Sam Akroyd is an aspiring educator, researcher, and philosopher of education whose work focuses on confronting alienation and the ethics of compulsory education. He is currently a teaching assistant at the Sir Karl Popper School, an experimental public school for highly gifted students in Vienna, Austria. He completed his MSc in Education at the University of
Edinburgh in 2024 with distinction, specialising in the philosophy of education. His dissertation, Toward a Critical-Ethical Framework for the Mitigation of the Social Injustice Potential of Artificial Intelligence in Education: Students and Selfhoods, won the 2025 BERA Master’s Dissertation Award. Sam’s research draws on critical theory and existential
phenomenology to interrogate the epistemological, ethical, and ontological foundations of compulsory schooling. His work aims to deconstruct dominant educational rationalities and to advance forms of education that confront conditions of alienation.