Seeing red? The agency of computer software in the production and management of students’ school absences

Abstract

An increasing number of Swedish municipalities use digital software to manage the registration of students’ school absences. The software is regarded as a problem-solving tool to make registration more efficient, but its effects on the educational setting have been largely neglected. Focusing on an event with two students from a class of 11-year-olds, the aim of the paper is to explore schools’ common uses of computer software for registering absence in order to understand how materialities – like the software – are entangled with the production of school absence. In the paper, the Deleuzio–Guattarian concept of the assemblage is put to work within a feminist relational materialist framework. This enables an understanding of the complexity of school absence, where materialities of the educational setting are theorized as entangled with social and gendered discursive components.

Keywords:

• school absence
• computer software
• feminist relational materialism
• assemblage
• gender
• Deleuze and Guattari

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the editors and authors of this special issue for productive comments on earlier versions of the paper as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive remarks. I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss the paper with Eva Reimers, Ann-Marie Markström, and Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, as well as Magnus Dahlstedt and Anna Bylund. Finally, I wish to thank Constance Ellwood for a rigorous proofreading.

Notes

1. Similar systems are used in Finland as well.