Call for paper: Critical Studies Perspectives on AI’s Impact in Education

Critical Studies Perspectives on AI’s Impact in Education

The advent of AI, particularly Large Language Models, have brought many celebratory and borderline utopian claims of the technologies’ promise and potential to democratize education and reduce inequalities by offering all learners low-cost, high-quality, personalized educational resources, knowledge and tools at their convenience. However, given that educational technologies have an uneven record of delivering such declared benefits in the past, critical scholars of educational technology are skeptical (e.g., Williamson, Macgilchrist, Potter, 2023; Selwyn, 2024). Scholars have cited the influence of social contexts in impeding educational technology’s translation from proposed benefits to actual practice, while such implementation may introduce unintended consequences and back-fire effects (Tawfik, Reeves, & Stichcite, 2016). Certain features and affordances in educational technology employing AI may emerge to provide certain benefits in specific learning contexts, designs or use cases and for some students.

Meanwhile, in many countries, including the UK, USA, Canada, and Australia, higher education and universities are under political and economic pressure. The state is receding from higher education, outsourcing it to a variety of suppliers, and reducing its funding, accountability and oversight (Sarpong & Adelekan, 2023). Public schools are similarly being incrementally privatised and governed more like businesses competing for customers with corporate cultures and management structures (Gutiérrez & Exley, 2025).

Such rapid proliferation, as well as adjacent marketing and PR on the part of companies making these inroads, and its pickup by the media, are contributing to hearsay and hype about what AI can achieve (Nemorin, Vlachidis, Ayerakwa, & Andriotis, 2022).

Topics of Interest

For this special issue, we invite papers that critically examine the use of AI in EdTech. We invite works that engage this scholarly inquiry through conceptual, theoretical, methodological, empirical research, ethics, and governance and policy lenses.

The following is a selection of exemplars for the types of research questions and topics of interest that are invited:

What research and scholarly paradigms, methods and theories are well-suited to understanding the proliferation of AI in education contexts?
What are the most relevant and impactful ethics theories and approaches relevant to AI in education?
Is AI becoming an instrument for democratizing, and/or, privatising public education? How do such perspectives juxtapose or coincide or contradict each other?
In what ways is AI refusal surfacing in contexts, regions, sectors as a response to AI proliferation?
What are some of the benefits and drawbacks of using AI in EdTech for teaching and learning?
How can research on AI education integration, and teaching and learning processes and outcomes be conducted rigorously, as it pertains to their concurrent risks?
Is the ability of companies to exploit AI in educational technology exacerbating educational inequality? How might this relate to the digital divide, especially as it pertains to whether and how the technology may augment or impede meaningful learning?
How do the environmental costs of AI pose barriers to its use in public education at mass scales?
In what ways can AI undermine trust and social relations within education?
Does AI enable the outsourcing of effortful and mindful learning activities to machines?
Does AI inhibit knowledge acquisition and subsequent skills development and application?
How should we (re)conceptualize and operationalize academic integrity and plagiarism in the AI era?
What will societies lose if they outsource education to AI?
Are concerns about student cheating with AI a rational response to the system proliferation and if not, how should it be otherwise conceived of? If so, how should such a response be incorporated into instructional paradigms?

Submission Information

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Author guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.