Conference Agenda

Since the educational expansion in the 1960s, both the number of candidates pursuing a PhD and subsequently the number of doctoral training programmes have steadily increased, accompanied by a diversification of doctoral degrees (e.g., academic, collaborative, professional or industrial doctorates) and the changing purpose of doctoral education and the doctorate in general (Sarrico, 2022). Achieving a doctoral degree requires strenuous effort, as well as opportunity costs in the form of lost spare time and income. Vis-à-vis the ‘limits of growth‘ (Hirsch, 1976), including limited resources in the economy in particular and especially in the labour market, the question arises as to whether this investment pays off in the later course of an individual’s career or whether the returns are below their level of education. Folk wisdom and public discourses often include doubts, with the image of the ‘taxi driver with a PhD degree’ as an extreme simplification of the 1980s discussion that initiated research on returns on education (e.g., Engelage and Hadjar, 2008; Ponds et al., 2016). These uncertainties are also reflected in scientific debates on the precarity among researchers or ‘academic precariat’ (OECD, 2021; Sarrico, 2022). This relates to educational returns – from a monetary perspective, this is the income people receive due to their (higher) educational qualification, while in a broader sense this concerns education-related monetary and non-monetary life chances. Such educational returns are not constant across different countries. Institutional contexts such as educational and social systems with their distinct policies, as well as labour market conditions, which are influenced by multiple factors, shape educational returns (Müller and Shavit, 1998; Glauser, Becker and Zwahlen, 2016; Hanushek et al., 2017). Furthermore, they are also affected by the degree of educational expansion (Bernardi and Ballarino, 2014).

In this study, we will focus on the distinguishing characteristics of a PhD degree and the mismatch between the demand and supply of tertiary education in countries with a greater educational expansion and examine whether possession of a very high educational qualification is gaining importance in terms of differentiation to improve one’s own income chances, or whether it reduces them due to educational attainment inflation.

In theorising the research issue, we discuss three different aspects: firstly, the PhD degree-income link (PhD premium) relating to classical human capital theory (Becker, 1964) and its application in the Mincer earnings function (Mincer, 1974) as well as to signalling theory and labour queue model (Arrow, 1973; Spence, 1973; Thurow, 1975). Secondly, we theorise the effect of the higher education regime on the base of higher education (HE) system classifications (Pechar and Andres, 2011; Triventi, 2014), which systematise structures and are strongly related to welfare state classifications. Thirdly, the effect of the degree of educational expansion on the PhD premium is conceptualised relating to concepts that center on the idea of education as a positional good. Education functions increasingly as an instrument for distinction in status attainment and labour market careers (Bol, 2015; Hadjar and Becker, 2009), as, referring to prominent conceptual approaches employed in sociology to the issue of the PhD income premium such as the ‘labour queue model’ (Thurow, 1975) and signalling theory (Spence, 1973), a higher qualification is necessary in order to differentiate oneself from others. However, arguments of increasing inflation and thus lower income premiums even for high degrees would point into the opposite direction.

International Baccalaureate (IB) development in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore is distinct from Asian counterparts like Japan and South Korea due to Chinese cultural influences (Li, Hameed, & Tsao, 2021). These societies share a “re-contextualisation” approach to embedding IB programmes within their local educational systems (Lee, Kim, & Wright, 2021). Hong Kong’s IB schools vie with other diploma options, relying on academic excellence to attract parental support (Tsao, Li, & Hameed, 2023). With limited presence within the local school system, IB in Singapore is mainly adopted in international/independent schools (Morrissey et al. 2014) and exhibits hybrid curricula that balance local/national and international elements. In Taiwan, the IB’s integration came later, primarily within private and international schools, and recently expanded to government schools, scrutinising its alignment with the national curriculum (Li, Hameed, & Tsao, 2021).

In this context, the international mobility of teachers in IB schools presents a rich area for inquiry due to its imbrications with technology, tourism, immigration, and social culture. Teacher mobility in international schools is a byproduct of globalisation, serving the transient needs of expatriate families as a symbol of the school’s global identity and fostering the international mobility of the students. This research aims to dissect and understand the complexities of teacher mobility in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where the confluence of Chinese cultural influences, global educational frameworks, assessment-focused culture and local educational policies create unique settings for international education.

The following research questions guide the study:

1. What are the characteristics and experiences of international mobility among IB school teachers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore?
2. How does the establishment and evolution of the IB curriculum influence the international mobility of teachers within these regions?
3. What implications does international mobility have on the professional trajectories and pedagogical practices of teachers engaged in international education?

The primary objective of this study is to explore the interplay between the international mobility of teachers and the operational dynamics of IB schools in distinct socio-educational landscapes. It seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of how mobility shapes educational practices and professional identities within the globalised context of IB schooling and European and Western educational contexts. The study is embedded in the conceptual framework of the “mobility turn” in contemporary sociology (Sheller & Urry, 2006), which regards movement and fluidity as central to understanding modern social life. By examining the mobility of teachers as a phenomenon that encompasses not only geographic relocation but also cultural, intellectual, and experiential shifts, our study acknowledges the potential tension outlined by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) between mobility and the fixed. Consequently, it considers the role of state power and educational policies in guiding and constraining teacher movement. This research recognises the “re-contextualisation” of the IB program as a process influenced by both global aspirations and local educational imperatives (Lee, Kim, & Wright, 2021). It views teacher mobility through the lens of this re-contextualisation, considering how teachers navigate and negotiate their professional roles amid different curricular and cultural demands. It will build on the foundational work of scholars such as Madge, Raghuram, and Noxolo (2015) and Sorensen and Dumay (2021), who have highlighted the need for further exploration of the international teaching labour market and its relation to globalisation. The research is also aligned with calls for a more nuanced approach to the study of education and mobility, one that factors in the diverse experiences of teachers and the multifaceted impacts of their mobility on international education (Gulson & Symes, 2019).

Higher education internationalisation has been deemed instrumental to creating and exchanging knowledge and to educating globally engaged students for an ever more fast-moving, complex, and interconnected world. Yet for some years now critical perspectives on the development and current orientation of internationalisation have been emerging, expressing concern about the risk of reproducing already uneven global hierarchies through mainstream internationalisation activities, particularly in institutions of the Global North and Western/ized higher education institutions. Since the beginning of the European colonial expansion in the sixteenth century, Western knowledge has become dominant across the world (Schwöbel-Patel, 2020). Travelling with the colonisers, ways of knowing, influenced by Western ethnocentrism, imposed a monolithic world view, and added new layers to Europeans’ position of control and power (Akena, 2012). Knowledges from the Global South were delegitimised and marginalised, while Western thinking was considered as legitimate knowledge (Schwöbel-Patel, 2020). Coloniality has shaped the relationship between the Global North and the Global South, and the enduring colonial-like, unequal global relations continue to influence knowledge production and circulation (Dei, 2008). Critical scholarship on epistemic diversity in higher education has illustrated that Western hegemony maintains its position of dominance and authority (R’boul, 2020).

Universities are one of the key agents in the dissemination and legitimisation of knowledge. However, due to universities’ historical focus on Euro-American traditions, international students from non-Western backgrounds have often been treated as passive receivers of ‘Western wisdom’ (Tange & Kastberg, 2013). Previous research has shown that the knowledge of international students is largely seen as inferior (Stein, 2017), and many international students report that their indigenous knowledges are not recognised within the Western higher education landscape (Dei, 2000; Zhou et al., 2005). Considering the skewed geopolitics of knowledge and the entanglement of knowledge circulation and international student mobility, it is indeed relevant to ask whether internationalisation of higher education is yet another way to promote Western knowledge and maintain Anglo-American hegemonic domination.

International student mobility, higher education, and knowledge mobilities have been discussed in relation to particular places of the world, depicting Europe, North America, and Australia as assumed centres of knowledge production (Jöns, 2007). The geographical location of universities plays a pivotal role in attracting international students with respect to their decisions of where to study (Kölbel, 2020). Places are positioned hierarchically, and student mobility is driven by the differential worth ascribed to particular countries (Waters & Brooks, 2021). This has implications for students’ mobilities and the re/production of established hegemonic knowledge centres in Europe and the US and emerging ‘knowledge hubs’ in Asia, reinforcing asymmetric power relations (Jöns, 2015), and it is concerning that internationalisation becomes Westernisation (Liu, 2020).

Fundamentally, this paper is concerned with how international student mobility is embedded within a global regime of hegemonic knowledge centres, built on the structures and foundations that imperial and colonial practices laid down. It seeks to explore knowledge legitimacy and the role international student mobility plays in the re/production of global hierarchies and the promotion of certain kinds of knowledges. By taking on a critical orientation, I wish to promote social and cognitive justice and challenge taken-for granted norms and epistemologies. I focus on power relations and the dynamic interrelation of knowledge and power. I wish to discover and recognise different ways of knowing and bodies of knowledge practised and circulated by students and lecturers in and beyond university classrooms.

Amidst a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape, marked by heightened tensions and unprecedented challenges, this study delves into the transformative role of virtual mobility in sustaining and enriching the aspirations of Russian students for physical study abroad experiences, offering a beacon of hope and connectivity in an era of increasing isolation pertinent in many geographical locales.

The Russia-Ukraine military conflict, coupled with the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic and economic challenges, has led to a marked decline in Russian outbound student mobility. A significant 33% drop in the inclination of Russian citizens to pursue education abroad was reported by the VCIOM (2023) in comparison to year 1993, highlighting influences of economic status, urban or rural living, and media consumption. Caught in the entangled crises, students in Russia are further affected by the spread of negative attitudes towards westbound student mobility which is positioned as an unwelcomed phenomenon in Russian political and academic discourse. Being framed as the projection of the soft power leading to either brain drain or political indoctrination (e.g. Antyukhova, 2019; Savelchev, 2023), outgoing student mobility to western countries has been subjected to a suppressive top-down approach, with mass media as a third power willingly or unwillingly playing a subtle yet powerful role in this process.

International student mobility is a specific form of migration that is voluntary and highly selective. Referred to as a ‘migratory elite’ (Murphy-Lejeune, 2002), international students tend to come from a higher socio-economic background (e.g. Brooks & Waters, 2011; Netz & Finger, 2016). They mostly aim to benefit from education abroad rather than escape from adverse circumstances at home, and for them the pull factors at a destination country are likely to be particularly influential based on push-pull model of migration theorised by Lee (1966). These pull factors are largely subjective (Lee, 1966) and are based on imaginaries of other places (Riaño & Baghdadi, 2007; Beech, 2014) which are curated through the scope of knowledge, often attained indirectly via media and personal accounts of others. Promotion of the imaginaries of the West as economically unstable and its educational systems being hostile towards Russian students diminishes the allure of the West as a potential study destination. Coupled with unfavourable currency exchange rates and structural difficulties in payments, visas and travel arrangements due to sanctions as well as fears for inability to succeed in Russian labour market upon return due to public ostracization, these negative portrayals shape the proximal level of international educational aspirations of Russian youth.

The present research draws upon the Aspirations-Capabilities Framework of Migration and states of (im)mobility (de Haas, 2021), intergenerational transmission of migration aspirations in post-Soviet countries (Brunarska & Ivlevs, 2022), and the notion of mobility capital (Murphy-Lejeune, 2002) to:

• shed light on how current states of (im)mobility of Russian students in relation to study abroad differ from those during the Soviet Union;
• conceptualise their potential long-term intergenerational effect; and
• unveil the affordance of virtual student mobility formats to help Russian youth escape the state of acquiescent immobility.

Amidst curtailed student exchange and international collaboration options with many initiatives either stopped or put under administrative pressure, virtual mobility, whether formal via bilateral institutional agreements or less formal through lower-level stakeholders’ collaboration, can be one of the ways to alter students’ perception of the existing scope of opportunities and support their aspirations for international student mobility and global inclusion.

Therefore, the present research seeks to answer the following research questions:

R1: Does participation in virtual student mobility increase Russian students’ aspirations for subsequent physical student mobility?

R2: If so, what is the mechanism of this effect in the context of the entangled crises and under the current mobility suppressing climate in Russia?

The internationalization of higher education aims to foster competencies and qualifications at both individual and collective levels, enriching students' interaction with diverse learning styles and contexts. Amid the burgeoning interest in China's transnational higher education (TNHE) programs, including articulation programs like "2+2", "3+1", or "1+2+1", these initiatives offer Chinese students opportunities to pursue degrees abroad, fostering intercultural learning and knowledge acquisition (Yang, 2008). Existing research has further explored the adjustment and acculturation of international students, emphasizing how they overcome challenges in the intercultural space, fostering cross-system learning and resilience development (Gill, 2007; Ungar, 2010 & 2019; Li & Yang, 2016). However, TNHE represents a unique field within which students encounter diverse academic, cultural, and social challenges. In the neoliberal and neoconservative context, the overemphasis of the individual adaptation can unintentionally lead to self-exploitation, where students become instrumental in the internationalization agenda (Mu, 2022). A psychological approach to adaptive resilience may inadvertently reinforce constraining social structures and inequalities by ‘coercing’ TNHE students to fully adapt to the new systems (Bottrell, 2013).

As such, there is a need to re-examine the resilience process of TNHE students while acknowledging the systemic roots of social inequalities that are both created and perpetuated (VanderPlat, 2016). As Bourdieu’s theoretical framework is valuable in illuminating underlying structural or systemic factors, which provides a new lens for us to recognise the “embeddedness of resilience in social inequities, social processes, and the differentiated societal and ideological expectations of young people” (Bottrell, 2009, p. 321). This study thus draws insights from Bourdieu's conceptual tools—field, habitus, and capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) to provide a sociological understanding of the resilience process and its construction in the dynamic reality of TNHE settings, with a primary focus on the experiences of Chinese students in this context.

For Bourdieu, the trajectory is constructed by those choices made under the constraints of an individual’s inherent disposition (habitus), which is the internalization of the social fields. These social fields are conceptualised as field, defined as ‘a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 97). Bourdieu (1986) defines capital as time-intensive resource with the potential capacity to yield profits and replicate itself in identical or expanded forms. Forms of capital include economic (financial resources), social (networks, relationships), cultural (knowledge, skills, education), and symbolic (prestige, recognition) (Bourdieu, 1986). The analysis of objective structures within a field extends beyond merely examining the distribution and competition for capital. It also encompasses habitus, which Bourdieu describes as ‘an embodied history internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 78). In applying these concepts, Chinese international students' resilience in TNHE is not just a result of individual traits but is deeply influenced by the interplay of their habitus (social and cultural backgrounds), the fields (TNHE setting) they navigate, the capitals (resources) they possess or lack, the symbolic violence they may encounter, and the structural constraints they face.

This study aims to investigate the structural inequalities and constraints that extend beyond the challenges of cross-cultural communication in resilience building and explore the pathways to change for students in TNHE settings. It sets the stage for investigating students' resilience from the perspective of their social transformation. This sociological perspective offers a nuanced understanding of the complexities involved in students’ mental health experiences, going beyond mere adaptation to also consider the broader structural forces at play. Therefore, this study seeks to bridge the gap between individual agency and structural conditions in TNHE settings by delving into the structural constraints within the field that contribute to students' resilience building.

Elite identity formation is shaped differently from one nation to another, but generally, the secondary and higher education system has an important role in its (re)production (Bourdieu, 1998; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). This study explores institutional habitus of elite schools through the choices, experiences, and future aspirations of Icelandic students. When the research is conducted, the students were about to finish their matriculation exams from schools known as elite schools in terms of academic performance.

The Nordic countries are often presented as model societies with high levels of happiness, commitments to democratic and meritocratic processes, and low levels of corruption and elitism. However, in recent years the social and cultural landscape of the educational field in the Nordic cities has been changing into a multicultural, class divergent and market-oriented society (Dovemark et al., 2018). Recent studies show clear correlation between student achievement and their backgrounds (Berglind Gísladóttir et al., 2019; Eiríksdóttir et al., 2022) as well as socio-geographical accumulation of economic and educational capital in certain neighbourhoods and schools (Magnúsdóttir et al., 2020). Despite the domination of neo-managerial policies in educational governance worldwide for the last 30 years the education system in Iceland bypassed most of the accountability policies but largely adopted the school autonomy policies. For the last decade, there have been no standardized tests at the end of the compulsory school level (Steiner-Khamsi et.al, forthcoming). The rationale for the importance of standardized tests was among other things to enhance meritocracy in selection process to elite secondary and higher education. In the last years, the hierarchy between school institutions at the upper-secondary level has become steeper and the route to success through the education system muddier. The combination of these factors has produced high importance to explore how elite institutions and identities are constructed and socially reproduced in this Nordic educational context.

Abstract

Many researchers of elite education argue that elite schools tend to cultivate apolitical attitudes, blindness towards race and ethnicity and obliviousness to privilege (Horvat & Antonio, 1999; Khan & Jerolmack, 2013). This is particularly true when describing elite education among hegemonic groups. Yet what happens in elite educational institutions targeting national minority groups? Do these students also exhibit a color-blind approach and/or a sense of obliviousness, as described by Khan (2011)? Is a culture of silence (Castagno, 2008) also dominant in these schools? These questions guided our research about private education among PCI (Palestinians, citizens of Israel), a national, indigenous minority that experiences stigmatization and ongoing discrimination (Ghanem & Mustafa, 2011).

Education in Israel is segregated based on nationality and religious orientation, resulting in separate educational sectors for religious and secular Jewish children, as well as Arab children (Arar, 2012). These sectors include both state and non-state schools. Private schools catering to moderately religious and ultra-orthodox Jewish students, as well as Arab church-affiliated schools, receive partial government funding. Most school children in Israel are enrolled in the state educational system (Agbaria & Pinson, 2019).

Findings in this article are based on thirty-five in-depth interviews conducted with high school students attending two elite private schools. One is located in an Arab city and the second in a city comprised of both Arabs and Jews (a ‘mixed’ city); both are in northern Israel. The findings presented here address two primary research questions. Firstly, what are the defining features of national identity exhibited by Palestinian students enrolled in elite schools? Secondly, how does an elite school contribute to the formation and shaping of national identity amongst its students? This research builds on previous studies that have examined the relationship between elite education, class, and the reproduction of elite identity (Bourdieu, 1986; Demerath, 2009; Khan, 2012). However, it examines a unique case study: Arab Palestinians in Israel who are a marginalized national minority facing discrimination and racism while simultaneously undergoing the emergence of their own self-defined elite (Haidar & Bar-Haim, 2022).

Our findings support existing research and bring forth new insights. Consistent with prior studies, we identified an elite identity (Demerath, 2009) and a positive self-perception, accompanied by a sense of entitlement and agency (Gaztambide-Fernández et al., 2003). Interviewees also expressed a positive orientation towards the future and an ability to aspire (Appaduri, 2004). Furthermore, the study confirms the role of schools in shaping and fostering elite identity through mechanisms such entrance exams, extracurricular programs, alignment with elite cultural norms, academic orientation initiatives, and discourses of excellence (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009). However, this research identified three distinct group-specific characteristics. Firstly, in the school selection process, parents and students seek institutions that emphasize academic excellence and also prioritize engendering a patriotic stance with special emphasis on Palestinian national identity. Secondly, interviewees demonstrated a high level of political awareness due to the unique practices and rituals implemented by both schools. This is noteworthy given that it deviates from the widely-held understanding of hegemonic elite groups, who often remain oblivious to inequality and consider social hierarchies to be the norm (Khan, 2011). Lastly, interviewees expressed profound pride in their national identity, which coexists with their pursuit of academic excellence within a deeply discriminatory reality.

This paper contributes to understanding how elite education intersects with the construction of national identity among minority elites. It offers insights into the experiences of Palestinian students facing discrimination while also highlighting the emergence of a self-defined elite within this specific sub-group.

The Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was introduced in 2010 to provide a coherent, competency-based education for children aged 3-18 years, aiming to better prepare young people for the modern world (Scottish Government, 2009). However, more than ten years since its implementation, there is growing evidence of a disjuncture between policy intention and practice at the school level. It has not been fully enacted in many secondary schools, and its provision is fragmented (OECD, 2015; RSE, 2018; Priestley, 2018; Shapira et al., 2021). This is significant because variances in provision have consequences for student equity and educational outcomes (Iannelli, 2013). Recent studies (e.g., Shapira et al., 2023) found that CfE led to fewer subjects being studied in the senior phase of secondary education, disproportionately affecting schools located in socially and economically disadvantaged areas. Immigrant children, often residing and attending schools in such areas, heavily rely on school resources (Arnot et al., 2014; Crul et al., 2017). Therefore, limited exposure to the broad curriculum and restrictions on their ability to explore diverse subjects and acquire a broad knowledge base through schools might negatively impact them more than non-immigrant peers, both in terms of educational attainments and broader outcomes indicating how well young people are prepared to succeed in the complex modern world.
This paper explored curriculum-making practices in Scottish secondary schools and the impact these practices have on the educational outcomes of young people from immigrant origins.

Aim of this Paper and Research Questions
Given limited evidence on immigrant children's educational experiences under CfE, our paper's main aim is to determine whether the breadth of the S4 (year four of secondary education in Scotland) curriculum affects immigrant outcomes and compare them with non-immigrants. To address the aims, the following research questions have been explored:
1. What is the association between the curriculum's breadth under CfE that 15-year-old students are exposed to at school and various outcomes evaluated by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study?
2. Is this association different for immigrant children and non-immigrant children in Scotland?
3. Are there attainment gaps in the various PISA measures between immigrants and non-immigrant children?
4. What factors (including individual characteristics of students, their families, and their curriculum provisions) are responsible for the attainment gaps in PISA measures between immigrants and non-immigrant children?

Theoretical Background

Two models have been established for many years when analyzing the effect of cultural capital on educational attainment: the reproduction model (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) and the mobility model (DiMaggio, 1982). The former describes the intergenerational transmission of capital and persistence of inequalities, while the latter focuses on the potential of cultural capital for social upward movement (see Jæger, 2022). While European scholars often emphasize systemic factors, their North American counterparts stress individual agency (Stetterson & Gannon, 2005).

Both have in common that they do not typically distinguish between the cultural capital of parents and their children. However, at a closer look, this does not seem to do justice to the real-world complexity: Research has shown that cultural capital is a dynamic construct that develops over the life course (Georg, 2004). Also, ethnographic research suggests that children do possess their own cultural capital (Chin and Phillips, 2004). Thus, one can assume that students’ cultural capital can be distinguished from their parents’.

Moreover, the distinction between primary and secondary effects has been proven to be productive for studies on social disparities in educational attainment (Boudon, 1974). However, prior studies have mostly focused on investigating the relationship between cultural capital and achievement (Tan et al., 2019) and thus primary effects. The role of secondary effects (i.e. educational decisions) remains empirically unclear but seems to hold additional explanatory potential.

The effects of cultural capital on educational success have been shown to be highly dependent on the operationalization of cultural capital (Tan et al., 2019). However, there is no consensus in the literature on how cultural capital should be measured (Jæger, 2022; Vryonides, 2007). Most commonly, non-formal arts (education) activities are used (Aschaffenburg and Maas, 1997). However, formal and informal activities could potentially function as cultural capital, too (Broer et al., 2019; Veale, 1992).

Research Questions

In line with the mobility model, one can assume that students’ own cultural capital has an effect on educational attainment even when holding constant their parents’ resources. First, our goal is to investigate whether student cultural participation has an effect on later degree attainment when controlling for parental socioeconomic status and parental cultural capital. Second, we aim to explore to what extent formal and informal cultural activities can function as cultural capital. Third, we analyze the mechanisms how cultural capital affects educational outcomes by investigating both primary and secondary effects as mediators between cultural participation and educational attainment.

Perceived decline in social mobility is an important and challenging topic for OECD countries, especially in the youth agenda (OECD, 2018). Education is typically seen as a major social elevator, given the relatively high returns to education (Psacharopoulos, Patrinos, 2018; Altonji, Zhong, 2021), and despite socioeconomic inequality in access to high-quality education institutions and especially tertiary education (Duta, Wielgoszewska, Iannelli, 2021; Malinovskiy, Shibanova, 2022). At the same time, the massification of tertiary education, resulting in the growing number of graduates aspiring for social status associated with highly qualified specialists, accompanied by a high level of labor force participation due to population aging, puts more pressure on the mechanism of social elevators.

Social mobility can be measured objectively in terms of earnings, income, or social class. The perceived (subjective) approach to measuring social mobility offers a holistic assessment of social position (Duru-Bellat, Kieffer, 2008), encompassing both objective indicators and other well-being dimensions. The majority of empirical studies employ the former approach and measure income mobility (OECD, 2018) or objective mobility in terms of social class (Wielgoszewska, 2018), while perceived social mobility, especially in the youth samples and in the context of education and career pathways, remains understudied.

Whereas the majority of Russian youth and their parents aspire to higher education (Kondratenko, Kiryushina, Bogdanov, 2020), an increasing proportion of younger cohorts get higher education (from 20% for those born in the 1950s to 35% in the 1990s), which is comparable with European countries (Bessudnov, Kurakin, Malik, 2017). On the other hand, the stratification of universities and the heterogeneity of tertiary education in Russia (Malinovskiy, Shibanova, 2022) make this aspiration challenging in terms of social mobility. At the same time, combining study and work has become a widespread phenomenon (Beerkens, Mägi, Lill, 2011), including in Russia, where graduates who combine study and work experience a 30% wage premium (Rudakov, Roshchin, 2019; Dudyrev, Romanova, Travkin, 2020). This pattern of school-to-work transition could have become a new tool for promoting social mobility.

Using data from the Russian national cohort longitudinal study "Trajectories in Education and Career, this study aims to untangle the ten-year education-career pathways of 9th-grade students by the age of 25. Our study aims to identify the different types of pathways followed by Russian youth (with a special focus on college graduates) in their journey from school to work and explore how these pathways contribute to perceived social mobility. We investigate pathways following the sociological approach and methodology of sequence analysis while considering the key findings of labor economists, thus embracing the framework of socioeconomic background, educational inequalities, and human capital theory. We investigate how the paths through postsecondary education and the world of work, as well as an extended set of socio-demographic factors, shape patterns of perceived social mobility and which educational or career pathways contribute to the upward and downward mobility patterns.

Our research contributes to the studies of social stratification and life trajectories of youth, taking into account the variety of school-to-work transition patterns (Boylan, 2020; Wielgoszewska, 2018). The use of longitudinal data and sequence analysis enables us to overcome the limitations of cross-sectional studies in the epoch of increasing nonlinearity and complexity of paths (Sullivan, Ariss, 2021) and decreased relevance of one-time measures of school-to-work transition (Duta, Wielgoszewska, Iannelli, 2021).

Is critical thinking in education studies running out of steam? Is critical thinking (un)helpful for reimagining educational futures? To give some answers to these questions, this panel discussion will introduce the recent book ‘Rethinking Sociological Critique in Contemporary Education. Reflexive Dialogue and Prospective Inquiry’ edited By Radhika Gorur, Paolo Landri, Romuald Normand.

This book explores a new repertoire for critique in the sociology of contemporary education, focusing on emerging social theories that respond to contemporary challenges in education, education policy and governance. Presenting a variety of approaches in the sociology of education, including pragmatist critical sociology, neo-Marxism, post-digital sociology, new materialisms, affirmative critique of education, and decolonial studies, the book engages in a novel, collective dialogue and reflection on the affordances, limitations, and challenges of emerging social theories in contemporary education. Relevant global and decolonial perspectives to study current transformations, drawing on innovations in theorising and empirical illustrations, are offered from different countries.

In sum, the book suggests that critique in the sociology of education is not exhausted. Rather, (1) it is developing in plural ways and engaging with emerging social theories; (2) a change in the direction of critical thought is becoming visible, which encourages us to reconsider the monopoly of the Western, European, and modern heritage; and (3) there is, increasingly, room for an earthly sociology. By commenting on the main threads or chapters of the book, panellists are invited to give their answers to the opening questions and to engage in a debate on the prospects of critique in contemporary education studies.

In today's neoliberal society, learning is imperative, demanding rapid assimilation of new information. Platforms like Wikipedia play a crucial role in facilitating this pursuit, with numerous studies emphasizing their educational benefits and their impact on enhancing the learning experience. However, a significant concern revolves around the temporal dimension inherent in this narrative.

What Rosa(2013) calls technological acceleration causes us to feel that we must speed up to keep pace with the changes of everyday life, i.e., social acceleration. This in turn causes several problems, such as the decrease in “real” production or consumption due to time constraints. For education in the broad sense, this necessitates accelerated learning, risking the creation and grasping of knowledge (which run parallel to what Rosa calls production and consumption), i.e. that it isn’t “real” grasping and creation anymore. Technological and social acceleration are intertwined, necessitating consideration of both aspects to address the challenges they pose.

Motivated by the narrative of accelerated learning, this study employs a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective to investigate if Wikipedia replicates this narrative. This perspective means that Wikipedia is seen as a specific effect generated by the interplay of different actors in a specific setting. This approach allows for seeing how a practice like Wikipedia is enacted and for identifying important actors and micro-practices.

Aligned with the broader field of STS, akin to Thompson's research (2012), it enables exploration of how networks, composed of human actors and non-human actors (including technologies) alike, structure and restructure the world in particular ways (Law, 2004). This approach sensitizes us to the fact that both human actors and non-human actors are needed to enact any practice and it helps us to see how that relation between actors enacts something like a policy document, educational technology, a website like Wikipedia or even knowledge (Thompson, 2010, p. 95; Decuypere & Simons, 2016).

One of the main interests of STS is the how-question: how particular things come to be (Decuypere & Simons, 2016; Sorenson, 2008). The goal is, then, to investigate how a relational constellation - a network - is distributed and to convey in what way a practice is performed. The goal in this contribution is to detangle the practice of Wikipedia. What I mean by this is the following: in a traditional representational approach, some actors that play a critical role are overlooked or ignored, they get “black boxed” (Decuypere & Simons, 2016, p.34). The objective is to open that black box, to look at the actors involved in the enactment of Wikipedia, to investigate how they are distributed and relate to each other, and to see how they effectuate Wikipedia (Decuypere & Simons, 2016). This approach ensures an apt vocabulary to describe this and open the black box that is Wikipedia.

Engaging as a Wikipedia editor and documenting activities, I constructed socio-material anecdotes, facilitating the creation of detailed mappings. This approach led me to the discovery of how the interplay of certain actors with other actors enact a rhythm. Thus, an STS approach made it possible to see that there are multiple acceleration dynamics that influence the learning and knowledge production practices on Wikipedia. However, instead of completely following today's dominant narrative on acceleration in learning, my research also demonstrated multiple deceleration dynamics.

I conclude this paper by stating that these deceleration practices play an important role in the quality of learning and knowledge production. Secondly, I point out that only by slowing down myself, I was able to investigate these practices. It is thus important for future research to slow down to focus on the unprecedented possibilities in and of the present.

The aim of this contribution titled 'Teachers' Diversity-sensitive Digital Practices in the Classroom - A Participatory Research Project' is to shed light on the question of how school teachers can address a diverse student population in their daily classroom practices under the condition of digitality. Utilizing the theoretical framework of practice theory (Schatzki, 2001) I explore digital practices in the classroom together with teachers, facilitating a participatory research project.
Within the European discourse on educational technology in schools, three main areas are investigated: Educational Governance, School- and Classroom Studies, as well as Data- and Information Literacy / Competence Research. This research project contributes to the area of classroom studies. Presently, a focal point of investigation focusses the question of how teachers, students, and technology interact (Macgilchrist, 2023). Practices involving digital artifacts are recognized for their significance in shaping social and educational frameworks (Wolf & Tiersch, 2023).
Grounded in the theoretical framework of practice theory, classroom studies investigate how digital devices generate a pluralization of attention through visualization on smartboards and Apple TVs, necessitating educators to adeptly navigate students’ attention across diverse screens and devices (Herrle et al., 2022; Rabenstein et al., 2022). Other studies investigate the effects of displaying students' notes and question how these become the center of attention as teachers can mirror every device in front of the class (Wolf & Tiersch, 2023). Here questions about privacy and the code of conduct using digital technologies within schools are raised.
Without succumbing to an argumentation of techno-solutionism, this research project investigates how educators can facilitate diversity-sensitive digital teaching to grapple with current challenges such as inclusion in schools. Diversity sensitivity is not solely understood as an awareness of multicultural backgrounds but as a sensitivity towards global and intersectional power relations (Budde, 2021; Walgenbach, 2017). In alignment with power-sensitive approaches towards the concept of diversity, this research project contributes to a discussion about the teachers’ and the technologies’ position within the classroom. By investigating practices with digital artifacts, the research project aims to explore how teachers can construct their teaching practices addressing intersecting power dynamics.
With an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 2023), the contribution investigates how school teachers can facilitate students' diversity in the classroom while critically reflecting on their own position and power dynamics within digital educational spaces. Participatory research is a collaborative process in which a teacher partners with the university-based researcher, to investigate a self-chosen specific research question. The current collaboration focusses on the question of how students' digital note-taking can be performed regarding inclusive and language-sensitive digital teaching with tablets for students with refugee or migration backgrounds.

Deterministic discourses that conceive of technology as independent from other social sectors and consider technological developments to be the cause of far-reaching social transformations are widespread (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1985; Wyatt, 2008; Wajcman, 2015). Within this contemporary thinking, we can find different narratives, with varying degrees of optimism, amongst which a rhetoric of techno-solutionism stands out, a Promethean vision which sees technology as a human good that contributes inexorably to the emancipation of the species (Martins, 2003).

The application of technological developments regarding the collection, processing and storage capacity to the education sector has been crucial for the parallel development of quantification and number-based policies in education. This means digital technologies have been enablers of data-driven policy-making (Ozga, 2008; Williamson, 2017; Landri, 2018; Grek, Maroy & Verger, 2021; Williamson, 2017, 2021; among many others), deepening and supporting the phenomenon of datafication (Williamson, 2017). Although the collection of data on education is nothing new, the importance of these changing digital policy processes shows that there is a digital layer added to what has already been taking shape in the governance of education. This layer includes its own actors, worlds, instruments, types of knowledge, possibilities for action.

Educational policy in the European space is nowadays entirely embedded in a digital environment of commensuration, where “good” outcomes are compared, visualized, and desired (Landri, 2018). This European digital environment is constituted by many instruments, some of European scope, but most working at national and local level, collecting, sorting and distributing data, often for later use by European aggregating platforms, such as the Education and Training Monitor. Educational policy research needs to study the digital instruments that make all this possible, it is important to understand the ideas they carry and the imaginaries surrounding them, as well as to follow the trail of their construction and the actors involved in their doings.

To understand how digital technologies are intertwined with educational policy we must distance ourselves from the above-mentioned deterministic thinking, but also observe and analyse those very ideas in the education sector. What are the imaginaries on technology that surround digital educational governance? How can we describe these imaginaries more concretely, where and by whom are they produced and reproduced? What ideas are shared among different actors and which are not, and how do these relate to practice?

This study analyses one of such digital objects: Escola 360 (E360). This is a web platform designed and developed by the Portuguese Ministry of Education, together with IT and consultancy companies. It serves at the same time local school pupil management and the administration of the education system. It is a real-time national web platform where an individual file is kept for each student from the time of entrance in the education system. It’s the software teachers access as they start each class to enter attendance data and lesson summaries, where student enrolment is carried out nation-wide, ministry staff check individual or aggregated data. It has some innovative features, like cross sector non-human automatic processes for information checking with social security, health or law services, for example.

Studied as a public policy instrument, E360 is analysed as an instrument loaded with meaning (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007), not as neutral device, a simple technical object, but rather as an artefact carrying ideas that deserve the researcher’s attention (Wajcman, 2015; Kitchin & Dodge, 2011; Beer, 2017). By describing these ideas, the purpose of this study is to understand the discursive construction surrounding E360, as a means to discuss the imaginaries on technology that surround digital education governance both nationally and in the European education space.

Temporality and its conceptions are fundamental to educational discourse, policy, and practices. More specifically, education is often and ubiquitously put about a specific kind of temporality, i.e., the future and ideas about possible and/or (un)desirable futures (e.g., Arendt, 1954). While (the concept of) future is often put in relation to education in rhetorical, tokenistic, or even instrumental ways, there are indeed different aspects of this bond that have been recognized and analyzed from diverse ontological and epistemological perspectives. For instance, we may think about how education will look like in the future, how it concurs in building the future or how it prepares students for the future, on the other hand, we may invert the relationship and ask ourselves how ideas and attitudes towards the future affect educational thinking, practices, and policies today. Here, for instance, ideas about technology and their role in future societal settings – so-called sociotechnical imageries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2013) – inform and define present discourses, practices and policies pertaining to education. This often happens in normative, preparative, or even speculative ways. In fact, as Facer (2021) summarizes, in the educational sector ‘the future’ can be subject to many diverse activities following heterogeneous aims: prediction, imagination, speculation, (adaptive or agentic) preparation, critique, emancipation, suspension, reflection and even repair. These activities, and the effects they induce upon present and future schooling, also depend upon which actors (students, teachers, policymakers, tech companies, financial speculators), interests (pedagogical, economic, political, … ), and generations participate in the construction of specific ideas, attitudes and conceptions of the future, but also upon how near or far the imagined future may be conceived.

In this paper, we are interested in discussing and confronting educational futures (and of futures in education) of small and rural schools. Education and educational practices are always embedded within broader territorial systems that define geographically specific needs, desires, constraints and grammar of school. Subsequently, educational conceptions of the future – and their influences and effects on the present – may also vary depending on territorial differences and specificities (Boix et al., 2015). Small and rural schools have specific features, needs, and grammar of school when compared with bigger schools in urban areas, for instance, regarding student numerosity and heterogeneity, classroom organisation or integration with other territorial actors and institutions. In this regard, one of the many questions arising is where, for which areas, and with which consequences educational futures are imagined, perceived, produced, built, or speculated upon.

By drawing on the current interest in the future in sociology (see the special issue in Sociological Review, 2016; New Media and Society, 2021; Qualitative Inquiry, 2022; Levitas, 2013; Urry, 2016) and on the ongoing investigation in small schools in Italy resulting from a collaboration between CNR-IRPPS and INDIRE, we will present social imageries of small schools emerging from participatory research with three schools aiming at stimulate bottom-up projects that makes operational the idea of the school as a learning hub. Our idea is to propose to work with the concept of ‘school as learning hub’ as a possible future scenario of the future grammar of the school in well-known OCDE scenarios of schooling to understand: a) how the idea of ‘school as learning hub’ may give a name to their schooling practices, and act as concrete (what could or ought to be), an abstract (core principles to engage critically with the present), or latent future (future in the making, but yet to materialise) (Halford & Southerton, 2023) for the three cases; c) to what extent this exercise of the future may help small schools stimulate their singularity and creativity in a bottom-up way.

Schools in the UK are currently at a disjuncture with regards to LGBT inclusion. In England, ‘LGBT content’ has been added to the curriculum for Relationships and Sex Education (RSE). Within this, government advice is tenuous, with notions of age appropriateness and parental consultations dominating guidance. These polices are also framed within a neoliberal climate, where structural inequalities are masked, and individualised solutions are favoured (Woolley, 2017). The resulting implementation of LGBT practices, and policies has been variable, both within and between schools (Llewellyn & Reynolds 2021). This picture sits alongside a rise in opposition to LGBT inclusion in schools (Nash & Brown, 2021).

In light of these contending notions, it is important to be sceptical of universal and linear narratives of progress which permeate modernity (Brown, 2001), education and research (Facer, 2023). However, linear narratives are only one of several possible “temporal framings” (Lazar, 2019) that are experienced. Indeed, education itself is often caught between competing conceptions of progress and conservatism. Both advocate a desired future, but each has a different relationship to the past, the former to discard and the second to preserve (Decuypere & Maarten, 2020). These ideas are adjoined to discourses of the desired child through a projected future (Lesko & Talburt, 2012). Arguably, nowhere are the lines between progress and conservativism more keenly drawn than with regards to LGBT inclusion in schools. Within this, conceptions of the desired child are used to advocate for, and notably against, LGBT inclusion. The moral rhetoric of “let kids be kids” (Bialystok & Wright, 2019) regularly appears in campaigns against LGBT inclusion, which can be seen more globally.

One group of people who are at the centre of these contestations are LGBT teachers, who are, to some extent, living their identities, and responding to the presence (or absence) of LGBT within their workplace. Identity formation in general has a relationship to time (du Gay, 2007). For teachers, they operate with the present, yet their work is centred around educational narratives of progress, and of their children’s future. However, teachers have a relationship to schooling through their own experiences, thus there is a recollected past that may impact their practices, perceptions, and identity formation. More broadly, for any individual, a “perception of their past, present and especially their future(s), is inextricably connected to psychological well-being” (Clancy, 2014, p. 36).

For LGBT teachers temporalities have even more significance, as often their own schooling has been harmful. UK schools have historically operated a homophobic relationship to LGBT content and people, with particular significance placed upon the legacy of Section 28 - this stated local authorities shall not “intentionally promote homosexuality” (DES, 1988). The impact of Section 28 has arguably led to decades of silence around sexuality in UK schools. Whilst present day schools may be less overtly homophobic, the inclusion of LGBT content, and treatment of LGBT people is variable, with emphasis often placed upon antibullying strategies, which construct a limiting victim narrative (Monk, 2011). Within this, schools are places that overwhelmingly reproduce heteronormativity; therefore, it is possible, LGBT inclusion is largely present through a “discourse of accommodation” (Omercajic and Martino, 2020). Alongside this, ‘LGBT people’ are also bounded by narratives of inevitable progress. This is demonstrated through public discourses such as the “it gets better” campaign, launched in 2010 in the US, and popularised through celebrities and online video content (West et al. 2013). Whilst these videos offer examples of hope and resistance, it is also possible that that they create a singular hero narrative, that streamlines an acceptable LGBT experience. Again, there is a separation into hero and victim.

Each phase of accelerated growth within a society also brings with it desires for deceleration. In view of technology-driven social transformations such as digitalisation, datafication or platformisation, critical perspectives on the role of technologies in society have been gaining traction, with the desire for a more just, humane and less technology-centred degrowth society becoming more widespread (e.g. Guenot & Vetter, 2019). These perspectives interweave critique of contemporary, technology-driven social transformation, with an interest in futures and futurity (e.g. Appadurai, 2021). Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, austerity, right-wing populism and technological acceleration, there is increased uncertainty today about many things in everyday life that could previously be taken for granted. Against this backdrop, this paper addresses how grassroots educational practitioners’ hopes for the future articulate a critique of the present and construe (im)possible futures.

The paper is contextualised in recent work on futures-making (e.g. Knox et al., 2020; Selwyn, 2021; Swist & Gulson, 2023). This research, sometimes based in empirical research, other times as social science fiction, critically reflects on the impact of technological change on society, creating versions of utopias and dystopias. Informed by the notion that a “historical retrospective” is necessary for the formulation of futures (Zierer, 2021, p. 13f), these studies engage with the (im)possible futures of education against the background of technological change. Drawing on the past to shape the future can, however, also restrict thought and practice (Macgilchrist et al., 2024). During the Covid-19 pandemic, this became apparent when, for example, key stakeholders took recourse to long-cherished concepts for how schooling should be transformed, rather than going beyond the already-known and well-rehearsed arguments for, e.g., more personalisation, better technology in schools or more effective leadership (Burgos et al., 2021; Zepeda & Lanoue, 2021).

Drawing on Bloch's "principle of hope" (1995), Appadurai's "traces of future" (2021) and Levitas’ "utopia as method" (2013), we utilize a critical utopian approach inspired by Muñoz (2009). The contribution adds insights to what Levitas refers to as “political pragmatism” which “prioritises short-term fixes for problems within the current system” while placing “questions of the viability or justice of that system itself, and certainly radical alternatives […] outside legitimate political debate” (Levitas, 2013, p. 132). Drawing on well-known, pragmatic concepts and approaches can inadvertently render the future smaller and less possible, rather than expanding future possibilities. As Appadurai (2021) argues, the more we think of technological futures, the less space is there for non-technological futures.

Based on interviews with school principals, teachers, (school) social workers and other educational professionals who worked with young people in school and out-of-school settings during the pandemic, this contribution explores which futures they consider desirable. The aim is to illustrate hopes for more socially just, sometimes utopian, futures using concrete, current examples from the reflection of educational practice.

After (i) presenting the theoretical-methodological framework and (ii) discussing the central findings, the paper (iii) reflects on the interviewees' wishes for more solidarity with one another in relation to research on convivial technologies in degrowth societies, debates on technological acceleration and deceleration and contemporary thinking about small revolutions and radical actions in everyday life. The contribution (iv) concludes with methodological reflections for future studies. Overall, the findings provide, we suggest, traces of futures otherwise as they are articulated in the present.

Bachilleratos Populares (BPs) are popular education (Freire, 1970/2005) experiences for young and adults created by grassroots social organizations in the context of the social uprisings of 2001 in Argentina. Guided by a utopian and anticapitalist view, organized horizontally, assembly-led, and autonomous from the state, they constitute an example of educational commons. Since their creation, the number of BPs has continued to grow to reach the number of 86 BPs in 2015 (GEMSEP, 2016).

Drawing upon the neo-Marxist approach on the commons (De Angelis, 2017; Federici, 2019; Laval & Dardot, 2005), we consider the BPs a main example of commons in the field of education. The notion of the commons designates the setting up of horizontal, assembly-based, and anti-capitalist social initiatives organized by civil society —chiefly social movements— to respond to the social needs of communities and to resist the dynamics of enclosure (privatization) promoted by the capital-state alliance, especially in the neoliberal phase of capitalism. In coherence, these initiatives vindicate their autonomy, distancing themselves from the notion of ‘the public’, understood as ‘what is owned, managed, controlled, and regulated by and for the state’ (Federici, 2019, p. 96).

However, the BPs do not understand their autonomy as just a withdrawal from the state, which according to Hardt and Negri (2012) seems to be the defining strategy of the common. In response to the need for an educational diploma expressed by their students, the first BPs decided to take on the form of a secondary school and initiate a process of dispute before the state (Moñino, 2021) for symbolic resources (official recognition to issue degrees) and material resources (such as scholarships and teacher salaries) that the state accumulates. In this way, the BPs unfold as a contradictory experience marked by a tense relationship with the state. On the one hand, state resources have enabled their sustainability and growth. On the other hand, obtaining these resources comes into tension with their declared autonomy (Wahren, 2020). These tensions are the result of a radical contradiction in the foundation of the BPs, between the stabilizing rationale of state policies (that grant their recognition and material resources) and the destabilizing rationale of their autonomous politics, typical of the commons (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2017, p. 59).

This work reconstructs the experience of the BPs in the City of Buenos Aires from an institutionalist and strategic perspective through two types of qualitative materials: 42 comprehensive interviews with BPs’ teachers and state managers, and a set of policy documents that have granted official recognition to 29 BPs in the city of Buenos Aires. Our analysis of this material is based on the works of Bob Jessop (2016) and Erik Olin Wright (2010). Wright’s work lays the ground for studying radical democratic and egalitarian institutional designs or ‘real utopias’, i.e., experiences of social power led by emancipatory movements, such as is the case of the BPs. While Wright turns his attention to the key role social movements, Jessop’s strategic-relational approach (SRA) provides a plural set of tools for unravelling the complexity of relations with and within state institutions. Our analysis gives response to two main tasks proposed by Wright to address real utopias: (1) to explore their enabling or facilitating conditions, and (2) to delve into their contradictions, limits, and dilemmas. In this way, this work seeks to contribute to the debates on non-state-centric educational experiences promoted by social movements.

This paper is part of the research project EduCommon. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101027465.

In these last few years, we have seen the emergence of private actors in the field of education. International advisory firms, non-profit organizations, Corporate Social Responsibility divisions of commercial enterprises, individual consultants and a growing number of philanthropic foundations entered the field of education that was almost exclusively government domain. At the same time, we are observing a shift in education philanthropy. Hence, as philanthropic investment in education is on the rise, increasingly critical questions are being asked about the impact of the activities of private actors on educational systems. New corporate donors have entered the scene, using large amounts of financial resources and employing new and ambitious approaches even as their commitments to educational philanthropy raise critical questions of accountability and legitimacy.

According to Ball (2016), some trans-national policy actors in the field of global education policy are well researched, such as the OECD, the World Bank and the European Union. Educational businesses, Ed-Tech companies and philanthropies compared have received much less attention from researchers, despite their significant impact on the reshaping of teaching and learning and on the conceptualization of education policy and governance within and across national jurisdictions (Hogan, 2015).

This presentation seeks to expand a body of research within policy sociology dealing with changes in the policy process and new methods of governing society (Ball, 2008), and to contribute to the conceptualization of policy networks in the field of education. The term “network” is used here as a theoretical device to represent a set of changes in the forms of governance of education, both nationally and globally, and as a method and an analytic technique for looking at policy communities and their social relationships (Ball, 2012,).

The popularity of the concept of “network” is an adequate methodological response to the change in governance and forms of the state. That is, the network as a device for both researching and representing policy allows policy researchers to shape their methods and analytic practices in relation to the global shift from government to governance (Rhodes, 1995, Ball & Youdell, 2008, Cone & Brøgger, 2020), or what is sometimes called “network governance”. This shift involves a move away from the administrative, bureaucratic, and hierarchical forms of state organization and the emergence of new “reflexive, self-regulatory and horizontal” spaces of governance: the heterarchies. The heterogeneous range of organizations and practices that constitute these heterarchies contributes to, reflects, enable, and require the semiotic and technical re-articulation of education and educational governance (Ball et al., 2017).

In the presentation, drawn from my doctoral research, I will introduce the reasoning behind the empirical investigation that allowed me to answer the research question on how new philanthropic organizations promote social investment in European education by mobilizing their resources and present the policy-scape” in which such organizations carry out their strategies of social investment. Therefore, understanding how these actors operate in education governance fits in wider efforts of understanding European trends of education policy towards education advocacy.

Moreover, network analysis responds to the need for new methods and new research sensibilities to better understand the new organizations, forms of participation and relationships engaging in education policy and, more generally, in the expansion of neoliberal ideas (Ball, 2012). Network analysis is appropriate here both as a method for the analysis of educational governance, and as a representation of the actual social relations and sites of activity within which the work of governing is done (Ball & Thawer, 2019).

The relationship between religiosity and work has been a key area of interest in the sociology of religion. The content of both religiosity and work has been transformed. However, the relationship between religiosity and students’ motivation for work is rarely studied, even though volunteering and paid student jobs are increasingly common. Previous research has shown that the largest group of volunteers is composed of university students and secondary school students (Tokhtarova 2014). In this study, we examine paid work of student as well as voluntary work. We seek to answer the question as to how the voluntary or paid work clusters are related to religiosity.

According to the literature (Handy et al. 2010), a volunteer is a person who does work that is not compulsory, driven by some intrinsic motive, and without any financial reward. Volunteering can be intrinsically and/or extrinsically motivated. Following the turn of the millennium, a new type of volunteering has emerged, which is not necessarily based on solidarity but instead reflects career considerations (Hoskins et al. 2020). This career volunteering is no longer motivated by altruism, but rather it is based on purposeful preparation for later employment. Volunteering is thus motivated by different reasons, which may include incentives by the state or the school, volunteering for career development purposes, or volunteering as an introductory phase to paid employment, which in turn leads to the hybridisation of the concept of volunteering (Handy et al. 2010; Bazan 2021). Immediately after the political transformation in CEE, non-governmental organisations based on voluntary participation and non-profit activities existed mainly in church-related environments. In this church-related setting, social patterns of volunteering, which were destroyed in the middle of the 20^th century, also returned (Máté-Tóth & Szilágyi 2020). Over the last decade, our results on students’ civic participation have shown that members of sports and church associations make up the majority of civic participants, as other organisations are not seen as attractive. This partly explains the association between volunteering and religiosity observed in Hungary and the cross border area (Fényes et al.2021; Fényes & Pusztai 2012). At the same time, in the period of pressure on societies during the COVID-19 crisis and the war in Ukraine, much of the voluntary work was organised through existing social networks. During the war, young people played a crucial role (Carlsen et al. 2020, Pallay et al. 2022).
However, there are young people who have career-building aspirations, but in addition to these goals, they also have the motivation to earn an income, and they do paid work, so that they gain experience and earn money at the same time. Work experience can be acquired not only through volunteering, but also through paid work of students during the semester and lecture period (Masevičiūtė et al.2018). Through paid work, students are supported in acquiring skills which are important in today’s labour market and enables a shorter and smoother transition from education to work (OECD 2015). Career volunteering and paid work can also be motivated by the desire to seek a vocation. Vocation goes beyond a job which provides a living; instead, it presupposes work which is fulfilling and rewarding, with a sense of calling and mission, whereby even the secularised interpretation of vocation has a transcendent element (Park, 2012). The question is therefore how motivations to work are related to religiosity among 21^st century students. We seek to answer in this study. Combined analyses of voluntary and paid work are relatively rare, with the beneficial effects of this combination found among migrant adults (Wood et al. 2019), but the potential links to religiosity have not been investigated.

Encompassing obligations to children’s welfare and well-being, it is accepted that all schools possess a ‘duty of care’ towards their students. This duty of care plays out in schools through the practice of ‘nurturing pedagogies’ (Gleasure et al., 2024). Drawing on the work of Noddings (2013), such nurturing pedagogies can be conceptualised as the ‘caring actions’ of teachers and other school personnel which arise from their attentiveness to the ‘expressed needs’ of the children under their care.

Although universal, the duty of care falls unevenly across schools, with research highlighting that it is often necessary for teachers in schools serving low-income communities to respond to the material and psychological effects of poverty as a priority (Crean et al., 2023; Moss et al., 2020). Against this backdrop, it has been argued that such schools play a dual role, not only as an education provider, but also as a frontline service for children living in poverty (Crean et al., 2023).

This dual role aligns with a body of research which suggests two corresponding domains of nurturing in schools serving low-income communities (Tichnor-Wagner & Allen, 2016; Valenzuela, 1999): a domain of ‘academic nurturing,’ centred on children’s academic progression and success, and a domain of ‘affective nurturing,’ related to children’s welfare and well-being. Research also indicates, however, that teachers in such schools often perceive these forms of nurturing as competing areas of interest, leading them to prioritise one over the other (Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006; Martin & Amin, 2020).

Others challenge such binarism, arguing that teachers should uphold the dual role of schools serving low-income communities by simultaneously engaging in both academic nurturing and affective nurturing (Crean et al., 2023; Devine & McGillicuddy, 2016). We build on that argument, characterising such practices as ‘critical nurturing.’ Importantly, critical nurturing is distinct from ‘instrumental’ forms of caring, where affective nurturing practices serve a performative end in children’s academic achievement (Dadvand & Cuervo, 2020; Walls, 2022). Such instrumental practices are especially salient in the context of the increasing emphasis on children’s performance in standardised assessments arising from neo-liberal accountability measures in education systems globally (Devine, 2013).

Our focus on nurturing pedagogies in schools serving low-income communities is particularly relevant in light of the EU Youth Strategy 2019-2027 (European Commission, 2018) which underscores the need to pay attention to the risks of socioeconomic exclusion in children’s lives. The Strategy identifies a number ‘European Youth Goals’ which correspond to the nurturing pedagogies within our typology, including mental health and well-being, quality learning, and quality employment for all.

Here, we present findings from two strands from our research on nurturing pedagogies in primary schools serving low-income communities. First, we consider the nurturing pedagogies evident during Covid-19 school closures, a period during which socioeconomic inequalities in education became particularly pronounced (Crean et al., 2023). The following research questions frame our analysis:

1. To what extent did teachers in disadvantaged schools emphasise academic nurturing and affective nurturing during COVID-19 closures?

2. What variation existed between schools in their enactment of nurturing pedagogies during this period?

3. What school-level factors influenced the enactment of nurturing pedagogies in schools at this time?

Second, we examine primary school children’s perspectives on their experience of nurturing pedagogies, recognising their agency as active co-researchers of their own lives (Donegan et al., 2023; Samanova et al., 2022). Again, our investigation is framed by the following research questions:

1. How do children in disadvantaged schools experience academic nurturing and affective nurturing?

2. How do children perceive the dual role of disadvantaged schools and the tensions associated with critical nurturing?

3. What places, spaces, and people do children associate with care at school?

The symposium presents results of qualitative research on juvenile politicization on digital platforms in times of uncertainty. Articulations on politics by adolescents and young adults are examined empirically concerning implicit notions of relations of care (Magatti et al. 2019) and temporality (Aswani et al. 2018). We examine concepts of care relations and temporality and analyse transformation processes, especially against the backdrop of the current age of uncertainty, in which modernized societies question fundamental assumptions of development, transmission and continuity (Zilles et al. 2022; Adloff & Neckel 2019). Digital conditions (Stalder 2016) arguably create low-threshold opportunities for social and political participation (Grunert 2022) and transform the access to educational spaces (Jörissen 2020; Stahl & Literat 2022). In this regard, data suggests that adolescents and young adults increasingly use digital media for protest (Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik 2019; McLean & Fuller 2016). Nonetheless, social media also has to be considered in terms of its algorithmic curation based on economic interests, which presents the digital possibilities of connectivity, favours emotional and affective content (Papacharissi 2015) and may lead to discriminatory injustice in visibility - which has direct consequences for political activism online (Etter & Albu 2020; Neumayer & Rossi 2018)

Therefore, the symposium examines political subjectification in the context of digital image platforms, taking into account both the algorithmic structuring as well as the applicable disadvantageous power asymmetries - especially concerning generational order (Liou & Literat 2020; Theodorou et al. 2023). In doing so, we focus on articulations on protest made by adolescents and young adults and analyse implicit political notions of future, present and past. Subsequently, we question the empirical data regarding its inherent utopian potential and concepts of care and temporality. The symposium aims to contribute to the understanding of the modes of political subjectification of adolescents and young adults with special regards to relations of social inequality and underlying concepts of (in)justice as they take shape under the conditions of late modernity and on social media platforms.

Lastly, we examine how the socio-cultural arena, as it is generated via video and image platforms such as TikTok or Instagram, (co-)contours the (in)visibility and significance of certain articulations of care relations and logics of time in the context of the age of uncertainty. By illustrating how visibility and invisibility are shaped by these socio-cultural arenas, the symposium explores how they sculpt and structure discourse on care and temporality. Conclusively the symposium raises questions on the interconnectedness of digital and analogue spheres and their consideration in (educational) research concerning transformative and dynamic societies.

In four lectures, the following questions will be addressed on the basis of four different qualitative research projects in which forms of youth protest in Germany, Spain, Brazil and Switzerland were examined.

The paper seeks to investigate the processes of political subjectivation among young individuals resulting from their engagement in digital image practices. The primary objective is to analyze how young people articulate and negotiate notions of (in)justice in the context of algorithmically structured political utopias and dystopias related to climate change. In particular, we examine concepts (and utopias) of care as they become central to the climate movement, such as transgenerational and transnational care as well as care for nature. We specifically explore how these different modes and concepts of care are articulated via digital media (Liou & Literat 2020). As the climate crisis can also be understood as a generational crisis, temporality and care, respectively generativity (Friberg 2021; King 2022), become closely linked within the activist’ discourse and refer to questions of continuity and transmission, especially within fast-moving digital realms that are mostly frequented by youth and young adults (Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik 2023). Our theoretical framework draws on educational and youth theories, examining how digital image practices influence the thematization of the world and self. The research explores the articulation and negotiation of political ideas and ideals within algorithmically structured contexts, using qualitative analysis of juvenile climate policy articulations on digital platforms. This methodology allows for a nuanced exploration of how young individuals engage in political discourse online, taking into account the algorithmic structures that shape their interactions. By using a qualitative approach, the project aims to uncover the underlying orders of recognition and power dynamics associated with the articulation of political views in digital spaces. The primary data source for this study consists of climate policy articulations by young people on digital image and video platforms such as TikTok or Instagram. The study shows how digital platforms structure political protest in relation to changing concepts of care and time. By understanding the dynamics of social and political participation within these digital spaces, the study aims to reveal opportunities and barriers to access educational spaces and contribute to a broader understanding of (post)digital orders and their implications for education and youth theory. This research therefore contributes to the broader discourse on (in)justice and utopias in an algorithmized society and in an age of uncertainty by presenting the perspectives of young individuals articulated within digital activist spaces.

Friberg, A. (2021): On the need for (con)temporary utopias: Temporal reflections on the climate rhetoric of environmental youth movements. Time & Society, 31(1), 48-68. Literat, I. & Kligler-Vilenchik, N. (2023): TikTok as a Key Platform for Youth Political Expression: Reflecting on the Opportunities and Stakes Involved. Social Media + Society, 9(1). Liou, A. & Literat, I. (2020). „We Need You to Listen to Us”: Youth Activist Perspectives on Intergenerationale Dynamics and Adult Solidarity in Youth Movements. In. International Journal of Communication 14, 4662-4682. King, V. (2022). Generative Verantwortung im Anthropozän. Psyche, 26(12), 1123–1146.

Sub-paper had to be withdrawn.

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Young people spend their free time on the Internet. This is also the place where they inform themselves about politics, exchange ideas and spend leisure time. Whether the so called “mass media” have an influence on young people's political orientations and interests has been discussed since the 1970s. From today's perspective, media, including the internet, have a place as a fixed political socialization instance, alongside the family, peers and school. The talk examines the relationship between young people’s digital information and communication with politics, especially focusing on the role of humour. It looks firstly at how young people use digital tools and media to discuss, produce and inform themselves or others about politics, but also, what temporality has to do with that. Secondly, it asks what role humour plays in the digital political information and communication of young people, what function it has and what form it takes. This will be connected to the idea of playful caring about others – or not. The talk and its initial idea draw from the empirical material from a research project about politics, participation and biographies of young people in Swiss ("Biographical Experiences and political Engagement" (2023-2026)).

Lütgens, J./Mengilli, Y. (2023): Counter–hegemonic Politics Between Coping and Performative Self-Contradictions. In: Batsleer, J./McMahon, G./Rowley, H. (Hg.): Reshaping youth participation: Manchester in a European Gaze. Emerald Publishing, 99-112. DOI: 10.1108/978-1-80043-358-820221006 McMahon, G./Liljeholm Hansson, S./Von Schwanenflügel/Lütgens, J./Ilardo, M. (2019): Participation Biographies. Meaning–making, Identity–work and the Self. In: Walther, A., Batsleer, J., Loncle, P./Pohl, A. (Hg.): Young People and the Struggle for Participation. Contested Practices, Power and Pedagogies in Public Spaces. London: Routledge, 161–175.

The Spanish indignados movement has often been portrayed as a ’youth movement‘, organized by heretofore rather ‘apolitical’ young people. However, this categorization tends to ignore aspects of political continuities, historical memory, and intergenerational solidarity within the movement. The most telling examples of these aspects are the iaioflautas (in Catalan) or yayoflautas (in Spanish), older indignados activists who define themselves as ‘the generation that fought and achieved a better future for our sons and daughters’ (see their manifesto). This rhetoric of care for the younger generation on the one hand avoids the acerbic right-leftist divisions that characterize post-franquist politics; at the same time, it organizes a generational unit, in Mannheim’s sense. As the only ‘grandparents movement’ to emerge in the European Spring protests, it brings together very experienced activists, some of whom had already organized clandestine resistance under Franco as unionists or members of leftist parties, with political newcomers – older people who had never been politically active before but who can identify with the movement’s framing strategy of intergenerational care in the face of the precariousness of the younger generation. Thus, in recent years yay@ activists with very different backgrounds have regularly been at the frontline of occupations or other anti-austerity protests, marked as yayoflautas by their characteristic yellow vests – and the respective hashtag several times reached the status of trending topic in twitter. Younger indignados activists organized digital literacy workshops for the yayos, teaching them the use of social media for mobilization. In exchange, yayos taught the younger activist forms of clandestine organization and subversion they had employed in their resistance against the Franco dictatorship. And, by passing on such repertoires of contention, the movement last but not least also endowed the younger activists with a political legacy…. Based on campaign material and life story interviews with yayoflautas activists and their younger supporters, this paper discusses intergenerational relationships within the indignados movement, particularly regarding the aspects of care and temporality in times of ‘wired citizenship’ (Herrera 2014).

Herrera, L. (2014). Wired Citizenship. Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East. Routledge. Schwarz, Ch. (2022). Collective memory and intergenerational transmission in social movements: The “grandparents’ movement” iaioflautas, the indignados protests, and the Spanish transition. In: Memory Studies, 15(1), 102-119.

In recent years, European primary and secondary schools and classrooms have become increasingly dependent on Big Tech ecosystems and their promises to seamlessly interconnect physical devices, educational software and apps, and cloud services. With companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple tightening their grip on classrooms’ transition into digital environments, Big Tech is asserting control over the material infrastructures, discursive framings, and economic logics undergirding educational digitalisation. As noted in recent scholarship (Kerssens & Van Dijck 2021), the notion of platformisation provides a useful conceptual tool to grasp the societal implications of this dynamic – namely the transformation of educational content, activities and processes to become part of a (corporate) platform ecosystem, including its economies (data) infrastructures and technical architectures (Srnicek 2016). Yet while the current scholarship on platformisation provides critical signposts for problematising the present, it offers little guidance for re-imagining digital education design beyond established platform logics (Macgilchrist et al. 2024).

Looking at problematisations of platforms and platformisation in education research, the broad field of study encompassed under the sociologies of education provides fertile soil for critically analysing the roles and impact of digital technologies in/on educational ideas and materialities (Selwyn 2019). Through the analytical lens of platformisation, recent work has examined Big tech influence in public education (Kerssens, Nichols & Pangrazio 2023), including the power of corporate cloud companies in educational governance (Williamson et al. 2022). Other studies have examined specific platforms as new infrastructures for pedagogy (Perrotta et al. 2020). Another strand of research has examined how platformisation of schools affects the day-to-day relations of teachers and students and conceptions of teacher autonomy (Cone 2023).

Yet as the monetary models, materialities, and embodied effects of Big Tech platform education come under increasing scholarly, political, and regulatory scrutiny, the apparent disaffection permeating much of the literature on platforms and platformisation begs the question of how and where to look for alternatives – both from a practical, administrative, and theoretical viewpoint. This question is, in turn, the starting point for the papers and discussions that form the present symposium proposal: What are the theoretical, empirical, and technical conditions for imagining and enacting alternative digital education ecosystems? And what role can sociologies of education play in affirming alternative approaches to and configurations of digitality, infrastructure, codes, and other related issues?

With this symposium, we seek to give space for empirical presentations and theoretical frameworks that can nurture such forms of questioning of post-platform classrooms and thereby mobilise the European educational research community around the critical study of platformisation, and the prospects of imagining and developing alternative digital ecosystems. The symposium includes four papers, representing four different national perspectives (Catalunya, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden) that explore possibilities for grounding digital education in other forms of pedagogical and sociological reasoning, infrastructural arrangements, and forms of governance that can challenge the status quo of the platform as the default for educational digitalisation.

This paper explores different dilemmas faced by the Education Administration and schools from Catalonia between “Googlification” of education (Kerssens & Van Dijck, 2022) and the search for alternatives. At the political level, during the pandemic, the Catalan Administration had to choose between improving Moodle – the main platform already used in schools despite getting little public investment – or facilitating the adoption of Google Classroom, which was offered to the administration free of charge (Jacovkis et al., 2023). Since both platforms were authorised, the final decision depended on each school. Therefore, principals faced the dilemma of adopting Google or keeping Moodle. In result, teachers from schools where principals decided to adopt only Google had no alternative: they could use Google or stop using a digital platform at all. Many teachers expressed great concerns regarding the use of Google’s educational ecosystem but felt pressured to adopt it. We identify two sources of resistance to the use of the Google ecosystem in schools. One related to strong political positionings of school management boards and another started by families that demanded an alternative (Rivera-Vargas et al., 2024). A collaboration between family associations, principals, and the organisation XNET created and implemented an open-source suite called DD in some schools in Barcelona with the support of the city council. However, due to the combined effect of decisions made during the pandemic, a lack of financial support, and unrealistic technical expectations from teachers, the previous decisions became barriers. The initiative failed to provide a viable alternative. The case of engaging digital ecosystems in Catalonia begs a series of questions that are key to understanding both the conditions of platformisation as the dominant arrangement of digital ecosystems globally as well as the situated possibility to imagine alternatives. To what extent were pedagogical reasons considered in the process of platformisation? How did Google Classroom attain a seemingly hegemonic position in recent efforts to materialise a digital education ecosystem in Catalonia? If not pedagogical, what are the logics and discourses driving discussions off school digitalisation? After responding to these questions, we argue that situating pedagogical elements at the center of the discussion can lower teachers’ technical expectations and make it possible to use a larger spectrum of digital technologies that can respond to specific pedagogical needs and amplify digital sovereignty in terms of infrastructure, data, and tools design.

Jacovkis, J., Parcerisa, L., Calderón-Garrido, D., & Moreno-González, A. (2023). Plataformas y digitalización de la educación pública: Explorando su adopción en Cataluña. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 31. Kerssens, N., & van Dijck J. (2022). Governed by edtech? Valuing pedagogical autonomy in a platform society. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 284-303. Rivera-Vargas, P., Calderón-Garrido, D., Jacovkis, J. & Parcerisa. L. (2024). BigTech digital platforms in public schools. Concerns and confidence of students and families. NAER, Journal of new approaches in educational research. 13(1). In press

In their transition to digital education, Dutch primary classrooms have become enormously dependent on Big Tech digital ecosystems of infrastructure and platform services, with far-reaching implications for schools’ control over the design of their online learning environments (Kerssens and Van Dijck 2022). To safeguard schools’ power to organize their digital classrooms “viable alternatives are required” (Veale 2022, 73). However, given the substantial costs and labor-intensive nature of developing alternatives to mainstream platforms, success may depend on collective responses to platformisation on national and sectoral levels of education. This paper discusses both strengths and limitations of such a cooperative response by the field of public education in the Netherlands. First, it will discuss the strengths of its contribution to the development of a digital education ecosystem anchored in public values. Like many other European countries, public values form a cornerstone of the organisation of the Dutch education system. Also in their transition to digital education, schools are supported to safeguard public values, including social equity, meaningful human contact and institutional control over data and pedagogies. Equally important, values-based digitisation unfolds through advanced “cooperative responsibility” (Helberger et al. 2018) involving dynamic interactions and allocations of responsibilities between Dutch schools, sectoral organisations, and private edtech developers, supported by national government. Such collaborations are key for creating governance frameworks (e.g. trust agreements and normative standards) as fundamental support frames for developing open and interoperable digital platforms and infrastructure that meet public value requirements. Examples include the creation of digital services for sharing and reusing digital educational content, open technical standards for data interoperability between educational platforms, and an open AI language model. Second, this paper discusses current limitations of the Dutch cooperative effort to effectively assemble these more or less isolated digital services and their governing frameworks into a coherent future digital education 'ecosystem'. To move towards the creation of a digital learning landscape for primary education dependent on the organizational power of schools rather than platform companies, the paper argues for enhancing forms of cooperative design in relation to its so far non-existent ‘architectural blueprint’. This plan for the design and construction of a public digital education ecosystem should specify its underpinning 'architecture of interoperability'. One which identifies and maps the (nature of) relationships between essential digital services, fundamental support frames based on the requirements of public education, and the responsibilities of schools, sectoral organisations, and private edtech developers.

Helberger, Natali, Jo Pierson, and Thomas Poell. 2018. "Governing online platforms: From contested to cooperative responsibility." The Information Society 34 (1):1-14. Kerssens, Niels, and José Van Dijck. 2022. "Governed by Edtech? Valuing Pedagogical Autonomy in a Platform Society." Harvard Educational Review 92 (2):284-303. doi: https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-92.2.284. Veale, M. (2022). Schools must resist big EdTech – but it won’t be easy. In: S. Livingstone & K. Pothong (Eds.), Education Data Futures: Critical, Regulatory and Practical Reflections. 5Rights Foundation; Digital Futures Commission.

The pervasive involvement of technologies in education has raised questions about the authority of digital platforms in shaping the future of educational practices. Through datafied surveillance, predictive analytics, automated teaching, digital platforms exercise their power not only on the infrastructures of pedagogy, but also on the political configurations of what counts as pedagogical knowledge (Cone, 2023). This paper aims at developing a research agenda to pursue alternatives to commercially driven logics underpinning current platformisation of education. In our proposal, this entails challenging habitual narrations of both humanism and technology-driven educational change to shift the focus from instrumental perspectives to collective and ethical stances (Pischetola, 2021). In relation to wonted assumptions of humanism, we argue, an ethical stance is characterised by its emphasis on the embodied and historical nature of digital education as something that requires situated judgements about the different forms of living that are coming into the world (Masschelein & Simons, 2015). Such judgments involve looking at the history of digital platforms and analysing both the materiality of what appears to be without material consequence – concepts, policies, tools, practices – and the discursivity of what appears to be fixed and passive – classroom settings, whiteboards. Pedagogy, in this view, becomes a posthuman practice directed toward drawing forth the forces at play in human becoming – rather than an attempt to realise certain pregiven ideas of becoming human (Biesta, 2011). As for assumptions around technology-driven change, our proposal to begin from pedagogy and ethics pushes beyond discourses that place technology at the vanguard of educational innovation, as this ultimately replicates modern ontologies and colonial epistemologies (Karumbaiah & Brooks, 2021). At every appearance of a new technology, utopian and dystopian narratives emerge – listing benefits and dangers, opportunities and risks, potentials and limitations – and by so doing, they avoid addressing more complex issues of distributed oppression, institutional materialisations of power, and exacerbation of structural inequalities. Post-platform schooling, we suggest, can be imagined only by understanding digital platforms as part of an ecosystem made of human and material actors (Pischetola & Miranda, 2020), and by exploring how technologies can become environmental forces for affirmative political transformation (Zembylas, 2023). On these grounds, a research agenda for post-platform education requires not merely investing in digital literacy, critical skills, and human empowerment, but also unveiling political and ethical stances that platforms present for education, with discussions about embodied intersubjectivity, responsibility, agency and justice.

Biesta, G. (2011). Philosophy, Exposure, and Children: How to Resist the Instrumentalisation of Philosophy in Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45(2), 305–319. Cone, L. (2023). Subscribing school: digital platforms, affective attachments, and cruel optimism in a Danish public primary school, Critical Studies in Education. DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2023.2269425 Karumbaiah, S. & Brooks, J. (2021). How Colonial Continuities Underlie Algorithmic Injustices in Education. Conference on Research in Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology. Philadelphia, USA, 2021, pp. 1-6. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2015). Education in times of fast learning: the future of the school. Ethics and Education, 10(1), 84–95. Pischetola, M. (2021). Re-imagining Digital Technology in Education through Critical and Neo-materialist Insights. Digital Education Review, 40 (2), 154-171. Pischetola, M., Miranda, L. V. T. (2020). Systemic Thinking in Education and a Situated Perspective on Teaching. Ciência & Educação, 26 (31), 1-15. Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136 Zembylas, M. (2023). A decolonial approach to AI in higher education teaching and learning: Strategies for undoing the ethics of digital neocolonialism. Learning, Media and Technology, 48(1), 25-37.

Digital platforms are often seen as given and established parts of educational systems, also in critical research questioning their impact (Nichol & Garcia, 2022). If we instead consider that frictions and resistance are integrally part of their process of becoming (Bowker & Star, 2000; Bates, 2019), new research possibilities open up for investigating counter-positions and unexpected effects of platformisation in education. In this paper, we explore how official platforms for home–school communication met resistance from parents and caretakers in Sweden. The paper will analyse two empirical examples that demonstrate two different positions with regards to parent resistance – and forms of enacting frictions – vis-à-vis the platform-based school. First, based on analyses of media reporting, we discuss an initiative of programming-savvy parents in Stockholm who created an independent, open-source home–school communication app as a response to frustrations with the complexity and information exchange deficiencies of the formal parent communication platform (Skolplattform) issued to schools from a municipal level. While the parent initiative exposed a controversy about the citizen perspective on the platform issue, the municipal school organisation responded with a police report of a data breach by parent software developers that received international attention (Burgess, 2021). Second, based on free-text responses from a survey of more than 700 Swedish teachers conducted in the Nordic SOS project (sosproject.dtu.dk), we analyse how parents have been regularly excluded from platforms despite formal ambitions that they should be able to take part in their children's schooling (Swedish Education Act, 2010), but also explore how alternative ways to grant parents access are realised by teachers or ‘shadow IT’. Through both examples we illustrate how attending to tensions and frictions makes visible the sociomaterial ‘shadow infrastructure of care’ that forms part of digitised welfare sectors today (e.g. Power et al., 2022), also in education (Zakharova & Jarke, 2022), where it replaces or complements official platforms that were supposed to constitute the home–school communication infrastructure. Shadow infrastructures therefore include the reparative work that both shadow IT and social agents do to fulfill ‘democratic purposes’ or rather the ‘coerced digital participation’ (Barassi, 2019) of welfare platformisation. Importantly, our study shows the extent to which processes of platformisation depend on such sociomaterial shadow infrastructures that can cover up or compensate for frictions around accessibility and participation, which in turn raises concerns about the implications of distributing core welfare services to permanent but non-resilient shadow infrastructures.

Barassi, V. (2019). Datafied citizens in the age of coerced digital participation. Sociological Research Online 24(3), 414–429. Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting Things out: Classification and its Consequences. MIT Press. Burgess, M. (2021-11-04). These Parents Built a School App. Then the City Called the Cops. Wired. Bates, J. (2019). The Politics of Data Friction. Journal of documentation 74(2), 412–429. Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (2022). Platform Studies in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 209–230. Power, E. R., Wiesel, I., Mitchell, E., & Mee, K. J. (2022). Shadow Care Infrastructures: Sustaining Life in Post-Welfare Cities. Progress in Human Geography, 46(5), 1165–1184. Swedish Education Act (2010). Skollagen 2010:800. Sveriges riksdag. Zakharova, I., & Jarke, J. (2022). Educational Technologies as Matters of Care. Learning, Media and Technology, 47(1), 95–108.