Conference Agenda

Education is deeply implicated in the organisation, circulation, and legitimation of knowledge. Educational institutions are sites where social reproduction and social change are continuously negotiated through practices of classification, evaluation, standardisation, and governance. Rather than approaching education primarily as a space of instruction or learning, this panel examines education as a sociotechnical and institutional field in which knowledge is produced, authority is established, and social futures are shaped.

Educational practices have long been entangled with material and technological arrangements, including examinations, assessment systems, documents, organisational forms, data infrastructures, and digital platforms. These arrangements shape what counts as knowledge, how capacities and problems are defined and measured, and which forms of participation, intervention, and citizenship become possible or foreclosed. Attending to these material and organisational dimensions allows for closer analysis of how educational governance and inequality are enacted, contested, and sustained in practice.

Dominant analytical framings often remain centred on classrooms, curricula, and pedagogical interaction. Such framings risk underplaying how education is entangled with wider processes of state formation, labour market regulation, future-making, and political governance. Responding to calls within the sociology of education to develop analytical approaches that better account for these broader connections, this panel advances an understanding of education as a dispersed set of sociotechnical practices and infrastructures operating across institutional sites and scales, making use of perspectives and concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS).

The panel has two overarching aims. First, it explores how concepts and approaches from STS can offer theoretical and analytical resources for understanding education as a field of knowledge production and social ordering. Second, it demonstrates how education, as an empirical domain, can in turn reshape STS understandings of materiality, expertise, governance, and knowledge-making. Education is thus treated as a productive site for examining how sociotechnical arrangements organise knowledge, power, and inequality.

Drawing on four papers and a discussant from the field of STS, the panel is situated in different empirical contexts and historical moments, and examines how educational knowledge and authority are assembled, translated, and stabilised across diverse sites. The contributions analyse national assessment regimes and the quantification of inequality; transnational futures-oriented reports as epistemic infrastructures for educational governance; the historical emergence and stabilisation of enduring organisational forms such as the age-graded classroom; and contemporary digital wellbeing technologies as experimental sites where educational problems are enacted, tested, and governed. By tracing moments of innovation alongside points of friction, mismatch, and contestation, the panel highlights the processes through which educational arrangements become institutionalised, resilient, and affectively sustained. Together, the panel advances sociological discussions of education while contributing to wider debates on governance, inequality, and social change in contemporary societies.

Applying an infrastructural lens to the development of education planning and quantitative expertise, the paper foregrounds how UNESCO’s flagship reports on educational futures operate not merely as texts but as part of material infrastructures (Larkin, 2013) that guide epistemic frameworks and governance practices: From Learning to Be: The World of Education Today and Tomorrow (1972) to Learning: The Treasure Within (1996) and the recent Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education (2021), the paper will show how these reports not only represent and shape UNESCO’s present futures (Primus, 2025), but also an epistemic infrastructure that underpin contemporary global education policy. By tracing the materialities of the reports— their production processes, documents, the actors (scholars, policy-makers, international organisations) and their interdependencies, and the socio-historical contexts in which they emerge — the paper argues that UNESCO’s reports on educational futures function as infrastructural artefacts that both embody and instigate governing panoramas of education. The 1972 Faure Report situates education within post-industrial and democratic transformations, introducing lifelong learning as a universal principle. The 1996 Delors Report systematises education around the “four pillars of learning,” providing a normative grammar that continues to organise policy discourse. The 2021 Futures of Education report further expands the panorama, integrating planetary sustainability, digital transformation, and social justice into a vision of education as a global common good. The reports embody panoramas by representing and manifesting particular understandings of problems, risks, and desirable futures and instigate them by provoking infrastructures of coordination and alignment, shaping agendas and priorities. Methodologically, the study combines discourse analysis of UNESCO’s reports with process tracing of the convergence of global research and policy agendas among major international organisations, including UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank. This approach reveals how quantitative expertise, indicators, and planning tools become embedded in policy infrastructures, enabling particular framings of problems and solutions that travel across institutional and national boundaries (Grek, 2009). We investigate the reports as boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989), bridging research and governance by translating complex futures into principles and normative commitments that inform educational planning.

Grek, S. (2009). Governing by numbers: The PISA ‘effect’in Europe. Journal of education policy, 24(1), 23-37. Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual review of anthropology, 42(2013), 327–343. Primus, F. (2025). Present Futures in Global Education Governance: A Critical Discourse Analysis of UNESCO's Futures of Education [Doctoral dissertation, Örebro University]. Örebro University. Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, 'translations' and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social studies of science, 19(3), 387–420.

How do characteristic features of schooling become stabilized and form durable structures? This paper addresses this question by examining the emergence of the age-graded classroom, an organizational principle that allocates students to specific school grades based on chronological age. Drawing on actor-network theory (see e.g., Belliger & Krieger 2006, Latour 2005), the presentation investigates how age-grading became a key feature of what Tyack and Tobin (1994) term the “grammar of schooling” – the fundamental organizational structures that shape practices in schools. Focusing on the implementation of age-grading in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, this paper traces the classroom's organizational transformation within a rapidly expanding urban school system. The analysis shows that the age-graded classroom emerged through complex assemblages of both human and non-human actors, which include, e.g., the teaching profession, administrations, psychological concepts, architectural designs, teaching materials, as well as particular notions of norms and standards. By employing ANT's principle of flat symmetry, which treats human and non-human actors as equally significant for the formation of networks, the paper illuminates how these diverse entities interacted to produce a stable organizational form. The methodological contribution of this research lies in ANT's focus on moments of controversy and collapse as analytical entry points. Specifically, the paper examines instances where prescribed age-grade standards conflicted with students' actual chronological ages. These mismatches – rather than seamless implementation – help to distinguish the translation processes (e.g., Callon 1984) that guided the establishment of the age-graded classroom network. Moments of friction between ideal standards and practical realities expose the mechanisms through which heterogeneous actors were enrolled, aligned, and stabilized into a coherent organizational structure. The findings demonstrate how a highly complex, multi-layered, and resilient school organization network emerged and persisted despite ongoing challenges. By tracing these processes of stabilization, the paper offers theoretical and empirical insights into the mechanisms through which educational structures become institutionalized. The presentation seeks to contribute to understanding in more detail why certain organizational forms, once established, prove remarkably durable and resilient, even when their original rationales are contested or have faded into the background. Thus, this study has implications for contemporary educational reform efforts, suggesting that examining the material, social, and conceptual networks that sustain existing structures is essential when seeking to transform schooling. The paper concludes by reflecting on how ANT's analytical approach can illuminate the historical formation of other enduring features of educational organization.

Belliger, A., & Krieger, D. J. (eds). (2006). ANThology. Ein einführendes Handbuch zur Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Transcript Verlag. Callon, M. (1984). Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. The Sociological Review, 32(S1), 196–233. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press. Tyack, D., & Tobin, W. (1994). The ‘Grammar’ of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change? American Educational Research Journal, 31(3), 453–479.

This paper is set in a ‘bureaucracy room’ in India, where statistical knowledge, inscribed into outcomes-based assessments, intersects with the state's apparatus to develop administrative frameworks and routines to produce new understandings of inequity in education and new ways of addressing it. Our empirical focus is on new technical improvements introduced in 2017 to India’s National Achievement Survey (NAS), including outcomes-based assessment, a multiple-choice format, and machine marking. These were complemented with extensive efforts to ensure the data were used in policy and administration with simplified forms of data distributed at the district level and extensive workshops to train officials in the use of data. Following these technical improvements, NAS produced a stunningly ‘flat’ picture, with little variation in achievement along historically significant lines of inequity such as gender, caste and location (urban/rural). This result contradicted every other known information about inequity in the Indian schooling systems – including previous rounds of NAS surveys. Where did the inequities disappear? Drawing on the sociology of quantification, an analysis of NAS documents and websites and interviews with nine experts, we track the ways in which mutually reinforcing calculative and administrative mechanisms detach the phenomenon of inequity from demographic and other structural issues, and relocate it within administrative units and along learning outcomes. We identify four processes of translation through which this occurs: dislocation and relocation; rescaling; replicating; and folding. These translations result in the recasting of inequities into other units which obscure glaring social realities. We argue that social phenomena such as ‘inequity’ are artefacts of measurement, or ‘datafictions’. At the same time, they are also real issues experienced by people. Moreover, the particular ‘fictions’ produced by data – i.e., particular visibilisations of phenomena – make their way into administrative and policy logics, congealing and reifying these ways of seeing and knowing through ways of doing – i.e., through administrative practices. Consequently, we are interested in what the data make visible and invisible, as well as how these visions are translated into policy imaginaries, expert discourses and administrative practices. The paper presents a contextually grounded critique of technocratic neutrality and dissects the politics of knowledge creation, both central concerns of education as well as STS scholarship.

Borooah, Vani Kant. 2012. ‘Social Identity and Educational Attainment: The Role of Caste and Religion in Explaining Differences between Children in India’. Journal of Development Studies 48 (7): 887–903. Desrosières, A. (1998). The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Translated by Camille Naish, Harvard University Press. Merry, S. E. (2016). The seductions of quantification: Measuring human rights, gender violence, and sex trafficking. Miller, C. A. (2005). New Civic Epistemologies of Quantification: Making Sense of Indicators of Local and Global Sustainability. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 30(3), 403-432.

This paper mobilizes Science and Technology Studies (STS) to examine the deployment of digital technologies on educational problems. Combined with an interest in materialities, the sociological thinking associated with STS is particularly suited to examine educational technologies in the knowledge practices of contemporary schooling (Gorur et al. 2019). While tools for school governance, management and learning continue to proliferate, recent post-humanist and critical scholarship on school digitalization, among them empirical studies of platformization and datafication, has highlighted how such technologies are locally contested and negotiated (Cone 2024; Selwyn et al. 2022). As a supposed wellbeing crisis among Danish youth mounts, digital technologies for measuring, understanding and intervening in student wellbeing have emerged, promising to aid schools and teachers in addressing this issue. In this paper, I empirically examine an encounter between a digital “wellbeing tool” and a Danish public school. The paper is set in one of the school’s professional development seminars, which convened the Behavior, Contact, and Wellbeing (BCW) team—those half-a-dozen pedagogical personnel at the school, who, in addition to their teaching duties, led the school’s ongoing efforts to address student wellbeing. The seminar, facilitated by an invited municipal development consultant, introduced the wellbeing tool through a hands-on exercise in which participants tried out its features. Drawing on STS, particularly work on experiments and their world-making effects (Mol 2022; Jensen 2021), I analyze the encounter between ‘wellbeing technology’, institutional routines, and attendant governance structures for student wellbeing intervention. I show how the testing of the tool enacted multiple, and at times conflicting, realities of student wellbeing intervention. Foregrounding these tensions, I demonstrate how student wellbeing is made into an object for intervention, and I discuss how educational technologies, in a post-digital age, come to matter in schools. Particularly how their promises are sustained, and their effects and affects are managed through a grammar of testing.

Cone, L. (2024). Subscribing school: Digital platforms, affective attachments, and cruel optimism in a Danish public primary school. Critical Studies in Education, 65(3), 294–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2023.2269425 Gorur, R., Hamilton, M., Lundahl, C., & Sjödin, E. S. (2019). Politics by other means? STS and research in education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2018.1549700 Jensen, C. B. (2021). Practical Ontologies Redux. Berliner Blätter, 2021(84). https://doi.org/10.18452/22974 Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press. Selwyn, N., Pangrazio, L., & Cumbo, B. (2022). Knowing the (datafied) Student: The Production of the Student Subject Through School Data. British Journal of Educational Studies, 70(3), 345–361. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2021.1925085