Short abstract:

This paper investigates the digital infrastructuring of education as part of the wider turn towards digital nationalism in Estonia. The focus is hereby put on the power and transformation of intermediary actors in relation to (inclusive/exclusive) mechanisms of ‘national’ technical infrastructuring.

Long abstract:

This paper engages with the ongoing transformation of Estonia into a ‘digital nation’. More specifically, it investigates dynamics of, and actor constellations around, educational data infrastructuring within that transformation. The study is hereby situated in an expanding field of research that is interested in both human (e.g., data managers) and non-human (e.g., platforms) ‘intermediaries’ which together deeply affect (not only) educational infrastructuring dynamics. Contributing to that field, and taking up perspectives from Actor-Network Theory and Social Topology, the paper suggests to approach intermediaries through a lens on performative contexting (Asdal and Moser, 2012), and contexting as labor and strategy of governance. In doing so, the focus is shifted to how intermediary contexting is used, by whom and where exactly, rather than seeking to map intermediaries as an object ‘from the outside’. Both data infrastructuring and digital nationalism can be regarded, then, as part and as a result of such contexting efforts. Using Estonia as a case study, it is shown what we see (differently) when applying such a lens. The findings hereby indicate the gradual emergence of what could be described as ‘governance by intermediarization’: a process in which more and more actors of the digital nation - public and private - are shifted into the (self)contexting as infrastructural stewards, while the politics of digital transformation become centered around asserting continuous change through (not only national) digital connection.