Public education has increasingly become a domain for nations and supranational entities to push for digitalization, which is often accompanied with promissory visions aiming at improvements in terms of e.g. ensuring more equitable schooling through digital technologies and infrastructures (European Commisson 2020). However, digitalization also potentially reconfigures 'socio-digital inequalities' (Helsper 2021) in schools, which are "systematic differences between individuals from different backgrounds in the opportunities and abilities to translate digital engagement into benefits and avoid the harm that might result from engagement with ICTs". Following this line of argument, socio-digital inequalities play out and are reconfigured depending on the context as digital infrastructures, equipment, curricula, teaching/learning strategies and competences found in practice vary greatly among and within nations. This study aims to provide situated and local accounts of the unfolding of socio-digital inequalities in practice in two economically and technologically strongly positioned nations, Sweden and Germany. It therefore contributes to current discussion points in critical educational technology research, where the roles of educational platforms, algorithms, infrastructuring or datafication practices in relation to the re/production of inequality are increasingly questioned.

Sweden and Germany both position themselves as technological and digital 'pioneers' in the European community of nations and consider digitalization as positive and a way to address inequalities (Ferrante et al. 2023 under review). However, how that might manifest in local practices differs, as the schooling landscapes vary greatly: In Sweden school digitalisation has unfolded as part of a marketization that includes free school choice and for-profit schools funded by the state that run alongside existing municipally run schools (Svallfors & Tyllström 2019). Educational technologies, platforms and software are generally procured but provided by commercial actors, similar to (data) infrastructures. Overall, this has led to increasing concerns about segregation and inequality despite generally well-resourced schools (Ljungqvist & Sonesson 2021). In Germany on the other hand, digitalization has traditionally been focused on privacy concerns and an orientation to open-source solutions, that are built rather than bought (Macgilchrist 2019). Even after German schools started inviting more commercial actors and their digital products in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the digitalization of schooling remains a slow procedure because of underfunding and the federal organization of the education system (Cone et al. 2021). Structurally, Germany has been criticised as having the most unequal education system in Europe, due to its tripartite school system that can block social mobility. Therefore, Sweden and Germany are rich contexts for this study to unpack the local and nuanced unfolding of socio-digital inequalities in practice.

However, inequalities are difficult to grasp, and as previous research has highlighted, they are difficult to approach ethnographically (Emmerich und Hormel 2017). Therefore, socio-digital inequalities in this study are approached through Marion Fourcade's account of different 'classificatory judgements' (Fourcade 2016) which serves as guiding lens. According to Fourcade, classification processes have different qualities and can be understood as either cardinal, nominal or ordinal classifications. While cardinal classifications refer to the numeral value of things (and are of lesser importance in this study), nominal classifications aim at the essence of things in a horizontal distinction and ordinal classifications refer to the value of things in a vertical, hierarchical distinction. With the help of this conceptual framing, everyday school practices could be observed and analysed in ethnographic field research, especially with regard to which 'differences' (in the sense of nominalisation) they produce between actors and which 'inequalities' (in the sense of ordinalization) result from them. 

Accordingly, this paper asks firstly how digital technology is encountered in Swedish and German school practice and secondly how such practices relate to re/productions of socio-digital inequalities.

The paper is based on ethnographic research stays in schools in a municipality/ federal state in Sweden and Germany. The schools were selected according to the above-mentioned structural conditions of the respective education systems in order to reflect the greatest possible diversity of prerequisites and conditions with regard to e.g. digital infrastructure or socio-economic background of students. Data, in the form of observations, field notes, informal and semi-structured interviews were generated over the course of nine months, resulting in a total of 122 observed lessons and a total of 25interviews with teachers, headmasters, school social workers, IT administrators, municipal IT developers and students. These varied approaches helped to capture diverse perspectives on the topic of digital education and inequality and to contextualise the classroom observations. Furthermore, the concept of ‘rich points’ was used to navigate the ethnographic field. Michael Agar describes rich points as "signal[s] of a difference between what you know and what you need to learn to understand and explain what just happened" (Agar 2006, 64). Accordingly, they are moments of surprise, irritation or fascination during ethnographic research that cannot be explained at first and for this very reason were understood and employed as analytical access points to the generated data.

In the paper, we provide access points into local and nuanced re/configurations of socio-digital inequalities in technologically and economically well positioned countries. By providing 'scenes' (Emerson, Fretz, und Shaw 2011) from the ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden and Germany along thick descriptions, the study provides insight into the ways in which socio-digital inequalities are re/produced in everyday school practices through classificatory judgements and ordinalization, further highlighting how these local practices are related to the diversity of infrastructures, actors and processes found in the field. The findings contest the overall assumption of digital technology being a magic bullet for socio-digital inequalities by contrasting the two national contexts on the one hand, but also aim at contrasting the cases within the national contexts, thus drawing a complex picture of the diversity of European digital educational practices and their interconnectedness with re/producing social-digital inequality.

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