Follow the Object. A Biographical Approach to the Study of Digital Devices in the Governing of Education

In bringing digital devices to the interior of social sciences and of educational policy studies, science and technology studies are an important contribution in stressing that neither should technology be seen as something external to other social realms, nor should we think of it as the cause of social transformations. Technological developments are themselves permeated by axiological and political dimensions and inevitably related to power dynamics. Digital devices are social phenomena themselves: objects that are socially produced (MacKenzie, Wajcman, 1985; Wajcman, 2015) while contextually capable of producing the world they inhabit. In this respect, software studies are also valuable, by pointing out the need of paying attention not only to digital devices’ characteristics and the meanings they carry from the moment of their design, but also of looking into their appropriation by social actors, into the relational dynamics surrounding these objects (Kitchin, Dodge, 2011). It is specifically departing from such nondeterministic complex view of digital devices that research on this subject would find an interesting path to be developed. Departing from an empirical research we carried out in 2018 whose main results have already been published (Romito et al. 2019; De Feo et al., 2019), this short paper aims to move forward our previous analysis by deepening the theoretical and methodological grounds of our study in order to set the basis of future works in this field.