We are accelerating towards a higher education future where AI, dataveillance, and personalisation are de-humanising the educational experience within virtual learning environments (VLEs). These teaching machines risk driving higher education away from its social and subjective aims towards efficient ways to credential human capital (Watters, 2021). The social effects of technology upon education are emerging within critical studies of educational technology (Macgilchrist, 2021) that highlight unforeseen and emerging harms upon individuals (Selwyn, 2010). This postdigital education research agenda, articulated by Fawns et al. (2023),

invites scholars to interrogate issues of sociomaterial entanglement and human experience. Here, a knowledge gap exists in our ability to conceptualise how student subjectivities might be shaped by emergent VLEs (Castañeda & Williamson, 2021). This paper seeks to develop such concepts through post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2018) that thinks with Romantic literature and literary theory. 

 

Postdigital critique echoes the central tenets of Romanticism, which questioned the veneration of technology, efficiency, and logic in favour of social justice and the flourishing of individual subjectivity (Ferber, 2010). In this paper I imagine how the Romantics might describe experience in VLEs supported by scholars that analyse literary tropes to generate novel concepts of how subjectivities could be forged. The literary retorts of Shelley, Austen, and Wordsworth to the Enlightenment (Berlin, 2013) have much to teach us about the loss of agency in emergent educational worlds and the unforeseen consequences of rapid technological advancement (Beetham et al., 2022; Douglas, 2017; Thompson, 2022). For example, Trigg (2015) highlights how Jane Austen's depictions of codified behaviours are developed to explain how subjects navigate "socially restricted spaces" (p. 199) by narrowcasting emotion. This has much to offer towards understanding the powerful gaze of affect recognition software within VLEs and the performative resistance that might ensue (McStay, 2020; Sumner, 2021; Sumner & Martin, 2020). Alongside Shelley's (1996) depiction of a non-human ethnographer, we might also speculate upon how AI might calculate our human striving to become.

 

My inquiry seeks to capture the power of literature to provide "scaffolding for the narrative imagination" (Comer & Taggart, 2021, p. 199) and contribute to knowledge at the intersection of literary theory, surveillance, and education (Brighenti, 2009). Following Greene (1976), I seek to draw literature into the otherwise social-scientific paradigm of educational research to develop theories of subjectivity for a plausibly less human education future (Carlin, 2010; Pasquale & Selwyn, 2022).