The School Device: Experiences and Territorialities

Abstract

The school device, as a line of governmentality, disputes the body of young students through the construction of the so-called model student: quiet, attentive, and obedient. Young students in turn dispute their own bodies to the device through de-territorializations and territorializations that produce interstitial spaces created by sociality, placing the socialization process under tension. In the relationship for the control of territories, the cyberspace or digital territory promotes areas of conflict where young students have certain kinds of expertise opposed to pedagogical processes, while these find the relationship uncomfortable. Faced with the COVID-19 contingency, the school device had to colonize that territory when schools had to be shut down. Thus, we seek to answer the question of how, by territorializing screens, the school device’s strategy has restricted the relationships of sociality and the production of interstices.