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

Abstract

Linnea Bodén is a Ph.D. student of Educational practice at the Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Linköping University. Her research focuses on school absenteeism and truancy and draws on a feminist relational materialist and posthumanist perspective, with a special interest in technical tools for the registration and control of absence. 2Seeing red? The agency of computer software in the production and management of students' school absences 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 eleven-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.

The Presence of School Absenteeism

“…As I have shown elsewhere (Bodén, 2013b), materialities like computer software are part of producing school absence. In this article, however, the focus is on the material-discursive intraactions taking place in the process of registration and how to account for this-not only in the analysis but also methodologically.…”

“…Each field on the screen represented 1 day and each used a specific color to indicate whether the student had been present or absent that day. A green field showed that the student had been present the whole day, a yellow field that the student was absent but that the absence was valid and that the parents had reported it beforehand, and a red field that the student had been absent and the absence was invalid (see also Bodén, 2013b). When opening the page, Malin said, This is someone who is absent so much that I will call the parents today, I think.…”

Sustainability for Whom? : The Politics of Imagining Environmental Change in Education

“…Theoretically, these posthumanities studies are inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Pedersen 2013;Mazzei 2013;Bodén 2013;Johansson 2014) as well as Karen Barad (Rosiek 2013;Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010) and approaches from science and technology studies in general and actor-network theory in particular (Fenwick and Landri 2012;Ceulemans, Simons, and Struyf 2012). Methodologically, these studies use ethnographic fieldwork (Pedersen 2013;Bodén 2013) as well as interviews (Mazzei 2013;Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010). A common denominator is the emphasis on decentering the individual human subject and attending to the agency of the material and the nonhuman world.…”

Going with the affective flows of digital school absence text messages

“…The text messages could thus be described as engaged in affective flows as they stir things up, become 'stirrers', and productive of both emotions and material practices related to school absenteeism. And how this is enacted and what will be produced is always connected to the various entanglements within the assemblage (Bodén 2013).…”

“…The messages are often digitally automated, sent directly from software like Dexter, into which teachers before, during, or after each lesson digitally register the students' absences and presences. These kinds of software and the messages produced have been described as problem-solving tools to make the management of absences more efficient (Bodén 2013;, see also Bhalla et al 2013;Gavade et al 2015;Isomursu et al 2011;Lodha et al 2015;More and Nayak 2013).…”