Using generative AI in science necessitates that institutions and researchers practice epistemic reflexivity to protect intellectual diversity and resist the threat of scientific monoculture. We argue that researchers and institutions can position generative AI both as a tool for epistemic reflexivity and as an object that must be examined reflexively.

In this paper we examine imagination as a capacity as it pertains to education futures, and ask what the futures young people both imagine and fail to imagine can tell us about the structural and political forces that shape futures thinking. Informed by a speculative design approach, we used the story completion method to survey young people aged 18-30 in Canada and the U.S. to generate and understand their ideas and feelings about one possible scenario for the future of higher education. We sought to gain insight into the perspectives of this group, whose contributions to education futures are often under-represented. Drawing on Giroux's (2014) concept of disimagination politics and its relationship to elite futurism, we argue that imagination is not only a capacity but a contested political terrain: those who control what futures are imaginable shape what futures are pursued. Analyzed through Dator's (2009) Four Futures framework, our data reveal that participants' stories cluster almost entirely in Continuation and Collapse archetypes, while Discipline and Transformation futures - those requiring genuinely different arrangements of power, resources, and values - go largely unimagined. We argue that this absence is itself evidence of disimagination politics at work. Improving futures literacy, including critical reflexivity about how futures are made and promoted, as well as digital literacies, can support young people in becoming more skillful and creative with the future, but only if the structural conditions that constrain imagination are also addressed.

Background: Sharing educational research publicly is a widely held professional value, intended to advance the societal use of research and honor public investment. However, many practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in under-resourced institutions lack access to paywalled journals, which limits the potential impact of educational scholarship. Although prior research indicates that only about 28% of all scholarly articles are openly accessible, the specific landscape within the field of education, particularly in journals published by prominent organizations like the American Educational Research Association (AERA), requires a more detailed examination. Purpose: This study provides a descriptive portrait of how widespread public access is for research published in AERA journals. The analysis was guided by three central questions: First, what percentage of articles published in AERA journals between 2010 and 2022 are publicly accessible via the internet? Second, what versions of these articles (e.g., pre-print, published version, open-access licensed) are available? Third, which online platforms are most commonly used to share these articles? Research Design: We used a public internet data mining approach to analyze all articles (N = 2,516) published in six non-open access AERA journals from 2010 to 2022. We utilized the SerpAPI service to systematically query Google Scholar and determine the accessibility of each article. To identify the version of each accessible file, we qualitatively coded a random sample of 250 files and used logistic regression models to make inferences about the entire population of accessible files. Finally, we analyzed the domains of the accessible files to identify the most common sharing platforms. Conclusions: We found that 65.0% of articles published in non-open access AERA journals were publicly accessible in some form, a rate higher than that of the broader scholarly literature. Most accessible files were the final published version (estimated 51.9%-64.0%), often found on commercial platforms like ResearchGate, while fewer were pre-prints (16.1%-26.1%) or had a formal open-access license (3.5%-9.4%). Although these findings are encouraging, significant gaps in access remain, highlighting a tension in the current publishing system. We conclude by joining calls for researchers, institutions, and AERA to continue advocating for and expanding open access to scholarly work.

This paper argues that for education fiction to be a valuable methodology for studying education technology and futures, it must be rooted in the context of our current era, marked by polycrisis, collapse, and the enduring influence of colonial modernity. We begin with a reflexive analysis of academic knowledge production and then explore how education fiction can inadvertently reproduce colonial logics of these contexts are ignored. Drawing on the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective's concept of 'hospicing modernity,' we propose cultivating a decolonial imagination, one that holds grief, complicity, and possibility, as a strategy for midwifing liberatory education futures. We further argue that education fiction can function as a prefigurative method: a space to practice relational, decolonial ways of knowing and worldmaking. This approach is especially urgent in relation to education technologies, which remain deeply entangled with extractive systems.

Defining manhood is a critical concern in contemporary politics, especially due to its increasing role in shaping cultural narratives toward gender-based violence—and in particular, toward gender-based technology-facilitated violence and abuse (GBTFVA). In this context, this study investigates how political affiliation influences perceptions of GBTFVA among young Canadian men. To explore this, we draw on a survey of 1297 young Canadian men who align themselves with ideological affiliations across the political spectrum. Overall, our results show that political ideologies matter when understanding who enacts and sustains GBTFVA, as they significantly shape attitudes toward gender-based violence in digital spaces. Moreover, while we note that conservative participants displayed higher acceptance of GBTFVA myths than their liberal counterparts (such as She wanted it and She asked for it ), findings show that these harmful narratives are endorsed in different yet meaningful ways throughout all ideological affiliations. Furthermore, we found that one myth— It wasn’t really gender-based online abuse —is similarly endorsed across all political affiliations, thus highlighting the scope of these narratives that diminish the experience of targets across political discourses. By illuminating these intersections, this study provides valuable insights into the cultural and ideological underpinnings of GBTFVA, offering leverage points for societal change and prevention efforts.

In a recent interview (Bender et al., 2025), Professor Emily M. Bender discussed the limitations of technical solutions in addressing harmful Artificial Intelligence (AI) bias. She described a particular point we may reach at which technical solutions stop working, and when we should then widen the lens to ask about the problem framing itself. This is a crucial step in any inquiry that is of concern to both novice and experienced researchers alike: moving from problem-solving to problematisation. This commentary aims to provide educational researchers with a glimpse into the wide array of research problems and problematisation of AI in Education (AIED). It discusses seven framings of AIED: methodological pluralism; metaphors; ethnographic studies; imagining futures through fiction; humanistic groundings of AI design and development; third space professionals in research; and open education. We describe why these particular frames are relevant and how we wrote this commentary. We go on to suggest that to sustain the desirable but sometimes elusive nexus between research and teaching, we need to see both as rich, diverse, and distributed activities consisting of many actors. We seek to probe: What is AI? Who gets to say so and why? What critical, creative and pluralistic approaches can we take to research into its effects on the outcomes and experiences of students in higher education?

Our societies face enormous and intertwined economic, demographic, political, ecological, and social challenges.In this environment of uncertainty, doubts about the future of higher education have proliferated, particularly as demographic changes take hold, technology rapidly advances, wealth inequality increases, and climate destabilizes.In response to these challenges, and following experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic, many have argued the time is right to not only tinker with the status quo, but to imagine otherwise, to imagine alternative higher education futures that are more hopeful, more equitable, and radically more just.The articles in this special collection aim to further those efforts, imagine differently, embrace complexity, and address varied kinds of innovations in a wide set of contexts.

Gender-based violence (GBV) prevention programs have long played an important part in both teaching the realities of GBV and training people in techniques to avert, mitigate, and respond to violence. This article examines the current state of GBV prevention training in Canada through an analysis of 81 GBV education programs provided by antiviolence organizations and universities. We identified notable gaps in topics relating to technology-facilitated violence and abuse in programs targeting men and in the provision of bystander intervention training. Each of these areas represents important, but as yet unrealized, opportunities in violence prevention.

This study, originally prompted by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational practices, examined Canadian faculty members’ expectations of teaching and learning modalities in the year 2026. Employing a speculative methodology and thematic analysis, interview responses of 34 faculty members led to the construction of three hypothetical scenarios for future teaching and learning modalities: a hybrid work model, a high tech and flexible learning model, and a pre-pandemic status quo model. In contrast to radical education futures described in the literature, the findings do not depart significantly from dominant modes of teaching and learning. Nevertheless, these findings offer insights into the expectations that Canadian faculty members have with respect to future teaching and learning modalities, the contextual issues and concerns that they face, the use of speculative methodologies in educational technology research, and the potential impacts remote learning trends have on the future of higher education in Canada.

The mobilization of academic research via online platforms presents a troubling paradox. Digital-first publications offer the opportunity for scholars to reach a wider audience, yet this same online vehicle for knowledge mobilization opens scholars to the risk of online abuse. Furthermore, the concept of online abuse is often misunderstood or dismissed by post-secondary institution administrators. The aim of this research is to understand why faculty members who experience online abuse do not report the such abuse to their administration, even though there is indication that support from administration is needed to manage the problem. Drawing from a series of semi-structured interviews and focus groups, this research examines the reasons why faculty members decide not to report their experiences of online abuse to their various academic administrators. A total of 11 faculty members in academic positions located North America agreed to participate in the research. We used a combination of semi-structured and narrative interview questions to understand participants’ experiences of online abuse. The data was coded using the constant comparative approach to identify emergent themes (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), and guided by the research questions. The Theory of Planned Behavior was used to schematize the attitudes, social norms, and perceived behavioral controls that dissuade reporting of online abuse, and provide institutional recommendations that may encourage reporting and improve support for targeted faculty members. This study contributes to theory and practice by offering that when academic administrators foster a culture of care, faculty would be encouraged to report incidences of online abuse.

Gender-based technology-facilitated violence and abuse (GBTFVA) is a common experience for those engaging with digital technologies in their everyday lives. To better understand why GBTFVA persists, it is necessary to understand the false beliefs and cultural narratives that enable and sustain them. Drawing on the literature on rape myths, this paper explores the prevalence of seven gender-based online violence myths among Canadian men. To achieve this, we adapted the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance (IRMA) (Payne et al., in J Research in Personality 33:27–68, 1999) to assess GBTFVA, and surveyed 1,297 Canadian men between 18 and 30 years old on their GBTFVA beliefs. Our results show that GBTFVA myths and cultural narratives are prevalent across participants, though endorsement levels vary. Four myths were more strongly endorsed: It Wasn’t Really Gender-Based Online Abuse, He Didn’t Mean To, Gender-Based Online Abuse Is a Deviant Event, and She Lied. Overall, these findings help to name and thus begin to address the narratives that sustain and perpetuate gender-based online violence.

While the COVID-19 pandemic significantly transformed post-secondary course delivery formats, little attention has been paid to post-pandemic learner preferences. To address this gap, we designed two scales to advance our understanding of learner preferences for online learning modalities: the Modalities of Digital Education – Learner Preference (MODE-LP) scale and the Perceptions of Online Learning Scale (POLS). In this proceeding, we describe the development and piloting of these scales, including how they can provide a nuanced understanding of learner preferences for online programs, courses, and course designs and the key underlying factors that impact them. We conclude with a snapshot of preliminary results and a discussion of future research.

Much of the literature on artificial intelligence (AI) in education imagines AI as a tool in the service of teaching and learning. Is such a one-way relationship all that exists between AI and learners? In this paper we report on a thematic analysis of 92 participant responses to a story completion exercise which asked them to describe a classroom agreement between an AI instructor and a learner twenty years into the future. Using a relational theoretical framework, we find that the classroom agreements between AI and learners that participants produced encompassed elements of education, boundaries, affordances, and social conventions. These findings suggest that the ways learners relate to AI vary. Some learners relate to AI as an object, others relate to AI as a subject, and some relate to AI both as an object and a subject. These results invite a deeper engagement with the ways in which learners might relate to AI and the kinds of ethics and social protocols that such relations suggest.

In UNESCO’s 2021 report, Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education, futures emerge as a key orientation for establishing not just improved educational systems but for creating liberatory worlds for everyone. Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, social and economic instability, and the climate crisis, the future of education, especially higher education, has become highly uncertain. Dominated by “elite futurism”, education futures are often dictated by powerful institutions, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations, failing to account for the diverse perspectives and needs of communities. This lack of inclusivity perpetuates conditions of uncertainty and instability worldwide. To address these challenges and foster education futures that prioritize justice and liberation, this article explores the role of radical imagination. While conventional imagination is constrained by discursive enclosures and powerful affective economies, hindering transformative and diverse visions of the future, radical imagination challenges the status quo, seeking to address the root problems of societal norms and ideologies. This article emphasizes the importance of collective processes in radical imagination, promoting inclusivity and diverse perspectives. Importantly, this work isn’t simply for students, but must include researchers, educators, and policymakers, challenging their complicity in systems of oppression and divesting from harmful structures. By incorporating “depth pedagogies” that prioritize caring relationships with the natural world and contextual understanding of histories of oppression, education can empower learners to envision and act on alternative futures.

The educational technology industry includes numerous learning providers and platforms offering cohort-based courses. In this paper, we examine, analyze, and critique one such platform called Maven. We focus our analysis on Maven because this specific platform describes itself as building ‘the university of the future’ and has recently received significant attention and funding, making it a compelling case study to better understand the potential roles and risks associated with education platforms operating outside of and alongside more traditional higher education institutions today and into the future. We highlight specific concerns about cohort-based platforms like Maven, including lack of transparency, risk of surveillance, lack of adequate financial support for learners, and over-reliance on social media networks as signifiers of educator/instructor qualification. Suggested benefits include adaptability, suitability to changing skills needs, and responsiveness to changing environmental scenarios.

Online abuse is a growing problem in higher education. For postsecondary institutions, the increasing prevalence with which faculty members are targeted with online abuse raises important questions about what it means to provide a safe and equitable work environment that promotes equality for diverse workers in the digital age. This article draws from a series of 10 interviews with academic administrators to assess the capacity of higher education institutions to address online abuse of faculty. Findings show that, while administrators recognize how online abuse reproduces inequality in the academic workplace, various procedural norms keep this problem at a distance, invisible to management, and beyond the scope of institutional responsibility. Following Jones and Pringle (2015), we argue that this procedural distancing relegates online abuse to the terrain of the unmanageable, which, in effect, helps to render inequality inevitable for the most marginalized faculty members. Finally, and to counteract the presumed unmanageability of online abuse, we identify several alternative interventions that might be used to address online abuse and help to mitigate the inequality it produces in academia and beyond.