Autonomy, Agency, and the Educated Subject – Beyond the Individual Learner
Published on (2025-09-08) by Stephen Wheeler.
Introduction
Imagine the familiar EdTech advertisement: a lone learner at their laptop, dashboard glowing, empowered to “personalise their pathway” and “take control of their learning journey.” This image resonates with contemporary ideals of freedom and self-determination, yet it also encapsulates the narrow way autonomy is imagined in education today. Too often autonomy is treated as self-sufficiency, a matter of managing one’s own progress through predesigned systems, buffered from others and detached from collective purposes. The ambition of this series is to think differently: to reclaim education as polis, a shared space of imagination and responsibility where freedom is cultivated with others rather than against them.
In the previous post, I contrasted the logic of the market, where learning is defined in terms of choice, efficiency, and return on investment, with imaginaries of the common good that emphasise mutual obligation and collective flourishing. This post deliberately pivots from the common good to autonomy: if education is to serve the public rather than private interest, autonomy cannot be reduced to personalised self-direction. It must be relational, institutional, and oriented toward responsibility. The question animating this post is therefore simple yet demanding: What does it mean to be autonomous in education today?
Charles Taylor’s account of modern subjectivity sharpens the stakes. In A Secular Age, Taylor describes the rise of the buffered self, an understanding of the person as sealed off from the world, secure against external influence, and inclined to treat meaning as internal and private (Taylor, 2007). This marks a departure from earlier notions of the porous self, open to forces beyond the individual. The buffered imaginary has enabled modern freedoms, but it also risks detaching authenticity from shared horizons of significance. Taylor had already warned in The Ethics of Authenticity that a fixation on self-expression can collapse into triviality unless oriented toward goods beyond the self (Taylor, 1992). Applied to education, this modern imaginary translates into autonomy as inwardness, managed through dashboards and “my pathway” logics, rather than cultivated in relation to a public.
Cornelius Castoriadis offers a more demanding alternative. For Castoriadis, autonomy is not only individual self-rule but participation in the collective self-instituting of society: the reflexive capacity to question inherited norms and consciously recreate them (Castoriadis, 1991; 1997). Individual and collective autonomy are inseparable. One cannot meaningfully exercise freedom apart from institutions that enable public self-questioning and renewal. From an educational perspective, this means autonomy cannot be confined to choice among predesigned options; it must involve learners in shared world-making - deliberation, rule-formation, and responsibility for the life held in common.
Gert Biesta adds a crucial pedagogical inflection. In The Beautiful Risk of Education, Biesta argues that education is always more than qualification and socialisation; it also involves subjectification, the emergence of the person as a responsible subject (Biesta, 2013). This process carries what he calls a “beautiful risk”: learners appear before others in ways that cannot be predetermined, taking responsibility in a world they share. Subjectification reminds us that autonomy is not the absence of ties but the cultivated capacity to act with and for others. True autonomy is not isolation but relation - freedom as co-authorship of a shared world.
Taken together, these perspectives suggest that the dominant image of the autonomous learner is inadequate. Autonomy worthy of democratic education is relational and institutional, exercised through practices of dialogue, judgment, and co-creation. The task is not to diminish the learner’s agency but to relocate it: from private optimisation toward participation in the democratic work of imagining and sustaining the common good.
The Autonomous Individual Learner
In contemporary education, autonomy is frequently imagined as the capacity of the self-sufficient learner to design, manage, and optimise their own learning path. The image is familiar: dashboards that track progress, adaptive platforms that promise the “right resource at the right time,” and marketing slogans urging students to “learn on your own terms.” At first glance, this appears empowering. Yet beneath the surface lies a powerful imaginary shaped by neoliberal values of choice, flexibility, and efficiency. Autonomy becomes less about democratic participation in shared learning and more about managing oneself as a consumer in an educational marketplace.
Wendy Brown (2015) argues that neoliberal rationality recasts all domains of life in the image of market competition, where individuals are conceived as entrepreneurs of the self. Stephen Ball (2012) traces how these logics enter education policy, positioning learners as rational choosers responsible for maximising their own returns. Within this framing, autonomy is not collective self-determination but a matter of personalised optimisation: each learner tasked with monitoring and investing in their own “learning capital.”
Educational technologies both illustrate and intensify this vision. Consider the experience of a student opening an online learning dashboard. The platform presents colour-coded indicators of progress, ranks performance against peers, and nudges the student toward tasks designed to increase “engagement minutes.” What feels like freedom is also an exercise in self-surveillance. Ben Williamson (2017) shows how such tools enact a “datafied” logic of governance, turning learning into something measurable, comparable, and steerable through analytics. Neil Selwyn (2022) similarly argues that the rhetoric of personalisation masks a restructuring of pedagogy around what can be easily quantified, narrowing the scope of education to that which fits the metrics.
The political-economic dimension deepens the concern. Shoshana Zuboff (2019) demonstrates how platform business models rely on extracting behavioural data to predict and shape future actions. When imported into education, this logic means that the optimisation of “my pathway” may serve not only the learner’s goals but also the platform’s imperatives: maximising engagement, prolonging screen time, or securing new markets. Autonomy here risks collapsing into compliance, as the learner’s choices are subtly steered by architectures of surveillance and commodification.
Empirical evidence further tempers the promise. Studies by RAND found “promising” but inconsistent effects of personalised learning programmes, noting significant variation in implementation and outcomes (Pane et al., 2015). Justin Reich (2020) reaches a similar conclusion in his wide-ranging analysis of digital learning innovations: technology alone rarely disrupts entrenched institutional patterns and cannot substitute for the relational and civic purposes of education. Personalisation may support some aspects of learning, but it does not deliver autonomy in the richer sense of participating in shared inquiry and democratic responsibility.
Seen together, these insights reveal the limits of the “autonomous individual learner” as a guiding figure. Framed through neoliberal and technological imaginaries, autonomy becomes synonymous with self-management, consumption, and optimisation. What is eclipsed is the possibility of autonomy as co-authorship of a shared world: a freedom exercised with others rather than against them. The challenge for democratic education is to move beyond dashboards and individual pathways toward practices that cultivate responsibility, dialogue, and collective imagination.
Taylor on the Buffered Self and Authenticity
To understand why autonomy in education is so often reduced to private self-direction, it is helpful to turn to Charles Taylor’s account of modern subjectivity. Taylor traces how the “self” has been reimagined across history, and how this has shaped what freedom is taken to mean. His analysis illuminates why contemporary imaginaries so often equate autonomy with inwardness, self-expression, and detachment from shared obligations.
The buffered self
In A Secular Age (2007), Taylor contrasts the modern buffered self with the premodern porous self. The porous self was understood as open to forces beyond the individual, spirits, communities, or transcendent realities. By contrast, the buffered self is imagined as self-enclosed, capable of standing back from the world, and generating agency from within (Taylor, 2007). This shift made possible gains in critical distance and personal rights, but it also led to a sense of insulation: freedom is imagined chiefly as freedom from external demands. Autonomy, in this frame, risks being understood only as self-possession and independence.
Authenticity and its horizons
This buffered imaginary aligns with Taylor’s discussion of authenticity. In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), he affirms the value of articulating one’s own voice and living true to oneself. Yet he warns that authenticity becomes empty when detached from what he calls “horizons of significance”: the wider goods, values, and purposes that give our choices substance. Examples of such horizons include commitments to truth, justice, or solidarity, goods that we do not invent but that orient and justify our evaluations. Without them, authenticity can collapse into mere preference or narcissism. In education, this is visible when autonomy is treated simply as “choose your own pathway” without situating those choices within shared practices of inquiry or ethical responsibility.
Horizons and social imaginaries
Taylor’s wider work underscores this point. In Sources of the Self (1989), he demonstrates that identity is always formed within frameworks of value we inherit and cannot simply discard. In Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), he describes the shared understandings that underpin common life, from democratic institutions to everyday norms. These analyses suggest that autonomy is never purely private: it depends on and is shaped by collective imaginaries that disclose what counts as meaningful action.
Implications for education
Applied to education, Taylor’s insights reveal both the appeal and the limits of the dominant image of autonomy. In classroom and EdTech discourse alike, autonomy is often represented as a dashboard where learners track “my progress,” “my goals,” and “my achievements.” Such imagery embodies the buffered self: agency imagined as inward management, sealed off from wider horizons. A Taylorian corrective would not reject autonomy but would deepen it. Autonomy must involve the cultivation of personal voice in relation to shared goods and communal life. Authentic education invites students not only to manage their pathways but also to deliberate together about what is worth learning and why. In this way, autonomy is redefined not as withdrawal into private self-direction, but as participation in a common search for meaning.
Castoriadis on Autonomy: Individual and Collective
Cornelius Castoriadis offers one of the most demanding accounts of autonomy in modern philosophy, insisting that the personal and the political cannot be separated. His work shows why autonomy must be understood not only as individual self-rule but as a practice of collective self-institution: the capacity of societies to recognise that their laws and norms are their own creations, and therefore open to questioning and transformation.
Heteronomy and autonomy
Castoriadis distinguishes between heteronomy and autonomy. Under heteronomy, people live according to rules they experience as given, from gods, nature, history, experts, or markets. These rules appear beyond contestation. Autonomy, by contrast, arises when a society acknowledges that it has made its own institutions and can remake them knowingly (Castoriadis, 1991). Autonomy means setting rules together, subject to revision, in light of collective deliberation. This is not licence but a shared responsibility for self-limitation.
The radical imagination and social significations
Central to this account is Castoriadis’ idea of the radical imagination: the human capacity to create new meanings that are not reducible to functional needs or external causes. Societies crystallise these meanings into social imaginary significations, shared frameworks such as democracy, justice, money, or progress (Castoriadis, 1997). In heteronomous societies, these significations are experienced as immutable necessities. In autonomous societies, they are rendered explicit and revisable: open to debate, criticism, and renewal.
Individual and collective inseparability
For Castoriadis, individual autonomy depends on collective autonomy. The self is formed within institutions and significations it did not originate. To become autonomous, individuals must be part of a society capable of questioning and altering its own frameworks. The autonomous subject is thus one who can interrogate inherited meanings and join with others in remaking them, accepting the burdens of self-limitation required for shared life (Castoriadis, 1991). Autonomy is not a private achievement but a social practice.
Relevance for education
Education has a vital role in this vision. Castoriadis invokes the Greek concept of paideia, formation through which citizens are initiated into practices of questioning and rule-making. In a heteronomous mode, education socialises learners into compliance with given structures: “these are the rules, follow them.” In an autonomous mode, education prepares learners to participate in self-institution: to deliberate about purposes, to question norms, and to change rules when necessary. A practical example might be students co-designing assessment criteria in a course. Rather than merely consuming pre-set frameworks, they engage in collective authorship, learning that institutions, including the classroom, are human creations that can be justified, revised, and improved.
Final reflections
Autonomy for Castoriadis is not the freedom of isolated choosers but the shared work of giving ourselves our laws. Education aligned with this vision invites learners into world-making: the move from “these are the rules” to “these are our rules, for now, and we are responsible for them.” Only in such contexts can individual freedom acquire substance, as learners discover themselves as participants in collective self-questioning and democratic creation.
Biesta on Subjectification and the “Beautiful Risk”
In much of contemporary debate, autonomy in education is imagined as individual self-direction or efficient self-management. Gert Biesta offers a different perspective, one that insists education is irreducibly relational and ethical. He introduces subjectification as one of three core dimensions of education, alongside qualification (acquiring knowledge and skills) and socialisation (initiation into traditions and communities). This triadic framework, first developed in Beyond Learning (2006), helps distinguish education’s different purposes and clarifies what is at stake when subjectification is overlooked. Subjectification names the emergence of the learner as a subject: a being capable of responsibility and response, not simply an object of instruction, measurement, or consumption (Biesta, 2006).
The beautiful risk
In The Beautiful Risk of Education (2013), Biesta expands this idea by emphasising that education cannot be reduced to techniques or guaranteed outcomes. True education involves what he calls the “beautiful risk”: the creation of spaces where learners may appear as subjects in ways that cannot be scripted in advance. It is beautiful because it honours freedom and uniqueness, but it is risky because it cannot be secured through systems of control. Standardisation, predictive analytics, and even personalised learning platforms seek to reduce this risk. Yet in doing so they also reduce the possibility of genuine subject-formation, replacing education with management.
Responsibility, unpredictability, and relationality
Subjectification highlights three interwoven elements of becoming an educated subject. First, responsibility: learners are not passive consumers but are called to answer for their actions. Second, unpredictability: what matters in education cannot be entirely planned, there is always the possibility of surprise, transformation, or dissent. Third, relationality: subjectification occurs in response to others. Biesta often describes this as an “appeal” from beyond the self: the learner confronted by a demand, a question, or another’s presence that requires a response. In practice, this might look like a student taking responsibility in a group project by ensuring quieter peers are heard, or responding to a teacher’s challenge with an unexpected idea that shifts the direction of discussion. These moments cannot be captured by dashboards or test scores, but they are precisely where educational subjectivity comes into view.
A corrective to individualised autonomy
Seen this way, subjectification serves as a corrective to thin, individualised accounts of autonomy. When autonomy is framed simply as “my goals, my pathway,” it risks collapsing into consumerism. Subjectification reminds us that autonomy is not isolation but appearance: stepping into public space, taking responsibility, and engaging with others. Autonomy is thus reconceived as relational freedom, the capacity to act with and for others in a shared world. This account resists the reduction of learners to datapoints or consumers, affirming instead their role as participants in the unpredictable, risky, and meaningful work of democratic education.
Final reflections
Biesta’s emphasis on subjectification and the beautiful risk reorients autonomy toward its ethical and democratic dimensions. To educate for autonomy is not to guarantee each learner’s private optimisation but to nurture the possibility that learners may appear as subjects, take responsibility, and act in ways that reshape their shared world. In a time dominated by datafication and personalised pathways, this vision is both challenging and hopeful: it reminds us that the most important outcomes of education cannot be predicted or controlled, only invited and sustained through risk.
The Danger of Individualised Autonomy in EdTech Narratives
“Learn anytime, anywhere. Your pathway, your pace.” Such slogans are common in EdTech marketing. They promise autonomy as empowerment: the freedom to shape learning around individual needs and preferences. Yet, as critical scholars have shown, these narratives often mask a very different reality. What is celebrated as personal autonomy frequently becomes a matter of optimisation within data-driven systems, where learners are positioned as self-managers rather than participants in shared educational projects (Selwyn, 2016; Williamson, 2017).
Personalisation: promise and operational logic
At the level of promise, personalisation suggests that learners gain meaningful control over content, pace, and direction. At the level of practice, however, personalisation is typically implemented through algorithms that profile learners, sequence resources, and track engagement. Dashboards display progress in metrics and visualisations that frame education as something to be managed and optimised. Autonomy here is procedural: the freedom to move within predesigned pathways calibrated for efficiency, not to deliberate about ends or purposes (Selwyn, 2022).
From autonomy to self-management
Within this framing, learners are cast as entrepreneurs of the self. Responsibility lies in monitoring data, meeting targets, and maximising returns on effort and attention. Self-paced modules and adaptive tutors promise flexibility but often enclose choice within the logics of platforms. “Anytime, anywhere” learning can easily become “always on” learning, where the responsibility for success shifts entirely to the individual. The language of empowerment masks a subtle shift: from education as a collective project to education as a personal portfolio of achievements (Selwyn, 2016; Williamson, 2017).
Risks to democratic education
Three risks follow from this individualised conception of autonomy. First, isolation: when progress is tracked privately, opportunities for dialogue, deliberation, and shared inquiry diminish. Second, erosion of collective responsibility: if learners are treated as self-tuning units, questions of what we owe each other as citizens or peers recede. Third, neglect of democratic purposes: efficiency and completion metrics crowd out the slower work of disagreement, judgment, and collective problem framing that democratic education requires (Reich, 2020; Selwyn, 2016).
Platform incentives and surveillance
These risks are not incidental. As Zuboff (2019) argues, platforms are built around the extraction of behavioural data to predict and shape future action. When such business models underpin learning platforms, the pathways offered may serve platform imperatives, maximising engagement time or demonstrating scalability, rather than educational goods. Autonomy collapses into compliant self-optimisation within architectures of surveillance and commodification.
Evidence and a concrete scenario
Empirical findings underscore these concerns. RAND’s large-scale studies of personalised learning reported mixed outcomes, with results highly dependent on context and implementation (Pane et al., 2015). Reich (2020) similarly concludes that EdTech rarely disrupts entrenched institutional patterns and cannot deliver transformation on its own. Imagine a self-paced, “anytime” course: each student advances through adaptive quizzes while discussion forums remain silent. Completion rates rise, yet collective exploration withers. Autonomy here is reduced to solitary throughput rather than co-authored inquiry.
Final reflections
If autonomy is equated with efficiency and independence, its educational horizon narrows to self-management. Reclaiming autonomy for democratic education means designing learning ecologies where learners are not only tracking progress but also encountering others, deliberating about purposes, and taking shared responsibility. Personalisation need not be discarded, but it must be subordinated to richer educational ends: dialogue, co-creation, and the cultivation of collective responsibility.
Towards Autonomy as Participation in Collective World-Making
Autonomy does not have to mean the private sovereignty of an isolated learner. Read through Castoriadis and Biesta, it is better imagined as co-authored freedom: the ability to act with and for others in spaces where norms, meanings, and rules are created, debated, and revised. In this view, autonomy is simultaneously individual and collective. It is exercised by persons, but only within a world that is sustained by shared practices and institutions.
From private choice to co-authored freedom
Cornelius Castoriadis argues that a society is autonomous when its members recognise themselves as the authors of their institutions and can remake them knowingly (Castoriadis, 1991; 1997). Individual autonomy, then, depends on collective self-instituting: our freedom has substance only if the frameworks we inhabit are open to questioning and renewal. Charles Taylor complements this with his account of horizons of significance, the shared goods that orient choice (Taylor, 1991). Together, these perspectives show that autonomy is not merely choosing from options but participating in the public work of world-making: shaping the shared contexts in which choices matter.
Democratic pedagogy
This reframing links autonomy to democratic pedagogy. For John Dewey, democracy was a “mode of associated living” sustained by inquiry and dialogue (Dewey, 1916). Paulo Freire added that education should be dialogical, enabling learners to become co-creators of knowledge rather than passive recipients (Freire, 1970). Gert Biesta’s notion of subjectification sharpens the point: to educate is to invite learners to appear as responsible subjects before others, not simply as consumers or data points (Biesta, 2013). Autonomy here means contributing to collective deliberation and shared self-rule.
Relational and situated autonomy
This democratic vision reframes autonomy as relational and situated. It binds freedom to responsibility (answering to others and to shared goods), to dialogue (the willingness to justify and revise claims), and to plurality (acknowledging that others see differently). Hannah Arendt reminds us that freedom becomes real when people act in concert in a public realm, sustaining a common world in their differences (Arendt, 1958). Individual autonomy is not erased here; it remains essential. But it is thickened by being exercised in relation to others, under conditions of plurality and mutual responsibility.
Education as a site of democratic imagination
In practice, this view casts education as a site for democratic imagination. One example is a course where students co-design the criteria for assessment. The process begins with a teacher presenting a set of draft criteria. Students then deliberate in groups, questioning what should count as evidence of understanding, negotiating disagreements, and proposing revisions. The final criteria emerge from collective authorship, with both teacher and students accountable for the outcomes. Such exercises show learners that institutions, even classroom rules, are human creations that can be justified and remade. Other practices might include public-facing projects, class charters, or structured deliberation protocols. These do not abandon individual agency; they cultivate it by embedding personal choice within shared responsibility.
Final reflections
Reframing autonomy as participation in world-making challenges the thin ideal of the self-sufficient learner. It calls educators to design environments where autonomy means taking part in shared deliberation, recognising plurality, and co-authoring the rules we live by. In such settings, autonomy is no longer the freedom of “my pathway” but the collective work of sustaining a common world.
Conclusion
The argument of this post has been straightforward: autonomy imagined as individual self-direction and personal optimisation is insufficient, and in many cases distorts the purposes of education. When autonomy is reduced to dashboards, self-paced modules, or “my pathway” rhetoric, it risks shrinking to little more than self-management. What is lost is the collective, relational, and democratic dimension of freedom. Drawing on Taylor’s analysis of the buffered self, Castoriadis’ account of collective self-instituting, and Biesta’s emphasis on the “beautiful risk” of subjectification, we have seen that autonomy must be reimagined as a practice of co-authorship exercised in common spaces (Taylor, 1991; 2007; Castoriadis, 1991; 1997; Biesta, 2013).
EdTech narratives continue to emphasise personalisation, flexibility, and efficiency. These can have real value, flexibility allows learners with caring responsibilities or jobs to access education on more equitable terms. Yet as Selwyn (2016; 2021) and Williamson (2017) demonstrate, personalisation is often implemented as data-driven optimisation, where learners are profiled, nudged, and tracked. Autonomy in this setting is procedural and thin. Reich (2020) and RAND’s large-scale studies (Pane et al., 2015) show that outcomes from personalised learning are highly variable, with no guarantee of transformation. Zuboff (2019) reminds us that platform business models incentivise engagement and extraction, not necessarily the cultivation of democratic subjects.
The corrective is to thicken autonomy by situating it in collective responsibility. Dewey’s notion of democracy as a “mode of associated living” (Dewey, 1916) and Freire’s vision of dialogical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) both highlight that education is always already a shared project. Arendt’s insight that freedom becomes real when people act in concert in plurality (Arendt, 1958) further grounds the claim that autonomy cannot be inward alone; it requires public appearance and participation. Autonomy, in this richer sense, is not freedom from others but freedom with and for others.
Practical implications follow. One example is the idea of a governance moment within a course. Imagine a seminar where, midway through the term, students and the teacher pause to reflect on the ground rules that shape participation: who speaks, how decisions are made, what counts as contribution. Together they deliberate on whether these norms are serving their shared purposes, and they revise them if needed. Such a practice does more than adjust logistics; it initiates learners into the experience of collective self-rule. Other possibilities include co-authored assessment criteria, course charters that set mutual commitments, and public-facing inquiries that engage audiences beyond the classroom. These designs reposition learners not as isolated optimisers of their own progress but as co-authors of a shared educational world.
This post has shown that autonomy as individual self-direction is too thin, and that education must cultivate autonomy as collective world-making. The next post in the series, Institution, Technology, and the Reproduction of Society, will extend this argument into the terrain of institutional forms and digital infrastructures. We will ask how learning management system defaults, assessment regimes, and data governance policies encode particular imaginaries of autonomy, and how they might be reconfigured to support democratic pedagogy. If autonomy is to be co-authored, then the very architectures that scaffold education must themselves be open to public justification, critique, and renewal.
Bibliography
- Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Ball, S. J. (2012) Global Education Inc. : New Policy Networks and the Neoliberal Imaginary. Taylor & Francis Group, Oxford. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central.
- Biesta, G.J.J. (2006). Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315635811
- Biesta, G.J.J. (2013) The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
- Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books (distributed by MIT Press).
- Castoriadis, C. (1991) Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy. Edited by D.A. Curtis. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Castoriadis, C. (1997a) World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination. Edited and translated by D.A. Curtis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Castoriadis, C. (1997) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by K. Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. New York, NY: Macmillan.
- Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary edn. New York, NY: Continuum.
- Pane, J. F., Steiner, E. D., Baird, M. D., & Hamilton, L. S. (2015). Continued Progress: Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt19w73mb
- Reich, J. 2020. Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674249684
- Selwyn, N. (2016). Is technology good for education? Cambridge: Polity Press. Available at eBookCentral
- Selwyn, N. (2022) Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350145573
- Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Taylor, C. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi-org.manchester.idm.oclc.org/10.4159/9780674237117
- Taylor, C. 1992. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674237117
- Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- Williamson, B. (2017) Big Data in Education: The Digital Future of Learning, Policy and Practice. London: SAGE Publications.
- Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.