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Mass school closures and restricted mobility during the Covid-19 pandemic have intensified matters of technology, teaching, and participation in schools. In response to this situation, this paper examines how attendance practices work during school closure and screen-saturated pandemic isolation at a Swedish upper secondary school. The aim is to empirically and theoretically explore school closure attendance by focusing on the sets of strategies and enactments that make school ‘attendable’ when being ‘in the right place at the right time’ becomes ambiguous. A relational materialist methodology is deployed with online interviews with six teachers during the first pandemic wave in 2020. The analysis traces empirical events that enact different school closure attendance devices: the video roll call, attendance performance, and ‘click like’ in the Microsoft Team-feed. The article highlights how attendance monitoring shifts and how attendance acts upon teaching, and vice versa.

This article explores lesson enactments as co-constitutive of human-technology relationality in everyday schooling, rather than neutral backdrops for educational activities. In doing so, the article introduces maintenance as its key concept, drawing on insights from maintenance studies and actor-network theory (ANT). Being both theoretically and empirically informed, maintenance means reconsidering lessons, and digital technologies, as part of lively and vulnerable objects achieved in sociomaterial practices and not merely stable in function and use. The empirical case of lesson enactments comes from fieldwork with an upper secondary school in Sweden during Covid-19. The article analyses situations of maintenance with online class calls and scheduling meetings. Herein, lessons turn into a topic of concern and mechanisms of maintenance enact educational order and prevent disorder. The article demonstrates how putting maintenance to work articulates and identifies so far neglected and mundane practices with digital technology in education. In light of this, the article argues for recognising maintenance in educational practice as too long overshadowed by use, reinforced by a persistent user-technology dichotomy. Finally, the article discusses how maintenance invites reconsiderations of the dominant before-after debate that the Covid-19 pandemic attracts and calls attention to the mundane maintenance of lessons regardless of breakdowns.

In this chapter, we introduce the configuration of caring cuts. Composed of care and cuts, two key notions in feminist posthumanism and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), caring cuts addresses the entanglement of epistemology and ontology. By putting to work an ontology of relational materialisms, the chapter explores how to respond to the mess, emergence, and elusive objects that become centred by our concern and ways of producing knowledge with and on postdigital worlds. It means that vital methodological questions are raised for postdigital relationalities in education and elsewhere. Instead of seeking to untangle the postdigital, caring cuts is put to work to examine mundane research events with sensibilities of the world-making practices of research. We argue that caring cuts affords acknowledgements of the collective responsibilities that research practices involve and bring attention to the inevitably untidy and non-innocent character of knowledge production and making worlds researchable. With caring cuts, modest interruptions and uneventful events suggest a methodological sensibility of not too hastily putting things ‘right’ but acknowledging that other worlds are possible. This means that caring cuts invites thinking and researching more-than-digital relations anew.

This paper takes on the rise and implications of platforms as a repertoire for knowing, doing, and relating the intensities of pandemic restrictions on teaching and schoolwork. Building on critical work on platformisation in education, the paper investigates what work platforms do and how in the unpredictable everyday of pedagogical encounters. To do so, the paper explores a methodological potential with platforms’ capabilities to pull some things together while supressing others. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with teachers and students in upper secondary education in Sweden in 2021, everyday platform practices are analysed such as dealing with assignments, requests to ‘connect online’, strategies with web cameras, and coping with repetitive notifications. Working with actor-network theory and sensibilities towards tensions of discomforts, resistance, trust and intimacy, the paper unfolds acknowledgements of digital platforms as relationally enacted and more complex objects than shaping pedagogical encounters from the outside or prior to their practices. Instead, capabilities emerge as mutually rendered. The analysis shows that platforming well-bounded domains for clearer and more flexible teaching and schoolwork incoherently make educational practices less so. At the same time, the platform becomes weak and unreasonable. Incoherence and unpredictability stress critical openings to surprise and curiosity of pedagogical encounters.