Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school

Finn, M.

Abstract

In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’.

Citation

Finn, M. (2016). Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school. Cultural Geographies, 23(1), 29-49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015575473

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 13, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Mar 23, 2015
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Jul 13, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 15, 2015
• Journal: cultural geographies
• Print ISSN: 1474-4740
• Electronic ISSN: 1477-0881
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 29-49
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015575473
• Keywords: Affect, Atmospheres, Data, Education, Futurity, Progress, Schools
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1405273