Digitalization of Russian Education: Changing Actors and Spaces of Governance

Abstract

This chapter discusses the operation of digital education in relation to the changing governance of education in Russia. It examines how digitalization changes the character of traditional actors and enables new actors and actor assemblages to enter the scene of education governance and provision. It then looks at how datafication extends spaces of governance in both a topographical and a topological manner. Topographically, some practices of datafication follow established administrative structures enabling tighter vertical control over regions and education institutions by the federal authorities. But datafication also generates spaces that overcome topographical distance through relationality and connectedness. These manifest, first, in the possibilities of intimate governance reaching into individual subjectivities and, second, intensifying proximities to the global level of education governance bypassing the national authority.