A Comparative Examination of Regulated and Unregulated Big Data Analytics as (Re)Makers of Complex Educational Assemblages in the European Union and the Caribbean Community

• Published in: Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2020 Vol. 40; pp. 149 - 170
• Main Authors: Salajan, Florin D., Jules, Tavis D.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Emerald Publishing Limited 01-01-2021
• Subjects: Education; Global & comparative education; EU; complex educational assemblages; Big Data; territorialization; Assemblage theory; amalgamation; CARICOM
• ISBN: 1800719086; 9781800719088
• ISSN: 1479-3679
• DOI: 10.1108/S1479-367920210000040010

Abstract
Drawing on assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; DeLanda, 2006), this conceptual chapter seeks to provide an analytical lens for examining the power and capacity of Big Data analytics to exercise territorializing and deterritorializing effects on compound polities and supranational organizations. More specifically, the modern massive agglomeration of data streams and the accelerated computational power available to sort and channel them in effecting actions, decisions, and reconfigurations in contemporary assemblages, necessitate new exploratory tools to examine the impact of such trends on educational phenomena from a comparative perspective. In the first part, the chapter builds an analytical instrumentarium useful in theoretically elucidating the effects of Big Data on complex assemblages and serves as a methodological extension in investigating the ramifications of these effects on educational systems, spaces, and policyscapes. The second part sets out to illustrate how assemblage theory can explain the tension between the formal use of large official statistical data sets as a type of “regulated” Big Data, and the informal use of social media, as a type of “unregulated” Big Data, to construct or deconstruct, respectively, interlacing/interlocking components of assemblages, such as supranational organizations or compound polities. The European Union (EU) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are taken as examples of complex assemblages in which the long-standing utilization of EU’s Eurostat and CARICOM’s Regional Statistical Database have served as territorializing forces in consolidating policy logics and in legitimizing decision-making at the supranational level, while the emergence of “loose” social networking technologies appears to have deterritorializing effects when employed deliberately to delegitimize or subvert socio-political processes across supranational polities.