Feeling infrastructures: How digital technology matters atmospherically for schools

This paper explores how digital infrastructures, and the conditions of possibility they provide, produce ‘affects’ that matter to a school organizationally. Increasingly, schools are characterized by infrastructural conditions enacted through global cloud-based ecosystems, their logics of subscriptions, the lock-ins they engender and many more elements that govern the organizational possibilities of schools. In this paper, we examine how these infrastructures produce affects that stretch across a local school or even school system. To scrutinize this level in-between general infrastructural conditions of governance and individual experience – where infrastructures and affects matter for schools organizationally – we propose the concept «atmosphere». Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in four schools across three years in Belgium (Flanders), our analysis shows how specific infrastructures generate atmospheric conditions for schools that are characterized by anticipation and legitimation. Both, we argue, are exemplary of what can be called infrastructural atmospheres dominant in the educational landscape today. Conclusively, this article suggests the need for the further development of atmospheric thinking to explicate how infrastructures exert affective pressures, thereby (re-)organizing school environments in subtle yet powerful ways.