Epistemic Agency, Critical Consciousness, and AI in the Neoliberal University

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping teaching, learning, and knowledge production in higher education. However, limited attention has been given to justice-oriented frameworks that connect AI-mediated education with epistemic agency and critical consciousness, particularly within market-driven university contexts. This conceptual article explores how teaching can be reimagined to cultivate epistemic agency and critical consciousness in AI-mediated higher education through a justice-oriented pedagogical framework. The article draws on frameworks such as critical pedagogy, decolonial theory, and epistemic justice to foreground the findings of this research. It employs a narrative-integrative review methodology to synthesise contemporary scholarship on AI and social justice in higher education. The article argues for a shift beyond transmissive and instrumental models of learning towards relational pedagogies that position learners as active co-creators of knowledge. It examines how AI technologies may reinforce or disrupt epistemic hierarchies through algorithmic bias, automated decision-making, and changing processes of knowledge production. The original contribution is a justice-oriented conceptual framework that integrates pedagogical design, institutional cultures, power relations, and technological systems for a better education experience. It recommends embedding critical AI literacy across curricula and aligning pedagogy with principles of epistemic justice to support equitable and socially transformative higher education in an increasingly algorithmic world.