A Critical Review of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Its Use in Education Research (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation, 2014
In this theoretical paper, the author provides a critical review of the Actor-Network Theory concept, while considering the relative under-utilization of Actor-Network Theory in education studies, tracing possible ways in which this theory can contribute as an analytical framework through its strands of 'actor-network', 'symmetry', 'translation', and their constituents-thus facilitating its international growth. Two concepts this paper gives prominence to are networks and power relations. The author challenges the widespread conception of the 'network' metaphor propagated by globalization discourses, contrasting it in turn with the network conception in Actor-Network Theory, where the main premise is multiplicity. The author explores Actor-Network Theory as a theory of the mechanics of power, concerning itself with the establishment of hegemony. This paper is especially aimed at those researchers of education reform who are as yet unfamiliar with Actor-Network Theory and somewhat sceptical of socio-material approaches, in order for them to realize its unrivalled potential contribution to their work.
Introduction: Reclaiming and Renewing Actor Network Theory for Educational Research
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2010
Actor-network theory (ANT) continues to enjoy a lively trajectory in the social sciences since its emergence in the early 1980s at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI) of the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris. Largely associated with its progenitors in science and technology studies including Bruno Latour, John Law and Michael Callon, ANT has contributed an important series of analytic approaches and considerations that rupture certain central assumptions about knowledge, subjectivity, the real and the social. The focus is on the socio-material-and how minute relations among objects bring about the world. Analyses drawing upon ANT trace how different human and nonhuman entities come to be assembled, to associate and exercise force, and to persist or decline over time. Nothing is given or anterior, including 'the human', 'the social', 'subjectivity', 'mind', 'the local', 'structures' and other categories common in educational analyses. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, ANT figured prominently in studies published in sociology, technology, feminism, cultural geography, organization and management, environmental planning, and health care. With a few limited exceptions, however, educational research in the main has not demonstrated a similar enthusiasm in the uptake of ANT. We are among those who believe that ANT offers truly important insights about the processes and objects of education. This is in spite of, or actually partly because of, its mutations in the past two decades into a highly diffuse, diverse and contested set of framings and practices. Its own key commentators refuse to call it a 'theory' as though ANT were some coherent explanatory device. It may be more accurate to think of ANT as a virtual 'cloud', continually moving, shrinking and stretching, dissolving in any attempt to grasp it firmly. ANT is not 'applied' like a theoretical technology, but is more like a sensibility, a way to sense and draw (nearer to) a phenomenon. For educational researchers, as we argue in Fenwick & Edwards (2010) and Fenwick, et al. (2011), ANT's language can open new questions and its approaches can sense phenomena in rich ways that discern the difficult ambivalences, messes, multiplicities and contradictions that are embedded in so many educational issues. This book is an experiment, intended to engage readers in the question: What work can ANT do in educational research? To bring some focus to the book, we called for chapters addressing issues of educational change or reform. The authors employ a range of ANT constructs to explore and perform educational change in highly diverse manifestations: integration of new technology, a large-scale school improvement initiative, everyday curriculum enactments, development of international standardized tests, introduction of teacher evaluation systems, and implementation of a literacy program. Each author argues for the unique analysis that ANT approaches enable, yielding overall an important expansion of how we engage with educational change. While one object of each chapter is to show an ANT sensibility at work with a particular researcher in a particular environment of concerns, each also focuses, as ANT studies are expected to do, on tracing the rich material details of the actual actors and their story being followed by the researcher. The remainder of this introduction outlines ANT for those who may be newcomers to its ideas and approaches, and offers a glimpse of the chapters.
Reading educational reform with actor network theory: Fluid spaces, otherings, and ambivalences.
In considering two extended examples of educational reform efforts, this discussion traces relations that become visible through analytic approaches associated with actor-network theory (ANT). The strategy here is to present multiple readings of the two examples. The first reading adopts an ANT approach to follow ways that all actors – human and non-human entities, including the entity that is taken to be ‘educational reform’ – are performed into being through the play of linkages among heterogeneous elements. Then, further readings focus not only on the material practices that become enacted and distributed, but also on the otherings that occur: the various fluid spaces and ambivalent belongings that create actor-network(s) but also escape them. For educational research, particularly in educational reform and policy, it is argued that ANT analyses are particularly useful to examine the complex enactments in these dynamics. That is, ANT can illuminate movements of ordering and disordering that occur through minute socio-material connections in educational interventions. ANT readings also can discern, within these attempts to order people and practices, the spaces of flux and instability that enable and protect alternate possibilities.
(un)Doing standards in education with actor-network theory
Recent critiques have drawn important attention to the depoliticized consensus and empty promises embedded in network discourses of educational policy. While acceding this critique, this discussion argues that some forms of network analysis -specifically those adopting actornetwork theory (ANT) approaches -actually offer useful theoretical resources for policy studies. Drawing from ANT-inspired studies of policy processes associated with educational standards, the article shows the ambivalences and contradictions as well as the possibilities that can be illuminated by ANT analysis of standards as networks. The discussion outlines the diverse network conceptions, considerations and sensibilities afforded by ANT approaches. Then it shows four phenomena that have been highlighted by ANT studies of educational standards: ordering (and rupturing) practice through 'immutable mobiles', local universality, tensions among networks of prescription and networks of negotiation, and different co-existing ontological forms of the same standards. The conclusion suggests starting points, drawing from these ANT-inspired network analyses, for examining policy processes associated with educational standards.
This paper presents insights into the leadership implications of recent shifts in a range of policy contexts towards notions of collaboration and partnership. The paper draws on empirical research into the formation and operation of government instituted networks in the context of education in Victoria, Australia. From 2001, School Networks and Local Learning and Employment Networks (LLEN) were implemented by the state government to support young people in their transition through school and into employment in a context of a risk society, a context where pathways into sustainable employment for young people, and others, had become more erratic. For comparative purposes, the paper also draws on published research into the implementation of joined-up approaches, including Primary Strategy Learning Networks (PSLN), in England. Using concepts from Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the paper argues for the value of considering the full range of actors – both human and non-human, real and unreal – involved in networking initiatives and proposes some thoughts on the implications of such a sociology of associations for both leadership and governance.
Multiple enactments? An Actor Network Theory approach to studying educational research practices
Actor Network Theory (ANT) is one of the more controversial approaches in social sciences. It arose in the early 1980s out of criticism towards the more traditional Sociology, which tended to disregard the role of the material and the natural in the constitution of ‘social reality’. In ANT terms, the social is not seen as the ‘glue’ holding society together, but as something made up of essentially non-social components (human, non-human, animate, inanimate entities) constituting networks of relations and being constituted by them. (Latour 2005, 4-5; Law 2007.) The main aim of ANT is to overcome the subject-object divide, the distinction between the social and the natural worlds and to see the reality as enacted. Over the years the ANT approaches have developed into various directions in the hands of different thinkers and disciplines. The aim of the paper is to disentangle some of the conceptual messiness of ANT while considering the potential of applying a strand of the approach in my PhD study, which is linked to an interdisciplinary (Education and Computer Sciences) research and development project Ensemble.
Students as actors in school networks. (2015) English version of ISSN: 2007-2686
In this article I pretend to expound some of the ideas originating from the Actornetwork theory (ANT) that have been utilized in education by anthropologist Jan Nespor, presently professor in the Ohio State University. In his work he studies the trajectory of students throughout their professional development, their career paths in research within college institutions and the extensive trajectories of grade school students. As an anthropologist he utilizes an ethnographic approach to research as conceived within the field of Science Studies, thus making his descriptions not only abound in detail but also in thorough analysis that transcends the macro-micro levels and the temporal dimension; it transfers the contributions of scientific practice studies to the student practice studies in academia; it explains how the transit of students through academic networks contributes to the redefinition of space, time, identity and the way in which knowledge constituted by school contents is displaced by students and teachers through the objects that represent them.