In the latest decades, educational systems are being interested by multiple changes that are modifying the spaces and the times of education. Loci and the time-frames of education practice are under the pressure of an epidemic of global, regional and national reforms aimed at transforming the traditional configuration of the space-times of education, made of topologies of education partially independent from the socio and economic dynamics. It is then increasingly difficult to describe the space-times of education as enclosed, embedded, or bounded by such state-nations, societies, regions, schools, classrooms, etc., and to defend these boundaries as ‘proper ontological regions’ (Massa, 1991)). We are witnessing, in particular, repeated attempts at reshaping the material and the social arrangement of the configuration of the schooling as a particular invention, and form of gathering characterized by suspension, profanation and forms of attention. At the moment, it is not sufficiently clear where the projects of change are intended to tame, or neutralize this ‘form of gathering,' or to transform the space-times of education to resume the possibilities of the morphology of the school as a mode of organizing  (Masschelein & Simons 2015). A functionalistic logic of the space-times of education that related them to the socioeconomic needs appears to take the lead, and the institutional boundaries defending the configuration of the schooling as a space-times of suspension of the natural and unequal order are slowly eroded by the epidemic of the reforms. Here, the ‘good intentions' of changing the space-times of education to upgrade this institution to the changing conditions of the contemporary societies are mixed with the logic of the advanced capitalism that tends to neutralize the scholastic form and to domesticate into its philosophy of governmentality. 

To improve our understanding of these transformations, and keep a critical edge, I will argue that we need to develop forms of investigation able to display the unintended consequences of the dominant dispositifs, the multiple enactments of the modifications of the space-times of education, and the related effects. A promising area of reflection and empirical research in that sense is being developed in the interference among sociomaterial approaches and education studies (ANT, STS, Feminist Studies) (Fenwick & Edwards 2010; Fenwick et al. 2011; Fenwick & Landri 2012). This paper is interested in comprehending how this interference may expand the sociology of education. It will be argued that the sociomaterial turn represents an invitation for the sociology of education to move beyond itself.

The paper will offer a review of the sociomaterial studies of education, and broadly of the new materialism (Coole & Frost, 2010) . Sociomaterial studies have not a long history. While they have some antecedents in the classics of education studies, they slowly emerged in the latest two decades through the interference among science and technology studies (STS) and the studies of education. STS is a broad area of scholarship with diverse orientations, and theoretical approaches focused on technoscience, i.e. on knowledge production, and circulation in scientific and technological circuits, and on the interplays between science, technologies, and society. It is an interdisciplinary area (anthropology, sociology, informatics, etc.) that contributed to the detailed description of knowledge-in-the-making, and brought to the forefront the materiality of the human and nonhuman associations. It shifted the investigation from the epistemology of the scientific disciplines, and from the classic sociology of science to the inquiry of science as a practice, ending to rethinking the ‘social,' and focusing attention of the sites of production of science and knowledge. The ‘planetspeak’ discourse of knowledge society accelerated the interests of many researchers towards STS: large investments in knowledge and innovation were emerging, yet it was becoming even clearer the singularity of knowledge as the economic resource and the difficulties of making it a lever for wealth production. Actor Network Theory (ANT) and After ANT were key perspectives here since they provided basic vocabularies that spreaded quickly in many fields of investigation. Later other theoretical orientations were imported, from feminist ANT, and also other sensibilities were also considered and imported, by supporting a renovation of social science vocabularies. The interference among STS and education studies reflected in a notable set of research projects and publications in authored and edited books, special issues in international and national journals (a provisional list should include for example Nespor 2002; Fenwick & Edwards 2010; Fenwick et al. 2011; Fenwick & Landri 2012; Sørensen 2009; Gorur 2012; Landri & Neumann 2014; Williamson 2016; Gorur 2016). It attracted the interests of many scholars coming from many professional and scientific backgrounds and contributing the enrich their vocabularies. The interference is a challenge to consolidate conceptualizations.

The paper is largely experimental, and intends to describe a possible research agenda for the sociology of education. Notably, it draws on the attempt to develop a mobile sociology of education(Paolo Landri, 2018), and at the same time to give some directions to the empirical work. The idea is to contrast the foci of the dominant regimes of truth in educational research and the related systems of accountability with the research interests of the sociomaterial studies. The new materialism expands the critical capacities of sociology of education, by sharping its sensibility to: a) the digital transformation b) the complex entanglements of natures-cultures c) the contemporary mobilities and d) the fluidity of gender.

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