Over recent decades, and especially since the turn of the millennium, a very specific European rationality has emerged with respect to educational governance (Lawn & Grek, 2012). One of the prime drivers behind this rationality was the Lisbon Strategy that launched in March 2000, which sought to turn Europe into ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’ (European Parliament, 2000). Overall, the Lisbon Strategy propagated the introduction of market principles, such as competition, to the educational sector, as well as fostering demands for ‘mobility, adaptability and permanent (self-) improvement in the name of quality and excellence’ (Hodgson, 2013, p. 193). Since then, and as part of its Europe 2020 strategy, the European Commission’s (EC) overall goals of competitiveness and dynamism have been expanded and are becoming increasingly directed at exploiting the affordance of digital technologies. This occurs on at least two levels: first, in providing policy documents and visions to the educational sector; and second, by increasingly developing digital tools itself (Decuypere & Simons, 2020). 

In this contribution, we focus on one such digital tool: eTwinning. eTwinning is one of the longest-standing European digital tools; having debuted in 2005, the digital platform is allegedly the largest network of teachers in the history of education (Kearney & Gras-Velázquez, 2015). eTwinning is funded by the EC under the popular Erasmus+ program, and the platform is currently used by over 200,000 schools and 750,000 teachers. eTwinning’s prime function is to allow teachers and schools to ‘communicate, collaborate, develop projects, share and, in short, feel and be part of the most exciting learning community in Europe’ (eTwinning, 2020a). The platform’s prime function is to digitally ‘twin’ schools all over European into distinct educational projects. Next to fostering collaboration, eTwinning equally functions as an inspirational repository where teachers can freely consult ‘ready-made project kits’ and ‘best-practice examples’ (eTwinning, 2020b). Thus, the platform is designed as a tool to bridge geographical distances and cross boundaries for educational actors all over Europe and beyond. Since 2014, under the name eTwinning-plus, the platform allows schools in one of Europe’s neighbouring countries (e.g., Armenia, Lebanon, Tunisia) to ‘twin’ with European schools (EU Neighbours, 2020). 

As a digital platform, eTwinning explicitly relates to both the transnational European community and the nation state. More particularly, it is the aim of this contribution to disentangle how the platform actively constructs ‘Europe’ and the ‘nation state’ as spatial and temporal forms. The point of departure is that eTwinning is not a neutral tool that merely conveys or transmits information but is rather an active device that performs specific operations (Decuypere, 2019; Lewis, 2020b). In particular, we query how both ‘Europe’ and ‘the nation’ are not something geographically fixed and bounded (i.e., a topography), but are rather constantly susceptible to processes of space and time making (Grommé & Ruppert, 2019). Inspired by the theoretical framework of social topology, which conceives of geographies as figures which are implicated with mutabilities, (de/re-)formations, and the construction of specific times and spaces (Lury et al., 2012; Thompson & Cook, 2015), and based on the argument that there are various ways in which Europe and nation states are being made to exist (Decuypere & Simons, 2020; Lewis, 2020a), this paper will identify those moments, places and processes where the platform seeks to enact particular forms of Europe, the nation-state and education. To that effect, our specific research question is not what is Europe, but rather where and when is Europe to be found on this platform, and what does that say about education and its envisaged users? 

Our topological genealogy analysis is based on recent methodological developments in the broader field of Science and Technology Studies and, more particularly, the field of ‘platform studies’, which point to the necessity of approaching digital education platforms as active devices (van Dijk et al., 2018). Our methodology involves, first, an analysis of how eTwinning is ecologically embedded within a variety of other European initiatives (e.g., Erasmus+; School Education Gateway) and specific policies (e.g., Digital Education Action Plan). Secondly, in order to disentangle where (and when) Europe is to be found on the platform, we perform a diagrammatic analysis to focus on how eTwinning acts as a ‘drawing and framing machine’; that is, how it both visually and discursively shapes specific versions of what Europe and the nation-states are, and how they should be conceived (Bratton, 2015; Decuypere, 2019). This implies that, in order to analyze where and when Europe and its nations are constructed as a spatiotemporal form, one needs to investigate where, and when, Europe is actually present on the platform (e.g., by reference to the EU logo, pictures of Europe, etc.). Third, our methodological approach explores the various ways the platform seeks to enact specific sorts of users (e.g., European users vs. users in neighboring countries – ibid.). Fourth, and as the sum of the previous three dimensions, our methodological framework considers the specific types of spaces and times that are being imagined and actively constructed by the platform.

This analysis presents the various ways in which eTwinning’s construction of Europe is not a fixed geographical territory, but rather one that is constantly (re)shaping in form. First, we argue that the boundaries of who and what is in/excluded in Europe are characterized by a significant amount of fluidity on the platform. For instance, the eTwinning-plus platform explicitly seeks to create a Europe whose boundaries do not coincide with ‘traditional’ European topographies. Second, we argue that this fluidity stands in distinct contrast with explicit processes of crystallization and stabilization, where ‘European education’ is increasingly defined and fixed by the use of digital certificates, tools and badges (cf. Decuypere & Simons, 2020). As such, the eTwinning platform is characterized by both fluid and stabilizing forms of spatialization and temporalization, making the question where and what is Europe increasingly complicated and in need of empirical analysis. More precisely, we will argue that European education comes into being ‘at a distance’, occurring between Europe as a topographical entity and, at the same time, the various topological data pointers, profiles, models and active propositions that are deployed on the platform (cf. Goriunova, 2019). Third, we argue that these spaces and times, whilst being highly specific, are nonetheless characterized by an increasing amount of connections with spaces and times invoked through/on other platforms. A central finding of this study is that it is impossible to approach eTwinning, as an educational platform, in and of itself; that is, the distinctiveness of eTwinning lies in its connectedness with other platforms, both European as well as proprietary (cf. Srnicek, 2017). We conclude by arguing that eTwinning, as a platform of platforms (i.e., an aggregator of other platforms, devices and content), eTwinning is emblematic for the ongoing ‘becoming topological’ of European education (cf. Lury et al., 2012).

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