Data Made School: Unpacking How Digital Data Flows Shape Education

Abstract

Across welfare institutions such as schools, healthcare, and social services, everyday work is increasingly entangled with digital data and data infrastructures. Systems for documentation and administration may appear mundane and neutral, yet digital platforms, data standards, classification frameworks, and the practices surrounding them classify, organize, and make social realities (in)visible. In education, such infrastructures – ranging from attendance registers and learning platforms to early warning systems and visualizations – have become integral to how students, teachers, and schools are known, compared, and acted upon. They are often presented as pragmatic tools for administration and efficiency, but they also shape what becomes visible, actionable, and accountable in schooling. This dissertation demonstrates the necessity to attend to the seemingly mundane and technical details of infrastructures and data flows, such as standards, thresholds, and visualizations, but also shows that they are never merely technical, and instead depend on continual acts of maintenance, repair, and negotiations through which governance is enacted. The study develops a conceptual framing through the lenses of infrastructuring, classificatory judgments, and sociotechnical imaginaries, which together demonstrate how governance is enacted not only through policy or reform, but also through (technical) standards, thresholds, and practices that make and maintain data flows. Empirically, it builds on ethnographic research in Sweden, South Africa, and Argentina, and comprises four papers. The findings demonstrate that governance is relationally enacted: sustained by the local work of teachers, administrators, and municipal staff who keep data moving, while simultaneously being shaped by technical standards, thresholds, and visualizations. Infrastructures create visibility without legibility; standards may be public and thresholds displayed, yet their technical density and arbitrary cut-offs foreclose scrutiny, structuring what remains too opaque to question. Care and control are therefore entangled in classificatory routines that flag risk and trigger intervention, often without accounting for the complexities of students’ lives. Considered together, this is conceptualized as infrastructural governance, which offers a vocabulary for recognizing and contesting how infrastructures configure responsibility, intervention, and accountability in education, while pointing to similar dynamics across welfare institutions.