Studies in the Education of Adults

60th Anniversary Special Issue #2 - Knowledge, Work, and Digitalisation in Lifelong Learning

Work, knowledge and technology have always been central to adult education. From workers’ education, vocational learning and trade union study to professional formation, continuing education and workplace learning, adult education has repeatedly had to respond to changing relations between labour, expertise, institutions and social power. The present moment brings these questions into sharper relief. Artificial intelligence, platformisation, digital infrastructures, automated decision-making, datafication, credential reform and precarious labour are not simply new tools or trends. They are reorganising what counts as knowledge, who is expected to keep learning, how learning is recognised, and who bears the burden of adaptation.

Knowledge, Work, and Digitalisation in Lifelong Learning is the second Special Issue in the 60th anniversary programme of Studies in the Education of Adults. Scheduled for publication in September 2028, it invites historically aware and critically engaged scholarship on the changing conditions of adult learning and education. The issue will not approach digitalisation as a self-evident force of progress, nor will it romanticise a pre-digital past. It asks instead how work, technology, knowledge and power have been related across the journal’s history, and how those relations are being reconfigured in contemporary lifelong learning.

The language of lifelong learning is now frequently accompanied by the language of skills, employability, reskilling, upskilling, flexibility, innovation, digital competence, artificial intelligence readiness, micro-credentials and future-proofing. These terms can describe real opportunities and practical needs. They can also conceal political choices. They can shift responsibility for labour-market volatility onto individual adults; privilege what can be measured, certified and platformed; narrow professional judgement into a set of visible competencies; and treat constant adaptation as a moral obligation. This Special Issue invites contributors to examine these tensions directly.

Digitalisation is understood broadly. It includes online and hybrid learning, data systems, learning analytics, platforms, algorithmic management, artificial intelligence, surveillance, digital assessment and new infrastructures of professional communication. It also refers to a wider social condition in which learning, work, recognition, evidence, identity and institutional governance are increasingly mediated through technical systems.

The issue is interested in how those systems can enable access, collaboration and new forms of knowledge, but also how they may intensify extraction, standardisation, exclusion, acceleration and dependence on powerful commercial infrastructures. This frame requires attention to power. Technological systems are designed, owned, governed and implemented through particular institutional and economic arrangements. They can redistribute authority between employers, educators, platforms, public bodies and learners; they can change the tempo of work and learning; and they can shape whose performance becomes visible, measurable and valuable. The issue therefore welcomes studies that treat technology neither as a neutral instrument nor as an inevitable destiny, but as a contested field in which adult education is implicated. Questions of refusal, conscientious objection, professional ethics and collective resistance are central here, particularly where adults are asked to comply with systems that intensify surveillance, deskilling, exclusion or unaccountable automation.

The issue also places knowledge at the centre of the inquiry. In policy and organisational settings, knowledge is often translated into learning outcomes, competency frameworks, credentials, standards, measurable skills and employability indicators. Such forms of recognition can be useful, but they do not exhaust what adults know or how they learn. Tacit and experiential knowledge, craft, care, professional judgement, political understanding, community expertise, critical literacy and ethical discernment may remain difficult to measure, yet they are indispensable to adult life and work. The Special Issue asks what contemporary systems make visible, what they ignore, and who gains or loses when knowledge becomes increasingly codified, datafied and marketable.

The anniversary frame makes historical engagement especially important. We welcome contributions that revisit earlier debates in adult education on work, industrial change, technological transformation, vocationalism, professional learning, workers’ knowledge, continuing education, the politics of expertise and the social purposes of lifelong learning. Such work may illuminate continuity as well as rupture. It may show that current claims about disruption, innovation and future readiness have predecessors, and that the meanings of work and knowledge have always been contested rather than technologically determined.

Indicative themes and questions

• Historical trajectories of adult education, work, technology, vocationalism, professional learning, workers’ knowledge, continuing education and the changing social organisation of expertise.
• Artificial intelligence, automation, platform work, algorithmic management, datafication and digital surveillance, including their empirical, ethical and normative implications for adult learners, educators, workers and institutions.
• Workplace learning, career transition, precarious employment, care work, labour-market insecurity, reskilling and the unequal distribution of responsibility for remaining adaptable.
• Micro-credentials, competence frameworks, learning outcomes, quality assurance, standards, recognition systems and the politics of what is made measurable, portable or valuable.
• Professional judgement, craft, tacit knowledge, care, collective expertise and the shifting boundaries between human decision-making and machine-supported systems.
• Critical theory, political economy, feminist, decolonial, disability, queer and intersectional analyses of technology, work, knowledge and lifelong learning.
• Refusal, resistance and conscientious objection in relation to technological systems, workplace digitalisation, algorithmic governance, automation and educational demands that compromise dignity, autonomy or social justice.
• Trade unions, worker organisations, communities and collective forms of learning that challenge or reshape dominant narratives of employability, innovation, flexibility and individual responsibility.
• Digital inequality and differentiated access, including the effects of class, gender, race, disability, migration, age, geography, language and uneven digital confidence on learning and work.
• Alternative futures for adult education: humane technological design, democratic knowledge infrastructures, socially just professional learning and lifelong learning beyond permanent acceleration.

The Special Issue is particularly open to research that connects present transformations to longer histories of industrial change, labour struggle, professionalisation, technological promise, educational reform and institutional control. It welcomes analyses of how knowledge and expertise travel across national and regional contexts, and how global inequalities shape access to technology, secure work, recognised learning and meaningful participation. It also welcomes work that recognises adults not only as recipients of technological change, but as educators, workers, organisers, carers, professionals and citizens who interpret, negotiate, contest and sometimes reshape the systems that surround them.

We welcome original empirical research, including qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, comparative, historical, ethnographic, participatory and policy-based studies. We also welcome theoretically ambitious articles, critical reviews, historically grounded analyses, conceptual contributions and practice-informed work that can illuminate wider questions of power, recognition and adult learning. Contributions may focus on workplaces, vocational and continuing education, universities, professional fields, trade unions, community organisations, public employment systems, digital platforms, prisons, cultural settings or other sites where adults encounter the changing relationship between learning and work.

The issue does not seek descriptive accounts of technologies or isolated evaluations of digital tools. Submissions should demonstrate a substantive connection to adult education and lifelong learning, and should explain how knowledge, work, technology and power are related in the context being studied. We are particularly interested in work that resists easy binaries: human versus machine, online versus face-to-face, innovation versus nostalgia, skills versus Bildung, flexibility versus security. Strong contributions will show how these tensions are lived, governed and contested in particular institutional and social settings.