Subscribing school: digital platforms, affective attachments, and cruel optimism in a Danish public primary school

ABSTRACTThis article explores the affective and situated aspects of enacting public schooling within a burgeoning economy of digital platforms. Drawing on a series of conversations with two teachers and two school leaders at a Danish primary school, the article examines how the increasing involvement of educational platforms in schools reshapes who and what matters in the everyday life of the school. The article highlights different ways in which platforms entangle with educational practices and relations beyond their functional promises to save time, promote efficiency, solve administrative issues, and other related tasks. As generative forces based on relocating educational phenomena within a proprietary digital architecture, the analysis illustrates how the involvement of platforms becomes co-constitutive of new forms of affective attachments and loyalty that challenge historical configurations of pluralism in public schools. Drawing on these constitutive effects, the article introduces Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism to discuss the implications of sustaining public schooling within a largely unregulated economy of platform subscriptions. The article’s discussions call for closer political and scholarly attention to the educational consequences of enacting school within the economic conditions of current platform capitalism.KEYWORDS: Educational platformsaffectscruel optimismpublic educationpedagogical practicesschool ethnography Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Recent years have seen a growing body of scholarship on educational platforms aiming to ‘disentangle the operations and relational agency of digital technologies’ (Decuypere et al., Citation2021, p. 3). Employing a topological approach, Hartong, for example, explores how two school performance platforms used in the US enact ‘the fabrication and stabilization of particular relational settings as powerful governmental framings of (good) education’ (Hartong, Citation2021, p. 35). Perrotta and colleagues (2021) raise a similar concern in their study of Google Classroom. Noting how the work of teachers becomes synchronized with the algorithms and user scripts of platforms, they highlight ‘how participation is configured through governance strategies and infrastructures that partially structure activities and subjectivities according to digitally encoded logics’ (Perrotta et al., Citation2021, p. 99). This paper contributes to the interest in platformed configurations of education by foregrounding the affective and organizational aspects of imbricating everyday school life in digital architectures.2. Generally, the involvement of digital platforms is highest in upper primary grades (7th, 8th, and 9th grade). Here, recent numbers suggest that digital technologies are used for almost all lessons in school (Danish Ministry of Education, Citation2021).3. According to the Danish Teacher’s Union, the number of full-time teachers employed in the Danish public school system has dropped from 54.897 in the school year 2009/10 to 45.134 in Citation2019/20, corresponding to roughly 18%. Student numbers in the same period fell around 10%. Together with a series of new tasks introduced through a comprehensive school reform in Citation2013, these shifts have increased the average number of lessons per teacher with 28% between 2009/10 and 2018/19 (Danish Teacher’s Union, 2019).4. Aula is a mandatory communication platform developed by the Danish company Netcompany following a national ‘user portal initative’ in Citation2014 aiming to modernize the digital infrastructure of Danish public schools.5. In data studies and critical media studies, these relations are often discussed through the terms intra- and inter-operability. These terms are used to reflect the extent to which databases and platforms can ‘talk’ to one another across domains through the programming interface (Bechmann, 2013). For an overview of the operational differences underlying digital infrastructures, commercial models, and organizational forms, see DeNardis (2016) and Plantin et al. (Citation2018).Additional informationFundingThe author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.Notes on contributorsLucas ConeLucas Cone (he/him) is tenure track assistant professor in educational research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.