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Paper short abstract

In the midst of uncertainty and instability, how to educate new generations of citizens has become an increasingly contested question. This piece asks how social actors problematize subject formation in technological societies and how they respond through alternative modes of education.

Paper long abstract

This piece focuses on how social actors—parents, educators, policymakers, and technologists—come together around the educational philosophies and practices of Rudolf Steiner in efforts to make the social and technological conditions of subject formation through conventional forms of schooling into a concern worthy of public attention. It is an early version of one of my dissertation chapters which traces how people committed to Steiner’s pedagogy in Switzerland responded to the advent of the internet in the 1990s, the widespread use of mobile phones in the 2000s, the introduction of smartphones in the 2010s, and to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence in the 2020s, and characterizes how these responses reconfigure subjectivity and relationality.

This piece contributes to this panel discussion by attending to the everyday practices of forming citizens through education in technological societies. It engages a leading edge of scholarship in STS which builds upon and extends the Latourian notion of constitution (Latour [1991] 1993) and bioconstitutionalism (Jasanoff 2003, 2011) to characterize constitutions of the human with science and technology (Sunder Rajan 2011; Laurent 2017, 2024, 2025; Boenig-Liptsin 2024; Boenig-Liptsin and West Bassoff forthcoming). While many scholars have focused on how technological artifacts enter the classroom (Cain 2021; Watters 2021; Flury and Geiss 2023; Trumbore 2025), my project approaches technology as social relations (Haraway 1997)—as sets of techniques, practices, and epistemologies that are constitutive of ways of life (Latour 1987)—to trace shifting meanings of citizenship with ethnographic and historical sources and with theories and methods from social constructionism and phenomenology.