Desiring-futures in education policy: assemblage theory, artificial intelligence, and UNESCO’s futures of education

Abstract

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched its Futures of Education policy initiative in early 2020. The process sought to open a sustained global policy debate on educational futures in a world typified by climatological instability, social inequity, and political unrest. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblages, this paper explores how the Futures of Education initiative simultaneously produces, captures, and reroutes flows of desire by opening its policymaking process to global consultation. Following this line of thinking, the paper introduces a speculative method for critical policy analysis that utilises AI-powered tools to generate expressive images and imaginaries of education futures based on UNESCO’s three stages of policy development. The authors argue that this method enables a step beyond conventional interpretations of a policy’s discursive content toward a speculative analysis of its processual dynamics and expressive potentials. Ultimately, the paper underscores the generative possibilities of AI-assisted methods for tracking flows and expressions of desire within education policy assemblages under conditions of climatological and political upheaval. The authors encourage further experimentation with plugging emerging technologies into global policy assemblages to better understand how desire is invested into particular images and imaginaries of educational futures.