Education as reproduction: a neo-Marxist analysis on tech hype in education

AI Ethics & Society is excited to welcome Dr Sara Black (King's College London) for her talk on education as reproduction.

Venue: Violet Laidlaw Room, Crystal Macmillan Building, University of Edinburgh + online via Teams (link below)

Date/Time: 14 April 2026, 15:30-17:00

Education as reproduction: a neo-Marxist analysis on manufacturing markets for tech hype in education

Abstract: Techno-capitalism has always eyed education as a key market to capture in order to secure future consumers for their products and services, as well as grow existing market shares for present sales. This practice can be framed in what Nancy Fraser refers to as ‘cannibal capitalism’ wherein social reproduction is undermined by the forces of production that ironically depend on it. Education practices in particular are enticing to technologise for future capital growth given their ubiquity, inherent future-orientation and semiotic nature. Recently, leaked documents from Google indicate this as an explicit strategy: the prevalence of Chromebooks and Google classroom products are an attempt to ‘produce future users’.In this talk, I will explore how financialized capitalist growth is increasingly discursive, premised on producing, exchanging and consuming desires, ideas and knowledge on a limited material footprint. I will argue education is one site where such unmoored forms of value find a home, but that materiality bites back through sticky ratios between fixed and variable capital in education practices in the present, as well as limited horizons for converting ‘cultural capital’ back into economic capital (cf Bourdieu) in the future. The contradictions inherent in the relationship between production and reproduction in education through technology are thus explored and problematised.

Speaker Bio: Sara Black is a sociologist, maths teacher and former coder who focuses on the geography of education, with particular interest in the temporality and spatiality of everyday life and how this (re)produces social inequality. Her experience as a software engineer generated her research interest in technology as it applies to education practices, focusing on the discursive and structural changes technologies bring to education systems and the effects of these on students’ and teachers’ work and lives. She currently leads the team designing the new MA in Education Futures and Technology at King’s, housed in the School of Education, Communication and Society.Before coming to King's in January 2022, Sara worked at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, and also on the teacher development programme at the University of Cape Town. She has experience across myriad contexts in the public education system in South Africa and the UK, both as a teacher and researcher. She was the acting deputy principal and head of the mathematics department in a township high school in Cape Town, and has eight years of experience in teacher support and training, as well as policy analysis in challenging schooling contexts. In her spare time, Sara is a working musician.

Teams link to join online:

https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/36610227169042?p=6Ev71n0Zywb044QmqU

Meeting ID: 366 102 271 690 42

Passcode: DJ9WR66y

Image credit: The Path, by Sophie Valeix & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org/images?artist=SophieValeix&title=ThePath https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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