ABSTRACT
The implementation of large-scale testing in education relies on existing and generates novel bureaucratic and digital infrastructures. Infrastructures are digitally mediated arrangements of humans, processes, procedures, tools and technologies that produce, use, transport and store examinations, data and information generated thereon. Moreover, the standardized assessments serve as infrastructures that build the state’s presence into and enable it to exercise power over a vast territory and the lives of its population to craft a nation and mark its territory. In contrast to the prevailing image of infrastructures as neutral, this chapter studies them as playing significant, but often neglected, roles in forging spaces and national identities. The chapter argues that the coming together – the infrastructuring of – diverse socio-material-discursive elements in the infrastructure of the Russian Unified State Exam contributes to (no less than) both nationalizing the Russian territory and territorializing (that is, bordering) the Russian nation.
