be worse elsewhere and possibly rising, giving a sense of urgency as to the campaign at hand with the assumption it is climate and flood related.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 6. Expressive image generated by Midjourney using prompts developed from a content analysis of the published results of UNESCO's global consultation process.</p> <p>Overall, we view the image as a speculative expression of a community already immersed within a radically uncertain and dangerous future scenario. While the water up to their waists references rising sea levels and climate-related weather events, the banners and posters the figures are facing in the image suggest collective concern and political will for change. While we view the body postures as suggesting a sense of dejection and even hopelessness, the characters nonetheless appear to be taking a stand in putting a campaign together to call for action and take their campaign to the streets and halls of power and influence. In our reading, the juxtaposition of building a political campaign while submerged in seawater accurately reflects another key contradiction at the heart of the Futures of Education policy assemblage. While Futures of Education lays the challenges facing education and humanity out on the table, it does so through rhetorical discussion rather than action. This enables destructive systems of governance and profiteering to continue while the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and numerous other crises increase in severity. To conclude, we view this AI generated image rendered from the UNESCO consultation process as a dystopian representation of the future of education as a time in which communities will be left to self-organise and fight for their survival amidst the onset of global catastrophes.</p> <hd id="AN0187499066-7">Core sample 3: the construction of a final report concerning a new social contract for educat...</hd> <p>Published in November 2021, UNESCO's report <emph>Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education</emph> calls for collective action to transform education, and a need to create more balanced relationships with one another, with the planet, and with technology (UNESCO, [<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref89">58</reflink>]). Our core sample compiled text from across all nine chapters of the report which was then fed into the MonkeyLearn word frequency and relevancy software. Figure 6 shows the outcomes of MonkeyLearn's analysis of the most relevant words and phrases in the final report (Figure 7).</p> <p>Graph: Figure 7. Results from the MonkeyLearn software showing the most frequent and relevant terms and phrases articulated in UNESCO's final report.</p> <p>A content analysis of the results suggests that the report effectively incorporated insights from the global consultation process into its call for a new social contract for education. The significant challenge that the environmental crisis poses to education is highlighted throughout the results, with "climate", "climate change", "environment", "planet", "sustainability", "ecology", and "earth" being some of the most frequent, high relevance terms in the report. Issues related to social justice were also emphasised across the report, including frequent and high relevancy mentions of "racism", "inclusion", "diversity", and "equity" as critical factors in shaping a new social contract and imaginary for education futures. Connecting both the environmental and social justice orientations are frequent articulations of "global solidarity", the "common good", "knowledge commons", as well as the phrase "future together" which emerged as a guiding aim and principle over the course of the policymaking process. These phrases were then used to generate a final descriptive prompt for the Midjourney software to render an expressive image from our third core sample of the policy assemblage (Figure 8):</p> <p>Education in the future, learning under conditions of climate change, a future together, through inclusion, for the common good, in global solidarity</p> <p>We see this final image as depicting a group of children sitting in an arid location seemingly gazing at an earth-shaped holographic display. Their backs are again turned to us, and they appear to be peering into a verdant and thriving image of the Earth. For us, the 3D hologram appears as an oasis of sorts when compared to the desert landscape that the children are currently inhabiting. Some of the children have backpacks and matching clothing, which we view as suggesting that they are on their way to school or that this is now indeed "school" for them. Our visual analysis also noted that some are wearing head coverings while others are not, which contrasts with the first two images. We agreed this suggests that the children may represent a plurality of cultural and religious perspectives, and observed that the figures' postures in this image contrast with those of the previous images. In our view, the children appear calmy attentive and focused on the holographic display, rather than poised for radical action (in the first image) or solemnly dejected (as in the second).</p> <p>Graph: Figure 8. Expressive image generated by Midjourney software based on descriptive prompts generated from a core sample of UNESCO's final report.</p> <p>Overall, we interpret the image as a speculative expression of the future world children may be required to live with in contrast to the world they hope or imagine for themselves in the future. While the water from the two previous images is gone, the barren landscape gives us the sense of a harsh living environment plagued by impacts of climate change at the other end of the spectrum: namely drought and famine. However, the shared focus of the children on regenerative images of the Earth offers us some hope that future generations will be capable of adapting to a radically transformed environment. Rather than appearing panicked or frightened, the students seem to be ready to listen, learn, and repair an Earth that was once full of vitality and diversity. It is therefore significant that the holographic image appears to be displayed via a future technology which seamlessly mixes digital imagery and the physical environment. We see the juxtaposition of the children's current environment with that depicted in the image as driving at a key tension in UNESCO's project of securing a quality education for every child through the ubiquitous proliferation of technology. While technology may provide seamless images of alternative futures and past histories of the earth, it will not be sufficient to enable the profound societal transformation necessary to prevent catastrophic environmental impacts and loss of life.</p> <hd id="AN0187499066-8">Plugging into wild policy</hd> <p>In this paper, we have used AI-powered tools to generate visual examples via our speculative method of taking core samples from phases of the Futures of Education policy process. We then used visual analysis to interpret these images in a way that shows how novel desires and imaginings of education futures become expressible when different assemblages are connected across strata, scales, and temporalities. Our speculative analysis of the core samples serves to disrupt common conceptions of education policy as a linear, teleological development which progresses from worse to better, often through a forced or complacent consensus. Our machine-assisted analysis of the policymaking process suggests that changes in discursive patterns of thought, language, and social imagining also reflect changes in material, bodily relations that ripple across spatial and temporal horizons. Every time desire is invested differently in a territorial assemblage there is always a new opportunity to think and live differently, and our analysis demonstrates how Futures of Education has indeed provided such opportunities. This experimental project provides evidence of this through its very enactment, to the extent that plugging our ITE students, multiple software platforms, a complex theoretical framework, and our own research positionalities into the policymaking process resulted in novel connections, flows, and images of the future. As stated earlier, our intent was not to use AI to create true or accurate interpretations of policy but rather to render speculative images from the policymaking process that can provide new angles for educational thinking and visions for action. In our case, the analytic process has enabled us to think more carefully about the tensions between current investments of desire into standardised education and the alternative social contract for education proposed by the Futures of Education policy initiative. The space between current education systems and the radically pluralised, climate-responsive, and technology-driven educational futures expressed through our AI generated images of the UNESCO process currently appears unfathomable, and yet it is precisely the unfathomability of this gap which, we believe, demands a speculative approach.</p> <p>The question remains as to how the novel images generated by our method potentially amplify and/or reroute flows of desire for new and different educational futures, and in this respect, address the gap identified above. Here we think further with Lea's ([<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref90">33</reflink>]) account of wild policy, and how our AI generated images draw out key tensions within the Futures of Education process which have concrete ramifications for diversely situated communities. Using examples from anthropological studies of Indigenous Australian housing policy, Lea ([<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref91">34</reflink>]) argues that policy has come to operate as an "ambient saturation" that flows in and out of human and nonhuman lives. She suggests that policy has become atmospheric at the level of the affective fabric of living relations, as an infrastructure that shifts with the protean flux of social life (see also Berlant, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref92">4</reflink>]; Povinelli, [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref93">42</reflink>]). While policy retains its status as a "fetishised state-effect" in Lea's ([<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref94">34</reflink>]) account, it also comes to impact and effectively change lives "in fragmented, inchoate, cumulative, and highly individualised ways" (p. 10). Lea's wild approach to policy studies helped us understand the results of our speculative analysis of UNESCO's Futures of Education as a policy assemblage that is atmospheric, speculative, dispersed, and future-orientated while also retaining its infrastructural ability to capture and impact lives in highly situated and material ways. Through the speculative methods discussed in this paper, different strata of activity begin to contaminate the boundaries that hold them at different scales when they are woven together, and as a result, find new patterns of consequential relation within a particular assemblage of bodies, images, and texts.</p> <p>The images rendered through our speculative process in our interpretation, at least, illustrate how the UNESCO policy assemblage can capture and reroute a multiplicity of flows of desire, including those who would seek to oppose it, such that the policy assemblage includes its unintended consequences, participants, benefactors, and detractors. This is precisely what makes Futures of Education a wild policy in Lea's terms.</p> <p>When policy is considered wild to begin with, it is no longer a stable body of rational thought whose deviations in practice might be traced as "unintended consequences". It loses its conventional political science demarcation between policy and program, with its convenient separation of the intended from the unintended ... As a growing body of scholarship within the anthropology of policy has shown, policies have multiple genealogies and chronologies. They have dispersed and fitful starting points and becomings. They operate more organically than centrist analyses tend to allow. They are <emph>wilder</emph>. (Lea, [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref95">34</reflink>], p. 10)</p> <p>Building on our speculative visual analysis, we argue that policy goes <emph>wild</emph> through Futures of Education, not just because the policy becomes inseparable from its impacts, but because the policy assemblage (as material ideation/expression) leaves itself open to continuous variation and social dissent. The policy incorporates critiques and alternatives to itself into its very constitution. As the speculative images generated by Midjourney suggest, the policy assemblage is not one thing to be dialectically supported or opposed from various angles. Rather it can become many things depending on the trajectories of desire that the assemblage connects, channels, captures, and expresses. The assemblage effectively changes its image to suit the flow of desire, and in doing so, it changes the future. In this sense, the policy operates as a <emph>receptacle</emph> of social desire, a rewilding of libidinal investments in/as the social body and its futural imaginary. However, as Massumi ([<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref96">39</reflink>]) warns, this wild capacity for unfettered investment of desire without a static form or exhaustible object has always been the aim of free market capitalism. In this sense we see the Futures of Education initiative as occupying a zone of tension between the desiring-futures of global capitalism and its "immanent outside" which continuously produces new edges of deterritorialisation and expressive angles of variation.</p> <hd id="AN0187499066-9">Conclusion: it matters how we plug in</hd> <p>In summary, our paper makes two contributions to discussions and engagements with assemblage theory, and critical policy analysis within the broader field of education studies. First, we offer a new speculative method for critically analysing policy using AI powered software which generates images of both the contents and expressive qualities of the policymaking process as it unfolds. Second, we demonstrate how assemblage theory presents an opportunity to plug these technologies into global policymaking initiatives, critical policy studies, and initial teacher education programmes. This second point is crucial to our argument and contribution in this paper, to the extent that a distanced rhetorical critique of policy is useful but not sufficient to meet the educational challenges of climate change, global health crises, catastrophic biodiversity loss, and widespread social inequity. Indeed, our research suggests that we must find new ways to plug into global policy assemblages in order to transform them and their effects in everyday matters of educational life, while also allowing ourselves <emph>to be transformed</emph> by the very policy assemblages that we plug into.</p> <p>Ultimately, it matters how we plug into policy assemblages across local and global scales because <emph>how we plug in</emph> has the potential to reroute flows of desire into new territorial assemblages and deterritorialised zones of encounter. The methods and analyses shared in this article sketch possible ways of plugging into education policy assemblages in order to express and interpret how current investments of desire are producing particular images and imaginaries of educational futures. We encourage readers to explore further possibilities and permutations of this process through their own channels and angles of engagement.</p> <hd id="AN0187499066-10">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <p>Correction Statement</p> <p>This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.</p> <ref id="AN0187499066-11"> <title> Notes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref34" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> It is important to note that policy assemblage approaches have been connected to a range of similar but distinct concepts. These include the Foucauldian concepts of dispositif and apparatus (Savage, [49]), with Collett ([11]) arguing that Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a process of "appropriation of the Foucaultian notion of dispositif (apparatus) via their concept of the assemblage" (p. 375), which is acknowledged by Deleuze in his [12] essay "What is a Dispostif?".</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref54" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Buchanan ([8]) argues that a theory and method of assemblages cannot be dissociated from Deleuze and Guattari's central project of schizoanalysis, which is ultimately concerned with how heterogeneous powers, arrangements, and behaviours of life arise within particular events and configurations of desire (p. 13).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref29" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Buchanan's ([8]) approach does not (necessarily) refocus assemblage theory back onto discretely "human" desire, but it does suggest that the machinic production and investment of desire through social assemblages almost always contains some element of thought, directionality, and/or unconscious impulse which cannot simply be overlooked or negated in a "posthuman" analysis of assemblages. 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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: Desiring-Futures in Education Policy: Assemblage Theory, Artificial Intelligence, and UNESCO's Futures of Education – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22David+Rousell%22">David Rousell</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4509-6128">0000-0002-4509-6128</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Matthew+P%2E+Sinclair%22">Matthew P. Sinclair</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Educational+Review%22"><i>Educational Review</i></searchLink>. 2025 77(6):1754-1777. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 24 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2025 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Descriptive – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Futures+%28of+Society%29%22">Futures (of Society)</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Trends%22">Educational Trends</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Policy%22">Educational Policy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Theories%22">Educational Theories</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Artificial+Intelligence%22">Artificial Intelligence</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22International+Organizations%22">International Organizations</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Climate%22">Climate</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Policy+Analysis%22">Policy Analysis</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Imagination%22">Imagination</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Discourse+Analysis%22">Discourse Analysis</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Politics+of+Education%22">Politics of Education</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1080/00131911.2024.2362176 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0013-1911<br />1465-3397 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched its Futures of Education policy initiative in early 2020. The process sought to open a sustained global policy debate on educational futures in a world typified by climatological instability, social inequity, and political unrest. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblages, this paper explores how the Futures of Education initiative simultaneously produces, captures, and reroutes flows of desire by opening its policymaking process to global consultation. Following this line of thinking, the paper introduces a speculative method for critical policy analysis that utilises AI-powered tools to generate expressive images and imaginaries of education futures based on UNESCO's three stages of policy development. The authors argue that this method enables a step beyond conventional interpretations of a policy's discursive content toward a speculative analysis of its processual dynamics and expressive potentials. Ultimately, the paper underscores the generative possibilities of AI-assisted methods for tracking flows and expressions of desire within education policy assemblages under conditions of climatological and political upheaval. The authors encourage further experimentation with plugging emerging technologies into global policy assemblages to better understand how desire is invested into particular images and imaginaries of educational futures. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2025 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1486332 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1080/00131911.2024.2362176 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 24 StartPage: 1754 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Futures (of Society) Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Trends Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Policy Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Theories Type: general – SubjectFull: Artificial Intelligence Type: general – SubjectFull: International Organizations Type: general – SubjectFull: Climate Type: general – SubjectFull: Policy Analysis Type: general – SubjectFull: Imagination Type: general – SubjectFull: Discourse Analysis Type: general – SubjectFull: Politics of Education Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: Desiring-Futures in Education Policy: Assemblage Theory, Artificial Intelligence, and UNESCO's Futures of Education Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: David Rousell – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Matthew P. Sinclair IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 01 Type: published Y: 2025 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0013-1911 – Type: issn-electronic Value: 1465-3397 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 77 – Type: issue Value: 6 Titles: – TitleFull: Educational Review Type: main |
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