With the rising prevalence of digital data, infrastructures and platforms in education, the challenge of conceptualizing and investigating ‘intermediaries’ has substantially increased. This not only refers to various new types of actors that have been materializing around practices of data infrastructuring (e.g., data management), but equally to the rising empowerment of data infrastructures themselves as intermediaries of policy and governance. The aim of this article is to sharpen our conceptual understanding of this interrelation between intermediaries and data infrastructuring. More specifically, the article suggests to approach intermediaries through a lens on performative contexting, thus shifting the focus towards how ‘intermediary contexting’ is used, by whom and where exactly, rather than seeking to map intermediaries as an object ‘from the outside’. Data infrastructuring, then, can be regarded both as part, and as a result, of such contexting efforts. Using Estonia as a case study, it is shown what we see (differently) when applying such a lens to the digital transformation of education. The findings hereby indicate a gradual emergence of what could be described as ‘governance by intermediarization’: a process in which more and more actors are shifted into the (self)contexting as infrastructural stewards, while the politics of digital transformation become centered – i.e., seemingly depoliticized – around asserting continuous change through digital connection.

中文翻译：

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中介化治理。深入了解爱沙尼亚教育的数字基础设施

随着教育中数字数据、基础设施和平台的日益普及，概念化和调查“中介机构”的挑战大大增加。这不仅指围绕数据基础设施实践（例如数据管理）具体化的各种新型参与者，而且同样指数据基础设施本身作为政策和治理中介的不断增强的授权。本文的目的是加深我们对中介机构和数据基础设施之间相互关系的概念理解。更具体地说，本文建议通过表演性语境的视角来接近中介人，从而将焦点转移到如何使用“中介语境”、由谁以及在何处使用，而不是寻求将中介人映射为“来自外部”的对象。那么，数据基础设施既可以被视为这种背景努力的一部分，也是其结果。以爱沙尼亚为例，它展示了我们在将这样的视角应用于教育数字化转型时所看到的（不同的）情况。研究结果表明，所谓的“中介化治理”正在逐渐出现：在这个过程中，越来越多的参与者被转变为基础设施管理者（自我），而数字化转型的政治则成为中心——即看似去政治化——通过数字连接主张持续变革。