(Re)Configuring Actors in Practice (original) (raw)

Springer eBooks, 2017

Abstract

What is an actor? What does it mean to act? Questions of actors and agency touch upon the core interest of social sciences and have been addressed from different theoretical angles. This article aims to investigate the term ‘actor’ and proposes to (re)configure actors as well as agency as practically achieved. This contribution draws on practice theories by Reckwitz and Schatzki to show that actors are constituted in practices while being constitutive of them. It then argues for a conceptualisation of actors as ‘actors-enacted’ by referring to recent work in actor-network theory. Such practice-based understandings do not only provide a new perspective on actors in theory, but encourage us to take actors and their emergence themselves as a topic of empirical research. Next, I elaborate and reflect upon methodological implications of a practice-based investigation of actors: (1) the necessity to explore sites where actors and agencies are observably achieved and actorship itself is of central concern for practitioners and (2) the emphasis on praxiography as a research strategy. Finally, using an example from a detailed study on how actors and agencies are implicated in practicing a public debate on assisted reproductive technologies, I illustrate the work involved in enacting actors and by doing so, highlight the situated accomplishment of actors and agencies in practice. The article concludes by arguing for treating our own research as theoretical and empirical practices that configure actors in particular ways.

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