Actor-Network Theory in Education

Tara Fenwick, Richard Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136952876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has enjoyed wide uptake in the social sciences in the past three decades, particularly in science and technology studies, and is increasingly attracting the attention of educational researchers. ANT studies bring to the fore the material – objects of all kinds – and de-centre the human and the social in educational issues. ANT sensibilities are interested in the ways human and non-human elements become interwoven. Since its first introduction, actor-network theory has undergone significant shifts and evolutions and as a result, it is not considered to be a single or coherent theoretical domain, but as developing diversely in response to various challenges.

This book offers an introduction to Actor-Network Theory for educators to consider in three ways. One mode is the introduction of concepts, approaches and debates around Actor-Network Theory as a research approach in education. A second mode showcases educational studies that have employed ANT approaches in classrooms, workplaces and community settings, drawn from the UK, USA, Canada, Europe and Australia. These demonstrate how ANT can operate in highly diverse ways whether it focuses on policy critique, curriculum inquiry, engagements with digital media, change and innovation, issues of accountability, or exploring how knowledge unfolds and becomes materialized in various settings. A third mode looks at recent 'after-ANT' inquiries which open an array of important new approaches. Across these diverse environments and uptakes, the authors trace how learning and practice emerge, show what scales are at play, and demonstrate what this means for educational possibilities.

Chapter 1
A way to intervene, not a theory of what to think

Actor–network theory is not terribly familiar in the study of education. This book examines its uptakes in educational research and the potential it offers for fresh and productive interventions within educational issues. Its routes in the 1980s from post-structuralism, the sociology of science and technology, human– computer interaction and feminism are still apparent. People still engage within it in these domains but it has dispersed and developed since then. Some people in education have taken it up over the years, but it has been sporadic rather than sustained. This book aims to provide a basis for a sustained engagement with actor–network theory and to take forward fresh agendas for intervening in educational research, policy and practice. Our use of actor–network theory is not for telling us about educational issues; it is a way of intervening in educational issues to reframe how we might enact and engage with them.

It is extraordinarily difficult to write or talk about actor–network theory without either destroying or domesticating it. Many of its more recent contributors would call their work ‘after-ANT’ or ‘post-ANT’, or for example, explorations of complexity, material practice, material semiotics, feminist science and technology studies or the sociology of science and technology. Often they avoid using explicit ANT-associated terminology at all. We say these things not to mystify ANT as some rarefied or sacred site permitting only elite knowers to draw near, but to declare at the outset our recognition of the essential difficulty – and possible heresy – of setting forth some explorations of ANT. After all, ANT’s key contribution is to suggest analytic methods that honour the mess, disorder and ambivalences that order phenomena, including education. As Law (1999: 10) has warned, the worst thing we could do is to re-establish and impose a purity of ANT-ness: ‘only dead theories and dead practices celebrate their identity’.

However, we are committed to engage educational researchers in ANT insights and approaches because we have experienced profound possibilities that these afford in our own work studying educational issues and conditions. We will undoubtedly suffer some missteps and become caught in contradictions and incoherences along the way. We also believe that, for the purposes of this book and for those unfamiliar with ANT ideas, it is helpful to represent with the single term ANT a constellation of these ideas that have associated themselves with ANT at some point. Our hope is that we can employ this term in the spirit of a temporary marker, an organizer – if a precarious one, as we hope to keep reminding readers. The term is also a handy reference to help distinguish ANT approaches from the many other available conceptions of socio-material practice and interobjectivity that have captured interest among educational researchers, such as post-structuralist geographies, complexity theory and cultural–historical activity theory.

Why do we say that ANT is difficult to write or talk about? ANT cannot accurately be described as a single, stable or identifiable theoretical framework. While the same thing could be said of many social scientific and philosophical theories that find their way into educational research, ANT has been particularly slippery and diffuse since its first appearances in the 1980s. Indeed, many of its progenitors such as Bruno Latour, John Law and Michael Callon have either struggled to avoid defining it as a set of theoretical ideas, or have distanced themselves from others’ efforts to do so. The frustration expressed by the most prominent ANT commentators is that many ANT uptakes have solidified particular models of analysis, have reified concepts such as networks, and have colonized their objects of inquiry in representational ways that ANT approaches were intended to disrupt. A landmark volume of essays, entitled Actor Network Theory and After (Law and Hassard 1999), was premised on the assumption that ANT ideas proliferating throughout the 1990s in various studies had largely run into an impasse. At that time, leading scholars associated with ANT declared various approaches that included eliminating or replacing certain naturalized ANT language and models, delimiting ANT’s claims and opening its conceptual scope.

At the time of this writing, ten years on from the publication of Actor Network Theory and After, there has been a remarkable profusion of ANT uptakes, critiques and hybrid theoretical blends as ANT has travelled across a number of disciplines ranging from scientific innovation to cyber-punk semiotics, from anthropology to the sociology of the everyday, from literacy education to organizational change, from urban planning to art history. Recently, Law (2007: 595) has referred to ANT as a ‘diaspora’, a disparate set of:

tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations.

This diversity and these uptakes have each helped to extend and reconfigure ANT ideas, opening new challenging questions and ways of intervening for educational researchers. The After in Law and Hassard’s (1999) book title did not signal the end of ANT, but that there was more to be done. This book is an attempt to explore what has and can be done in education.

ANT offers an unfamiliar take on many familiar issues. It invites us to avoid making a priori distinctions and then making these the foundations upon which all other knowledge builds. Distinctions, such as those between the social and natural, between the material and cultural, the human and non-human, and between the technical and social, are taken to be effects rather than foundational assumptions. In particular, they are taken to be network effects, as subjects, objects, agency and actions are taken to emerge from the particular networks through which they co-emerge. In ANT, therefore, society and the social are not seen as a pre-existing object of enquiry, but as emerging through enactments of various forms of association, as network effects. Here, the social is viewed as assembled and only becomes possible through its own enactment as a separate domain. Actor–network theory examines the associations of human and non-human entities in the performance of the social, the economic, the natural, the educational, etc. The objective is to understand precisely how these things come together – and manage to hold together, however temporarily – to form associations that produce agency and other effects: for example, ideas, identities, rules, routines, policies, instruments and reforms. In educational discourse, such an approach leads us to question common categories and distinctions, such as teacher and learner, curriculum and pedagogy, formal and informal learning. This includes the notion that there is an a priori domain that we can identify as education as separate from not-education. Each of these distinctions can be examined as themselves network effects.

A key assumption in ANT analyses is that humans are not treated any differently from non-humans, because ‘without the nonhuman, the humans would not last for a minute’ (Latour 2004a: 91). Humans are not assumed to have a privileged a priori status in the world but to be part of it. This position, first suggested by Bloor (1976) and then elaborated by Latour (1987), is called symmetry. In ANT, a generalized symmetry is enacted in relation to different things, and approaches are adopted for ‘levelling divisions usually taken to be foundational’ (Law 2007: 597). Everyday things and parts of things – animals, memories, intentions, technologies, bacteria, furniture, chemicals, plants, and so on – are assumed to be capable of exerting force and joining together, changing and being changed by each other. As they assemble together, they form associations or networks that can keep expanding to extend across broad spaces, long distances or time periods. In the process, such networks can become more or less durable. For example, think of a mathematics textbook for children. That one object, the textbook, embeds a network of curriculum development (policy-makers, computers, teachers, maths experts) with networks of publication (writers, editors, reviewers, text drafts, pilot testers, print machines, ink) in a network of distribution in schools and classrooms across a country, or further. All are linked together such that a very particular maths concept presented in one particular way can be experienced at the same time by thousands of children in far-flung contexts. We therefore witness how networks can become more durable by being both supported and promoting standardization across space and time, a theme in relation to education to which we will return throughout this book.

ANT is an approach that enables us to trace the ways that things come together, act and become taken for granted, or ‘black-boxed’. Latour (1987) uses the example of a camera to illustrate his understanding of a black box: it is made up of many elements but is taken to be a single entity with properties, and acts in a certain way. ANT can show how things are invited or excluded, how some linkages work and others do not, and how associations are bolstered to make themselves stable and durable by linking to other networks and things. Further, and perhaps most interesting, ANT focuses on the minute negotiations that go on at the points of association. Things – not just humans, but the parts that make up humans and non-humans – persuade, coerce, seduce, resist and compromise each other as they come together. They may connect with other things in ways that lock them into a particular association, or they may pretend to connect, partially connect, or feel disconnected and excluded, even when they are connected. We are in a world of precarious correlations rather than cause and effect. ANT analyses try to trace these negotiations and their effects, and in the process show how the things that we commonly work with in educational research – whether classrooms, teachers, curriculum, a policy, standardized testing, racism or evidence-based practice – are each in fact assemblies of myriad things. These assemblies order objects and actions, flows of movement and choices in space and time. Yet these assemblies are precarious and require a great deal of ongoing work to sustain their linkages.

ANT analyses can show, therefore, how such assemblages can be unmade as well as made, and how counter-networks or alternative forms and spaces can take shape and develop. Networks can never be complete or totalizing; there are always gaps, holes and tears, and multiple networks vying to be effective. Further, ANT analyses show how knowledge is generated through the process and effects of these assemblages coming together. In this approach, learning is not simply an individual or cognitive process. Nor is it simply a social achievement. Learning itself becomes enacted as a network effect. ANT does all of this by drawing attention not only to the importance of things, to the non-human, in all educational endeavours, but also to the intimate associations between objects and all human attributes, capacities and activities. Life, in education as well as other spheres, is never only about the personal and the social. It is about what we will refer to as the socio-material.

Working from these assumptions, this chapter has been shaped to speak to those who may be newcomers to ANT ideas and approaches. In an introductory spirit, we do not intend to be comprehensive in breadth or depth, but to explain what we have found to be particularly helpful concepts for education. At the same time, we try to do justice to certain complexities and critiques around these concepts that have emerged, and to indicate some questions that gesture to interesting possibilities for educational analyses.

The rest of this chapter and the next represent our desire to explore what we believe to be certain useful ANT interventions for studying educational practices and dilemmas. Our objective is simplicity without dishonest simplification. Our challenge is to be clear without smoothing out lumpy complexity to purified clarity. We will discuss how ANT writings help us to consider the following issues in education: ‘things’ and why they are so important; ‘translation’ as a way to think about how things come to be and how they change; ‘networks’ and how they grow to constitute educational practices and ecologies; and ‘effects of networks’ in terms of agency, power, identity and knowledge. We also show some limits of ANT, what it does not seek to address and what it cannot, nor should be asked to explain in education. These limits do not diminish the power of what ANT can offer to educational analysts. ANT commentators have been clear that its ideas are best utilized as an approach, a sensibility and a method for understanding, not a totalizing theory of the world and its problems. For us, ANT is a way of intervening in or interrupting education rather than simply a different way of representing education.

Things – why are they so important?

I have sought to show researchers in the social sciences that sociology is not the science of human beings alone – that it can welcome crowds of nonhumans with open arms, just as it welcomed the working masses in the nineteenth century. Our collective is woven together out of speaking subjects, perhaps, but subjects to which poor objects, our inferior brothers, are attached at all points.

(Latour 1996: viii)

Chalk and textbooks, tests and databases, student portfolios, playground equipment, desks, bulletin board displays and math manipulatives: education could be described as a set of material things or artefacts that are continually distributed, managed and employed (Lawn and Grosvenor 2005). And things are themselves assembled or, in Molotch’s (2005: 1) term, ‘lashed up’ from numerous elements; ‘to understand any one thing you have to learn how it fits into larger arrays of physical objects, social sentiments and ways of being … each element is just one interdependent fragment of a larger whole’.

Pedagogy centres around, and is constantly mediated by, material things. Pedagogical encounters change radically when its things change, for example, when a PowerPoint presentation is used instead of a textbook, or field trip to show how a pumping station works, or when desks and chairs are removed for learning activities to explore democracy or relationships. In one study, McGregor (2004) traces how things in a school science department office – from laboratory preparation materials and filing cabinet of students records to wall displays of timetables and humorous photos – drew teachers together in a distinct network of materials and conversations that reaffirmed particular practices and values, and that organized specific associations of materials and information. Her ANT analysis shows how the science department comes to be an accumulation of particular forms of knowledge that orders people, things and teaching identities and flows in space and time. This is taken to be qualitatively different from the physical education department.

However, schools constitute only one type of the many environments addressed in educational research and throughout this book. Things are central in vocational learning. Novice cooks, electricians, nurses or managers, for example, explore the nuances of how all the tools and substances of their work behave, what they can produce, and how these things act upon them as much as they act with them. Educational policy processes, workplace learning, curriculum-making, technology implementation and evaluation activities are all fundamentally shaped by the material things with which they associate and are associated, as much as by the human ideas, desires, meanings and actions that are entangled within them.

The simple recognition that things are ubiquitous in educational practices does not go far enough. Social scientists, including those working with ANT, are now emphasizing that things are integral to such processes. Things exert force themselves. They do not just respond to human intention and force. In fact, things change and shape human intentions, meanings, relationships, routines, memories, even perceptions of self. Miller (2005) reminds us that in our everyday lives, our material things can possess us as much as we possess them. Things in our homes can take up space we might not necessarily have, or compel memories and associations we may not wish to make. From food in the fridge to plants in the garden, things have demands and needs. People associate with these according to their own emotions, intentions and desires. Things exert attachments that enact identities.

Consider the struggle of many people to de-clutter their homes, offices and classrooms by giving up attachments to certain things. Knorr-Cetina (1997: 9), whose conceptions of intimate objects in professionals’ knowledge has influenced a whole body of scholarship, emphasizes that ‘[t]o understand the binding role of objects, personal object ties, object-centred traditions and collectives, and object-created emotional worlds all need to be considered’. Consider how a teacher actually comes into being as a teacher. This is not through force of individual will, nor through the conferring of a certificate alone. It is rather through the myriad things that she designs, selects, organizes, stores, evaluates, maintains and responds to, as well as the humans with whom she interacts every moment. Furthermore, things themselves embed complex histories of events and forces that produced them and continue to change them. To view things as either the products of human design or as brute tools controlled through human action alone is to underestimate the power and contribution of things themselves in enacting events. It is to overlook the complex effects that these non-human entities produce through associations with other (human and non-human) things.

Waltz (2006) is one who argues strongly for ANT-like attention to things in educational research. He claims that material non-human things are often analytically subsumed by human intention, design and drive and treated merely as representatives of human ends. As tools, the role of non-human things is typically limited to extension, transportation, distribution and prevention. Overall, this subjugation of things to humans obscures their own particular contributions and hides the qualities of the entities themselves. One example Waltz uses is the course textbook. This is typically treated as a tool even by critical theorists who present texts as ideological vehicles for control and oppression. However, textbooks exert force themselves. Depending on their form, they can enact certain pedagogical activities and sequences, align curricula across space and time, limit the teacher’s academic freedom, affect student funds, and generally can function as ‘co-conspirators, law-enforcement officers, administrators, racists, quality control agents, seducers, and investment advisors’ (Waltz 2006: 57). In another example provided by Waltz, school playground equipment combines with children’s behaviours to produce particular activities, speech, social groupings and exclusions, injuries, even gender identities. The point here is that material things are performative; they act, together with other types of things and forces, to exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation. What, then, is produced can appear to be ‘gender identity’ or ‘expertise’ or ‘knowledge’ or a social ‘structure’, such as racism. A focus on things therefore helps us to untangle the heterogeneous relationships holding together these larger categories, tracing their durabilities as well as their weaknesses.

Things circulate in a midst of ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1 A way to intervene, not a theory of what to think
• Chapter 2 Knowledge, innovation and knowing in practice
• Chapter 3 (De)naturalizing teaching and learning
• Chapter 4 Entangling curriculum-making
• Chapter 5 Networking technologized learning
• Chapter 6 (Un)making standards in education
• Chapter 7 Educational reform and planned change
• Chapter 8 (Ac)counting for education
• Chapter 9 (De)centring educational policy
• Chapter 10 Messy research
• Chapter 11 Translating ANT in education
• References
• Index