Conference Agenda

The aim of this paper is to cultivate conceptual and practical possibilities that lie beyond the ubiquity of the crisis narratives that marks research, theory and practice in education and beyond. It is a paper for ‘the ones who stay and fight’ (Jemisin, 2020). Central to the arguments is the development of the radical imagination as a collective practice that can drive what David Graeber (2007) calls ‘insurrectionary moments’ in our work as researchers and practitioners, and in our lives as citizens and human beings. With this work, I set out to contribute to ‘the emergence of a different paradigm for researchers…that puts at the centre concerns with social transformation and the creation of alternative futures through imaginative actions in the present’ (Punk Ethnography, 2023, n.p.).

In earlier work, I explored Ruth Levitas’ utopia as method as a way for educational researchers and practitioners to engage with alternative futures that go beyond problem solving (see Van dermijnsbrugge & Chatelier, 2022). I made the argument that the imagination is hijacked by those who wish to build a singular, prefabricated future that will emerge from solving the problems that the assumed crises are posing. This future is a ‘known territory to be mapped and conquered and fought over’ (Facer, 2016, p. 70) with evidence-based ‘weapons’ that do nothing more than perpetuating a crisis-ridden status quo.

In this paper, I build on the work of utopia as method by looking more closely at the concepts of hope, despair and radical imagination, as well as the very concept of education itself. I reimagine education as a hyperobject (Morton, 2013) that is ‘everything everywhere all at once’ (after the 2022 film by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). I problematize the binary opposition between education and non-education and argue that the ‘explosion’ of education - to borrow an image from anarchists Colin Ward and Anthony Fyson (1973) - beyond the institutionalized and limiting spaces of schools and educational institutions is necessary if we want to put the radical imagination to work and contribute to social transformation.

I weave together three arguments that each attempt to respond to a question:

Can we exist beyond the binaries of hope and despair? And if so, what does this place look like?

What is the radical imagination and what are the conditions for it to exist in educational spaces?

So, what do we do now? How can we put the radical imagination to work?

Through responding to each of these questions, I try to offer ways of being, thinking and doing that ‘not only help reveal structures and systems of violence, exploitation and domination…it must also contribute to people’s capacity to imagine and forge paths beyond them.’ (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014, p. 85).

Recently there is a growing interest in anticipatory regimes and imaginaries in education (Ramiel & Dishon, 2023; Morris, Couture & Phelan, 2023; Webb, Sellar & Gulson, 2020; Amsler & Faser, 2017). These contributions bring together questions about how anticipation as a discursive practice narrows down the future imaginaries that are possible in relation to education. The future when turned into an object of educational policy making loses its open-ended character often over-emphasizing certain aspects of the present social world, for example human capital (Webb, Sellar & Gulson, 2020) as central aspects to thinking about the future of education. Thus uncertainty about an open future is progressively turned into performative certainty.

The proposed paper seeks to contribute to the debate surrounding the limits of this performative certainty through a historical- sociological analysis of the ways in which sociologists of education, futurologists and related scholars and intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s in state socialist Romania envisioned the future in relation to education. The time frame was chosen as between the publication of the UNESCO Faure report (1972) Learning to be: the world of education today and tomorrow, as a hallmark for the discursive materialization of a global response to the crisis of education (Elfert, 2015) and the events of 1989 as the end of state socialism in large parts of the world and temporarily of the legitimacy of the corresponding social imaginaries of the future. Moreover, this period allows the inclusion of a perspective on the relationship between imaginaries of the future and education from within late state socialism and thus has the potential to balance out the dominance of capitalist-centric reconstructions of this relationship and its impact on present imaginaries.

The investigation builds on archival and library material, primarily academic journal articles and books. In a first step, the inquiry will be focused on the intellectual productions of actors based in Romania that circulated in both Romanian, English, French and German language sources. The analysis will look at the ways in which influential international theories of education of the future, and of the relationship between the future and education, were taken up and responded to in the Romanian context, as well as the interrelationship between conceptual, empirical and political realities. Through this, the project will contribute to a situated and nuanced understanding of the social imaginaries of the future, the roles of education, and the understandings of youth. It will shed light on the ways in which the state socialist system was imagined from within, as a prospectively lasting and continuous future, going well into the 21^st century, and the relations that this had with conceptualizing the roles of education. It will shed light both on the limits of anticipatory regimes based on the assumption of continuity, crafted within one political system, thus exposing the fragility of anticipatory practices and the limitations this imposes on prescriptive practices of the roles of education. Moreover, it will help uncover the intellectual traditions of the sociology of education and futurology in Central and Eastern Europe through a Romanian case study, and thus help balance the mostly Western European historic accounts of the European sociology of education. Finally, through a focus on the relationship between socio-cultural reproduction and political-economic system, it will shed lights on the subtle historic differences between educational traditions in Europe.

On October 7, tens of thousands of Israeli children and youth were uprooted from their homes by the war in Gaza and transferred to evacuation centers, where they reside to this day. Immediately after this withdrawal, dozens of youth workers turned up at these venues for the sake of rebuilding the youth’s education systems. A few months later, non-formal education centers are operating at hotels and motels throughout the country in an effort to bring succor to youngsters who have undergone severe trauma. The research project at hand is documenting the experiences of these educators, their motivations, and the daily challenges they face with the objective of answering two key questions: how do professionals educate in the absence of a blueprint for the future, to include how long their services will be necessary? And what methods are being used to reach traumatized children of all ages and persuade them to adopt, as much as possible, new routines? To date, we have conducted interviews with 80 educators from different organizations and ranks. Preliminary findings suggest that education under fire concentrates on rebuilding trust and re-forming relationships. On occasion, these pedagogic activities have, for all intents and purposes, kept these youth afloat. At the conference, we will elaborate on the enduring efforts to reach high schoolers. In addition, the researcher shall discuss how these educators grasp and are responding to the situation on the ground, while some of them are families and friends' victims of war.

This symposium presents an ongoing project focusing the ideals and practices of ‘One school for all’ as a core of the Nordic welfare state (cf. Blossing et al, 2014, Frønes et al, 2021; Lundahl, 2016). Internationally, Nordic education systems have been considered to promote educational equality and social inclusion by bringing together pupils from diverse backgrounds. From 1945 to about 1970, the Nordic school model was developed as the solution to the future challenges of its time (Telhaug, Mediås & Aasen, 2006). In a little more than ten years, beginning in Sweden in 1962, followed by Finland in 1968, Norway in 1969, and Denmark in 1975, all of the Nordic countries took the final step from parallel education systems to one, common basic education. Non-tracked common neighborhood Nordic schools became well-known for their ambitions in relation to quality and equality (Lundahl, 2016). In the One school for all model, the aim was to provide Nordic children with not only learning, but also diversity of class, culture, gender, ability, and language.

Since then, Nordic societies have faced ideological, economical and social changes and also the Nordic education model has lost some of its spark, with widening differences between schools and continued evidence of exclusion (Beach 2018; Thrupp et al. 2023; Lundahl, 2016). The 13-year olds of the 2020’s also come from a different social world than their predecessors. From 2010 onwards, the rapid and massive digitalization has caused on-going changes: increased individualization, altered notions of time, space and place, and the enabling of mobile, ever-present and place-independent social networks (van Dijk, 2012; Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016).

Against this background, this project examines how the Nordic basic school as a physical and social space shapes social interaction and learning with a particular interest in the challenges that material and digital re-configurations of sociality bring to the future of One common school for all. The project operates within a multidisciplinary framework – education, history and applied language studies – of analyzing Nordic comprehensive schools as spaces and places constructed in the intersections of their material qualities and social interaction (see Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2005). Through multidisciplinary studies of four Nordic schools we explore their changing role for inclusion and exclusion over a time-span of approximately 50 years, from the 70’s to date, organized in three sub-studies. The substudies address the following research questions:

1. How have educational spaces, physical and digital, been locally enacted in the studied communities and schools during the period 1970 to 2020?

2. How, in retrospect, did the basic school spaces during the 70’s provide opportunities for pupils to engage in social relations with peers with diverse social backgrounds, and what are their perceived long-term implications of the relations established in school?

3. How do school spaces at present provide opportunities for pupils to engage in social interaction with peers with diverse social backgrounds, and what are the roles of digital sociality for the relations that develop?

The research material consists of policy documents and archive material from the selected schools, interviews with former students about their life histories, small projects carried out collaboratively with students, video material, field notes, and interviews from the schools today. The symposium consists of three presentations focusing on each of the sub-studies, followed by a fourth presentation about how they altogether make it possible to contrast past education and current developments, and as a next step can contribute to articulate basic education in new ways in the Nordic countries and beyond.

This study is a historical analysis of how national school policies concerning basic education have been enacted in the local community and at the school sites (Clark 2010; Gamson, 2019; Westberg, 2014). Through studies of policy texts and archive material from the four local communities, the focus is on local and regional documents, and how pedagogical ideas have been enacted in the physical spaces of the school buildings. This is done through a reflecting interpretative approach (Alvesson & Sköldberg 2009). Theoretically, the starting point is that there is no single factor that can explain the establishment of basic schools in the cities studied; rather it is a complex interaction between a series of processes at local and national level. In this process, local traditions interact with national and international perspectives at school as a space for the development of a democratic society (Westberg, 2014). To capture local processes and how they interact with regional and national institutions, we have used a wide range of sources. Examples of material we use are drawings, planning materials, municipal commissions of school buildings, correspondence between the municipality and the national authorities and teacher interviews. In this presentation, empirical data from the four cases comprising the study will be presented. We have studied the overall process that led to the establishment of secondary schools in four municipalities. The material used is mainly based on local and regional source material where the process and planning of the school building was dealt with. The studies enable comparative analyses that explore the differences and similarities of how localities, including municipality policies and local communities, shaped the processes of envisioning and establishing schools in the Nordic countries. The study also contributes to an understanding of how the municipalities viewed the school itself as a specific place (or space) that could contribute to an inclusive society. These perspectives can then be related to the other sub-studies in the project. Overall, one conclusion of this study is that the school's location was governed by municipal ideals, resources and experiences, not primarily pedagogical ideas from outside the school. Here, the municipality's ideas about a democratic school came to be decisive. But when it comes to the physical design of the school itself, a clear inspiration came from outside pedagogical ideals.

Alvesson, M., and Sköldberg; K. (2009). Reflexive Methodology. London: Sage. Clark, A. (2010). ‘In-between’ spaces in postwar primary schools: a micro-study of a ‘welfare room’ (1977–1993) History of Education Vol. 39, No. 6, 767–778. Gamson, D. The Importance of Being Urban. Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 2019. Westberg, Johannes. Att bygga ett skolväsende: Folkskolans förutsättningar och framväxt 1840–1900. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014.

This paper presents a subproject that aims to examine inclusion and democratization in Nordic basic schools by adopting a life history approach (Bertaux & Thompson, 1997). The focus is on the students of the 70’s and their narratives about school experiences described in hindsight (Freeman, 2010). We ask how the school spaces provided opportunities for pupils to engage in social relations with peers with diverse social backgrounds, and what the perceived long-term implications are of the relations established in school. The theoretical framework of this study is grounded on the concepts of space, place and time, seeking analytical connections between physical objects, narrated experiences, bodies and places. Informed by Massey’s (2005) notion of throwntogetherness, we aim to describe the plurality of individual trajectories that come together in the construction of the school as a social and physical space. This enables us to explore how the different social backgrounds of pupils have merged in the construction of schools as meeting places and how these encounters have further influenced the lives of the previous pupils. Methodologically, this study sets out from interviews of informants who attended the partner schools of this project in the 70’s. The interviews include elements of walk-along interviews (Kusenbach, 2003) where informants are encouraged to interact with objects that can set into play storytelling that informs the analysis of social relations, interactions, and material, cultural and historical constructions in which the life story is embedded (Goodson, 2013). The interviews have been conducted in and near the school buildings and in the informants’ present homes or other places of their preference. Participants in Sweden (N=8), Finland (N=9) and Norway (N=8) have been interviewed twice in 2022–23 and the participants in Denmark will be recruited and interviewed in the spring 2024. The interviews are analyzed in a framework of narrative analysis with a life history approach (Goodson, 2013). The life history approach will give access to the narrated memories and experiences of the school as a meeting place, the opportunities it provided to the informants and the difficulties they encountered. It also contributes with knowledge of what these lived experiences of the social relations established in the local school as a meeting place with its specific architectural divisions and spatial arrangements have meant for the students across the lifespan, providing socio-historical insight into the development of the Nordic basic school as a political and a educational project.

Bertaux, D., & Thompson, P. R. (1997). Pathways to social class: A qualitative approach to social mobility. Transaction Publishers. Freeman, M. (2010). Hindsight. The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward. Oxford University Press. Goodson, I. (2013). Developing narrative theory: Life histories and personal representation. Routledge. Kusenbach, M. (2003). Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool. Ethnography, 4(3), 455-485. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage.

In the third substudy, we follow the students that presently attend the four Nordic schools. Massive investments in digital technology have found its way into schools of today, and most secondary students have access to a computer of their own for school work and, more or less openly, are constantly connected through their own smartphones (Sahlström et al., 2019). This possibility of always being connected to the internet has also been described as being “always-on” in “hybrid spaces” (Trentin, 2016). In this presentation we focus on the students’ experiences of participation with others in these new hybrid school spaces. The aim is to further understandings of what ongoing digitalisation means in relation to the role of classrooms and schools as shared spaces for knowledge and inclusion, from the perspective of the students. Theoretically we understand the concept of space as produced and emerging in relations between social and material dimensions of people’s lives, always entailing different connections to places and time (Massey, 2005; Lefebvre, 1991). We investigate the school's spaces as conceived, perceived and lived spaces and their importance and possibility for learning and knowledge communication (Leijon, 2016). The study is conducted in close collaboration with students (aged 14-15) at the project schools where we have employed citizen science for investigating the role of digital technologies in students' everyday sociality (Haklay, 2018). The students document their digital communication at school and beyond in the form of screenshots, video- and screen recordings as well as digital and analogue surveys and logs. Students and researchers then analyze these materials together in recorded data sessions. Still in the initial phases of analysis, we will present some preliminary findings from this innovative and collaborative field-work. Although findings point to a continued importance of schools as sites for meeting peers with different backgrounds, the boundaries between schools and families have become blurred due to the constant availability in both ways. Students can always be reached from the outside, and schools are always present in the homes through digital apps and platforms. Almost all screen-mediated social interactions are based on physical relations and we see few examples of relations based exclusively online. Based on preliminary findings we discuss how our study can contribute to knowledge about the role of contemporary schools as meeting places for students with diverse backgrounds, who attend the same schools.

Haklay, M. (2018). Participatory citizen science. In S. Hecker, M. Haklay, A. Bowser, Z. Makuch, J. Vogel & A. Bonn. Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy, (pp. 52-62). UCL Press, London. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage. Leijon, M. (2016). Space as designs for and in learning: investigating the interplay between space, interaction and learning sequences in higher education. Visual Communication, 15(1), 93-124. Sahlström, F., Tanner, M. & Valasmo, V. 2019. Connected youth, connected classrooms. Smartphone use and student and teacher participation during plenary teaching. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 21: 311-331. Trentin, G. (2016). Always-on Education and Hybrid Learning Spaces. Educational Technology, 56(2), 31-37.

The final paper of this symposium presents a preliminary synthesis of the analyses undertaken in the substudies of the project. A core aim of the project Nordic Basic Schools is the integration of the substudies, related disciplines and the four Nordic research sites for furthering both national, Nordic and international understanding of the possibilities and constraints for basic education in providing the foundation for diverse and inclusive societies of the future.To better understand the ongoing changes in the Nordic education systems, phenomena such as digitalisation need to be related not only to a contemporary context but also to the school's spatial physical history, the changes in the space-times of schooling and the effects of digital media on classroom pedagogies (Dussel, 2018). In this presentation, we merge data from the three substudies to analyze the spatial and temporal construction of the Nordic basic schools as meeting places in a timespan of 50 years. The analyzed data include policy and planning documents, interviews with former and present pupils, ethnographic data and data produced by participatory methods. Informed by Henry Lefebvre’s theorization (1991, see also Larsson & Rönnlund 2021), we analyze space as socially constructed and three-dimensional, consisting of ideological and institutional space (conceptual space), everyday spatial practices (perceptual space) and the space experienced and negotiated by its users (lived space). Aligned with Doreen Massey (2005), we conceptualize places as spatio-temporal events, where a multitude of human and non-human trajectories come together. Utilizing this analytical framework, we aim to reach a preliminary analysis on how the different dimensions of space have been and continue to be co-constructed in the everyday lives of the schools. For instance, we expect to learn more about the role of spatial conceptualisations, i.e. ideas, policies and plans of school space of the 1970’s influencing the organized use of space and pupils’ agency today and gain a deeper understanding of the role of digitality in altering these dimensions of space. Moreover, we are interested in the meanings given to particular places in the school buildings and how they have contributed to students’ understanding of inclusion or exclusion in the past and today. The analysis will gain relevance not only in the context of Nordic basic schools but also in understanding the spatial and temporal change in European spaces of education from the perspective of social inclusion.

Dussel, I. (2018) The Digital Classroom: A Historical Consideration on the Redesigning of the Contexts of Learning. In: Grosvenor, I. & Rosén Rasmussen. L. (Eds.). Making education: Material school design and educational governance. ProQuest Ebook Central. Larsson, A. & Rönnlund, M. (2021) The spatial practice of the schoolyard. A comparison between Swedish and French teachers’ and principals’ perceptions of educational outdoor spaces, Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 21:2, 139-150, DOI: 10.1080/14729679.2020.1755704 Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage.

In just a few decades, a new vocabulary - consisting of platforms, clouds, machine learning, personalisation and much more - has become inevitable to describe a rapidly growing part of our social world. Under the heading of algorithmic management, sociologists have begun to study how these new elements relate to the contemporary conditions of work and its control. By and large, their conclusions suggest that algorithms open up novel ways to discipline labour in pursuit of ever greater efficiency – Taylorism on steroids, for short. Despite some similarities, I argue that algorithmic management should not be understood as a simple extension of scientific management, since it operates within a different worldview: Whereas Taylor’s scientific management saw humans as programmable machines, algorithmic management sees machines as capable of learning.

This contribution explores this different worldview of algorithmic management, so as to illustrate how the concept can be made useful for the sociology of education. This is done by focusing on classroom instruction as a moment where algorithms, professional practice and school organization intersect. Taking cues from Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and pragmatist theories of interaction, I examine how digital interactivity translates educational aspirations into the interaction with a lifeless object. How are the defining traits of pedagogical interaction reorganised to orchestrate its progression? This translation act, I shall argue, hinges on its ability to (algorithmically) anticipate and coordinate futures, so that a platform or app's intent to educate can appear as a constancy. On basis of this characterisation, I aim to complement the existent literature on datafication which has hitherto understood the above depicted evolution as either the unwelcome intrusion of surveillance capitalism or as the surge of mindless automatons that threaten to strip professional care of its humanity. In contrast with that literature, I highlight how digitally mediated (self-)instruction participates in and perpetuates education’s broader wish to program an uncontrollable future.

Depicting refugees as a threat to the nation, the Orbán government turned the 2015 refugee crisis into populist propaganda (Cantat&Rajaram, 2019). As part of a broader set of anti-refugee politics and policies, earlier intercultural education programs were dismantled, resources – including financial and symbolic support for local innovations and NGOs focusing on refugee education, for Hungarian language teaching, and the per capita financing for teaching non-Hungarian speakers – were withdrawn. Consequently, families entering Hungary after the breakout of Russia’s war on Ukraine faced an education system unprepared for welcoming displaced children (Ercse, 2023).

In the context of the Hungarian state’s ambiguous political communication and “organized non-responsibility” (Pries, 2019: 6), a handful of civil society and grassroots actors immediately started to provide education and childcare for Ukrainian families. My presentation focuses on interviews with representatives of “grassroots humanitarianism” (Vandevoordt & Fleischmann 2020) or “citizen aid” (Fechter and Schwittay 2019) as well as organized NGOs offering educational support and childcare for Ukrainian families. The discussion concentrates on how the problem of time and the social imaginaries of hope and uncertainty featured in the helpers’ narratives and shaped their actions. These initiatives are examples of experimental humanitarism (Thieme et al. 2020; Ramakrishnan and Thieme, 2022): solidarity work entailed constant problem-solving, yet it has not proved to be ephemeral, but so far has survived growing public disinterest.

Drawing on recent studies on the temporalities of humanitarian action (Brun 2016; Vandervoodt and Felischmann, 2020), I explore how solidarity education initiatives navigate different temporalities. Humanitarian actions responding to crises are often thought to be governed by the ‘imaginary of emergency’ and captured by the present. Critical voices argued that their preoccupation with alleviating suffering in the here and now tends to de-contextualise suffering from its long-term causes and solutions (Calhoun 2008) and depoliticize these initiatives (Braun, 2017). But equally influentially, similarly to social movements, volunteers’ imaginaries are inspired by an ideal vision of future society (Fournier 2002), and some of them deeply engage with the structural political causes of the events.

Regarding the here and now, most interlocutors conceptualized their educational services as a means of unmaking uncertainty through providing structure and safety that aims to counterweight the chaos of the war. They often emphasized that the primary objective – one related to the present – of their initiatives is to establish a safe space where the children can experience empathy and compassion.

Education is profoundly driven by the social imaginaries of the future (Facer, 2023). I will bring examples of grassroots education initiatives, typically organized by members of the host society, who understood their solidarity work as prefigurative politics (Swain, 2019), a means of modeling change for the host society. Our interlocutors viewed education as a vehicle for a transformative and ethopoietic pedagogy (Collet-Sabé&Ball), which can foster social change through the practice of the relational ethics of care. Zembylas (2020) suggests that in the context of populist politics and exclusive forms of nationalism, democratic education should be a practice of affective counter-politics, developed at the micro-level of pedagogical encounters. These solidarity initiatives can be understood as affective counter-politics driven by visions of enacting alternative modes of togetherness and “politics by other means” (Kirsch, 2016) in the context of exclusivist populist politics.

Another type of engaging with the future was primarily enacted by Ukrainian-led initiatives. Making alliances with international and non-state partners (donors and host schools providing their infrastructures), and positioning themselves in a transnational space of education, these interlocutors talked about universalistic educational objectives (sustainability, climate education) and aimed to educate transnational citizens.

This paper is concerned with educational-social movements' making and unmaking of educational ethos during national emergency. Based on an ethnographic study of educational social action during a national emergency, the paper considers how educational-social movements deal with existing educational inequalities and the possibility that their actions during emergency can further social transformation. This paper brings together three temporal lenses – an anthropological understanding of emergency as a mode of eventfulness(Anderson, 2017), a topological perspective on education and (in)equality, and the conceptualization of vectors and events in the temporality of social movements. How do social imaginaries of past and present accomplishments and failings of educational-social movements shape their educational praxis within the time-space of emergency? In what ways can this praxis offer possibilities for hopeful transformation of past inequalities alongside a transformative pathway out of emergency? Alternatively, are these aspirations to transformation too much to hope for?

Our study focuses on the social-educational activism of the graduate-movements of Israeli youth movements following the events of October 7 and the internal displacement of over a hundred thousand civilians. The government was slow to provide basic educational services; civic organizations stepped up to fill the void, notably, the graduate-movements. These graduate-movements constitute educational-social movements formed by nonformal educators, former members of Zionist youth movements, who are attempting to revitalize the pioneering ethos of the early socialist-Zionist movements through educational projects that stimulate social change and advance democracy, equality, social justice, and Zionist values. At displacement centers, they organized and operated nonformal youth activities, early childhood centers, schools, and neighborhood leadership groups. Though these graduate-movements have a history of educational activism in emergency in the wake of war across Europe (Huss, Ben Asher, Shahar, et al., 2021; Huss, Ben Asher, Walden, et al., 2021), national emergency at home was complicated by internal issues of inequality particularly between kibbutzim and development towns, such as educational gaps, access to nonformal educational frameworks, distribution of resources and organizational capacities.

We adopt a conceptualization of emergency as a mode of eventfulness, organized around four temporalities – exceptionalness from ordinary life, a sense of urgency to action to forestall foreseen harm of an unknown but impending future, a time-limited interval in which action is imperative, and a hope that correct action can make a difference (Anderson, 2017). Emergency indicates threat to something considered socially or historically valuable and uncertainty concerning how and if action in the present can bring about a future that is improvement on the past (Brun, 2016; Samimian-Darash, 2022). Considering specifically the role of education in emergency, we focus topologically on the ways that educational activism in emergency morphs the shape of educational governance and practice (Decuypere et al., 2022). The topological perspective directs attention to how educational practice elicits continuity and change, reformation of relations between educators and communities, and specific space-time practices that link past, present, and future educational aims. To provide nuance of the multiple temporalities at work in making and remaking educational practice and governance (Lingard & Thompson, 2017), we focus on educational-social movements. We take up Gillian's view of social movements as actors in the creation of events and his suggestion to analyze vectors – the social behavior and discourse of movements over a particular timescape – as a means for understanding the socio-political conditions and trends at work in a larger context (Gillan, 2020). In other words, the focus on educational-social movements in emergency allows us to trace how their particular educational ethos, tied as it is to a larger national ethos, morphs and reforms in the context of emergency and to ponder its possible unfoldings into the unknown future.

In our paper, we focus on the constructions of refugee students’ futures and the associated notions of temporality and uncertainty in German schools with reference to newly arrived students who have fled to Germany in 2022 due to the war in Ukraine.

Our contribution is based on the observation that constructions of “future” in the context of (forced) migration biographies are often closely linked to notions of uncertainty. These biographies and educational paths are not only characterized by discontinuities in the (individual) past. They often also appear uncertain with regard to the future, e.g. due to unclear residence and/or return options that can hardly be planned in terms of time. Future uncertainty in this context can therefore be understood as a social construction of time, which arises through institutional regulations on migration and asylum with regard to the associated political and social discourses. However, the education system assigns additional significance to uncertain futures by translating them into individual life chances. It functions as a temporal structure for individual biographies and educational paths and, through its inherent linear temporal logic, shapes the future options for action of the subjects (Solga/Becker 2012; Scherger 2016). However, the individual temporal logic of educational processes as a lived experience can deviate from this “dominant timescape” (Facer 2023), which can be highly consequential for the future (educational) biographies of individuals (cf. Dausien/Rothe/Schwendowius 2016). For example, the (ascribed) uncertainty of students’ futures in the context of migration can be decisive for pedagogical diagnoses as well as for predicting future developments and deciding on students’ educational pathways (based on the institutional time regime). Moreover, uncertain futures are often associated with attributions and interpretations of vulnerabilities which can lead to educational practices that imply specific risks and opportunities for individuals and their educational trajectories.

In our paper, we examine how students’ uncertain futures are anticipated and constructed by educational professionals and what (temporal) expectations are associated with them. Furthermore, we ask how the educational pathways of refugee students are institutionally processed and how these practices are embedded in specific timescapes (Adam 1998). Empirically, our study is based on the analysis of documents and guided interviews with teachers, head teachers and social workers conducted at schools in Germany (in the federal states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt). We show how dominant timescapes inform school and pedagogical practices with regard to refugee students from Ukraine, how they are entangled with constructions of uncertain futures, and how these open up or close off educational options and thus create (new) precarisation (or new opportunities for educational participation).

This study is part of a larger project called The Fiction of Numbers, in which we locate and explore the intersections between the spheres of science, public discourse, policymaking and educational practices. We specifically examine how reading becomes a specific node, or discourse, where the changing ideas on societal, sociotechnical and educational imaginaries (cf Jasanoff, 2015; Rahm, 2019; Sundström Sjödin, 2017; 2019) and solutions take place. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), we are primarily concerned with how knowledge and facts are produced and naturalized; that is, how a phenomenon is produced as a matter of course and thus becomes difficult to question, and the ways in which values and politics of knowledge become invisible in this process (Dussauge et al. 2015; Latour, 1987, 1993).

In this sub-study, we “trace” – in Latour’s (2007) sense of the word – specific ‘numbers’ related to reading that are regularly referred to in media as well as in educational and political settings in contemporary Sweden. The numbers are used in reading promoting arguments: it is claimed that seventeen-year-olds who read a lot have a vocabulary of 50,000 words, while their low-reading peers have only 15,000 words in their vocabulary. It is also argued that 50,000 words is what is needed to be able to read and understand a typical newspaper text.

These kinds of numerical claims circulate in the public discourse and are often unchallenged and presented as matters of facts. Uncontested, the numbers are left to do their work – efficient in establishing truths, suggesting impartiality and transparency, ‘strengthened by the historical relationship between numbers and rationality, objectivity and control’ (de Wilde & Franssen, 2016, p. 505; see Hacking, 1990; Porter, 1995). They stabilize beliefs about reading into hard facts. By that, they also naturalize reading as something inherently good and useful, and therefore difficult to question (Sundström Sjödin, 2019). Moreover, although the construction of the problem implies the construction of the recipient, i.e. the so-called troublesome subject, in this case it remains unclear for whom exactly the lack of reading is a problem (Marres, 2005).

In this study, we trace the specific numbers we encountered in various sites of what we call “the reading industrial complex” (Sundström Sjödin et al, in press). We trace the origins of these numbers, how they have been produced, and with what tools. In doing so, we aim to develop knowledge on how reading is constructed as a public problem and a societal desire and what role numbers play in this construction. This aim is specified in the following three research questions: I) Which actors are involved in the dissemination of particular numbers related to reading, and who are the (implied) addressees of these numbers? II) What societal and educational imaginaries and desires are embedded in these numbers? III) What are the “origins” of the numbers? How and for what purposes were they produced? Theoretically and methodologically, the study draws on concepts and sensibilities of STS to explore the processes of knowledge production and dissemination, developed in the section below.

The main aim of the presented paper is to analyze the Independence March as a heterotopia according to the approach introduced by Michel Foucault.

The Independence March is an annual event celebrating the regaining of independence by Poland on 11th of November in 1918. The initiators and organizers of the March are nationalist youth organizations - the All-Polish Youth (in Polish: Młodzież Wszechpolska) and the National Radical Camp (in Polish: Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny) - who formed together the Independence March Association. Though organized by civil society rather than being an official state event, the March became over the years the leading public event on Poland’s Independence Day. The March as an event and as a social phenomenon has already been discussed by many researchers (Malendowicz, 2016; Wiącek, 2019, Wiśniewski, 2019, Rukat, 2020, Witkowski, Woroncow, Puchała, 2023), but wasn’t so far studied as a space of heterotopia, which allows to understand the complexity of the event, the social role it plays, and the involvement of organizers in defining concepts of citizenship and national identity in Poland.

The main research question this paper attempts to answer is the following: is the Independence March a heterotopia? Michel Foucault set six rules of heteropia, four of which are analyzed to answer the research question and understand the role that the March plays within the Polish society in defining and marking categories of citizenship and national identity (see more detailed information below under „Research Methods”).

The key point of reference is the 2018 March of Independence, which celebrated the cententary of regaining independence by Poland. The collected materials include: documents of theese organizations, information posted on the official website of this event, posts on Facebook and press articles published in 2018. In total 232 documents were analyzed.
The paper presents the results of author’s own research carried out within the scientific project titled ‘Heterotopias of Citizenship. Educational Discourse and Pedagogies of Militarization in the Spaces of Youth Organizations. A Critical-Analytical and Comparative Approach’ (no. 2019/35/B/HS6/01365), financed by the National Science Centre in Poland.

Students are frequently rendered into digitized and datafied formats. When students use and engage with digital technologies like digital learning materials and digital tests, a plethora of information in the form of digital data is generated about them. Such data are often described as static and rational matters of fact, neutral and objective in comparison to ‘subjective’ human judgment (Williamson & Piattoeva, 2019). While this description is not entirely wrong, it somehow limits our possibilities to see data as dynamic becomings, materializing in a variety of ways, as well as to analyze how data participate in the configuration of for example humans in other ways than merely describing their properties in quantitative terms. It seems that we somehow lack the vocabulary to describe data as more-than-digital phenomena.

In this article, we aim to take a few steps towards producing such a vocabulary. We explore the vibrant and vital qualities generated when for example schoolteachers engage student data, such as those displayed in colorful data visualizations. We illustrate five different data becomings in a single ethnographic case.

In order to explore possible vocabularies, this article takes up more-than-human theoretical perspectives found in feminist new materialist scholarship as well as in non-Western cosmologies. Specifically, we build on Donna Haraway’s more-than-human theorization of becoming as becoming with (Haraway, 2008), which challenges ideas of the human as being separated from its surroundings, as well as Deborah Lupton’s more-than-human theoretical work on human-data assemblages and her attention to vitalities (Lupton, 2020; Lupton et al., 2022). We illustrate our conceptual points with an ethnographic case study exploring what happens to students and teachers when engaging with digital testing in Danish primary and lower secondary education. Teaching, for the oldest students in Danish primary and lower secondary schools (‘folkeskole’), is almost exclusively done through digital platforms and digital learning materials. These digital learning materials automate part of the assessments and testing of student work by visualizing the results through graphs, bar charts, and other forms of data visualizations.

We understand data visualizations as one of several becomings of data. While both educational scholars and data practitioners like teachers often refer to ‘data’ as one-and-the-same phenomenon, we propose viewing data as multiple interwoven becomings. In other words, we do not understand visualization as a process of reconfiguring ‘actual’ or ‘raw’ data into a visual format, but rather as one of the many ways data materialize. Data only ever emerge in some sort of specific material form, as for example digital data made up of binary digits, as ‘raw’ data made up of survey responses or registered values in rows and columns, or as visuals made up of colors, shapes, and numerical values. Even though the category of ‘data visualizations’ indicates a particular state of being of data, most data materializations are visual in some way – also ‘raw’ data. Thus, we do not use the term data visualizations to refer only to system-generated data visualizations with their colorful dashboard aesthetics, but also to homemade tables or notes displaying data in a different and more mundane, yet visual format. Our article includes empirical examples of several types of data visualizations used and produced by teachers. It also includes empirical examples of ‘data’ simply materializing as an idea or concept in talk, without emerging in any visual form. As the analysis will show, these various becomings of data are important and constitute students and teachers in different ways – as they are becoming with data. We therefore view sensitivities to different materializations of data in different situations as analytically fruitful for our understanding of data practices.

Due to neoliberal governance, accountability, evaluation, and clearly specified goals have become the buzzwords of the administration of education. Increasingly, the answer to enhancing efficiency and accountability in education, is offered through technocratic rationality, as in digitalization and new educational technologies offering effective means for management of time, space and pedagogical content. (e.g., Ball 2015; Plum 2012). In such ethos, commercialization of education has accelerated rapidly, leaving education to face novel pressures, expectations as well as transformations on a global scale. These transformations are notably characterized by an apparent constriction of the overarching objectives of education, a narrowing of the scope of accessible information, and reconfiguring the very concept of human subjectivity. (Mertanen, Vainio & Brunila 2022).

The first aim in our paper is to clarify the impact of commercialization on teacher education within the broader academic context. As Ball (2006) has argued, it is necessary to examine the impact of the increasing number of private commercial actors on education. Acknowledging that private education is undoubtedly part of organizing education in contemporary societies is imminent, thus ‘the question is no longer whether private actors should be allowed in education, but rather, to what extent and how should their activities be regulated, and to what end’ (Rizvi 2016: 2). Educational entrepreneurship has grown rapidly also in Finland, where education has traditionally been a public good and free of charge. What follows is that ideologies of ‘business rationale and attitude, emphasizing innovation, dissemination of ‘best-practices’, quick evidence for decision-making, and return on investments’ are now incorporated into education (Candido Hinke Dobrochinski, Seppänen & Thrupp 2023). Thus, we find most relevant Ball’s (2006) call for the investigation of the ethical and moral consequences of commercialization, since it affects also what in education in general is seen meaningful and why.

In more practical terms we aim to examine the possibilities that could offer strategies for challenging these forces by asking; How do teacher education students recognize commercialization of education? and What means support their understanding of the phenomenon of commercialization, and the effects of it? These questions are interconnected within the larger framework of education governance and the effects it has on teachers. As teachers are increasingly internalizing the idea of a neo-liberal professional, as in believing that by acquiring new (e.g., technological) skills, they will improve their productivity and ‘add value’ to themselves (see Ball, 2003; Pesonen & Valkonen, 2023), they are at the same time more ontologically insecure – that is, they are unsure whether they are ‘doing enough, doing the right thing, doing as much as others, or as well as others, constantly looking to improve, to be better, to be excellent’ (Ball, 2003: 220). By examining future teachers’ understanding of commercialism in education we also aim to increase knowledge about the effects of highly individualized perception of teacher’s professionalism.

Objectives and purposes

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing demand for evidence-based policies and practices in education worldwide. This has led to a hierarchy of knowledge sources, with data from standardized testing and evaluations being prioritized as ‘objective’ measures, while local and contextual knowledge ranks lower (Johansson et al., 2015). School actors are expected not only to comply with policy demands but also to develop their practices according to research relevant to their profession (Penuel et al., 2017). A key challenge is that it is often assumed that access to various knowledge sources leads to its actual use. Several studies show that this is not the case as teachers rarely use research to develop their practice as research is perceived as too abstract (Joram et al., 2020). Also, expectations for rapid improvements to raise test scores put pressure on school actors’ decision-making and seem to promote knowledge sources targeted short-term solutions rather than long-term developmental work (Mausethagen et al., 2018). Sources of knowledge that are practical and closely related to teaching or school practice are more likely to be used (van Ackeren et al., 2013). Moreover, professional learning communities and networks have an important influence on teachers’ learning and school development (individual and organizational learning) (Stoll & Louis, 2007).

This paper focuses on the extent to which and how teachers' use various knowledge sources in development work, such as data from standardized testing, practical experiences, subject knowledge, pedagogy, didactics, and educational research. The analysis explores and compares teachers’ use of knowledge sources in two different development project settings. Both projects are prioritized development areas in the school program. One of the projects can be described as a typical ‘top-down’ project because it involves new policies on formative assessments and thus new expectations from school authorities to which the school must respond. The other project represents a ‘bottom-up’ project, which was initiated in the school by the principal and is now being driven forward voluntarily by teachers. The organizational context and the actors in both projects are largely the same.

The following research questions guide the analysis:

• RQ1: What kind of knowledge sources do teacher teams draw upon in development work?
• RQ2: What differences can be identified regarding knowledge sources in two different project settings (top-down vs. bottom-up project)?

Theoretical Framework

Policy enactment is used as a key analytical perspective since it helps identifying priorities and conditions for local school actors involved in school development in specific socio-institutional settings. Moreover, it emphasises how teachers in the study through creative processes interpret, translate and recontextualise relatively abstract ideas into practice (Braun et al., 2011).

This Panel engages the question:

How can schooling, teacher agency and inclusion be reimagined and operationalised as hopeful practices for plural, sustainable and participatory futures?

Within the field of education, there is growing interest in futures discourses. Issues including the future of the planet, the opportunities and fears presented by technological developments in AI, and rising nationalisms have resulted in speculation on the future of education and its role in global society. A recent example is UNESCO’s “Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education” report (2021). While education does aim to offer responses to societal crises, as a field it is arguably ‘subsumed under a market logic that prioritizes the development of human capital and economic growth’ (Van dermijnsbrugge & Chatelier, 2022, p.3). As such, its orientation towards the future is too often considered to be a ‘known territory to be mapped and conquered and fought over’ (Facer, 2016, p. 70) resulting in little more than perpetuating a crisis-ridden status quo.

Through this panel, we wish to (re)orient ourselves, together with others, in relation to the field of education and to society more broadly by offering ways of being, thinking and doing that ‘not only help reveal structures and systems of violence, exploitation and domination’ (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014, p. 85), but also by supporting ‘people’s capacity to imagine and forge paths beyond them’ (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014, p. 85). To this end, we reimagine the concepts of schooling, teacher agency and inclusion, and the practices that underpin them. Through perspectives centered around plurality, participation and sustainability we wish to create ‘a space where an awareness of difference can lead to new ideas, alliances, solidarities and possibilities’ (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014, p. 244).

The first project presents a reimagined perspective on schooling via a research study conducted in 2024 with a group of about 40 educators in various roles, with different levels of experience and located in diverse contexts across the globe. They applied utopia as method, a speculative and imaginative practice that goes beyond critical scholarship and requires ontological inquiry and direct action (see Van dermijnsbrugge & Chatelier, 2022), in order to generate a shared imagination of a genuinely alternative future for schooling that is better equipped to respond to society’s most pressing challenges.

The second project focuses on reimagining teacher agency. A recent research project, rooted in Actor-Network-Theory (Latour, 2005), shows how teacher agency is entangled with and often restricted by the agency of things (Oosterhoff et al, 2023). Human agency, decision making and taking action, ‘cannot be realized without an in-depth understanding of education “in its becoming”, as it unfolds and emerges’ as complex more-than-human practices (Gourlay, 2021, p. 165). This study supports educational professionals in gaining insight into the influence of objects in action that shape their profession. Through this insight, they develop a wider sense of response-ability that helps them to critically navigate increasingly complex educational practices.

The third project focuses on inclusive educational practices that are driven by a pedagogy of hope, or, in the words of Webb (2019): pedagogical tact for alternative futures. Ten teacher trainers with leadership roles and expertise in pedagogy participated in a phenomenological study (Middendorp, 2015; Van Manen, 2014) wherein they used the mirror letter as a phenomenological method (Middendorp 2015, 2023) to investigate their experiences with and perspectives on hope in inclusive practices. The mirror letter creates awareness of one's (inclusive) actions and helps to make explicit values of individuals and communities.

This Panel offers opportunities to discuss educational practices, and propose ways of thinking and doing that help offset dominant powers, whilst embracing complexity and uncertainty.

Networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

We live in a fractured world—a time of 'polycrisis' (Tooze, 2021). A sense of anxiety, instability, and rupture marks a crisis. Fassin (2021) defines crisis as 'dramatic ruptures into the normal course of things that […] call for urgent solution' (p.265). The present perpetual crisis has many faces. Recurring shocks contribute to heightened economic uncertainty—the surging prices of food and energy have substantially elevated the overall cost of living. War has engulfed millions. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic linger. Ecological breakdown threatens life on the earth. With the rise of extreme nationalism, democracy is in trouble. Advances in artificial intelligence have pushed us all into a moment of disjuncture.

In the context of education, crises can manifest as significant disruptions or challenges that impact the normal functioning of educational systems. In education systems, crises may stem from natural disasters, public health emergencies, economic downturns, or political instability and affect the regular teaching and learning process. The COVID-induced school lockdowns have had profound implications for learning loss, particularly among disadvantaged communities. Limited access to technology, a lack of a conducive learning environment, and a lack of resources exacerbated existing educational inequities. Extended school closure has exacerbated educational disadvantage, as reflected in the evidence of 'learning deficits' in Europe (De Witte & François, 2023) and 'learning loss' internationally (World Bank, UNESCO & UNICEF, 2021).

Crisis marks a crucial decision point (Molla & Cuthbert, 2023; Molla et al., 2023). It erodes confidence in the status quo, resulting in the urgency to return to regularity and making drastic reforms possible and difficult decisions acceptable. However, as Prudham (2005) notes, 'there is no crisis without someone to call it one [and] how it is named will influence how it is addressed' (p.21). Without persistent and timely advocacy, governments often adhere to the status quo. We need advocacy efforts grounded in evidence to prompt policymakers to tackle the adverse outcomes of crises, such as the widening achievement gap due to school closures. The following research question guides this paper:

How can engaged scholars capitalise on crisis to cause the right change in education?

To answer this question, I draw on a range of theoretical resources, including Bourdieu's (2003) idea of 'scholarship with commitment', Taylor's (2004) concept of 'social imaginaries', and Sen's (2009) call for 'public reasoning'. For Bourdieu (2003), scholarship with commitment entails intervening in "the political field" while adhering to the "rules that govern the scientific field" (p.24). Those who have evidence of the effects of the crisis in society should not shy away from being political—they should raise difficult questions and provide alternative policy ideas. Becoming political means being committed to raising difficult questions and contributing to public reasoning, which combines 'participatory discussions with public decision-making' (Sen, 2009). The desire to make contributions to public reasoning is guided by the assumption that public-facing scholarly engagement can create and shape collective narratives, which entail shared stories, beliefs, and perspectives that form a shared understanding within society. Collective narratives, thus formed, wield considerable influence, extending their impact to the realm of social imaginaries and public policies. Here, social imaginaries encompass the ways individuals envision their social existence—how they perceive their connections with others—and the underlying normative notions and images that shape these expectations at a profound level (Taylor, 2004). Imaginaries take roots through narratives (e.g. causal analysis and moral claims) that anchor shared concerns and framing devices (e.g. metaphors and catchphrases) that represent desired futures and orient actions.

In September 2023 the region of Thessaly in Greece was struck by two different floods within 20 days. Both floods had a sever effect on infrastructures, social life and schooling. Drawing from a disaster education (Preston, 2012) theoretical framework, this research focuses on the effects of disaster education regarding preparedness to Greek primary education students. In particular, it explores the role of acquired knowledge on preparedness in addition to the role of information as coefficients for action during a disastrous event. According to (Clausen, Conlon, Jager, and Metreveli, 1978 cited in Preston, 2012, p. 3) ‘whether human or anthropogenic in origin the designation of ‘threat’ or ‘disaster’ implies a discontinuity with previous social relations’ and the notion of ‘disaster’ is perceived predominately as a social category. Within this framework disaster education can be ‘delivered’ via diverse pedagogies (Preston, 2012, p. 3).

Recently it is observed the increase of a set of diverse natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, extensive fires etc. Based on this the United Nations (UN) (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2023) intensified its efforts aiming to raise public awareness of natural disasters and to increase and improve information and education. Within context Prevention and early warning systems were strengthened, as were emergency response, damage recovery and reconstruction procedures (Yusuf et al., 2022). In terms of education, previous research has indicated that children who have been taught about the phenomenon of disasters and how to react to these situations have been shown to be able to respond promptly and appropriately to the specific disaster context, to be able to warn others and to protect themselves in times of emergency (Shaw et al., 2011, Torani et al., 2019).

Even though in 2006 the UN launched a campaign promoting disaster education in school curricula (UN/ISDR, 2006) in Greece disaster education is mainly focused to earthquakes. In Thessaly prior to the two flooding events in September 2023, the region also faced an extensive fire that lasted four days and led to the explosion of military ammunition. All three instances affected and destroyed infrastructures, family homes and cultivations, farms and businesses. All events led to invacuations, and during the floods a large amount of population was left without drinking water, electricity and access to communications (internet and land line telephone). The population was largely unprepared, and both adults and children had to respond to unknown circumstances. Social life was interrupted and the schools year in the area begun with a two-week delay than the rest of the country. These events led to the exploration of possibilities of disaster education for diverse events within primary education starting with the exploration of knowledge and understandings of the students in affected and non-affected areas. The aim is to identify disaster education pedagogies (Preston 2012, Kitagawa, 2021) that are locally targeted and specific event orieneted as the means to enhance students and schools prepardness.

The recent interest in the spaces and times of networked governance that emerged under the broad umbrella notion of topology is an exciting development in the sociology of education. As stated in the NW 28 Special Call for this conference, topology represents a robust conceptual framework for the study of social constructions of time and the future. The key problem at the heart of the call is the need to identify alternative ways to think about the future, to challenge the regimes of algorithmic prediction and automation that are shaping the educational imaginary. This problem, however, requires a self-reflective discussion about the analytical scope made possible by topological thinking, which is to say, rather pithily, that the conceptualisation of alternative future narratives must be warranted by a solid empirical foundation. In this regard, a key issue is that of “topological morphology” (Decuypere et al., 2022; Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020), understood as a conceptual category that can direct research efforts. Morphology, in this context, refers to spatial-temporal forms that are observable and can be subjected to empirical scrutiny, and which can be held up as either problematic (the forms we don’t want) or progressive - maybe even “hopeful” (the forms we want). In this conceptual paper, I wish to contribute to this self-reflective discussion.

One of the key theses of topology is that relations among people and sociotechnical infrastructures of digitisation are ontologically constitutive (Lury et al., 2012), leading to continuities and discontinuities which may be dynamic and flowing across borders, but are nonetheless visible and researchable. These topological morphologies mostly emerge in two ways: a) firstly, they operate as practical enactments, observable in the “generative” dynamism that occurs across spaces, times and within assemblages of people and infrastructures (Lewis & Decuypere, 2023); b) secondly, they operate as part of a political-economic discourse connected to the logic of value creation, creating topological forms by projecting into the future imagined gains, benefits and sometimes risks (Williamson & Komljenovic, 2023). As these promissory anchor points are placed in the rarefied space-time of the future, they hold the present in place, steering policy and investment strategies and creating regimes of understanding and governance.

Moving tentatively across the terrain defined by these constitutive relations is the researcher, not a neutral and detached observer but a partial cartographer drawing - sometimes creatively – the shifting boundaries of emerging morphologies. The researcher is therefore framed as an agent and a “methodological bricoleur”, self-reflectively navigating the complexities of interpretative analysis to assemble critical accounts of bordering and debordering (Decuypere, 2021).

A central methodological problem in this framework is that of the account: who or what produces the empirical accounts of topological forms? There are a few possible answers to this question, but I wish to focus on one for obvious reasons of scope. This answer posits that researchable accounts of education governance are, or will soon, emerge from the hybridisation of machine logic and human cognition (Gulson & Sellar, 2024; Gulson et al., 2022). The temporal horizon of this hybridisation of cognition is left deliberately vague. As humans and machines conjoin (or will soon do) in multiple ways, they provide (or will soon do) “synthetic” accounts of themselves and of novel topological morphologies. This conceptual and methodological argument is gaining interest in the study of education governance, and it is without doubt a valuable attempt to bridge policy sociology with recent innovations in the cultural and philosophical study of algorithms (Amoore, 2020; Parisi, 2019), which explored the risks but also the possibility of novel ethico-political opportunities arising from human-machine cognitive architectures.

In contemporary public debates, AI and robotics are presented as technologies that will revolutionise the future of education. Promoted by an increasingly powerful industry, iterative cycles of hypes and hopes are boosting the creation of an imaginary (Beer, 2019; Taylor, 2004) that makes their introduction into the field of education a ‘desirable necessity’. AI and robotics innovations, often referred to as “disruptive”, are presented as a way to improve (the future of) teaching and learning.

This presentation deals with the analysis of this imaginary with the aim of understanding the different educational timescapes enacted through it (Kitchin, 2023). Our analysis will focus, in particular, on the envisioning of AI-based educational robotics within that industry (Beer, 2019).

Recently, scholars have focused on the investment made by the EdTech industry in imagining digital educational futures (Williamson & Komljenovic, 2022) and, within that, on the social production of temporality (Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020). This literature highlights the complexities of the relationship between technology and socio-technical imaginaries, the contingency of time-making (and space-making) and how specific forms of technological innovation in education can be related to shifting experiencing and understandings of time (Decuypere & Simons, 2020; Vanden Broeck, 2020). In line with wider debates on temporality (Kitchin, 2023), speed, acceleration, real-timing, personalisation, and efficiency are key issues (Rosa, 2003; Beer, 2019) to understand the traits of imagined educational temporalities. Likewise, the interplay between three different temporal regimes is widely discussed, an immediate, archival and predictive time (Barassi, 2020). Within those debates that mainly deal with datafication and platformisation, there is also a specific focus on processes of imagined anticipation, that look to the future not as a resource to progress towards but as a resource to be drawn into the present (Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020), using anticipated outcomes to rethink current practices and identify desirable futures (Amsler & Facer, 2017).

The distinctive contribution of our presentation is to project those debates on the social production of educational temporalities on the educational robotics imaginary, a relatively unexplored field (for an example see Tafdrup, 2020). Our analysis will, in particular, focus on the social production of temporalities enacted in the Educational robotics imaginary (Beer, 2019). We will explore how the EdTech industry envisions educational robotics innovation and how this envisioning has to do with the social production of a distinct set of technologically-mediated educational temporalities.

Theoretically, we draw on David Beer’s (2019) analysis of imaginary, defined as how “people imagine [something] and its existence, as well as how it is imagined to fit with norms, expectations, social processes, transformations and ordering” (p. 18). In this perspective, the imaginary is profoundly material as it shapes practices, and in turn, practices shape the imaginary through the forging of ideals and norms (Taylor, 2004). In our presentation, we will mobilise Beer’s theoretical and analytical toolbox to explore the AI-based educational robotics imaginary and the related temporalities. Additionally, we anchor to Rob Kitchin’s analysis of digital timescapes (2023), providing us a conceptual grid to analyse the emerging forms of robotically-mediated educational temporalities. If temporality denotes the diverse set of temporal relations, processes, and forms that are embodied, materialised and experiential, and if robotic technologies have profoundly transformed these relational processes, the educational robotics timescapes could be analysed by mapping out the fluctuations in pace, tempo, rhythm and synchronicity.

Consistently, the research questions that we will explore are:

• What forms of temporality are enacted in the imaginary of robotics in education?
• What kind of pace, tempo, rhythm, synchronicity are distinctive of those forms of temporalities?
• What relations and ethics can be detected on those forms of temporalities?

EdTech startups are being touted as steady purveyors of innovations designed to revolutionize the education system (e.g. European Schoolnet 2023; Jacobs Foundation; European EdTech Alliance 2024). In our contribution, we aim to explore the discourse produced by EdTech startups themselves and related actors, such as accelerators and investors, and it's possible implications for the development of educational technologies. These actors in the EdTech space seem to thrive on the notion that “education is broken”, and an “oncoming educational apocalypse” (Weller 2022, 83−84) by creating a cornucopia of digital solutions, and with it, ways to translate didactic and pedagogical concepts (e.g., Schiefner-Rohs, Hofhues & Breiter 2023; Jarke & Macgilchrist 2021) or managerial needs around school environments (Hartong & Breiter 2021) into algorithmic systems. Over the past years, there has been a growing body of international research from various perspectives, such as in-depth analyses of specific products. Beyond the field of education, startups have been investigated, for instance, in terms of their organizational culture and gender (Pöllänen 2021); their global startup culture and its domestication (Koskinen 2021); the sociality of networking of young tech-entrepreneurs (Pfeilstetter 2017); the rise of startup entrepreneurship as a cultural phenomenon (Hyrkäs 2016); the exploitative tendencies of startup economy (Hill 2017); or as affordance networks, symbolic form and cultural practice (Werning 2019).

Most of the existing international studies related to the EdTech startup space focus on individual stakeholder groups, like investors (Venture Capital, business angels, e.g. Ball 2019), accelerators (e.g. Ester 2017; Ramiel 2021; Nivanaho et al. 2023), and “Big EdTech” (e.g. Williamson 2022; Komljenovic et al. 2023).

EdTech startups themselves and their realities present an intriguing object of sociological education research, since startups are the actors who in practice develop educational technology, seek investment possibilities, and cater to and/or deploy a specific vision of education. Their discourses and practical working conditions are the realties in which EdTech products emerge – they are an important executive agency, made of individuals able to criticize practical contradictions and act accordingly (as considered in pragmatic sociology, see e.g. Barthe et al. 2013, 186).

To this end, we draw on empirical material from our work at a European EdTech conference, analyzing presentations from EdTech startups, investors and policy makers given at a public conference in central Europe and shedding light on the many intricate practices EdTech startups adopt to persist within the “ecosystem” (itself a powerful biological life/agent metaphor, Weller 2022, 9; see e.g. Founders Foundation 2024). In our analysis, we show how the seemingly underlying motive of a broken education, the conspicuous references to the otherworldly and heroic individuals overcoming hardship isolates the real-life actor ‘startup’ from its complex interrelationships with the actual world.

In hardly any other format is the dimension of the temporalisation of the social and thus also of education as clear as in biography (Alheit & Dausien, 2000; Stasz, 1976; Tileagă, 2011). As a social construction, biographies are created at the interface between the individual and society: they are therefore often described as an amalgamation of the micro and macro levels. The interplay of past, present and future produces an individual story of learning and education (Schulze, 1993). It is this form of temporalisation that promises continuity and reliability beyond all disruptions and uncertainties, especially in the course of social pluralisation, increasing uncertainties and (global) social crises (e.g. consequences of ecological catastrophes and devastation), as described in Society on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Lessenich, 2022). Not only the reference to past and present, but also the future openness of the biography is of central importance here.

Therefore, we think it is important to take a closer look at the logic of the biographical and the associated bodies of knowledge, when considering the shaping of the future from an educational perspective. Biographical knowledge is not only individual, but closely linked to social and collective memories (Alheit & Hoerning, 1989). It is ultimately from this reservoir (e.g. surplus meaning of life experience - Alheit, 2022, p. 119) that the potential for shaping the future is drawn. In our contribution, we would like to take a look at this potential and focus on the significance of remembering and forgetting for education and the construction of the future. Our thesis is that the study of forgetting in particular has received too little attention, and that its perspectivisation holds productive potential for research on education and the future. Based on this thesis, we show in our presentation how forgetting in its various forms (e.g. erasure, concealment, silence, overwriting, ignoring, neutralisation, denial and loss) (Assmann, 2016) can open up new perspectives on un/certainty, the future and initiate education.

In order to develop our considerations, we proceed as follows: First, we outline the constructed nature of biographies in order to then theoretically sharpen the meaning that forgetting and the forgotten have for education and the future; second, we underpin our considerations with two empirical examples; and finally, we conclude by emphasising the relevance of forgetting for the study of education and the future in uncertain times.

The world is shaken by multiple crises like accumulating natural disasters, global pandemics and reactive social forces as indicated by the increase of extremist right-wing populism. Not only do they lead to an exacerbation of social inequalities, they also raise attention to the fact that individual and collective futures are constantly at stake. Certainties have become a rare good, especially for those who suffer the most from discriminatory discourse like racism, sexism, nationalism, heteronormativity or classism. Still, schools continue to be a central arena for conveying certainty: They follow the meritocratic principle and thus make subjects believe that they will be successful in education through performance, and can secure long-term social and societal integration (Hadjar & Becker 2016). Subjects fall prey to this neoliberal promise of being able to belong in school and society if you just try hard enough (Davies & Bansel 2007). However, it becomes apparent that sexism and racism thwart the promise of equal opportunities at school and make it more of an illusion than a lived reality (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977; Phoenix 2005, Youdell 2006). Consequently, subjects are thrown back on their social positioning, no matter how meticulously they try to conform with meritocratic principles.

In our paper, we use biographies to tackle the question of how subjects in deprivileged social positions negotiate the meritocratic illusion they encounter in school. We assume that biographies can not only demonstrate how students are affected by and suffer from powerful structures, but how they “work” with these, in e.g. resisting, complying, and often contradictory ways. To conceptualize how subjects submit to powerful discourses like meritocracy, but also racism and sexism, we use Judith Butler’s concept of subjectivation (Butler 1997). According to Butler, subjects are not pre-given entities but are constantly produced in and through powerful discourses: Individuals are subjected through discursive interpellations (Althusser 1971) which address them to develop a sense of the self as somebody in the world in relation to others. However, subjects in privileged positions can often perceive themselves as sovereign agents, while subjects that experience racist or sexist interpellations over and over again, as observed in the school context (Chadderton 2018; Youdell 2006), might struggle with the construction of a stable self. Therefore, the possibilities to conceive of oneself as a (more or less) stable, certain, sovereign subject encountering safe and certain spaces within one’s biography are distributed very unequally among individuals and vary widely according to one’s position inside the power relations of society.

By the example of two case studies in two different national school contexts (Turkey and Germany), we ask for the production of certainties in biographies of marginalized subjects. Both of them refer to biographies of women with “successful” educational pathways despite the fact that they are marginalized along discourses of race and gender. On the basis of excerpts from two biographical interviews, we seek to show how students engage with the meritocratic principle performed in education to “work” on their belonging to collectives defined along the lines of race and gender. Particularly with regard to experiences of discrimination, it becomes clear how the belief in school performance (in)ability is intertwined with race and gender norms in this affiliation work. We will focus on different ways in which subjects attempt to create certainty of action by adapting to hegemonic norms. By understanding the desire to comply with social norms as a way of future-making, we ask both for the biographical functions as well as for the subjectivating effects of these practices.

The doctorate is, by its nature, rich with tensions. Park (2005) articulated an evolving tension between product (thesis) and process (training, development of academic identity, integration into the discipline) in the policy discourse and institutional delivery of doctoral education. Fast-forward two decades and the ‘doctoral experience’ in many national contexts has expanded to incorporate generalist and specialist training and development, mobility, competitions and work-based experiences – alongside the informal ‘hidden curriculum’ (Elliot, Bengsten, Guccione and Kobayashi, 2020) of learning opportunities with which doctoral candidates must engage. The becoming-researcher is expected to do far more than create one discreet project to make a successful transition into an academic career (Clarence and van Heerden, 2023).

The time available to postgraduate researchers and supervisors to complete a doctorate has not changed, however. The tension between product and process then manifests, for postgraduate researchers and supervisors, as a persistent struggle for balance: between time for freer thinking, writing and discovery and a timeline in a GANTT chart; between enabling pauses and redirection and setting due dates that focus the production of assessable content. These tensions play out against a societal backdrop marked by rapid change, anxiety (related to conflict, war, economic pressures, climate change), and uncertainty on many fronts. This may mean, in education, greater pressure to create certainty for our students, to manage anxiety and perhaps play down the tensions inherent in any learning process, where not knowing, ambivalence and time to think are crucial parts of the learning journey. This is perhaps most marked at doctoral level, where candidates must become independent, confident and autonomous researchers, ready for an unknown future, and able to create and conduct new research projects and processes.

The time implied in the development of a doctoral identity, expert knowledge, and advanced research competencies is not only linear time (i.e., from registration to graduation). Other kinds of time play out in doctoral journeys that are critical to the kinds of learning and becoming doctorates are designed to enable. In particular, what Araujo (2005, 197) calls ‘circular’ time, marked by ‘unpredictable and iterative periods of adaptation, uncertainty, ambivalence and becoming’ (Manathunga 2019, 1230). Circular time in doctoral research implicates another form of time, what Barnett (2015, 121) has termed ‘epistemic time’ - ‘careful time, expansive time, watchful time, listening time’. Linear time implies certainty, about the process and by extension the kinds of development needed to make it happen 'in time'. Circular time, epistemic time, are uncertain by contrast, and need to unfold outside of the linear timestream to enable meaningful knowledge-making as well as meaningful researcher development. These kinds of time enable ‘lines of flight, movement, deterritorialization and destratification’ (Deleuze & Guattari,1988, 3) in thinking, which appear messy, de-centred and distracted. They are, however, necessary to a mode of deep thinking which is fundamental to the quality of the thesis, the contribution to knowledge, and the development of future-facing researchers.

But, the carer-candidate, the self-funded candidate, the international candidate remind us that time is not neutral and not equally accessible to all - any form of time involved in the doctorate. The challenge, it seems, is the structure of the PhD itself as a discreet research project, one that can be managed within the linear timestream, results in publishable outputs, and produces a particular kind of researcher. This form of the PhD may belong to the past, and what may be needed is a radical reimagining of the doctorate as a way of producing research outputs and developing researchers. This reimagining must be informed by critical understanding of temporality, and further, of equity, access, and diversity.

The topic of the proposed symposium is the recovery of Europe through education and its digitalization in several CEE and SE countries. The empirical case is the European Commission’s NextGenerationEU plan (NGEU) in the European countries. From 2020 onwards, the European Union intends to rebuild Europe as a political and social region, including national economies, by generous funding for mobilising “all resources available to help member states coordinate their national responses” to Covid and other challenges, to make Europe more digital, greener and more resilient. This broad-scale initiative will influence a decisive amount of people since it aims at the recovery of the “whole of European society”.

From a historical view, a planned better future for Europe is not a new idea. From postwar “reconstruction” of Europe, to post 1989 “transformation” of Europe (or other, especially post-socialist countries into Europe), the desired future always combined technological solutionism (technocracy) and humanistic values (democracy).

Now, the drive for the “recovery” of Europe and a “new generation” stems from social and economic damages caused by COVID-19 and the new energy crises caused by the Russian war in Ukraine. However, the main means proposed are digitalization interlinked with education, which has a longer tradition (Landri, 2018). Thus, both digitalization of education and education for digitalization is needed for the possibility of recovering our society. Such a complex claim interlinking education with digitalization requires various actors to implement. It combines technical and financial investment into and development of digital and other infrastructures with the normative presupposition about human agency, i.e. citizens, national governments, and the civil sector enthusiastically implement the recovery of and through education. Moreover, since these are the member-state governments that are responsible for the management of these funds, formally visible actors of recovery through the digitalisation of education are actors from these governmental bodies – but in a topological view, other actors are attracted by or reach to NGEU as well. The administrative maps of each country cannot be a decisive optic.

Digitalisation will produce various kinds of people (Hacking, 2002; Popkewitz et al., 2016), the question is what and who will be included and who not – for this is needed to scrutinise new categories of “proper actors” (experts, etc.) and new patterns of achieving agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Therefore, the concrete actors cannot be constructed as comparative objects in advance, since they are research questions

This symposium does not ask whether the current planned future is the best form for new content, but what is the meaning of recovery this time, how it is changing in the course of recent events, and what does it mean for its actors, receivers, implementers, and how these kinds of people are established. We will bring new insight into three questions posed by this ambiguous planned and elusive, rational and moral, post-material and financially material initiative:

1) How to approach Europe as an agential region for education and how to study it form a comparative perspective 2) What are the discursive topos of education and digitalization as the present imaginary of the future 3) Actors of recovery - who are those men of recovery? How did they emerge? How did they receive their agential positions, and what kind of people and kinds of action are made possible?

This project would address these issues through Central, Eastern, and South European countries case selection.

This presentation will introduce the most recent discussions about Europe as an agential space for education and how to study it from a comparative perspective in the case of NextGenerationEU (NGEU). National recovery plans (NRP) put us in front of theoretical and methodological problems. Despite the common “addressee” (the European Commission giving money and imposing certain conditions of acceptance) making NRPs comparatively accessible, the temporal and spatial views problematise such accessibility. NGEU changed its legitimisation of why Europe should be recovered in time, from Covid, the energy crisis, to war’s threat to democracy. It changes also its scale in terms of financial means provided. Consequently, also national “answers” to this changing initiative change. As is evident from a pre-study of NRPs involved in this broader project, all have more or less publicly changed in terms again time schedules and scale of implementation. The advance in Europeanisation studies in education brought to the fore the danger of uncritical acceptance of administrative maps of both the EU and nation-states (Popkewitz, 2023), and decontextualization character of standardised comparisons common in education (Landri, 2018). NGEU seems to provide just the next Europeanised educational normative. However, although we know much about the translation of these normatives in local settings of given countries (Grimaldi & Serpieri, 2012; Kascak, 2017; Neumann, 2011; Sifakakis et al., 2016; Viseu & Carvalho, 2018; Wirthová, 2022) the elusive nature of the current initiative to recover Europe poses significant comparative challenges. We would like to deal with them through a topological approach, which stresses the possibility of objects being the same while changing the relations among its components. In that sense, both RF and NRP are objects in mutation, not of replication, as they repeat in time and space (Allen, 2016) and we can focus on these changed relations. Helping us with the philosophy of comparison, we acknowledge that the construction of "tertium comparationis" – the third of comparison between cases to be compared (different NRPs) – is actually a conceptual practice and not comparative practice – determining this third is pre-comparative and acknowledges ontological consequences (Weber, 2014). This sensitives us to the politics of education and digitalisation we want to scrutinise, to ways how current nationalism offers a diverse Europeanisation, another spatialisation, and to our own ontological commitments that go with our tertium. Thus, we can compare a recovery effect in a broader richness of its variability than in mainstream numerical and standardised comparisons.

Allen (2016). Topologies of Power. Routledge. Grimaldi, Serpieri (2012). The transformation of the Education State in Italy: a critical policy historiography from 1944 to 2011. Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 4(1) Kascak (2017). Communists, Humboldtians, neoliberals and dissidents: or the path to a post-communist homo oeconomicus. Journal of Education Policy, 32(2) Landri (2018). Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and Europeanization of Education. Bloomsbury Neumann (2011). Negotiating power: Interviews with the policy elite - Stories from hungary lost between genres. European Educational Research Journal, 10(2) Popkewitz (2023). Europe as the Exterior Interiorized in the Infrastructures of Policy. In Krejsler, Moos, School Policy Refom in Europe. Springer. Sifakakis, Tsatsaroni, Sarakinioti, Kourou (2016). Governance and knowledge transformations in educational administration: Greek responses to global policies. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 48(1) Viseu, Carvalho (2018). Think Tanks, Policy Networks and Education Governance: The Emergence of New Intra-national Spaces of Policy in Portugal. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 26(108) Weber (2014). Comparative Philosophy and the Tertium: Comparing What with What, and in What Respect? Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 13(2) Wirthová (2022). Patterns of actorship in legitimation of educational changes: The role of transnational and local knowledge. European Educational Research Journal, 21(4)

This presentation focuses on the role of digitalisation, education and its mutual entanglement in several versions of National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRPs), as responses to the NextGenerationEU Plan (Landri, 2018). NRPs are normative documents that forecast and plan the future states of European societies. But in their articulations around various desires concerning the future, they significantly shape the present (Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020). For interrogating comparatively the imaginaries of the future of education it projects and the politics of digitalisation that underpins it, we will use the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Sociotechnical imaginary, as collectively held and performed visions, is an analytical tool to capture the relationship between normativity of imagination and materiality of networks (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, p. 19). It enables us to approach NRPs as materialisations of such imaginaries containing digital and educational desires (Popkewitz, 2020, 2023). NRPs are well suited for comparative scrutiny to seek the differences and shared patterns of linking ideas about education and digitalisation, the discourses articulated thereby and the potential they afford to redraw existing boundaries (defining time, space, content and relations) in the education field (Bernstein, 2000; Decuypere & Simons, 2020). Methodologically, we read these artefacts from a social topology perspective, inverting our analytical gaze from the European Recovery Plan to the creations that it has induced (Decuypere & Lewis, 2023). We thus focus on how time (present-future relationships) and space (scale and boundaries of digitalisation) are involved in the formation of the social order imagined, figured and fixed. We pay special attention to spatial imaginaries of the scale, extension and intension of education and digitalisation that bypass administrative givens and that so far escaped the focus of critical scrutiny of spatial and temporal relations. The dataset consists of the Czech, Greek and Italian NRPs. In these textual or hypertexted documents and attached materials (reports, press releases, etc) we will go in depth regarding the content, form, and structure of each NRP document to analyse the mutual positions and relations between education and digitalisation in the recovery of each country, and the contexts of where the “recovery” of and through education takes place. This paper will show how the desired role of education and digitalisation is shaped not only by local national traditions and imaginaries about themselves, but also by the need to “respond” to the common donor (the EC).

Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity (2nd revised edition). Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Decuypere, M., & Lewis, S. (2023). Topological genealogy: a methodology to research transnational digital governance in/through/as change. Journal of Education Policy, 38(1), 23–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2021.1995629 Decuypere, M., & Simons, M. (2020). Pasts and futures that keep the possible alive: Reflections on time, space, education and governing. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(6), 640–652. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1708327 Decuypere, M., & Vanden Broeck, P. (2020). Time and educational (re-)forms—Inquiring the temporal dimension of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(6), 602–612. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1716449 Landri, P. (2018). Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and Europeanization of Education. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Popkewitz, T. S. (2020). The Impracticality of Practical Research: A History of Contemporary Sciences of Change That Conserve. University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11354413 Popkewitz, T. S. (2023). Europe as the Exterior Interiorized in the Infrastructures of Policy. In J. B. Krejsler & L. Moos (Eds.), School Policy Refom in Europe: (pp. 281–302). Springer.

This presentation introduces an exploratory study focused on the actors involved in the recovery of Europe through education, specifically those evoked by NextGenerationEU. Previous literature has shown interest in conceptualizing "recovery spaces" as spaces where actors - their resources, relationships, and visions - are central to understanding governance arrangements in post-disaster and crisis moments or to construct new visions for building back better (Borie & Fraser, 2023). Similarly, prior data indicated the reconfiguration of power relations in the making of national RRFs, for example, among financial and economic actors, institutional social affairs actors, EU civil servants, EU civil society organizations, member States, and the European Parliament (Vanhercke & Verdun, 2022). Drawing on the network ethnography (Rowe, 2024) we take as its empirical object the National Recovery Plans of Portugal and Slovakia concerning the sections related to the digitization of education. In these countries’ plans, we focus on the reconfiguration of actor relations through discursive and intertextual references and relations that produce actors of recovery in Europe through education. More precisely, we aim to describe and understand who these actors of recovery are, how they emerged, how they received their agential positions, and what kind of actions are made possible. Based on networked governance perspective (Ball & Junemann, 2012) we will map the actors invoked in two national contexts undergoing significant educational reforms incentivised also by NGEU to describe: which social worlds they belong to (political-administrative elite, government agencies, businesses, academia, curricular reformists); what are the reasons for their invocation (expert knowledge or brokerage, position, or role …) and what roles are expected to be performed (authors, receivers, implementers); what patterns of relationship between the actors can be observed, and what possibilities for change are imagined they could produce? The data may contribute to illustrating how, in the European space and through the creation and implementation of NRPs, new relationships - collaboration, cooperation, partnership, but also competition - between governments and the private sector have strengthened (Cone et al., 2022; Grek and Landri, 2021). Additionally, we aim to discuss how the pursuit of "building back better" has driven the adoption at national scales of the digitization of education, where Ed-tech takes a central role - outside educational systems - in designing and delivering a digital future (Morris et al., 2022).

Ball, Junemann (2012) Policy networks and new governance. In Networks, new governance and education (pp. 1-18). Policy Press. Borie, Fraser (2023) The politics of expertise in building back better: Contrasting the co-production of reconstruction post-Irma in the Dutch and French Caribbean. Geoforum, 145. Cone, Brøgger, Berghmans, et al. (2022) Pandemic Acceleration: Covid-19 and the emergency digitalization of European education. European Educational Research Journal 21(5). Grek, Landri (2021) Education in Europe and the COVID-19 Pandemic. European Educational Research Journal 20(4). Morris, Park, Auld (2022) Covid and the future of education: global agencies ‘building back better’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 52:5. Rowe (2024 Network Ethnography in Education: A literature review of network ethnography as a methodology and how it has been applied in critical policy studies. Analysing Education Policy, 136-156. Vanhercke, Verdun (2022) The European Semester as Goldilocks: Macroeconomic Policy Coordination and the Recovery and Resilience Facility. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 60: 204–223. Williamson, Hogan (2020) Commercialisation and Privatisation in/of Education in the Context of Covid-19. Brussels. Zancajo, Verger, Bolea (2022) Digitalization and beyond: the effects of Covid-19 on post-pandemic educational policy and delivery in Europe. Policy and Society 41(1).

Public schooling has been considered an institution for shaping the future since its inauguration. Whether as an institution for creating national identities or, for enabling equality and social mobility, schooling is oriented to a sense of futurity. In recent decades, digital technology, in particular, digital educational technology (EdTech) has been woven into promises of better educational futures. Decades of educational research have shown, however, that schooling reproduces existing (structural) inequalities. Examining the algorithms, structures and infrastructures of digital technologies, recent studies argue that these systems reformat pedagogical priorities with implications for increasing discrimination, injustice and inequity (Zakhavora & Jarke, 2023; Perrotta et al., 2020). Further studies have proposed critical interventions with technology to alleviate inequalities and promote justice (Choi & Cristal, 2021; Swist & Gulson, 2023). The question that still requires systematic investigation is how, despite often well-intentioned efforts to alleviate inequalities, ‘persistent and pernicious inequalities’ (Facer & Selywn, 2021: 7) are reproduced and/or interrupted through technology use in schools. These inequalities make certainties for young people, by opening up some futures and foreclosing others. This panel thus draws on ethnographic research to ask: How is the uptake of digital technology reproducing, reconfiguring and/or alleviating relations of inequality in schools?

Ethnographic research, with its ‘arts of noticing’ in today’s ‘capitalist ruins’ (Tsing, 2015), offers a promising methodological approach to EdTech’s futures-making entanglements, since it enables researchers to spend time in the field, embedded in the practices, relations, tensions and ambiguities of everyday life with technology in schools (Alirezabeigi et al., 2020). Participant observation, accompanied by thick descriptions, enables scholars to trace the patterns of practices and the ‘rich points’ in which confusing, surprising or unexpected moments give insight into participants’ perspectives, expectations and hopes for the future. Although ethnographic explorations of digital technologies, education and inequality are emerging, these are currently based primarily in the US, with few studies of European or other contexts (Rafalow, 2020; Watkins et al., 2018). Given the situated and contextual unfolding of both schooling and of relations of inequality, there is a risk in assuming that these findings are relevant around the world. Research in further local settings aims to elaborate a more nuanced understanding of how data flows and other technologies reproduce, reconfigure and/or alleviate inequalities (Murris et al., 2023).

The chair opens the symposium by highlighting the key issues noted above, and by reflecting on the challenges of this kind of research when “new” technologies hint at moments of possibility and futures otherwise, and yet structural inequalities are historically sedimented in public education. The first paper presents a systematic review of recent international research on digital technology, schooling and inequality. Three ethnographic case studies then each highlight a central theme emerging from varied methods including participant observation, interviews, and workshops with students and teachers in Germany, Mexico, Sweden and the UK to explore how technology and inequality are interwoven in everyday school practices. Each study includes schools at different positions in the local opportunity structure, i.e., more privileged/ well-resourced schools and historically marginalised/ poorly-resourced schools. With a shared relational sociomaterial/sociotechnical theoretical perspective, the papers explore the constitution of inequality through practices of waiting and maintenance, through the intensification of work, and through the shifting of pedagogical relations between teachers and students. Through these situated analyses, the papers also speak to broader issues such as temporal bordering, distraction, opportunity, trust, validity, surveillance, communication, temporal frictions and local collective action for social justice. The discussant responds to the individual papers and reflects on overarching themes in the making and unmaking of in/equitable edtech futures in today’s schools.

In many education systems digital technologies are seen as an important way to address educational inequity. Yet despite this enduring emphasis on equity in policy and popular discourse, the research evidence is complex to navigate. It is multifaceted, wide ranging and relatively disparate. This paper presents a systematic thematic (as opposed to meta-analytic) review of the peer-reviewed academic literature that explores the relationships between technology, equity, and teaching and learning in secondary schools, identifying 73 studies from the Global North based on an initial review of 15,000 abstracts from three academic databases (Google Scholar, Scopus, and EBSCO Host). The thematic analysis of all 73 included studies identified four overlapping themes: 1. Digital equity: work that provides an increasingly nuanced understanding of the constituent aspects of the ‘digital divide’ (Dolan, 2016), that has implications for the learning experiences of secondary school pupils (Robinson, et al., 2018), that have intensified and reconfigured during the pandemic (Greenhow et al. 2021) 2. Data driven systems: work that addresses the equity implications of the use of algorithmic systems in education, including growing concerns about the multiple ways that these systems can lead to unjust practices and outcomes along different social axes (Baker and Hawn, 2021) 3. Socio-technical interactions: work that examines the equity implications of the relationships between technology, teachers, pupils, and school administration, including how schools in wealthier areas tend to use technology differently to schools in less well-off areas (Rafalow and Puckett, 2022) 4. Equity-orientated pedagogies: work that attempts to make learning environments more equitable, including digital access schemes (Adhikari et al., 2017); the fostering of digital and data literacies (Choi and Cristol, 2021); and the use of Universal Design for Learning (Griggs and Moore, 2023) The paper presents a synthesis of these themes, and highlights important gaps in the evidence base: a need for greater clarity in the definitions of equity; a need for greater attention to the underpinning logic, biases and accountability structures in commercial EdTech products; and a need for richer, context-specific understandings of how and for what purpose technologies are employed in the learning experiences of secondary school pupils, especially outside of the U.S. We suggest the need for an explicit focus on the ways in which complex patterns of digital inequity, algorithmic bias, and interactions between teachers, pupils and technologies can exacerbate existing social and educational inequities or, indeed, create new ones in specific school contexts.

Adhikari, J., Scogings, C., Mathrani, A. & Sofat, I. (2017). Evolving digital divides in information literacy and learning outcomes: A BYOD journey. International Journal of Information and Learning Technology 34, 290–306. Baker, R.S & Hawn, A. (2022). Algorithmic Bias in Education. Int J Artif Intell Educ 32, 1052–1092. Choi, M. & Cristol, D. (2021). Digital citizenship with intersectionality lens: Towards participatory democracy driven digital citizenship education. Theory Into Practice 60, 361–370. Dolan, J.E. (2016). Splicing the divide: A review of research on the evolving digital divide among K-12 students. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 48, 16–37. Greenhow, C., Lewin, C. & Staudt Willet, K.B., (2021). The educational response to Covid-19 across two countries. Technology, Pedagogy & Education 30, 7–25. Griggs, N. & Moore, R. (2023). Removing Systemic Barriers for Learners with Diverse Identities: Antiracism, UD for Learning, and Edpuzzle. J Spec Educ Technol 38, 15–22. Rafalow, M.H. & Puckett, C. (2022). Sorting Machines: Digital Technology and Categorical Inequality in Education. Educational Researcher 51, 274–278. Robinson, L., Wiborg, Ø. & Schulz, J. (2018). Interlocking Inequalities: Digital Stratification Meets Academic Stratification. American Behavioral Scientist 62, 1251–1272.

Digital infrastructures and EdTech in schools participate in renegotiating the social fabric of schools. They differentiate, categorize and hierarchize (Rafalow & Puckett 2022) actors in digital education practices. One overlooked dimension of the relationship between EdTech and inequalities is the way in which digital education practices create temporal borders between actors. Therefore, in this paper, we zoom in on practices of waiting. We make use of the double meaning of the German verb ‘warten’, in which both the waiting for something (in the sense of pausing; Warten) and the maintenance of something (in the sense of preventive measures to avert breakdown; Wartung) are inscribed. Based on a year of ethnographic research in six schools (three in Germany and three in Sweden) the paper draws links between ‘warten’ practices, EdTech, and social inequality. It asks: Which practices of ‘warten’ (as waiting/maintenance) can be observed in the sociotechnical infrastructure of German and Swedish schools and to what extent are social inequalities negotiated in these practices? The paper draws on two perspectives on ‘warten’: First, an infrastructure studies perspective, which does not consider digital infrastructures as stable entities, but as fragile assemblages of practices, objects, policies, and actors (Star 1999) that need to constantly be sustained, maintained, or repaired. Different temporalities are inscribed in these practices, and for this paper, the concept of maintenance-as-waiting (Schabacher 2021) is particularly relevant. Second, the conceptualization of waiting as part of temporal bordering from critical border studies and migration studies (Andersson, 2014). In this literature, "waiting is the feeling that one is not fully in command of one's life" (Khosravi 2017, p. 81). Digital infrastructures and EdTech in schools give rise to practices of ‘warten’ in the double sense (Warten/Wartung; waiting/maintenance) – and temporal bordering sensitizes us to the unequal ways in which different actors are affected by these practices. Our analysis shows that while ‘warten’ is a central aspect of everyday school life shaped by digital technologies in European countries, it affects different people unevenly. As digital infrastructures and EdTech materialize as actors of temporal bordering, they evaluate the time of certain people in school as more valuable and important than that of others – forcing some to wait or to practise maintenance-as-waiting. By laying out differences and similarities between and within the German and Swedish contexts in relation to ‘warten’, this paper offers thick descriptions and deep insight into the state of European digital classrooms.

Andersson, R. (2014). Time and the Migrant Other: European Border Controls and the Temporal Economics of Illegality. American Anthropologist, 116(4), 795–809. Khosravi, S. (2017). Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran. University of Pennsylvania Press. Rafalow, M. H., & Puckett, C. (2022). Sorting Machines: Digital Technology and Categorical Inequality in Education. Educational Researcher, 51(4), 274–278. Schabacher, G. (2021). Time and Technology: The Temporalities of Care. In Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time (S. 55–76). Amsterdam University Press. Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391.

The focus of this paper is how teachers’ work is regulated and materialised through the relational arrangements of digital technologies. In particular, we pay attention to temporal aspects of work through the issue of work intensification as the generated effect of complex sociotechnical and affective arrangements, which include the experiences and self-regulation of subjects managing time pressure demands (Creagh et al., 2023) and exploitation of emotional labour as part of today’s performative work life (Zafra, 2017). Decisive for how this is played out, are the resources in teachers’ work and positions of teacher labour within different school systems, issues that have become a concern in policy (e.g., Education International, 2023; UNESCO, 2024) often suggesting that teachers be released from work burdens to secure the teacher labour workforce. Based on a sociomaterial understanding of work and as part of a larger international research project, we set out to explore and mirror the issue of work intensification through the Swedish and the Mexican case. Methodologically we draw on thick school ethnographic descriptions consisting of field note observations, interviews, diaries and logbooks, and platform mapping. Actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and the concept of jumping scales (Barad, 2007) were used to relationally analyse the local–global arrangements that concentrate teachers’ work time and produce work intensification, yet also to highlight the resistance and interruptions to such forces. Analytically, we focus on the sociomaterial time-ordering devices in teachers’ work to sync or counteract temporal frictions and tensions exemplified by (digital and analog) documentation of completed work tasks and calendar coordination (Wajcman, 2019). Our analyses show that work intensification is enacted in Sweden and Mexico through political and teachers’ unions pressures, demands of platform technologies and communication operating on a 24/7 timescale and continuous and yet unpredictable work events of control and care in everyday work. Discussions on teachers’ work often problematised the tensions between global and local demands of work performativity and argued that the global neoliberal agendas won over local demands, de-nationalising and de-regulating teachers’ work (e.g. Robertson, 2013). Our argument, however, is that there are still very powerful local forces speaking to collective work and social justice issues beyond individual well-being and employment discourses (Supiot, 2023) that shape teachers’ work, that are made visible as we mirror our different local cases and their global entanglements.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Creagh, S., Thompson, G., Mockler, N., Stacey, M., & Hogan, A. (2023). Workload, Work Intensification and Time Poverty for Teachers and School Leaders: A Systematic Research Synthesis. Educational Review. Education International. (2021). The Global Report on the Status of Teachers. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press. Robertson, S. (2013). Teachers’ Work, Denationalisation, and Transformations in the Field of Symbolic Control: A Comparative Account. In J. Levin & J. Ozga (eds.). World Yearbook of Education 2013 (pp. 77–96). Routledge. Supiot, A. (2023). El trabajo ya no es lo que fue. Cómo pensarlo de nuevo en un mundo que cambió. Siglo XXI Editores. UNESCO - ITFT (2024). Global Report on Teachers. Addressing Teacher Shortages. Wajcman, J. (2019). How Silicon Valley sets Time. New Media & Society, 21(6), 1272-1289. Zafra, R. (2017). El entusiasmo. Precariedad y trabajo creativo en la era digital. Anagrama.

Studies have highlighted how EdTech may be reconfiguring pedagogical and social relationships. For example, the use of dashboards influences how teachers understand their students and the students see themselves (Jarke & Macgilchrist, 2021); the use of EdTech platforms can encode expectations of what a learner should be and how they should act (Decuypere, 2019) and Google Classroom can shape the role of teachers (Perrotta et al., 2021). Concurrently, research shows that schools with less resources may tend to resort to more automated versions of EdTech (Zeide, 2017) which may have implications for learning and teaching relations (Saltman, 2016). This presentation adds to this emerging area. Drawing on in-depth data from ethnographic research in three secondary schools in England, which takes a relational socio-technical approach, this paper focuses on the ways in which the increasing use of digital technologies in schools is changing student-teacher relations, and the implications this has for educational and social equity. We combine the findings from participatory classroom observation (40 classes per school), interviews with students and teachers (40 per school), futures workshops with students (2 per school) and “socio-technical audits” of key EdTech platforms (Gleason & Heath, 2021). We focus on three themes and tensions in our data that raise questions for pedagogic relations: distraction and opportunity, (dis)trust and validity, and surveillance and communication. We show how the underlying logics – i.e. the design choices and pedagogical assumptions embedded within EdTech - come together with the varied structural and cultural conditions that students and teachers encounter in each school and how these have varied implications for educational equity. We show how the “hidden curriculum” along with the potential biases of EdTech, can shape teacher agency, how students think about themselves, their relationships to others, and the expectations society has for them (Biesta, 2016); and demonstrate how this has implications for the reproduction and reconfiguration of inequity. Viewing the future as a process of emergence from current school practices (Facer, 2013), our findings highlight the significant inequities in schools in England, and how the current EdTech on offer can often be inadequate. Although the implications of EdTech are never straightforward, we argue that stakeholders should be demanding and reimagining “better” EdTech, that fits with broader educational purposes (Biesta, 2016) and are “explicitly designed to address issues of equity” (Facer & Selwyn, 2021:143) to support pedagogical relations that enable positive social change.

Biesta, G. (2016). Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future. Taylor & Francis. Decuypere, M. (2019). Researching educational apps: ecologies, technologies, subjectivities and learning regimes. Learning, Media and Technology, 44(4), 414-429. Facer, K. & Selwyn, N. (2021). Digital Technology and the Futures of Education: Towards ‘Non-Stupid’ Optimism. The Futures of Education initiative UNESCO. Facer, K. (2013). The problem of the future and the possibilities of the present in education research. International Journal of Educational Research, 61, 135-143. Gleason, B., & Heath, M. K. (2021). Injustice embedded in Google Classroom and Google Meet: A techno-ethical audit of remote educational technologies. Italian Journal of Educational Technology, 29(2), 26-41. Jarke, J. & Macgilchrist, F. (2021). Dashboard stories: How narratives told by predictive analytics reconfigure roles, risk and sociality in education. Big Data & Society, 8(1). Perrotta, C. Gulson, K., Williamson, B. & Witzenberger, K. (2021). Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom, Critical Studies in Education, 62:1, 97-113 Saltman, K. J. (2016). Corporate Schooling Meets Corporate Media: Standards, Testing, and Technophilia. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 38(2): 105–23. Zeide, E. (2017). The structural consequences of big data-driven education. Big Data, 5(2):164-172.