Educational vanishing points: When interoperable platforms turn infrastructural and back in higher education

Platform interoperability, the ability of digital architectures to work together and exchange data, is proliferating in education research and practice but requires further investigation, especially in higher education. In this chapter, we aim to scrutinise how platforms enact specific ways of (inter)operating and contribute to the intersection of critical data infrastructure studies and platform studies in education. We adopt a concomitant, ethnographic approach regarding platforms and infrastructures to analyse how humans and other-than-humans do interoperability and the ramifications for knowing their environments. Employing Hannah Knox's concept of 'vanishing points', we demonstrate how data movements across a university's platform-infrastructure become self-evident or, conversely, highlighted in everyday life. Findings detail ways a university's supposedly interoperable platform turns infrastructural while enacting specific modes of operating: cooperating, teaching, transforming, intermitting and dis/appearing are all effects of relations amongst technologies, materialities and humans. The findings thereby complicate the inter/intra dichotomy and imaginary of a seamlessly interoperable platform to one with multiple, messy, value-laden operations entailing sociotechnical and political consequences. We advance the notion of 'educational vanishing points', when/where education platforms turn infrastructural and back, so others can scrutinise platform dependencies, pedagogical underpinnings and reconfigurations of how actors come to know each other and the world.