Dr Francesca Peruzzo PhD, FHEA

About

I am a Lecturer at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University (OU), where I co-chair the Digital Wellbeing, Health and Learning research programme, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I am a sociologist specialising in governance, digital and AI contexts and infrastructures, and the transformation of state–market relations in contemporary education systems. My research examines how digitalisation, platformisation and shifting public–private networks reconfigure power, institutional processes, and the conditions of participation and inequality, drawing on policy sociology, governmentality studies and sociotechnical approaches. A central strand of my work develops a critical disability and inclusion studies perspective on governance, examining how ableism is reproduced, contested and reconfigured within digital, policy and institutional infrastructures.

In my current research agenda, first, I am problematising and analysing first, how AI governance, digital infrastructures and policy networks and assemblages reshape inequalities, institutional contexts and the forms of the state, second intesecting critical disability and inclusion studies analyses of governance, with a focus on how ableism is embedded and mobilised through policy, digital systems and institutional practice, and how alternative, more inclusive and relational forms of governance can be developed, and third, developing decolonial, inclusive and culturally relevant pedagogies, online and offline, to reimagine digital and educational futures beyond Global North frameworks and to rethink what counts as knowledge, expertise and legitimate participation in education. I draw upon post-structural (in particular Foucault’s) and neo-material approaches, and I use qualitative (analytical) methods, including network ethnography, assemblage analysis, critical policy analysis, and participatory research designs, including co-produced and co-designed research tools.

I am currently Co-Investigator on the Office for Students-funded project Addressing Disparity of Support (£174,000, 2025–2027), led by the University of Plymouth (PI: Professor Suanne Gibson) in partnership with the University of Birmingham, the University of Wolverhampton, Disability Rights UK and Disabled Students UK. Working with undergraduate and postgraduate disabled students as co-researchers across the three institutions, we examine students’ experiences of Reasonable Adjustment Plans in academic and personal support contexts, and we are producing a national open access digital CPD programme for higher education staff alongside sector-wide guidelines for equitable university experiences.

Between 2022 and 2024, I was Research Lead on the Education RESET Project (Renewal and Technologies for Inclusive Educational Futures, PI: Professor Julie Allan), in which we investigated the reproduction of digital and social inequalities during the pandemic and sought alternative, culturally-relevant approaches to digital inclusion through case studies in Italy and Malaysia. RESET built on Phase 1, the DIGITAL in the Time of Coronavirus project (Diversifying Inclusion and Growth: Inspiring Technologies for Accessible Learning, 2021–2022), which I also led as Research Lead, mapping inclusive educational responses to the pandemic across England, Italy, the US, Australia, Malaysia and Chile through digital ethnography, and policy assemblage analysis. Through these projects we produced internationally relevant findings on inclusive, decolonised digital pedagogy and contributed to national policy agendas on children’s digital futures.

I believe that activism and co-production should be integral part of being a researcher and over the past decade I have researched with disabled student activists across UK higher education, examining how they mobilise resistance, refusal and care to challenge ableist institutional structures and to open up more just and relational ways of organising university experiences. I was Principal Investigator on Political Activism, Ethics and Disabled Students in and beyond Higher Education (2020–2024), with Dr Rille Raaper (Durham University) and Mette Anwar-Westander (CEO, Disabled Students UK), and Co-Researcher on the TASO-funded project Supporting Disabled Students: Developing Evidence-Based Transitions Support and Improving Data Use (2023–2024). 

I am the author, with Julie Allan, of Students, Teachers, Families, and a Socially Just Education: Rewriting the Grammar of Schooling to Unsettle Identities (Lived Places Publishing), and co-editor, with Paolo Landri, of Shifting Landscapes in Digital Education Policy: More-than-Human Education Governance and New Materialisms (Springer, Educational Governance Research series, 2026). I have published widely on ableism and higher education policy and in the fields of sociology of education, critical disability studies, policy sociology and critical inclusion studies.

Qualifications:

•             PhD, Sociology of Education, UCL Institute of Education, University College London (supervisor: Prof. Stephen J. Ball)

•             MSc (Hons), Work, Organisations and Information Systems, University of Trento, Italy

•             LLP Erasmus Programme (MA level), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

•             BSc (Hons), Sociology and Social Sciences, University of Trento, Italy

•             Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)

Biography

Dr Francesca Peruzzo is a Lecturer at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University, where she co-chairs the Digital Wellbeing, Health and Learning research programme, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Trained as a sociologist at the UCL Institute of Education under the supervision of Professor Stephen Ball, her doctoral research offered a policy genealogy of disability in Italian higher education, and her subsequent work has built a distinctive body of scholarship bridging policy sociology, critical disability and inclusion studies, and digital and AI governance.

Her research is defined by a commitment to participatory, co-produced methods, and much of her work is developed directly with disabled student activists, refugee educators and community groups, translating post-structural and neo-material theory into research designs that are led by, and accountable to, the communities she does research with. This orientation has shaped a sustained programme of externally funded research, from her current role as Co-Investigator on the Office for Students-funded Addressing Disparity of Support project (2025–2027), through her earlier leadership of the pandemic-era Education RESET and DIGITAL in the Time of Coronavirus projects (2021-2023), her leadership of the Qualitative strand of the Teachers for Educational Equity Project in Malaysia (2022-2025), to her role as Principal Investigator on Political Activism, Ethics and Disabled Students in and beyond Higher Education (2020–2024).

Francesca is an Editorial Advisory Board Member and reviewer for the Journal of Education Policy and the British Journal of Sociology of Education, and a member of the Laboratory of Digital Education at the University Federico II (Naples) and CNR (Rome).

My research interests encompass:

• Education governance, digital and AI governance, platformisation and datafication
• Sociology of education and policy sociology
• Critical technology studies and EdTech markets in education
• Critical inclusion studies and critical disability studies; disability and SEND policy
• Digital wellbeing, mental health in education and public policy
• Public–private partnerships, privatisation and policy network/assemblage analysis
• Participatory, co-produced and student-led research methods
• Post-structural and neo-material approaches in education policy and practice