Navigating datascapes: mapping testing practices within and across national and global contexts

Interrogating historical and spatial flows, in relation to specific testing technologies, we draw upon Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ and Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), revealing how testing systems, conceptualised as actor-networks, rearticulate colonial legacies of inequality exacerbated by new and emerging technologies. ANT helps us trace social and relational interactions occurring in various national and global data interconnections, and make sense of incessant transformations in education datascapes. Mapping actor-networks, and translations help name and navigate neoliberal forces acting through colonial legacies through emerging educational datascapes. We interrogate how educational technologies associated with standardized testing in northern and southern contexts exacerbate structural inequalities. We describe how such technologies are actants and reflective of co-existing historical and temporal influences, and global cultural and spatial flows, allowing us to map an emerging education datascape. We exemplify multiple ways in which educational technologies are manifested in England, Singapore, Bangladesh and Australia.

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