ABSTRACT
As digital technologies are increasingly integrated within schools, and policy models such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) are implemented during school lessons, the borders of policy work are reordered by actors that are introduced through these digital technologies. This reordering often tends to circumvent local and national policymaking processes and establishes new policy relationalities that are progressively termed as ‘fast policy’. The aim of this chapter is to cast a retrospective and reflexive look at our methodological decisions during a research project aimed to understand the above-mentioned fast policy relations that come to being as BYOD policy is enacted at one school. The chapter elucidates how our deployed sociomaterial approach towards fast policy understands normative and political aspects of implementing digital technologies in classrooms. By presenting five concrete anecdotes of our ethnographic research project, the chapter argues that our research is not merely about policy. Rather, the five cases precisely show how the research becomes of policy in a strictly local, slow and surprising manner performed in a minor key. Accordingly, we conclude that normative and political aspects of implementing devices are to be understood in a strictly local, provisional and at times implicit ways.
