Conference Agenda

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).