This chapter critically examines the application of the What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach, arguing for its broader use beyond textual policies to include sociomaterial artefacts and systems. Using the crank radio as a case study, we highlight how WPR can expose power asymmetries embedded in material culture. Thus, we propose expanding WPR to engage with sociomaterial infrastructures as discursive practises of power/knowledge, thereby deepening analyses of governance, technology, and subject formation. However, we also contend that WPR’s focus on problem-solving configurations limits its ability to address governance logics beyond problematisation, such as those exemplified by Raymond Williams’ Plan X.

This chapter explores postdigital approaches to critically rethinking and dismantling grind culture—a relentless cycle of productivity and overwork. We explore pathways to resistance against grind culture by mapping out different forms of opposition and reform, relying mainly on theoretical explorations, but also illustrating these with both historical and contemporary examples. Central to our discussion is the role of digital systems in exacerbating grind culture, where the relentless pursuit of efficiency and optimization paradoxically often leads to increased work and more bureaucracy. To disrupt this harmful cycle, it is crucial to imagine and implement postdigital frameworks that challenge the constant strive for more productivity. Our speculative approach involves deconstructing existing technologies and imagining new paradigms that promote, for example, rest, meaningfulness, and individual and collective agency. The chapter draws on Foucauldian concepts such as ‘docile bodies’ and ‘technologies of the self’ to examine how power operates through the regulation of the body and both external and internalized disciplinary frameworks. It provides a tentative roadmap for reimagining ‘the machine’, advocating for futures where technologies take unexpected turns or breaks in directions that could make current productivity paradigms impossible.

Having researched music file-sharing during its heydays in the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s(Skågeby, 2008), there is one thing that has, since the subsequent universal adoption of music streaming,fascinated me: how very quickly we come to the defense of our music streaming service of choice whenit is, in any way, criticized. While admittedly anecdotal, it seems to me that any hint at “bogus capitalistprocesses” is immediately overlooked, and instead, arguments about the perceived ease of accessto a ‘total supply’ of music are put forward; suggestions that algorithmic regimes (Jarke et al., 2024)or ‘software logistics’ (Eriksson, 2019) could be dictating the circulation of culture are not so muchdismissed as accepted as ‘the way it is now’; and proposals that we have now even regressed from thesupposedly ‘free and competitive’ markets of capitalism to digital feudalism (Arditi, 2023), where a fewdata siloed services are providing all our access to music, are perhaps met with a little more frustration,but ultimately also acceptance and internalized convenience. Algorithmic and capitalist regimes arenow so tightly woven together and so ubiquitous that anything else (both future and past) just seemsunnecessary, annoying, and overly laborious.

The purpose of the edited volume is to explore knowledge production under algorithmic regimes. Algorithmic regimes are, in this case, conceptualized as a combination of regimes of truth in a Foucauldian sense (Foucault 1977), and sociomaterial apparatuses in a Baradian sense (Barad 2007), something we find very generative and interesting.

As such, we were initially thrilled to read and review this book. To us, it tackled an important gap in addressing the epistemological issues that emerge from ubiquitous use of algorithmic systems. We found the combination of a Foucauldian conceptual framework, including power/knowledge, governmentality, and regimes, together with Baradian concepts, such as intra-action, phenomenon and apparatus, deeply enticing and productive.

Frågor rörande om, eller hur, AI kan bidra till nya kunskaper eller lösa föreställda problem är i högsta grad beroende av hur problemet i sig uttrycks och kommuniceras.

This paper suggests that artificial intelligence in education (AIEd) can be fruitfully analysed as ‘policies frozen in silicon’. This means that they exist as both materialised and proposed problematisations (problem representations with corresponding solutions). As a theoretical and analytical response, this paper puts forward a heuristic lens that can provide insights into how AI technologies (or advocated AI technologies) function as proposed solutions to certain problematisations based on various imaginaries about how education and learning are best performed or supported. The combined reading of imaginaries and problematisations can thereby aid in our understanding of why and how visions of learning and education are framed in relation to AIEd developments. The overall ambition is to advance theoretical and analytical approaches towards an educational system which is (anticipated as) increasingly permeated by AI systems—systems that also support and implement, more or less, invisible models, standards and assessments of learning, as well as more grand visions of (technology-augmented) education in society.