This presentation focuses on the role of digitalisation, education and its mutual entanglement in several versions of National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRPs), as responses to the NextGenerationEU Plan (Landri, 2018). NRPs are normative documents that forecast and plan the future states of European societies. But in their articulations around various desires concerning the future, they significantly shape the present (Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020). For interrogating comparatively the imaginaries of the future of education it projects and the politics of digitalisation that underpins it, we will use the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Sociotechnical imaginary, as collectively held and performed visions, is an analytical tool to capture the relationship between normativity of imagination and materiality of networks (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, p. 19). It enables us to approach NRPs as materialisations of such imaginaries containing digital and educational desires (Popkewitz, 2020, 2023). NRPs are well suited for comparative scrutiny to seek the differences and shared patterns of linking ideas about education and digitalisation, the discourses articulated thereby and the potential they afford to redraw existing boundaries (defining time, space, content and relations) in the education field (Bernstein, 2000; Decuypere & Simons, 2020). Methodologically, we read these artefacts from a social topology perspective, inverting our analytical gaze from the European Recovery Plan to the creations that it has induced (Decuypere & Lewis, 2023). We thus focus on how time (present-future relationships) and space (scale and boundaries of digitalisation) are involved in the formation of the social order imagined, figured and fixed. We pay special attention to spatial imaginaries of the scale, extension and intension of education and digitalisation that bypass administrative givens and that so far escaped the focus of critical scrutiny of spatial and temporal relations. The dataset consists of the Czech, Greek and Italian NRPs. In these textual or hypertexted documents and attached materials (reports, press releases, etc) we will go in depth regarding the content, form, and structure of each NRP document to analyse the mutual positions and relations between education and digitalisation in the recovery of each country, and the contexts of where the “recovery” of and through education takes place. This paper will show how the desired role of education and digitalisation is shaped not only by local national traditions and imaginaries about themselves, but also by the need to “respond” to the common donor (the EC).

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