This presentation introduces an exploratory study focused on the actors involved in the recovery of Europe through education, specifically those evoked by NextGenerationEU. Previous literature has shown interest in conceptualizing "recovery spaces" as spaces where actors - their resources, relationships, and visions - are central to understanding governance arrangements in post-disaster and crisis moments or to construct new visions for building back better (Borie & Fraser, 2023). Similarly, prior data indicated the reconfiguration of power relations in the making of national RRFs, for example, among financial and economic actors, institutional social affairs actors, EU civil servants, EU civil society organizations, member States, and the European Parliament (Vanhercke & Verdun, 2022). Drawing on the network ethnography (Rowe, 2024) we take as its empirical object the National Recovery Plans of Portugal and Slovakia concerning the sections related to the digitization of education. In these countries’ plans, we focus on the reconfiguration of actor relations through discursive and intertextual references and relations that produce actors of recovery in Europe through education. More precisely, we aim to describe and understand who these actors of recovery are, how they emerged, how they received their agential positions, and what kind of actions are made possible. Based on networked governance perspective (Ball & Junemann, 2012) we will map the actors invoked in two national contexts undergoing significant educational reforms incentivised also by NGEU to describe: which social worlds they belong to (political-administrative elite, government agencies, businesses, academia, curricular reformists); what are the reasons for their invocation (expert knowledge or brokerage, position, or role …) and what roles are expected to be performed (authors, receivers, implementers); what patterns of relationship between the actors can be observed, and what possibilities for change are imagined they could produce? The data may contribute to illustrating how, in the European space and through the creation and implementation of NRPs, new relationships - collaboration, cooperation, partnership, but also competition - between governments and the private sector have strengthened (Cone et al., 2022; Grek and Landri, 2021). Additionally, we aim to discuss how the pursuit of "building back better" has driven the adoption at national scales of the digitization of education, where Ed-tech takes a central role - outside educational systems - in designing and delivering a digital future (Morris et al., 2022).

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