The Technopopulist Assemblage: Epistemic Co-Optation and the Curricular Materialization of Citizenship in Ecuador (2006–2016)

This article proposes a critical reappraisal of the citizenship education curriculum reform in Ecuador (2006–2016), analyzing it not as a failed ideological contradiction, but as a paradigmatic instrumental case of a new logic of governance: technopopulism. Challenging prevailing interpretations that diagnose a hypocrisy between socialist rhetoric and neoliberal practice ("ethnoneoliberalism") within the "Citizens' Revolution," it argues that Rafael Correa's regime constituted a coherent "technopolitical assemblage". This model fused the charismatic legitimacy and affective mobilization of populism with the technocratic instruments of control, standardization, and efficiency. Through a comprehensive analysis of curriculum documents, ministerial regulations, and public policy, the study demonstrates how the regime operated through a mechanism of "epistemic co-optation". This systematic process stripped political content from emancipatory concepts emerging from social movements—such as "Buen Vivir" (Sumak Kawsay) and "Critical Pedagogy"—translating them into standardized and measurable "Performance Criteria-based Skills" (DCD) within a centralized school architecture. The outcome of this operation was not the formation of a critical citizen capable of challenging power, but rather the production of an "Institutionalized Citizen": a subject whose participation is confined to predefined state channels and whose identity is defined by normative adherence to a vertical modernization project. The article concludes that technopopulism employs progressive discourse not to emancipate, but to morally legitimize an unprecedented architecture of state control, offering a critical warning for the political sociology of education worldwide regarding the plasticity of social justice discourses when absorbed by the state machinery.