Feeling infrastructures: How digital technology matters atmospherically for schools

Infrastructure and affect in school education

In recent years, critical education research has highlighted how digital technologies and their corporate providers generate emotions, thoughts, and desires, when they are engaged with (Brunila et al., 2024; Bucher, 2017). Central to such analyses is the concept of ‘affect’, which indicates how technologies shape a person’s capacity to act, think, and feel in educational practice (Dernikos et al., 2020). When affect is addressed in relation to education technology, it often tends to be conceptualized as that which is located in the relation and (micro-)interaction between an interface of a digital infrastructure, for example a platform’s dashboard with data visualizations, and an individual such as a teacher or principal (Mikhaylova and Pettersson, 2024). Here, affect reveals how data visualizations interrelate with individual subjectivities and desires and how, in turn, infrastructures contribute to the form of pedagogical practice (e.g. the practice of grading that is shaped through colour-coded representation of students’ performance informing teachers’ practice; Ratner, 2024). These concrete day-to-day experiences of infrastructures in schools have been increasingly explored and have shown how infrastructures are not only technical. Rather, they also operate at the level of emotion and desire, and infrastructures’ role in education therefore has to be partly understood in how they provoke – or affect – certain feelings and capacities for action for individual people in everyday interactions (Cone, 2024; Dernikos et al., 2020; Sellar, 2015a; Zembylas, 2022). Focusing on affect has thus been crucial in understanding how and why infrastructures are engaged with by people and further materialize in individual practices (Sellar, 2015a).

Building upon this research, in this article we ask whether the interrelation between infrastructure and affect can also be perceived in how contemporary digital infrastructures, and the particular conditions of possibility they provide, produce affects that matter to a school organizationally (e.g. administrative structures, organizational practices and preferences, collective beliefs); that is, without people directly interacting with the user interfaces of infrastructures (Beyes et al., 2022; Ratner and Plotnikof, 2022; Sellar, 2020). By asking this question, this article explores how the interrelation of affect and infrastructure provides organizational conditions for the everyday life of a school – something we propose, drawing on Anderson (2009), can be understood as ‘atmosphere’. This is of increasing importance due to the changing infrastructural conditions of governance characteristic of contemporary European school education (Williamson et al., 2024). Central here is the growth of a digital economy where commercial providers offer digital services and products for which schools need to pay subscriptions for continuous access to resources such as lesson preparations and administrative procedures (Komljenovic et al., 2023). Education technology providers have hereby progressively shifted from offering stand-alone products to expansive infrastructural, cloud-based ecosystems regularly controlled by global corporations such as Google and Amazon, entrenching schools within the logic of private providers (Kerssens et al., 2024; Williamson et al., 2022). These infrastructures engender lock-in effects, making it challenging for schools to disengage due to legal constraints, economic barriers or practical dependencies arising from deep technical integration (Komljenovic et al., 2024). In general, a political-economic climate has emerged where digital infrastructures and their controlled digital architectures, to which schools become socially and technically wired, mediate and condition the possibilities of schools and educational decision-making processes (Gulson and Sellar, 2019; Williamson, 2021).

Researching these shifting infrastructural conditions in schools, we further push the notion of affect in relation to infrastructure to understand how contemporary infrastructures interrelate with affect as an organizational condition of a school, and how affect therefore itself becomes infrastructural (cf. Jørgensen, 2019). As such, our article can be situated in-between broader infrastructural conditions of possibility sketched above and the individual micro-interactions they elicit, exploring how affect and infrastructure interrelate on the level of the school, for which we advance the concept of atmosphere (Anderson, 2009; Decuypere and Perrotta, Forthcoming). Atmosphere diverts attention away from individual affections generated through an infrastructure at the interface, towards an understanding of the collective affective forces generated by infrastructural conditions at the organizational level of schools (cf. Jørgensen, 2019). To be clear, our aim is not to research an emergent, general organizational form of ‘the school’ (Romanelli, 1991; Stevens and Kirst, 2015). Rather, our interest is to explore how infrastructures and infrastructural conditions of governance matter for specific schools, which is registered in collective orientations and shared possibilities for action (Bille and Simonsen, 2021; Jørgensen and Holt, 2019). By addressing the school as an organization we allude to this level where affect matters as a broader condition, where it circulates and registers in how people across a school experience their everyday environment, and how it conditions collective possibilities for action and decision-making (Jørgensen and Holt, 2019; Julmi, 2017).

The article proceeds as follows. The subsequent section further develops the concept of affect in relation to infrastructure, thereby illustrating the importance of atmospheric thinking. Next, we outline our methodological approach, clarifying our use of empirical material drawn from ethnographic research in four schools in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (Flanders). The analysis then highlights two distinct ways contemporary infrastructures bring into being atmospheres across schools, characterized by anticipation and legitimation. Finally, we conclude by arguing that anticipation and legitimation generally exemplify infrastructural atmospheres that permeate everyday practices in schools, and we thereby propose to further develop atmospheric thinking to research digital technologies in schools.

Affect, atmosphere and technology

Increasingly central to analyses of digital technologies in education is the concept of affect, commonly understood as the pre-personal intensity or force that conditions a person’s capacity to act, think, and feel prior to conscious reflection (Dernikos et al., 2020; Massumi, 2002). Affect is not synonymous with individual emotions or conscious responses; rather, it refers to the relational intensity generated through interactions between humans and non-human elements, including technologies, that ‘drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 1). In critical education technology research, affect has been explored in relation to the immediate encounters individuals have with digital interfaces as mediators of infrastructures – for example, when teachers interact with visualizations on data dashboards or digital grading systems (Mikhaylova and Pettersson, 2024). Studies show how infrastructures, through these interactions, form perceptions and emotional responses, illustrating why certain infrastructures are taken up and ultimately shape pedagogical practices and decision-making in education (Ratner, 2024; Sellar, 2015a).

Whereas affect is here understood as emerging at the interface between an individual user and an infrastructure, affect can also be understood as a condition of education governance and draws attention to collective movements, orientations and intensities (Finn, 2016; McKenzie, 2017; Zembylas, 2023). The ways infrastructures operate affectively are then not necessarily limited to individual interactions; they extend to collective educational experiences and broader organizational conditions, shaping capacities and desires at the level of a school (Sellar, 2020). Affects, here, are infrastructural forces that stretch across a particular surface or across a school or even school system (Ibid.; Riedel, 2019). Infrastructures thus also generate collective affective climates and collective sensibilities that serve as organizational conditions (Beyes et al., 2022; Jørgensen, 2019). We propose that this collective dimension of affect (and its interrelation with infrastructure), operating at the level of the school, can be understood as atmosphere, a concept that indicates how collectives of people feel an infrastructural pressure of some kind weighing upon them, without clearly knowing where this comes from but to which they feel they must react (Anderson, 2014; Decuypere and Perrotta, Forthcoming). An atmosphere is, broadly defined, a quality ascribed to places, times, societies, and other collective situations, that generates specific moods, thoughts, actions, feelings and desires, and which presses on those within a particular environment (Anderson, 2009). Atmospheres exert affects and a collective propensity, or ‘a pull or a charge that might emerge in a particular space which might (or might not) generate particular events and actions, feelings and emotions’ (Bissell 2010: 273). People attune to emergent atmospheres – that manifest as collective moods, felt intensities and subtle forces – as they willfully and unwillfully go along with the atmospheric flow, thereby participating in its ongoing reconfiguration by fostering certain attitudes and emotional attachments (Stewart, 2011).

In sum, atmosphere highlights how infrastructures – and specifically the conditions of possibility they provide – imbue a school with certain collective propensities and expectations that affect feeling, thinking, and acting in the everyday school environment (Decuypere and Perrotta, Forthcoming). The infrastructural is hereby understood as forms of networked computation and interconnected sociotechnical arrangements (including software, hardware, standards, resources, and more) that give shape to, and are themselves, atmospheric conditions of organizational possibilities (Ibid.; Ratner and Plotnikof, 2022). Infrastructures thereby ‘affect one’s capacity to relate to others, to shape the contours of memory and how one experiences and inhabits territories’, and thus generate (organizational) environments and intensities (Beyes et al., 2022: 1009).

An ethnography of atmospheres

The empirical material underpinning this study is derived from ethnographic research ¹ conducted between 2021 and 2024 in four schools in Flanders (Belgium): Apollo (secondary school), Artemis (primary school), Athena (secondary school) and Hermes (secondary school). The first author conducted fieldwork in all four schools by attending scheduled meetings and paying regular visits to all schools (at least one day per month for each school) during three years, in combination with more intensive periods of continuous fieldwork in each school (approximately two months per school). This fieldwork was not confined to examining specific, preselected technologies or fixed moments of interaction. Instead, it centred on observing when and how infrastructures became a topic of concern, debate, or emotional response across a school – and thus gave shape to intensities (Kofoed and Staunæs, 2015). This signals moments where infrastructures’ affective and organizational significance become practically meaningful (Kofoed and Staunæs, 2015). Paying attention to such intensities implies zooming in on moments of, for example, sudden enthusiasm and desire or frustration and respulsion attached to an infrastructure and how these opposites are tied together in everyday practice (Davies, 2021).

The concrete empirical material analyzed in this article, reflecting such intensities, consists primarily of statements from spontaneous and planned conversations with (groups of) school personnel (i.e. teachers, ICT coordinators, care coordinators, principals, administrative personnel), and of participatory observations across school spaces (including classrooms, teacher’s rooms playgrounds, hallways, and offices of school leadership). Spontaneous conversations and observations were recorded through written fieldnotes to not disrupt the spontaneity of moments of intensity through other means of recording (i.e. audio or video), whereas for planned conversations (such as fixed staff meetings), as agreed upon by the participating schools, audio recordings were systematically made. The statements and observations that were gathered and are presented in this article reflect moments where such intensities become tangible in tone (i.e. social and material expressions that affect the mood of a gathering), gestures (i.e. bodily expressions of people), and conversational dynamics (i.e. patterns of interaction between people that generate certain feelings). The aim of discussing these statements and observations, however, is not to capture ‘representative’ accounts or to provide generalizable claims about infrastructures in education. Rather, they are discussed in this article because they present emergent moments of affective significance that signal the atmospheric implications of infrastructures in schools (Beyes et al., 2022; Vannini, 2015).

Given the centrality of affect and atmosphere in this research, ethnography has proven to be a particularly fruitful avenue to research infrastructures in schools. It enables a researcher to attend to how and when infrastructures become embedded in, affect, intensify, and become constitutive of, everyday school life, and how people across a school then act upon this (Pink et al., 2022). Generally, atmospheres are lived and experienced across a space and cannot be limited to individual experiences (Anderson and Ash, 2015). Additionally, given that atmospheres are often diffuse and difficult to articulate, they can equally not always be explicitly described by those who experience them; rather, they unfold within specific spatiotemporal conditions (Albertsen, 2012). Hence, to articulate atmospheres as a researcher necessitates attention to the continuous making and ongoing circulation of affects within an environment (Bille and Simonsen, 2021). By attending to conversations and meetings, taking note of frustrations and enthusiasms, and embedding oneself in schools for longer durations of time, ethnography can be seen as particularly well-suited for studying atmospheres. Ethnography directs the gaze to affects circulating across a school, and can therefore be seen as a way of resonating with the collective attuning to atmospheres over time and in a wide variety of situations (Blackman, 2015; Gherardi, 2019). In short, ethnographic research allows to explore unexpected intensities where infrastructures are felt and become of importance for groups of people.

The following two analytical sections explore atmospheric formations that emerged throughout the fieldwork, which we conceptualize as anticipation and legitimation. Both illuminate how infrastructures operate affectively across a school and, therefore, matter atmospherically (Beyes et al., 2022). While treated separately for analytical clarity, they are not mutually exclusive. In practice, such atmospheres might co-exist, overlap, and mutually constitute one another within everyday life (Anderson and Ash, 2015).

Anticipation and preparatory practices

In the schools Apollo and Hermes, the arrival of ChatGPT as an AI infrastructure ² stirred an atmosphere characterized by a collective sense of anticipation. The cases of Apollo and Hermes are of specific interest here because both schools for many years fostered a strong commitment to open-source software and, primarily expressed by the school leadership, generally desired the complete absence of any proprietary software in their schools (due to concerns about data privacy and commercial influence in education). In both schools, the open-source platform ‘Moodle’ was meant to be the primary infrastructure. As ChatGPT settled into the educational landscape, both schools found themselves amidst intense discussions about AI and its implications for schools. These discussions were set against a broader backdrop of European policy directives, corporate endorsements, and public (technocentric) narratives both in Flanders as well as globally claiming that ‘AI is here to stay’ and that schools should innovate accordingly (Educational Series, 2025; Kenniscentrum Digisprong, 2025). ChatGPT – and AI in general – was being ‘turbocharged’ into education (Williamson, 2025), leaving little space for questioning its necessity in education. In both schools, ChatGPT materialized less as a pedagogical ‘tool’ and more as an infrastructural force laden with future-oriented promises and affordances, largely related to the automation of particular educational processes. This enacted a certain shock that generated intensities characterized by both anxiety and excitement across the schools.

Initially, this shock was accompanied by a mounting pressure in relation to ChatGPT as a chatbot, primarily for teachers, and the experienced need to attune to the proclaimed risks and benefits of ChatGPT. At Hermes, ChatGPT’s emergence catalyzed multiple informal conversations among teachers about their responsibilities, which was for example addressed by a teacher Haley, in conversation with her colleague Joe in the teacher’s room.

Everyone says to me: ‘it is your responsibility to train students for the AI age’. But what should we do exactly? I am fed up with it. ChatGPT generates this constant sense of dread. This is the first time I’ve felt this way, maybe because ChatGPT seems so intangible and vague. No one seems to really know what it is, how it works, and what to now concretely do with it. It’s a bit like a ghost. Worst of all, we’re constantly told we must adapt or at least do something, and quickly, and of course I agree, but I am unsure of what this adaptation precisely implies.

Haley’s reflection here underscores the affective quality of an infrastructure linked to a cloud of affordances and future promises; that is, the uncertainty generated by ChatGPT’s intangible, yet seemingly unavoidable presence amplified feelings of unease despite limited direct interaction. Another teacher, Billy, who was busy grading papers, overheard Haley and joined the conversation.

Look, writing exercises can simply not be given anymore without being worried [due to AI automation]. I am reviewing some students’ essays at the moment, and I am certain they are written by ChatGPT, but I can’t prove it. There are clues, but there’s uncertainty, and there are very little ideas on how to resolve this. But we need to keep on thinking about what to do, without jumping ship to the first and best solution one of us sees online.

The teachers here mention an overarching sense of dread and worry which affectively resonates in the school, and which directs their professional orientation, noticeable in the emergence of both uncertainty and the conviction that ‘something’ must happen without clearly knowing what (cf. Decuypere and Perrotta, Forthcoming). This anxiety was, in turn, also matched with teachers’ excitement towards the abundance of things ChatGPT could make possible and this collective sense of both anxiety and excitement gained recognition by Hermes’ leadership team. The leadership team, in agreement with teachers in the school, explicitly positioned ChatGPT as a central school priority. As expressed by one member, ‘we are on the verge of transition and we should prepare for what is still to come’. While these feelings and emotional responses might seem personal in experiences of people in the school, they are infrastructurally bound and therefore not only prepersonal, but resonating collectively throughout the school as such (Sellar, 2020).

This shock that accompanied the introduction of ChatGPT in Hermes, was noticeable in Apollo as well. Here, ChatGPT was perceived across the school, as articulated by the ICT coordinator Victor in a conversation with teachers on a study day in his school, as a ‘real gamechanger for the way things can happen in our school’. According to Victor, ChatGPT, and AI in general, manifests a change in the capacities of their school across various domains. The arrival of ChatGPT thus initially gave rise to distinct moments where excitement and anxiety circulated in both schools, each time intensifying the perception of affordances linked to ChatGPT and igniting an atmosphere across the schools characterized by an urgency to respond to potential issues as soon as possible (cf. Endrissat and Islam, 2022; Ratner and Pors, 2013). People therefore became more invested in their engagement with future consequences of ChatGPT, already anticipating them, which intensified due to a shift in ChatGPT’s infrastructural capacities that further saturated it in schools (Decuypere and Perrotta, Forthcoming). As addressed by the principal of Apollo, Peter, ‘due to the new API that makes it possible to embed OpenAI’s ChatGPT services into our existing digital system of the school, many elements of the school will change. Now it has really begun’. According to Peter, the shock of ChatGPT became all the more tangible due to its shift from primarily a web interface to a platform-level infrastructure that was promised to offer even more future benefits (e.g. interoperability with various systems, allowing automating individual feedback for students, automating administrative tasks, and more; Eliot, 2023).

This atmosphere that emerged in both schools, tied to how infrastructural capacities of ChatGPT circulated affects across schools, was characterized by subsequent preparatory practices that unfolded as people became increasingly invested in and anticipated the expanding affordances of ChatGPT. In Apollo, prior to ChatGPT’s active integration in the school, practices emerged to prepare for and maximize the potential affordances of ChatGPT. Significant here are the preemptive cancellations of several existing subscriptions to proprietary digital learning platforms provided by private Flemish publishers – platforms that are often developed in tandem with or instead of traditional paper handbooks and require yearly fees. ³ These platforms were still in use in Apollo, despite the interest in open-source software, because teachers in the school refrained from using Moodle largely due to the technical complexities related to developing course material oneself and the practical comfort of relying on corporately developed digital learning platforms (see Tierens et al., 2024b). The arrival of ChatGPT and its affective intensification due to its infrastructural conditions of possibility enacted a shift in attitude in Apollo’s teachers. A general sense of possibility arose because ChatGPT’s infrastructure would be interoperable with Moodle, and the integration of the former into the latter would be made possible in the school. This, as expressed by one teacher, ‘allows to automate the development of course material [in Moodle], which completely changes the game’. In relation to the changing attitude of teachers, the school leadership of Apollo, firmly believing in the affordances of ChatGPT, therefore cancelled several remaining subscriptions to platforms of private publishers in order to keep their presence in the school to a bare minimum. Both teachers and the school leadership started to prepare for the moment ChatGPT would be integrated in Moodle by developing guidelines for good practices of automated course development and delineating what could be offloaded onto AI, and what not.

Similarly, in Hermes, both the leadership team and the teachers agreed that the school should, as explicitly addressed on numerous occasions, become a ‘prepper’ for ChatGPT, and for AI in general. While specific infrastructural affordances related to the evolvements in an OpenAI API were not addressed in Hermes, equally here practices emerged that prepared the school for this infrastructure. An AI-team was set up, numerous impromptu meetings were organized about potential AI issues that may arise in the futures, and external experts were regularly invited to talk about AI in the school. Additionally, although there was no clarity on the issue whether their students actually used ChatGPT, it was agreed in Hermes that teachers would start to reform practices where ChatGPT might have a potential impact (e.g. getting rid of writing exercises and digital examinations or having them complemented with oral examinations as well), and that it should be actively incorporated into their routine practices (e.g. redeveloping lesson preparations, grading, checking whether a text has been written by AI) – ultimately altering existing and generating new routines and, thereby, reconfiguring autonomy in relation to a specific infrastructure (Kerssens and van Dijck, 2022).

In both cases, preparatory practice emerged within a process of relational attunement to an atmosphere of anticipation that is enacted through an AI infrastructure, as school staff respond to its arrival (e.g. by becoming a ‘preppers’). The resulting infrastructural shock can be seen as a distinct moment where affect operated socially in reorganizing a school and the relations, ideas, preferences, and activities that matter there (Wetherell, 2015). As such, in the day-to-day experiences across the schools, it becomes clear how this infrastructure exerted a force in shaping interpersonal relations and prompting shifts in how people across each respective school experienced their environment (cf. Beyes et al., 2022). Therefore, the schools grew in relational intensity with AI more generally (not only thinking about ChatGPT but also about ‘what is still to come’), where a personal and collective sense of urgency emerged, and readiness and appropriation of an infrastructure became a school-wide priority; that is, by enacting these moods, the infrastructure fostered deeper commitment and investment (Stewart, 2007). Here, infrastructural affect transcended individual experiences, becoming organizational and effectuating actions aimed at preparing the school for particular affordances of ChatGPT, concretely reshaping organizational practices and orientations. For example, the preparatory action of cancelling several proprietary subscriptions in Apollo illustrates how anticipation, tied to an infrastructure, fosters emotional responses and, therefore, tangible institutional practices aimed at aligning the school with an infrastructural future that has not yet fully materialized. Such preparatory practices demonstrate how infrastructural anticipation functions atmospherically, producing a collective investment in and orientation toward a desired infrastructural future. Interestingly, in both schools, despite a strong critical stance against proprietary software, the arrival of ChatGPT thus prompted a reconsideration of this position, as it was seen to offer infrastructural conditions that schools felt compelled to engage with. This illustrates how an infrastructure matters atmospherically not by simply surrounding a school as a backdrop; rather, it shifts school values by generating affective orientations that make certain infrastructural choices feel desirable or even inevitable, and others less so. In this sense, ChatGPT (as a proprietary infrastructure) produced a force that affects the school organizationally in that it enacts a new sense of community (i.e. feeling part of a group with an objective) in a school. This sense of community emerges around an infrastructural condition people feel they necessarily have in common and therefore have to deal with despite, or instead of, previous concerns (Anderson, 2016).

Legitimation and practices of nesting

A different atmosphere emerged in schools Artemis and Athena, one that can be characterized by ‘legitimation’ provided by infrastructural ecosystems. As noted earlier, Big Tech companies, such as Google, have increasingly transitioned from selling only standalone tools toward all-encompassing infrastructures, or ecosystems, encompassing hardware, software, cloud-based services, and teacher training (Kerssens et al., 2024; Williamson et al., 2022). This infrastructural interconnectedness does not only manifest technically and economically but also has profound affective implications. This became explicitly visible in Artemis, a school that became incrementally entrenched in the Google for Education infrastructure. As expressed by John, Artemis’ ICT coordinator, ‘today, you just either choose Google, Microsoft, or Apple. It does not really matter. You just need to pick one of them for your own sake and the image of your school, and then the only question is: which school do you want to be?’ John highlights the perceived necessity today for schools to be associated with an internationally recognized digital ecosystem.

For his school, this decision remained long unsettled due to some other concerns that were relevant for the school and due to the inherent complexities of navigating the ever-growing landscape of education technology. For this reason, for a long time diverse but unrelated platforms were present in the school, which often caused issues: students who forgot their passwords because they needed to log-in each time to different platforms, or platforms whose subscription would be automatically renewed even though they were not in use anymore by teachers. To solve these issues, in 2021 a working group was formed in Artemis dedicated to focus on digital technology in the school. The working group initially struggled to articulate a coherent digital vision for the school, despite regular meetings intended to foster consensus. This impasse shifted significantly following a presentation from a Flemish company that promotes and offers Google solutions for schools. Artemis’ principal, Clara, described the encounter as a transformative event that generated widespread excitement and a sense of new possibilities that vibrated across her school.

We got a visit last week by someone who provided a short workshop for us about Google and its educational innovations. It was someone our ICT coordinator met on an education technology fair recently. Well, anyway, this man said that people are currently developing good adaptive software that would allow teachers to gain insight into the process of learning rather than only outcomes, and especially that all of this could be grouped in this central infrastructure of Google Workspace for Education. [. . .] It was really a cool moment. Finally, we have a clear path forward.

Clara’s remarks illustrate how Artemis’ enthusiasm was linked to adaptive technologies but also, and critically, to the promise of interoperability within a unified, expanding infrastructural ecosystem. Interoperability, here, makes the infrastructure feel viable, desirable, and worth investing in – and is, therefore, both technical and affective. As mentioned by one of the teachers of the working group, ‘Google does not only offer all these software services, but equally Chromebook devices. It’s just the full package’. Google Classroom is seen as the infrastructure with the greatest technical possibilities and the broadest interoperability with various adaptive learning platforms the school might eventually make use of. This perspective aligns with broader global marketing of Google Classroom, premised on the promise of technical and educational improvement (cf. Beer, 2018; Perrotta et al., 2021). Here, it becomes clear how affect is baked into the Google ecosystem, which generated a palpable sense of excitement by addressing existing challenges, thus cultivating a shared sense of validation within the school. The infrastructural ecosystem of Google appeared to provide an affective condition for the school where additional Google products (e.g. ‘equally Chromebook devices’) became desired as well.

Here, affective engagement with Google’s infrastructure is not limited to interactions with a digital interface. Rather, affect circulated because of the interconnectedness of Google’s infrastructural ecosystem and the possibility of the vast interfacing between software, hardware and cloud services, which generated excitement across the school (Perrotta et al., 2021; Sellar, 2020). These interconnections fostered collective feelings of enthusiasm. As articulated by Lottie, a teacher at Artemis, ‘as teachers we will now also dare to actually engage with the technology because we know that Google will not suddenly stop working. Equally, if we make use of Google, we also prove to other schools and the parents [of the students] that what we are doing makes sense’. Google’s status as a global infrastructure assured continuity and dependability. Therefore, Google’s infrastructural ecosystem exerted an affective pull that shapes feelings across an environment (cf. Bissell, 2010), thereby creating a shared perception of safety and future-oriented legitimacy in terms of (symbolic) infrastructural validation. As also articulated by John, and other school staff, Google’s infrastructural ecosystem becomes a symbol for the school that provides validity to Artemis’ approach to digital transformation because it ‘is well-known and will be supported in the future as well’.

A similar atmosphere was noticeable in Athena. Here the case concerns not a global infrastructure within which a local school inscribes itself, but a local infrastructure that adapts to and has been inscribed within a global ecosystem and for this reason provides a similar sense of validity. In Athena, the Flemish platform ‘Smartschool’ had functioned primarily as an obligatory but peripheral learning management system (LMS). Its relevance surged when it expanded to incorporate Microsoft’s Office 365 Education suite and thus became part of a broader infrastructural ecosystem, integrating deeply with Microsoft’s educational services (Smartschool, 2025). Microsoft’s integration into Smartschool, providing software suites for schools, meant that students, and teachers and other school staff, could now access a wide array of services simply by signing into Smartschool. This shift does not only alter the services that were available, but also contributed to a broader process of attunement across the school based on the shared sense that Smartschool was no longer ‘just’ a platform.

Akin to the case of Artemis, the school leadership of Athena, in agreement with its teachers, made large investments in Microsoft devices (i.e. laptops) so the school could become part of, as addressed by the principal Michael, ‘a whole integrated ecosystem’ that includes devices and a pool of software accessible through the Smartschool platform. This resonated across Athena and was effectuated in how teachers started to invest time in learning to use Smartschool and Microsoft 365 Education, workshops were given by the ICT coordinator, and the principal explicitly expressed his desire to become ‘a real Smartschool-school’. While this enthusiastic mood circulated across the school, it was, at least initially, not uniformally shared by all. One teacher, Nathan, explicitly shared his concerns during a monthly meeting of the working of group of digitalization in his school.

All our data is stored by Smartschool somewhere, but we don’t really know what happens with it. I know Smartschool is already paid for but. . . By equally putting our lesson preparations on it, the platform keeps growing stronger and obtains a more dominant position.

Nathan’s counter-voice to the growing desire of becoming part of an integrated ecosystem, sparked a series of reactions from his colleagues, primarily regarding the idea that it is futile to take up such a dissident position. Concerns like those of Nathan were actively sidelined and many mentioned they had to be ignored as it ‘is part of becoming a good school. We can trust Smartschool, it’s a good company’ – effectively strengthening the idea that being part of an ecosystem is necessary today. This highlights how infrastructural legitimacy produced through an ecosystem minimizes deviant voices in favour of collective enthusiasm, and how potential individual counter-voices further illuminate and solidify what is collectively desired and taken-for-granted.

Furthermore, the integration of Smartschool with Microsoft was also considered as having a benefit for students. As addressed by the pedagogical coordinator of Athena, Nora:

Whereas Smartschool is a bit rigid and disappears from students’ life the second they quit school, office 365 and all related services are key for their future, both when they will continue studying in higher education as well as when they start working.

The infrastructure of Smartschool, and primarily its interoperability with Microsoft 365 Education, reverberated a desire across Athena to become increasingly entrenched in the infrastructure. As expressed by many teachers and the school leadership, since Smartschool now ‘feels like a safe environment’ – largely because it became embedded in a broader ecosystem that continues to expand its functionality and due its intertwinement with Microsoft software that presumably benefits students – practices emerged where people aimed to become more invested in the infrastructure. The desire expressed by the principal to become a school that is entrenched in the Smartschool and Microsoft’s Office 365 for Education infrastructure, was enacted in how the school was moved to further become part of this infrastructural ecosystem.

Both in Artemis and Athena, infrastructures generated a sense of validity for the schools and, relatedly, produced a collective desire for the further infrastructural entrenchment of the school. This means that the schools sought to further invest in the affordances of infrastructural ecosystems, through various practices, because it proved to offer further legitimation of their school. This was most explicit in Artemis in relation to the Google infrastructure, which contributed to the transformation of organizational processes and relations through the amplification of affects that induced further investments in the infrastructure (Beverungen et al., 2019). As argued by Clara, ‘becoming more involved [in the infrastructure], is good for the school’, and this largely shifted the school’s professionalization practices both for teachers and the ICT coordinator. John, Artemis’ ICT coordinator, applauded teachers who were already acquiring the ‘right’ expertise.

At this moment I am also getting my certificates to become a Google Certified Educator. Some of our teachers are already on their own becoming certified and have really improved their understanding of Google Classroom and what it could mean for their teaching and for the school as such. A lot of us now want these certificates because we see this platform as our goal. This will make everything better in the future. Teachers also motivate each other to do this and give each other tips.

John remarks how teachers have been mobilized in the school to become more personally committed to this infrastructure by obtaining certificates in the pursuit of becoming a ‘Google Certified Teacher’. Google for Education certificates are online training courses, focusing on the products included in the broader Google for Education ecosystem, that allow a teacher to obtain a certificate that is purported to show their professional development (Google for Education, 2025). Across the school, teachers were obtaining their certificates in a desire to become further habituated, or accustomed, to the infrastructure – which is actively pursued by technology corporations where further engagement with infrastructural services (such as in this case certificates) is perceived in a positive light (Williamson et al., 2022). The validity the infrastructural ecosystem provides here precipitates on experiences of teachers in the school as they pursue further investments in the infrastructure. New organizational and professional dynamics thus emerged, and an excitement vibrated across Artemis that shaped a distinctive milieu and, therefore, had atmospheric implications. Across Artemis, the hope and perceived possibilities linked to this infrastructure played an affective role in bringing about the sociotechnical reconfiguration of the school (cf. Hughes, 2024); that is, Google Classroom generated collective desires that, in turn, made possible the further materialization of it as the central infrastructure of the school.

Through Artemis and Athena’s incremental engagements with their respective infrastructures and the associated products and services, infrastructural lock-ins intensified. This implies that the vertical integration of infrastructural services, as both Google and Microsoft do, privatize the infrastructural flows in schools, where schools cannot easily opt-out of the infrastructure of a private provider (Komljenovic et al., 2024; Van Dijck, 2021). Contrary to critiques identifying lock-ins as coercive or restrictive, these schools actively desired and invested in these lock-ins due to the validation they conferred (Cone, 2024; cf. Massumi, 2002). Lock-ins, therefore, were seen as affectively desirable conditions, permeating school conversations and structuring collective identities around validated infrastructural affiliations. This shows an atmospheric condition where infrastructures produce affects that circulate across an environment and enact a growing emotional entanglement of people with their infrastructural condition (cf. Ahmed, 2014). The increasing certifications obtained by teachers in Artemis, workshops organized in both schools (for students, teachers and sometimes parents) to better understand possibilities provided by Google or Smartschool and Microsoft, and many more things, exemplify this and can be understood as practices of (infrastructural) nesting – that is, ongoing activities by which schools embed themselves more deeply into a particular digital ecosystem that increasingly feels both necessary and affirming. These nesting practices illustrate the affective dimension of infrastructural ecosystems as they offer not only technical changes to a school, but also provide validation. As these larger infrastructural ecosystems found performative anchorage in the school, they enacted an atmosphere of legitimacy that cultivated a collective sense of, as articulated by the pedagogical coordinator of Athena, ‘finally being on a good track’. Lock-ins then envelop schools within a comforting, predictable, and secure environment where certain commercial infrastructures (those that function as ecosystems of services) are granted with an atmosphere of legitimacy, heightening investments in it across a school.

Concluding discussion

This article set out to explore how infrastructures operate affectively, extending beyond direct individual interactions with user interfaces. Specifically, it asked how infrastructures and their conditions of possibility affectively (re-)organize school processes (Jørgensen, 2019; Sellar, 2020). The analysis demonstrated that digital technologies – and primarily the specific infrastructures engaged with in our cases – exert affective forces that act as organizational conditions, shaping everyday experiences and collective capacities in schools. The empirical cases of the four Flemish schools presented illustrate atmospheres, generated by infrastructures, that are characterized by anticipation (including preparatory practices oriented towards future infrastructural possibilities) and legitimation (including schools increasingly nesting themselves within expansive infrastructural ecosystems to gain validation). While we have analytically presented these atmospheric forces as isolated entities, they must be more precisely understood as formations that can overlap and interweave (Anderson and Ash, 2015; Fregonese and Laketa, 2022). In some cases, anticipation may generate the conditions for legitimation, as the speculative excitement about infrastructural futures becomes stabilized through alignment with ‘valid’ ecosystems. In others, legitimation may retroactively reframe moments of anticipation, granting them coherence or organizational weight. They can co-exist within the same school context, even the same moment, expressed through ambivalent affects. What this suggests is that atmospheres are not fixed and static entities, but dynamic modes of infrastructural sense-making that might unfold through each other. Together, both atmospheres underscore how infrastructures orchestrate affective experiences that transcend individual interactions, permeating organizational practices and contributing to collective orientations through sequences of events that unfold in schools. Even those who were initially reluctant to engage with these infrastructures eventually found it increasingly challenging to remain detached from them and to find a position outside of the conditions they provide, given their pervasiveness and organizing force (Sellar, 2015b). In all four cases, specific infrastructural configurations incited a collective desire, reorienting practices and affecting relations and the unfolding of the day-to-day activities of schools (cf. Endrissat and Islam, 2022). Infrastructures thus create new desires and attitudes as they form the conditions of possibility of how people in schools come to imagine, organize and inhabit their environment (Lupton, 2017; Sellar, 2020).

The atmospheres characterized by anticipation and legitimation are, we argue, illustrative manifestations of a broader category we term infrastructural atmospheres; that is, affective conditions that emerge around promises, pressures, and organizational realignments associated with digital infrastructures in schools. In other words, as infrastructures unfold, so too do atmospheres that organize collective orientations, feelings, and desires. Therefore, since infrastructures’ affective implications stretch beyond the individual user but affect schools and the way their environments are experienced, we propose that infrastructures always matter atmospherically for schools (Beyes et al., 2022). This means that the interrelation between contemporary infrastructures and affect contributes to the formation of school environments and the practices that emerge across a school as people feel a pressure to become invested in, and therefore start to desire (but also sometimes fear), the infrastructure. In this sense, infrastructural atmospheres mediate forms of organizing across a school to which people (differently) attune in everyday situations (Ratner and Plotnikof, 2022; Stewart, 2011). The infrastructural atmospheres of anticipation and legitimation discussed in this article emerge within the contemporary European educational landscape characterized by the accelerated rhythms of policy-driven imperatives and corporate interests, and the infrastructural conditions that accompany these, that promote digitalization as indispensable to educational advancement (Saari, 2022; Seppänen et al., 2020; Tierens et al., 2024a). Anticipation and legitimation exemplify the affective implications of these overarching tendencies and infrastructural atmospheres can therefore be seen as sharing overarching propensities (cf. McCormack, 2008), and thus pulls that emanate from it that are characteristic of contemporary infrastructural conditions. That being said, our fieldwork was solely conducted in schools in Belgium. While this limits our understanding of how infrastructural conditions of possibility affectively pulsate elsewhere, considering the largely global scale of the infrastructures discussed in this article, their atmospheric capacities might resonate across national borders. In general, however, these particular infrastructural atmospheres may also stop emanating, be overridden, or simply disappear from existence (Anderson and Ash, 2015), and, as such, there is a need for future research to further empirically explore how infrastructures affect schools in other national contexts and bring into being both similar as well as completely distinct atmospheres.

Our findings thus generally suggest that the affective implications of digital infrastructures can be (partly) understood in how they are able to form new, and shape existing, environments in schools (cf. Suchman, 2008). As for example demonstrated in the first section, ChatGPT had not been extensively adopted in the daily operations of the schools examined, yet it precipitated shifts in how schools imagined and prepared for it, shifting certain fundamental values (i.e. open-source in relation to proprietary technology). This does not contradict research that shows how concrete interactions with digital technologies such as platforms may similarly foster atmospheres in schools, including, for example, a disciplinary landscape in schools based on the datafication and data-driven surveillance of student behaviour (Manolev et al., 2019). However, our research contributes to these insights that the way infrastructures matter atmospherically cannot only be understood in their sense of proximity and in how they are concretely used by people, nor exclusively by exploring their anchorage within only certain school spaces (e.g. classrooms). Infrastructures affect schools through their generation of desired futures at the school level, their lack of immediate tangibility, their architectural composition, and their incomplete integration into pre-existing infrastructures of a school.

For this reason, we offer a concluding proposition regarding the importance of further atmospheric thinking to research digital technology in school education, which offers a critical focus in addition to research on the values embedded in the design epistemics of technology, predefined technological scripts, and user interactions (Wu, 2022). Atmospheric thinking emphasizes infrastructures as ambient, as a looming presence without being haptic, inducing collective desires and shaping organizational inclinations prior to explicit rationalization (Allen, 2006; Suchman, 2008). Hence, thinking atmospherically about technologies can further clarify how they also affect schools because of their very lack of concrete and definitive substance that can be engaged with or noticed by individual people (cf. Benjamin, 2002). Understood atmospherically, infrastructures exert affective pressure through their openness, uncertainty, and promise, thereby organizing organizational environments in subtle yet powerful ways (Beyes et al., 2022). Further expanding and complicating such atmospheric thinking in empirical research on technology in schools, draws attention to these affective undercurrents and their contingent production through the gathering of heterogeneous elements (Anderson, 2009). Therefore, the atmospheric thinking we propose could imply the constant consideration of how infrastructural atmospheres that envelope schools with a unifying affective force remain subject to continual renegotiation, resistance, or collapse (cf. Latour, 2013; Wall, 2019). As such, zooming in on atmospheres enables further exploration of how infrastructures have affective implications that are maintained and can therefore be contested – or, put differently, it opens up ways to explore how people can differently attune to them to sustain potential and different ways of living with infrastructures (Stewart, 2011). This offers possibilities to experiment with ways of reimagining infrastructural atmospheres in education and articulate how they could be actively given shape by schools in pedagogically meaningful ways.