The topic of the proposed symposium is the recovery of Europe through education and its digitalization in several CEE and SE countries. The empirical case is the European Commission’s NextGenerationEU plan (NGEU) in the European countries. From 2020 onwards, the European Union intends to rebuild Europe as a political and social region, including national economies, by generous funding for mobilising “all resources available to help member states coordinate their national responses” to Covid and other challenges, to make Europe more digital, greener and more resilient. This broad-scale initiative will influence a decisive amount of people since it aims at the recovery of the “whole of European society”.

From a historical view, a planned better future for Europe is not a new idea. From postwar “reconstruction” of Europe, to post 1989 “transformation” of Europe (or other, especially post-socialist countries into Europe), the desired future always combined technological solutionism (technocracy) and humanistic values (democracy).

Now, the drive for the “recovery” of Europe and a “new generation” stems from social and economic damages caused by COVID-19 and the new energy crises caused by the Russian war in Ukraine. However, the main means proposed are digitalization interlinked with education, which has a longer tradition  (Landri, 2018). Thus, both digitalization of education and education for digitalization is needed for the possibility of recovering our society. Such a complex claim interlinking education with digitalization requires various actors to implement. It combines technical and financial investment into and development of digital and other infrastructures with the normative presupposition about human agency, i.e. citizens, national governments, and the civil sector enthusiastically implement the recovery of and through education. Moreover, since these are the member-state governments that are responsible for the management of these funds, formally visible actors of recovery through the digitalisation of education are actors from these governmental bodies – but in a topological view, other actors are attracted by or reach to NGEU as well. The administrative maps of each country cannot be a decisive optic.

Digitalisation will produce various kinds of people (Hacking, 2002; Popkewitz et al., 2016), the question is what and who will be included and who not – for this is needed to scrutinise new categories of “proper actors” (experts, etc.) and new patterns of achieving agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Therefore, the concrete actors cannot be constructed as comparative objects in advance, since they are research questions

This symposium does not ask whether the current planned future is the best form for new content, but what is the meaning of recovery this time, how it is changing in the course of recent events, and what does it mean for its actors, receivers, implementers, and how these kinds of people are established. We will bring new insight into three questions posed by this ambiguous planned and elusive, rational and moral, post-material and financially material initiative:

1) How to approach Europe as an agential region for education and how to study it form a comparative perspective 2) What are the discursive topos of education and digitalization as the present imaginary of the future 3) Actors of recovery - who are those men of recovery? How did they emerge? How did they receive their agential positions, and what kind of people and kinds of action are made possible?

This project would address these issues through Central, Eastern, and South European countries case selection.

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What Is Agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023. https://doi.org/10.1086/231294 Hacking, I. (2002). Historical Ontology (2nd 2004). Harvard University Press. Landri, P. (2018). Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and Europeanization of Education. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Popkewitz, T. S., Diaz, J., & Kirchgasler, C. (2016). Curriculum Studies and Historicizing the Present: The Political and Impracticality of Practical Knowledge. Knowledge Cultures, 4(2), 11–18.