Computables: emerging subjects and practices in times of pandemic in Mendoza

Abstract

The following paper aims to investigate and analyze the emergence and resignification of certain subjects and practices in public secondary education during the pandemic period (2020-2021) in the province of Mendoza. To this end, official documents and educational policies issued during the pandemic period at both national and provincial levels, targeting the secondary level of the public sector, are analyzed. The empirical material consists of resolutions, documents, and circulars published between March 2020 and December 2021, produced by the Federal Council of Education (CFE); the Ministry of Education (ME); the General Directorate of Scholls (DGE) of Mendoza, and teachers' unions.

It is assumed that educational public policies are fundamentally provisional discursive practices (Laclau and Mouffe, [1985] 2004) that seek to articulate signifiers that are always partial. Therefore, these documents explore the partial fixations of certain significations to specific signifiers, from which specific subject positions emerge, which in turn determine particular practices. These fixations are based on two discursive equivalences that provided meaning and support to these emergences during the pandemic: education as access, and pedagogical link as connection.

Based on these equivalences, partial fixations were configured, resulting in subjects and practices established from different criteria: epidemiological and pedagogical. We will also show how the G.E.M. (Mendoza Educational Management System) became the main educational control device, as an all-encompassing intersection point, as it not only regulated but also contributed to these emergences that had not previously been considered within the Mendoza educational system and that became computable or non-computable subjects.