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Paper short abstract

With the instability brought about by information technologies, how to educate new generations of citizens has become an increasingly contested question. This piece asks how citizenship figures in how educators and parents problematize and respond to subject formation in technological societies.

Paper long abstract

My project traces how educators and parents problematize and respond to the ways in which the human subject is shaped through the relationship between education and information technologies. It is interested in how educators and parents attempt to reconfigure subjectivity and relationality by turning to educational philosophies and practices alternative to conventional forms of schooling. Three alternatives are frequently compared by educators and parents in contemporary debates: the philosophies and practices of Rudolf Steiner, Maria Montessori, and Charlotte Mason. Communities of educators and parents committed to these three pedagogies serve as my main interlocutors.

With this piece, I wish to discuss the ways in which citizenship figures as a question in my dissertation. I do so by attending to the everyday practices of citizenship as they materialize through alternative modes of educating children in technological societies. While recent scholarship has 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 the shifting meanings of citizenship as they are lived and experienced by educators and parents in specific times and localities. To do so, my contribution engages a leading edge of scholarship in STS which develops the notion of constitutionalism (Jasanoff 2003, 2011; Sunder Rajan 2011; Laurent 2017, 2024, 2025) and constitutions of the human with science and technology (Boenig-Liptsin 2024; Boenig-Liptsin and West Bassoff forthcoming).