Accelerationism: a timely provocation for the critical sociology of education

Abstract

Accelerationism is a theoretical movement that seeks to mobilise reason and technological development as a strategy for moving beyond capitalism. The first wave of accelerationism took the effects of capitalism at their most pernicious and suggested that they have not gone far enough. More recent work has complicated this project and explored political, epistemic and aesthetic accelerations. The central push to accelerate, and therefore to manifestly alter time, has consequences in terms of how one understands temporality in education. This article outlines the development of accelerationism and examines whether this theoretical movement can aid critical analysis of the growing presence in education of commercial technology providers, new modes of data analytics, and the application of machine learning algorithms to analyse data. These developments provide a useful example in relation to which a critical question can be asked: is it possible to accelerate technological development in education separate from its capitalist development?

Keywords:

• Acceleration
• algorithm
• capital
• data
• technology
• time

Notes

1. The example is drawn from a broader empirical study that investigated data production, dissemination, and use across schools and education systems in Australia, Japan, the USA, and Canada and in the education work of the OECD. The project is titled Data infrastructure, mobilities and network governance in education and is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP150102098). The Chief Investigators are Professor Bob Lingard, Associate Professor Kalervo N. Gulson, Dr Sam Sellar and Associate Professor Keita Takayama. The Partner Investigators are Professor Christopher Lubienski and Associate Professor P. Taylor Webb.