This paper explores how digital infrastructures, and the conditions of possibility they provide, produce ‘affects’ that matter to a school organizationally. Increasingly, schools are characterized by infrastructural conditions enacted through global cloud-based ecosystems, their logics of subscriptions, the lock-ins they engender and many more elements that govern the organizational possibilities of schools. In this paper, we examine how these infrastructures produce affects that stretch across a local school or even school system. To scrutinize this level in-between general infrastructural conditions of governance and individual experience – where infrastructures and affects matter for schools organizationally – we propose the concept ‘atmosphere’. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in four schools across three years in Belgium (Flanders), our analysis shows how specific infrastructures generate atmospheric conditions for schools that are characterized by anticipation and legitimation. Both, we argue, are exemplary of what can be called infrastructural atmospheres dominant in the educational landscape today. Conclusively, this article suggests the need for the further development of atmospheric thinking to explicate how infrastructures exert affective pressures, thereby (re-)organizing school environments in subtle yet powerful ways.

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).