Notions of agency have become increasingly foregrounded in education technology literature (Charteris & Smardon, 2018). Contrary to the rather dominant instrumentalist view on material objects in educational settings, grounded in the humanist approach, post-human social theory calls for a re-positioning of the nature of the human subject and its relation to material objects. As an onto-epistemological stance, pos-thumanist perspectives decenter the human subject and recognize the agency of nonhuman elements (Braidotti, 2013). This raises critical questions related to conventional research methodology and knowledge creation, not least within the field of education. The aim with this presentation is to consider the methodological problem of ‘operationalizing’ agen-cy in a consistent way when drawing on qualitative data within a posthumanist framework, and its possible implications for conducting comparative classroom research. Generally, instead of reducing data to an objective and stable “real”, i.e. finding representations of events taking place in the class-room, pos-thuman theorizing emphasizes the need for a “contextualized study of how digital devices and data ‘perform’ sociality, rather than about how they simply represent it” (Bayne, 2016: 92). This implies that data and data analysis cannot be interpreted free of context, circumstances, and theory (Jackson, 2013; Jackson & Mazzei, 2013). Hence, ‘coding’ and ‘categorizing’ data becomes compli-cated and the problem of ‘operationalizing’ agency is evident. As a departure point, I will illustrate an empirical study under work, which explores technological agency in digitalized lower secondary classrooms in Finland and Sweden. Theoretically, a posthu-manist approach is applied, evoking the sociomateriality and entangledness (Barad, 2003; Pickering, 1993) of contemporary Nordic classrooms. The study is part of the Connected Classrooms Nordic (CCN) –project within the research centre Quality in Nordic Teaching. CCN is a three-year longitudinal video-ethnographic study aiming to follow the same lower secondary classrooms in three cycles in all Nordic countries. In this study, data from the first cycle from Finland and Sweden is used, consisting of video-recorded lessons (n=22) in three school subjects (Language Arts, Mathe-matics, Social Science/History). Inasmuch as the students and teachers can act agentically, the study points that also technological tools and artifacts powerfully co-constitute agencies through human and material entanglements in the classroom. This provides a more nuanced understanding of to-day’s technology usage and how agency is co-produced by different participants in the teaching.

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