Across the globe, the university is in crisis. Yet it is not a singular crisis, it is institutional, epistemic, economic, and pedagogical. Under the pressures of marketisation, datafication, and platformisation, the university is increasingly governed through metrics, audit cultures, and global rankings that reframe academic value in quantifiable terms (Shore and Wright, 2015; Collini, 2012). As Shore and Wright (2015) argue, this logic of “governing by numbers” is not merely bureaucratic but ideological: it reassembles the university around performance indicators and managerial control, hollowing out its democratic and collegial ethos. These developments represent not a rupture but a deepening of neoliberal transformations that have long reshaped higher education as a site of production and consumption rather than a space of democratic inquiry (Giroux, 2014). The university is no longer imagined as a public good but as a provider of services, responsive to the demands of employers, funders, and global rankings.

Digital technology is central to this transformation. Learning management systems, data dashboards, micro-credentials, and AI tutors are not neutral tools, they are embedded in, and help to reproduce, a particular institutional imaginary. These technologies often foreground speed, scalability, and surveillance, reconfiguring educational practice around managerial imperatives rather than pedagogical or emancipatory ones (Williamson et al., 2020). As Hall (2018) argues, digital platforms increasingly function as instruments of labour extraction and control, shaping both academic and student experience in ways that mirror broader logics of platform capitalism.

Yet crisis is also a moment of possibility. The university, as Cornelius Castoriadis (1997) reminds us, is not merely an institution among others, it is an imaginary institution: a socially created form that both shapes and is shaped by the collective imaginaries of its time. Institutions are not fixed; they are instituted by human beings and open to re-institution through acts of the radical imagination. This means that the university is not doomed to its current trajectory. It can be reimagined and reinstituted, collectively, democratically, and pedagogically.

This final post in the series takes up that challenge. It asks: what would it mean to reclaim the university as a democratic pedagogical institution? How might we reorient educational technologies, institutional practices, and pedagogical commitments towards autonomy, creativity, and ethical engagement? And how might the radical imagination serve as a compass in navigating this terrain?

In what follows, we synthesise insights from the previous posts in this series, on imagination, critique, temporality, and assessment, to envision a university grounded not in metrics and market logic but in the shared work of institution-making. This is not a blueprint but an invitation: to reimagine the university not as it is, but as it might yet become.

Over the course of this series, we have explored how the institution of education is shaped, and reshaped, through imagination, critique, autonomy, temporality, and historical becoming. Each thread represents not a discrete theme but a dimension of a broader philosophical and pedagogical project: to reclaim education as a democratic, ethical, and imaginative undertaking in the age of digital governance.

First, imagination is foundational. Drawing on Castoriadis (1997), we have seen that society is not simply structured by objective necessity but instituted through the radical imaginary: the collective capacity to bring forth new forms of life, meaning, and relation. Digital education, when governed by commercial platforms and audit cultures, tends to limit this imaginative scope, prescribing what learning should look like and how it should proceed. A genuinely transformative pedagogy must resist this closure. It must cultivate imagination as an institutional force, the power to envision alternatives to the dominant logics of efficiency, metrics, and control.

Imagination alone, however, is insufficient without critique. Critique is not mere commentary but, as Motta (2013) and Freire (1970) argue, a form of action that refuses and reconfigures. To critique educational technologies, platform regimes, or assessment practices is not to disengage but to reimagine their purposes and possibilities. Such critique becomes institutional when it informs how we design systems, structure time, and enable learning. It becomes political when it exposes how power operates through digital pedagogies and makes room for collective agency.

Autonomy is the condition for this agency. Castoriadis (1997) distinguishes between heteronomy, where institutions are accepted as given, and autonomy, where they are critically interrogated and self-instituted. Education must be a space where learners and educators alike become subjects of their own practices, not objects of algorithmic decision-making. Autonomy in this sense is not an individualist ideal but a collective capacity to shape and remake our institutions, a principle that stands in stark contrast to EdTech’s turn toward surveillance, nudging, and predictive analytics (Williamson, 2017).

These dynamics are deeply entangled with temporality. As explored in Post 5, educational technologies often compress time into a perpetual present: real-time dashboards, instant feedback, performance metrics. Yet learning unfolds over time. It requires delay, reflection, ambiguity. The social-historical, in Castoriadis’ (1997) formulation, reminds us that time is not linear or empty but imbued with meaning, struggle, and becoming. A democratic pedagogy must honour this temporal richness, refusing to reduce education to short-cycle optimisation.

Finally, historical becoming reconnects education to lived experience and memory. Drawing on Rendón’s (2009) sentipensante pedagogy and Freire’s dialogic method, we can reimagine pedagogy as a practice that locates learners in time: as agents formed by, and forming, history. This stands in opposition to a technocratic vision of education as information transfer. It positions learning as relational, ethical, and collective.

Together, these five threads reveal that education is never neutral. It is always already an act of institution, a choice about what kinds of futures we make possible. If digital education is to live up to its emancipatory potential, it must be grounded not in metrics or platforms but in imagination, critique, autonomy, temporality, and becoming. This is the terrain upon which democratic reinstitution must begin.

Dominant narratives of the university portray institutions as static structures, formalised systems designed to manage complexity, maintain order, and enforce accountability. Within this logic, institution is equated with bureaucracy: something to be administered, evaluated, and optimised. In the context of digital education, this perspective is amplified. Platforms such as learning management systems (LMSs), predictive analytics dashboards, and AI tutors operate within predefined metrics and assumptions. These systems instantiate a technocratic imaginary that presents educational processes as programmable, predictable, and performance-driven.

This managerial paradigm is more than an administrative convenience; it is a mode of governance. Managerialism, as Shore and Wright (2015) describe, reconfigures institutions through regimes of audit, metrication, and surveillance. In doing so, it transforms educational institutions from spaces of intellectual exploration into sites of risk management and data accountability. Education becomes a series of inputs and outputs, with little room for reflexivity, collectivity, or dissent. Such logics reinforce what Castoriadis (1997) terms the “instituted society”, a society governed by sedimented norms, structures, and procedures that conceal their own contingency.

Yet Castoriadis insists that all institutions are the creations of the radical imagination and therefore open to transformation. He distinguishes between the instituted and the instituting society: the former seeks stability, while the latter is the creative force that founds and re-founds institutions. Institution, then, is not merely a container for education, it is a practice of world-making. It expresses a society’s collective orientation toward what is valued, how meaning is formed, and what futures are imaginable.

From this perspective, digital infrastructure is not neutral. The design of educational platforms encodes specific institutional imaginaries, privileging efficiency, modularity, and control over care, complexity, and collaboration. Even when marketed as “open” or “agile,” these tools often reproduce existing hierarchies and epistemic exclusions. By naturalising the present as inevitable, they foreclose the possibility of instituting education otherwise.

Resisting this logic requires reclaiming institution as praxis: the ongoing, collective creation of meaning and form. This involves recognising that educational institutions are not things to be managed, but relations to be cultivated. As Motta (2013) illustrates through her study of Latin American social movements, critical praxis entails reimagining and reinstituting education in ways that are participatory, reflexive, and grounded in social justice. Such acts do not reject institutions per se, but challenge their current configurations and open space for democratic reinvention.

To view the institution through this lens is to see it as a site of struggle, imagination, and ethical action. It is to refuse the passive acceptance of inherited forms and instead ask: what kind of educational institutions do we want to co-create? What imaginaries do we wish to enact? And how might our digital systems be designed not to reinforce the instituted, but to support the instituting? In reclaiming institution as praxis, we reframe education not as the reproduction of control, but as the creation of collective autonomy.

To reimagine the university is also to reimagine pedagogy. At its most vital, pedagogy is not simply the transmission of knowledge or the management of learners. It is a form of world-making, an imaginative and ethical act that opens possibilities for being, knowing, and acting otherwise. As Castoriadis (1997) reminds us, institutions are the sedimentation of imaginary significations, yet they remain open to transformation through the radical imagination. Pedagogy, understood in this way, is a site of institutional re-creation, a space where educators and students collectively institute new forms of social meaning.

Central to this vision is the idea of autonomy, not as the possession of the individual, but as a process of becoming that is relational, dialogic, and situated. Castoriadis (1997) frames autonomy as a capacity to question and transform inherited significations. In education, this entails cultivating the conditions in which learners can participate in shaping the purposes, practices, and meanings of their learning. Freire (1970) similarly asserts that education must be rooted in dialogue, critical reflection, and the co-creation of knowledge. Both thinkers challenge the instrumental logic that reduces learning to outcomes, competencies, or behavioural compliance.

This pedagogical orientation is also an ethical one. It requires educators to act in ways that foreground care, responsibility, and relationality. As Biesta (2013) argues, teaching is not merely about effective intervention but about taking responsibility for what we bring into the world. It is always a risk, what he calls the “beautiful risk of education”, because it involves opening oneself to the unpredictable emergence of subjectivity. Such ethics resist the closure of pre-set goals and metrics; they invite uncertainty, encounter, and change.

Relationality is therefore not a supplement to pedagogy but its very condition. In digital contexts, this means designing environments that allow space for vulnerability, co-presence, and collective authorship. While digital platforms often fragment pedagogical relationships through surveillance and modularisation, they can also be reimagined to support shared inquiry and meaning-making. Educators who design for mutual recognition, care, and dialogue make possible a pedagogy that resists the dehumanising effects of automation.

This is not a naïve call for idealism. It is a commitment to seeing pedagogy as a form of praxis, of imaginative and ethical engagement with the world as it is and as it could be. Pedagogy must begin from the premise that every act of learning is also an act of institution. In this light, digital environments are not neutral tools but spaces to be claimed, remade, and oriented toward democratic ends. The ethical task is to shape these spaces in ways that honour the autonomy, dignity, and imaginative potential of all participants.

By reclaiming pedagogy as imaginative and ethical action, educators assert their role not as functionaries of a system, but as co-creators of new possibilities for education and society alike.

In the final movement of this series, we shift from critique to construction, from analysis to action. If the university is to be reimagined as a democratic institution, its digital infrastructures must be guided by principles that resist automation, instrumentality, and enclosure. These are not abstract ideals. They are conditions for education as a humanising, emancipatory, and ethical practice.

Design for Autonomy, Not Automation

Autonomy, in Castoriadis’ (1997) terms, is not the freedom to choose within a pre-given system, but the collective capacity to create and transform institutions. Digital systems that predict and prescribe, such as AI-driven learning paths or behaviourist nudging, undermine this capacity. They replace decision-making with compliance, flattening the imaginative potential of education. Designing for autonomy means cultivating open-endedness, meaningful choice, and critical self-reflection. It invites learners and educators to co-create the very systems they inhabit.

Honour Temporality and Emergence

Frictionless platforms promise seamless efficiency, but learning is not seamless. It unfolds through rhythms of confusion, insight, and revision. When systems collapse time into real-time metrics and dashboards, they obscure the long arc of educational growth. Design must honour slow learning, recursive understanding, and the dignity of not-knowing. It must support spaces where uncertainty is not a defect but a generative condition of thought.

Centre Dialogue, Reflection, and Dissent

Education is not simply content delivery, it is dialogue. Digital environments should amplify, not silence, the voices of those who inhabit them. This includes designing for deliberation, ethical disagreement, and moments of rupture. Drawing on Freire (1970), pedagogy must remain dialogical, grounded in the belief that all learners can name and transform their world. Reflection and dissent are not add-ons but core components of democratic practice.

Support Co-Creation and Shared Authority

The architecture of platforms often encodes hierarchical assumptions. Designers must challenge these defaults. Inspired by traditions of participatory design (Björgvinsson et al., 2012) and feminist theory (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020), co-creation means involving learners and educators in shaping the tools, spaces, and policies that govern them. Shared authority decentralises expertise and affirms education as a collaborative venture.

Refuse Platform Capture, Reclaim Federated Infrastructure

The logics of surveillance capitalism, ranking, tracking, behavioural surplus (Zuboff, 2019), have no place in democratic education. Platform capture locks institutions into proprietary systems that prioritise efficiency over freedom. To design for democracy is to cultivate open, interoperable, and federated infrastructures, those grounded in public values, not private extraction. Examples such as Mastodon, H5P, and open-source LMSs reveal the viability of such alternatives.

These principles are not utopian abstractions. They are practical commitments for educators, designers, and institutions committed to reclaiming education as a space of possibility. As Castoriadis reminds us, institutions are not fixed. They are imagined and instituted by us, and therefore open to reinvention.

This claim lies at the heart of the series. At stake in any discussion of educational technology, platforms, or data systems is not simply how we teach, but what kind of world we seek to co-create through teaching. As Castoriadis (1997) reminds us, institutions are not fixed; they are formed and reformed by the radical imagination. The university, too, is such an institution, historically contingent, socially imagined, and therefore open to reinvention.

As Shore and Wright (2015) argue, the proliferation of audit cultures and global ranking systems reshapes universities through logics of surveillance and competitive comparison, undermining democratic educational values. Across these posts, we have seen how the temporal, ethical, and institutional dimensions of education are always at risk of being collapsed into managerial logics, rendered efficient, measurable, and devoid of possibility. In response, we must resist the default settings of digital modernity: the dashboards that flatten pedagogy into metrics, the platforms that mediate learning through surveillance, and the bureaucratic norms that shrink education to a service economy.

To resist is not simply to negate. It is to reimagine. A pedagogy of possibility calls on educators, designers, and institutional leaders to actively create conditions for autonomy, solidarity, and critical thought. This means refusing the assumption that educational structures are neutral or unchangeable. As Hall (2018) argues, the alienation experienced by academics is not a personal failure but a systemic design. Addressing it requires a collective reconstitution of purpose, not just better coping strategies.

Such reconstitution begins in pedagogy. A pedagogy of possibility treats education as a shared ethical project, a practice of care, co-creation, and critical reflection. Freire (1970) insisted that education must be dialogical and rooted in the lived experiences of learners. Similarly, hooks (1994) framed teaching as an act of love and liberation, a space where new selves and new worlds can be imagined. These visions demand time, trust, and institutions capable of sustaining ambiguity, dissent, and transformation.

Technology can support this, but only if radically repurposed. Platforms must be redesigned around dialogue, not control; infrastructures must be open, federated, and responsive to local needs. One need not start from scratch. Projects like the Cooperative University initiative in the UK or the expansion of community-led open education networks offer real-world alternatives that challenge dominant paradigms of digital education.

In this light, the task ahead is neither nostalgic nor technophobic. It is constructive. The imaginary institution of education must become a site where freedom is practised, not simply promised. Where the university becomes a space of world-making, not world-reproducing. And where pedagogy, when reclaimed as an imaginative and ethical act, opens the door to other futures.

“To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn.” (hooks, 1994, p.17)

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