The Impact of a Digital Third Place as a Hybrid Invited Space on Stakeholders’ Co-Construction of the Framework for AI Use in French Schools

Research on invited spaces has contributed to shifting the analysis of participation away from a normative register toward a situated approach focused on the conditions of possibility and the political effects of institutionalised participation. Cornwall (2002, 2004) shows that participatory spaces are not neutral arenas: they are produced by authorities and endowed with boundaries and internal dynamics that can both open up opportunities for voice and channel their effects. From a complementary perspective, Gaventa (2006) emphasises that the opening of a space does not in itself guarantee transformative effects, which instead depend on power relations and on the relationships between closed, invited, and claimed spaces. However, a blind spot remains in the analysis of contemporary platform-based consultation mechanisms. While the literature documents in detail the ambiguities of invitation, it still rarely treats these spaces as hybrid third places—that is, as in-between spaces that are neither fully internal to the administration, nor external like union arenas, nor strictly embedded in ordinary professional settings. Yet these digital dispositifs concretely reconfigure both horizontal relations among peers and vertical relations between participants and authorities. We therefore propose to reconceptualise the invited space as a space-time configuration. Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space (1974/1991) allows participation to be understood as an articulation between conceived space, perceived space, and lived space. Applied to a consultation platform, this approach leads us to consider the call for contributions as a spatial formatting of speech. In addition, Bakhtin’s dialogical approach (1981) provides tools to analyse the tensions between centrifugal and centripetal forces, as well as the competing chronotopes that structure the circulation of discourse. This analytical framework is mobilised to examine the participatory platform CREIA, implemented by the French Ministry of National Education as part of the Digital Strategy for Education 2023–2027. The framework for AI use published in 2025 is presented as the result of a national consultation conducted between January and May 2025, notably through CREIA. The associated exchanges constitute a privileged empirical site for observing the functioning of the hybrid third place: an arena in which the educational community debates internally while simultaneously addressing an institutional authority that is present as both addressee and final author. From a methodological perspective, the study combines critical discourse analysis (CDA) with dialogical analysis, making it possible to observe strategies of legitimation, shifts in responsibility, polyphony, and addressivity. The analysis highlights the coexistence of chronotopes in tension. A chronotope of acceleration and regulatory urgency is mobilised to justify the rapid stabilisation of the framework. Conversely, a chronotope of school time emerges through demands for gradual implementation, training, consideration of educational cycles, and comprehensible procedures. This tension is embedded in a centripetal/centrifugal dynamic: the plurality of voices and concerns coexists with a participatory architecture oriented toward a normative outcome.