CREDS Seminar with Leon Tikly: Education in the Interregnum: Digital Infrastructures, Knowledge Projects and the Hegemonic Struggle over the Post-2030 Agenda

As the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals approaches, the emerging post-2030 education agenda is unfolding amid an organic crisis of global capitalism characterised by fiscal constraint, geopolitical fragmentation, digital consolidation and intensifying contestation over epistemic authority. Drawing on a recent scholarship, this talk argues that the post-2030 settlement will be shaped less by formal goal-setting than by struggles over the material, institutional and epistemic infrastructures through which education is governed, financed and known. Working within a neo-Gramscian framework, the talk identifies four competing knowledge projects through which the regime is being rearticulated within an increasingly poly-imperial order: technocratic-digital optimisation, authoritarian nationalism, state developmentalism and liberal humanist restoration. Particular attention is given to the digital dimensions of this struggle. Platform capitalism, data extraction and algorithmic governance now constitute one of the central frontiers on which the post-2030 settlement is being contested, with procurement regimes, interoperability standards, AI policy and the politics of digital public goods functioning simultaneously as mechanisms of accumulation, instruments of geopolitical positioning and infrastructures through which colonial asymmetries are reproduced. The argument is offered in a spirit of critical hope and from an explicit normative commitment to social, epistemic and environmental justice. The talk closes by considering the conditions under which counter-hegemonic projects oriented towards these ends might achieve institutional durability, and asks what this implies for researchers working at the intersection of education and digital society.

https://events.humanitix.com/creds-seminar-with-leon-tikly-education-in-the-interregnum-digital-infrastructures-knowledge-projects-and-the-hegemonic-struggle-over-the-post-2030-agenda