New shadow professionals and infrastructures around the datafied school: Topological thinking as an analytical device

Drawing upon the growing datafication of contemporary schooling, our purpose in this article is to use topological thinking as an analytical device to better understand the professionals and practices within emergent data infrastructures. We address this by attending to an influential national (and subnational) data infrastructure of school monitoring in the United States, managed by the federal Department of Education, known as EDFacts. Informed by policy documents relating to EDFacts, as well as by various related software platforms and portals, we explore the whom and how of datafication, and expose the increasing presence and influence of otherwise ‘hidden’ technology mediators, or ‘shadow professionals’. In particular, we argue that the increasing dependency of EDFacts on data has necessitated the introduction of new professional roles associated with optimising the flow of data, and thus stabilising and normalising the topological space of the infrastructure. We conclude by suggesting that EDFacts encourages teaching professionals and shadow professionals alike to engage in acts of data submission; that is, providing data to EDFacts and, at the same time, positioning themselves as wholly responsive to the infrastructure and its datafied renderings of schooling.

(Dis)orientation and spatial sense: Topological thinking in the middle grades

In this paper, we focus on topological approaches to space and we argue that experiences with topology allow middle school students to develop a more robust understanding of orientation and dimension. We frame our argument in terms of the phenomenological literature on perception and corporeal space. We discuss findings from a quasi-experimental study engaging 9 grades 5-8 students (10-13 years old) in a 6-week series of school-based workshops focused on knot theory. We discuss video data that shows how students engage with the intrinsic disorientation of mathematical knots through the use of gesture and movement.(Des)orientación y sentido espacial: pensamiento topológico en los grados intermediosEn este trabajo, nos centramos en enfoques topológicos del espacio y sostenemos que las experiencias con topología permiten a los estudiantes de secundaria desarrollar una comprensión más sólida de la orientación y de la dimensión. Enmarcamos nuestro argumento en términos de la literatura fenomenológica de la percepción y el espacio corpóreo. Discutimos los hallazgos de un estudio cuasi-experimental con 9 estudiantes de quinto a octavo curso (10 a 13 años) que participaron en talleres sobre la teoría de nudos durante 6 semanas. Discutimos los datos de vídeo que muestran cómo los estudiantes se involucran con la desorientación intrínseca de los nudos matemáticos mediante el uso del gesto y movimiento.Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10481/33232

Mediation and digital intensities: Topology, psychology and social media

Social media are said to offer seemingly endless ways of connecting with people in a variety of online spaces. The mediated form that such communication takes has re-opened many theoretical debates regarding the status of relationships that are organized and managed online. In this article we seek to explore these issues through the lens of topological thinking, and particularly through the work of Kurt Lewin (1890–1947). Lewin’s topological psychology has recently featured in the social sciences as a way of overcoming some of the, frankly unhelpful, dualistic thinking that features commonly in psychology (e.g. subject–object, mind–body, individual–social). Topological thought focuses on the spatial distribution of psychological experience, and therefore offers a social perspective not reliant on traditional notions of internalized psychological states and traits. The kind of spatiality at work though is not one that relies on Euclidean fixity, but one that draws out notions of stretching, moulding, bending and flexing. Space is seen not as a fixed property, but rather the form that psychological activity takes through connections and relations with others. In this article we seek to explore the potential value in characterizing social media activity topologically. This involves analysing people’s experiences with social media, and how topological concerns of boundaries, connections and thresholds work (or not) in and through social media. Furthermore, the focus is not only on extensive properties of social media, but rather on how intensive processes are actualized and distributed in and through mediation.

Geography, space and the re-emergence of topological thinking

‘Topological twists’ is one part of John Allen’s long project where he has profoundly examined the spatialities of (political) power and has considerably expanded our horizons. This commentary will reflect four themes related to his article ( Allen, 2011 ). Since there are currently several challenging views on the changing forms of power, I will first briefly compare his ideas of power with that of others. Second, I will scrutinize the re-emergence of topological thinking in social sciences and geography – ‘re-emergence’ because this idea has long roots. I will then comment on current ideas and related ‘geometric’ vocabularies, and finally discuss the issue of generalization versus context in the social sciences.