Conference Agenda

Current technological changes put human action in different relations than we have been used to – human action is beginning to reflect off the new digital culture in previously unexpected ways. Empirically, there is a salient infrastructuring of AI and other digital tools across most communication and work practices, including educational practices. AI products are beginning to be plugged into all communication technologies and, in a sense, are becoming inevitable for people to use and to be used by. The distinction between humans using AI and AI using humans becomes obscured, for which the processual and dynamic term “infrastructuring” (Enfield & Kockelman, 2017) is appropriate.

Despite this, a kind of resistance was observed in the form of a suggested label, “human-made” or “human-thought,” in public discourse, or an existing badge, “not by AI,” that promises purchasers “Empowering Humans to Create Authentic Content” (Hsu, n.d.). like the older debates about the value of human-made objects, or the organic origin of food (Bio), here also rise concerns about “human washing”. Last but not least, in another way, the value of human teachers and technology-free didactics is raised again in informal discussions between teachers on social media. These shifting expressions and dynamics of resistance to AI and digitalisation also shape how human agency (HA) matters within them. Based on this context, I ask the following questions: How does human agency matter in current digital infrastructures, and how is the meaning of human agency made through the infrastructuring of these digital tools?

However, at the theoretical level, the long-criticised essentialist bifurcation between the human and the non-human in the social sciences, which leads to post-human or more-than-human ontologies, becomes insufficient to capture the ways in which human agency matters now. The sociology of agency, I argue, deserves a new impetus in the context of infrastructuring digital tools and AI.

Moreover, despite academic research have deconstructed modern assumptions about human action (individual and free agency) as an inappropriate form of anthropocentrism in both sociology and education, educational policy and practice implicitly presupposed these assumptions and hold individuals responsible for their actions, including the use of digital tools. Although HA is dissolved within the notions of distributed agency (Enfield & Kockelman, 2017), in many subsequent political infrastructural (hard and thinking) initiatives (including COVID recovery), HA is unproblematically and implicitly presupposed, called upon, evaluated, and responsibilised.

To disentangle this paradox of inadequate responsibilisation of human agency (e.g. the responsibilisation of teachers for the running of didactic digital tools) and inadequate capitulation to seemingly determining infrastructures (e.g. passive adaptation to infrastructural settings), I ask how questions of human agency matter in current infrastructure studies within post-human and more-than-human ontologies. What conceptual and methodological tools are available to address human agency sociologically? The problem is that mainstream sociology rather presupposes agency as being inherently human since it presupposes human subjects as existing as biological individuals prior to agency, which involves taking some non-related objects (in hands) and relating them consequently. However, sociological research has long shown that human subjects do not exist in this way. Relational sociology has challenged both the subjectivity as apriori of social relations and the essential separation of social entities in space as an empty vessel (Powell, 2013). Nevertheless, relational sociology left the question of explicit human agency unaddressed (with some exceptions, e.g. Burkitt, 2018) while more-than-human scholarship, in a sense, overlooks human agency, and when it does not, it is critical rather to the economic and capitalist notion of human (Parisi, 2021).

The education sector is facing changes as the use of commercial digital platforms, owned and designed by large international corporations, continues to increase with the general promise of simple answers to complex, contextualized, issues, such as learning and teaching (Bergviken Rensfeldt & Hillman, 2024). These platforms are embedded in and entangled with educational practices in school (Bergviken Rensfeldt & Hillman, 2024; Pangrazio, et al., 2023), they are part of decision-making processes, they create new forms of work (Selwyn, 2021), and they are involved in categorizing and systematizing in ways that may be hidden from practitioners (Moraiti, et al., 2024). The platformization of education is a strong imaginary (Palsa, et al., 2025; Rahm, 2024) and some researchers argue that the digitalization and platformization of education is “an apparatus that is entangled with the worst managerialist, authoritarian and corporatized aspects of contemporary education” (Selwyn, 2024, p. 264). Nevertheless, Pangrazio et al. (2023) concluded that data-driven education is considered self-evident in schools and therefore does not need to be questioned. Pangrazio et al. (2023) discuss that this is evidence of how marketing and policy lead schools to believe in the effectiveness and superiority of data-driven systems. Altogether, previous research on the platformization of education shows that there is great value in closely and critically examining specific sociomaterial realities using specific platforms to be able to generalize how platformization affects education on a broader scale. Previous research indicates that platforms are embedded in the educational systems, globally, and are thus influencing the realization of education. However, to understand how the platformization of education (macro-level) actually plays out in teachers’ digital work, we need to study what digital work is done in schools, by whom, and how (micro-level).

The proliferation of platforms that are embedded in and entangled with pedagogical processes in school has contributed to a growing concern about how and what the digital actually, concretely, socially and materially affects (Selwyn, 2024). The influence of platforms may be hidden from teachers because of their ubiquity and embeddedness in everyday school practices. Educational platforms are a seen but unnoticed part of the mundane social and material infrastructure of pedagogical practice that affect the social, technical and political-economic dimensions of school activities. In this paper, we focus on the usage of a dominant platform in Finnish schools, Wilma (owned by Visma), which is a school administration and communication platform that has a near-monopoly position in the Finnish educational system. We focus on teachers' digital work around classifications (Bowker & Star, 2000) connected to the monitoring of attendance and behavior at school. Although the platforms are part of the tapestry of schools, the generation of data on the platform requires that teachers, caregivers and students do digital work, which has increased the workload of, for example, teachers (Bergviken Rensfeldt & Hillman, 2024; Selwyn, et al., 2017; Selwyn, 2021). The digital work is often invisible (Star, 1999; Hatton, 2017), since documenting attendance and behavior is not seen as the main educational practice of the teacher and because it can be performed seemingly without much effort. At the same time, this type of invisible work is crucial in meeting the multifaceted expectations placed on both teachers, students and caregivers (Chen, 2020). Our study is structured around three research questions, inspired by Bowker and Star (2000): How do teachers create and maintain complex classifications? What work do the classifications do? How do teachers handle deviant cases of classification?

What is a research article? In simple terms, it is a record of history that seeks to communicate knowledge. In sociologies of education, research articles are generally made up of a problem statement rooted in a sociological literature review, some kind of analytical approach, empirical observations, and a discussion/conclusion based on the observations coupling back to the already established knowledge base. Therefore, what an article is at an ontological level is dependent on the information, data, and knowledge available to its author(s) at its time of writing. Thus, it is a form of a snapshot of the state of a given object (and research field) at a given time, as understood by a given set of researchers drawing on the knowledge available to them. A snapshot of an object, at one particular point in time, is arguably but one of many possible snapshots over the history of an object, such as a particular educational technology. It is a singular view that can be used as a building block to construct a greater whole, such as a snapshot series or even a movie. Such a move from singular snapshot (image) to movie is similar to how old cartoons were made, as one drawing led into the next with minor modifications, but eventually conveying change (movement) that could otherwise not be seen.

In the field of educational technologies (edtech) in particular, most material objects of study are dynamic and perpetually changing, particularly when digital in nature, and are as such subject to continuous spatio-temporal change and (de-)formation (Decuypere et al., 2022). If a piece of edtech is subject to change and functions as it moves across space-time, a snapshot arguably provides a limited image of the artefact, as it – by and large –only tends and aims to capture the state of a particular piece of edtech in a singular moment. However, inherent change in digital technology precludes the exclusive methodological reliance on such singular points of observation for comprehensively understanding digital artefacts (Decuypere & Lewis, 2023). In that regard, the purpose of our presentation is to foster epistemological and empirical debate as to what research articles, when investigating edtech in a critical manner, precisely enable to show and capture when they rely on singular snapshots, as compared to more longitudinal follow-up studies. We will more particularly argue that follow-ups allow to capture how edtech evolves and mutates, as we cannot derive general conclusions from singular snapshots.

In particular, in this presentation, we will conduct a follow-up study of the smartphone application TeacherTapp. In a previous study (Helgetun & Decuypere 2023), we analysed TeacherTapp as a multiple enactment with an emphasis on its differences across various spaces such as England/Flanders, and the multiple enactment of the app’s data streams across social media and policy documents/debates. Here, we build on and at the same time follow up on that study by providing a spatio-temporal analysis to trace the evolution of TeacherTapp over time.

This study empirically explores configurations of digital vulnerabilities in the automated school, showing how current Nordic debates mark a shift from the traditional digital divide to new forms of vulnerability and risk attribution.

In the case of Sweden, emerging “de-digitalisation” has been shaped by a narrow crisis narrative in which decision makers frame schooling as pedagogically out of control, partly caused by excessive experimentation with digital connectivity (Forsler et al., 2025). Within this narrative, two widespread assumptions converge: that students are particularly vulnerable, and that measures are needed which promise a return to safer and less complex school arrangements. Yet such solutions, promoted by the edtech industry as neutral and convenient for schools and largely uncontested as such, conceal new kinds of knowledge production and the extensive articulation work of sorting, valuing, and removing technology in education. Importantly, it is work that paradoxically risks reproducing surveillance and standardisation while also obscuring further digital vulnerabilities (Crooks, 2024; sarin & Hill-Bonnet, 2025).

To investigate this so far understudied shift, this study asks: how do digital vulnerabilities motivate new measures and practices? And how are digital vulnerabilities produced through these measures? These questions suggest paying attention to the making of objective practices (Jasanoff, 2011) through which schools and local authorities legitimate and attempt to sort out and limit invasive and “out of control” classroom connectivity. The aim is to highlight a shift from digital inclusion to digital vulnerability as the central matter of concern, and to expand how digital vulnerability in education is configured—materially, politically, temporally, and ethically. Drawing on STS and especially information and discard studies (Bowker & Star, 1999; Corvellec, 2025), the study sheds light on the political orderings enacted when some devices and connectivity are discarded and others elevated, and on what education, behaviours and forms of access are thereby stabilised.