Picturing technological change: the materiality of information infrastructures in public education

Abstract

Information technologies are often depicted as possessing the potential to correct social inequalities by democratising information access and economic opportunity. This view of technology, however, tends to overemphasise virtual spaces to the neglect of the material and social conditions of technological infrastructures. The goal of this article is to explore visually the messy, situated materialities of information infrastructures in public schools – in places that have become both sites and symbols of economic inequality in the United States and elsewhere. Through photographic images, the contradictions of technological promises and changes are interrogated with attention to the lives of individuals moving through physical and virtual spaces – spaces that are always political and embodied.

Keywords:

• information technology
• infrastructure
• materiality
• public education
• space
• photography

Acknowledgments

I thank my informants in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for generously including me in their lives and allowing me to shadow them and take photographs during their daily work activities. I also thank the students of LAUSD for providing me with sketches of their imagined future learning spaces. The reprinted map of the Sachsenhausen camp appears courtesy of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Museum, Oranienburg, Germany.

Notes

1. By ‘social compensation’, I am referring to the status privilege – or symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) – afforded to TAs working in the school’s computer lab. For instance, when they supervise other students in the computer lab or when they run instructional classes on software applications, they gain momentary control over fellow students and status over less knowledgeable teachers.