Researching Education Through Actor-Network Theory E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issues
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 346

Beschreibung

Researching Education Through Actor-Network Theory offers a new take on educational research, demonstrating the ways in which actor-network theory can expand the understanding of educational change. * An international collaboration exploring diverse manifestations of educational change * Illustrates the impact of actor-network theory on educational research * Positions education as a key area where actor-network theory can add value, as it has been shown to do in other social sciences * A valuable resource for anyone interested in the sociology and philosophy of education

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issue Book Series

Title page

Copyright page

Notes on Contributors

Foreword

Introduction

About Actor-Network Theory

Translation—How Change Occurs

Networks

Effects of Networks—Agency, Power, Identity and Knowledge

Translation, Devices and Assemblages in Education

Conclusion

1 Devices and Educational Change

Devices and Distribution in Actor Network Theory

Little ‘Demos’: Technology and Organizational Identity

Devices and Change: Tinkering, Cartesian Fixes, Brokerage

Conclusions

2 Translating the Prescribed into the Enacted Curriculum in College and School

Introduction

Background to the Study

Actor-Network Theory

The Prescribed Curriculum: An (In)visible Token?

Inferences

Acknowledgments

3 Unruly Practices: What a sociology of translations can offer to educational policy analysis

1. Introduction and Overview: What’s the Story?

2. Concepts Useful for Policy Analysis

3. The Skills for Life Strategy—A Panorama and Three ANT Stories

4. Conclusions

4 ANT on the PISA Trail: Following the statistical pursuit of certainty

ANT and the ‘PISA Laboratory’

PISA: An Overview

Background to the Study

Making PISA Knowledge

From ‘World’ to ‘Word’

Engaging in a ‘Politics of Fact’

5 Assembling the ‘Accomplished’ Teacher: The performativity and politics of professional teaching standards

Introduction

Clearing Some Definitional Ground: Standards as Epistemic Objects

What Counts as a Standard?: Orthodoxies and other Stories

Travelling with Actor-Network Theory: ‘It’s Practice All the Way Down’

The Project in Question: Data and Method Assemblage

Teaching and Standards of Teaching: Performative Tales from the Field

Assembling the Accomplished Teacher: Whose Assemblage Counts?

The Critical Contribution of Actor-Network Theory: Performative Politics

6 Reading Educational Reform with Actor-Network Theory: Fluid spaces, otherings, and ambivalences

Introduction

ANT, After-ANT, and Educational Reform

Network Readings and Educational Reform

A First Reading of Reform: Extending the Network

Re-thinking the Reading: Centrality and Otherness

A Second Reading: Mobilizing and Sustaining Reform

Re-reading Reform: Fluid Spaces and Ambivalent Belongings

Conclusion

Index

Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issue Book Series

Series Editor: Michael A. Peters

The Educational Philosophy and Theory journal publishes articles concerned with all aspects of educational philosophy. Their themed special issues are also available to buy in book format and cover subjects ranging from curriculum theory, educational administration, the politics of education, educational history, educational policy, and higher education.

Titles in the series include:

Researching Education Through Actor-Network Theory

Edited by Tara Fenwick and Richard Edwards

The Power In/Of Language

Edited by David R. Cole & Linda J. Graham

Educational Neuroscience: Initiatives and Emerging Issues

Edited by Kathryn E. Patten and Stephen R. Campbell

Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy

Edited by Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein

Thinking Education Through Alain Badiou

Edited by Kent den Heyer

Toleration, Respect and Recognition in Education

Edited by Mitja Sardo

Gramsci and Educational Thought

Edited by Peter Mayo

Patriotism and Citizenship Education

Edited by Bruce Haynes

Exploring Education Through Phenomenology: Diverse Approaches

Edited by Gloria Dall’Alba

Academic Writing, Philosophy and Genre

Edited by Michael A. Peters

Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education

Edited by Mark Mason

Critical Thinking and Learning

Edited by Mark Mason

Philosophy of Early Childhood Education: Transforming Narratives

Edited by Sandy Farquhar and Peter Fitzsimons

The Learning Society from the Perspective of Governmentality

Edited by Jan Masschelein, Maarten Simons, Ulrich Bröckling and Ludwig Pongratz

Citizenship, Inclusion and Democracy: A Symposium on Iris Marion Young

Edited by Mitja Sardoc

Postfoundationalist Themes In The Philosophy of Education: Festschrift for James D. Marshall

Edited by Paul Smeyers and Michael A. Peters

Music Education for the New Millennium: Theory and Practice Futures for Music Teaching and Learning

Edited by David Lines

Critical Pedagogy and Race

Edited by Zeus Leonardo

Derrida, Deconstruction and Education: Ethics of Pedagogy and Research

Edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas and Michael A. Peters

This edition first published 2012

Chapters © 2012 The Authors

Book compilation © 2012 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

Originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Volume 43, Supplement 1)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Researching education through actor-network theory / edited by Tara Fenwick and Richard Edwards.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-27489-7 (pbk.)

 ISBN 978-1-118-27586-3 (epub)

 ISBN 978-1-118-27585-6 (mobi)

 1. Education–Research–Methodology. 2. Actor-network theory. I. Fenwick, Tara J. II. Edwards, Richard, 1956 July 2–

 LB1028.R384 2012

 370.72–dc23

2012001068

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image by www.cyandesign.co.uk

Notes on Contributors

Richard Edwards is Professor of Education and Head of the School of Education, University of Stirling. His published work has focused on issues of spatiality and materiality in education, curriculum and literacy, educational policy, and lifelong learning more broadly. Email: [email protected]

Tara Fenwick is Professor of Professional Education at the School of Education, University of Stirling. Her research currently focuses on professional knowledge, practice and education in the workplace, with particular interest in sociomaterial theory. She has published widely in theories of workplace learning. Email: [email protected]

Radhika Gorur is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include education policy, evidence-based policy, and material semiotic theories. She is particularly interested in following the practices of measurement of performance and equity in education. Email: [email protected].

Mary Hamilton is Professor of Adult Learning and Literacy in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK and Associate Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre. She researches, publishes and teaches in the field of Literacy Studies, discourse, policy and change. Email: [email protected]

Dianne Mulcahy is a Senior Lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Her published work in Education concerns policy and political issues surrounding educators’ professional formation and development. Her recent research activity has centred on capturing the complexity of educators’ professional learning, with particular attention to the materiality of this learning. Email: [email protected]

Jan Nespor is a professor at The Ohio State University. An educational anthropologist, he has published works on curriculum and learning in higher education, urban elementary schooling, the politics of computer-mediated instruction in universities, qualitative methodology, and other topics. Email: [email protected]

Foreword

Actor-network theory (ANT) insists on forms of nonhuman agency and focuses on how networks get formed. As a form of material-semiotics, it emerges in science studies and is faithful to the ethnomethodological school and consonant with poststructuralist and constructivist commitments. It is particularly useful in analyzing large technical systems. Already there is enough in this brief encapsulated description to challenge the ontological commitments and epistemological orientations of most social science approaches and to recommend the adoption of the approach to educationalists. Tracing its origin meanings to Diderot Bruno Latour (1998) writes: ‘Put too simply ANT is a change of metaphors to describe essences: instead of surfaces one gets filaments (or rhyzomes in Deleuze’s parlance) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). More precisely it is a change of topology. Instead of thinking in terms of surfaces—two dimension—or spheres—three dimension—one is asked to think in terms of nodes that have as many dimensions as they have connections’.1

In Researching Education Through Actor-Network Theory, Tara Fenwick and Richard Edwards both renew and reclaim actor-network theory for educational research demonstrating its potential and power in a series of related papers selected and edited for their insights into educational processes. This is an authoritative collection by experts in the field who as editors and contributors provide the basis for a good understanding and application of actor-network theory in educational research.

Michael A. Peters

University of Waikato, NZ

Note

1. See “On actor network theory: A few clarifications” at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9801/msg00019.html.

Introduction

Tara Fenwick & Richard Edwards

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 (STS) 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 and 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 objective 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 educators, as described in Fenwick and Edwards (2010), for those who may be.

About Actor-Network Theory

The risk in explaining ANT is distorting and domesticating it. Its ideas are practices for understanding, not a totalizing theory of the world and its problems. Jan Nespor puts it well in his chapter when he describes ANT ideas as ‘ontological acids undermining reductive explanations and pushing us towards engagements with evidence’. The more well-known ANT ideas that authors have taken up are described here briefly, including symmetry, translation, network ontology, network effects, (im)mutable mobiles, obligatory points of passage and scale play. We also introduce selected critiques of ANT and certain ‘after-ANT’ conceptions such as multiple ontologies. We hope to avoid the trap of re-establishing and imposing a purity of ANT-ness that Law (1999, p. 10) has warned of: ‘Only dead theories and dead practices celebrate their identity’.

ANT examines the interconnections of human and nonhuman entities based upon an anti-foundationalist approach in which nothing exists prior to its performance or enactment. Human intention and action are therefore decentred in this approach. The objective is to understand how these things come together—and manage to hold together—to assemble collectives or ‘networks’ that produce force and other effects: knowledge, identities, routines, behaviours, policies, curricula, innovations, oppressions, reforms, illnesses and on and on. ANT thus helps us to ask: What are the different kinds of connections and associations created among things? What different kinds and qualities of networks are produced through these connections? What different ends are served through these networks? A key assumption is that humans are not treated any differently from nonhumans in ANT analyses. This assumption, elaborated by Bruno Latour (1987), is called ‘symmetry’. Everyday objects and parts of objects, memories, intentions, technologies, bacteria, texts, furniture, bodies, chemicals, plants … all things are assumed to be capable of exerting force and joining together, changing and being changed by each other. The networks thus formed can keep expanding to extend across broad spaces, long distances or time periods. Of course, networks can also break down, or dissolve, or become abandoned. ANT analyses show how things are attracted into or excluded from these networks, how some linkages work and others do not, and how connections are bolstered to make themselves stable and durable by linking to other networks and things. In particular, ANT analyses focus on the minute negotiations that go on at the points of connection. Things persuade, coerce, seduce, resist and compromise each other as they come together. They may connect with other things in ways that gather them into a particular collective, or they may pretend to connect, partially connect or feel disconnected and excluded even when they are connected.

Latour (1999) fights any ontological separation between materiality and meaning as a rupture between the thing and its sign that are part of each object. He considers a central problem to be the ‘circulating reference’ between words and world that attempts to transform matter, the objects of knowledge, into representations, as though there were justifiable a priori distinctions between mind/matter or object/sign. He, like Ian Hacking (2000) and Deborah Barad (2007), is therefore critical of social constructivists as well as realists in assuming that materiality and representation are separate realms. The important point is that ANT focuses not on what texts and other objects mean, but on what they do. And what they do is always in connection with other human and nonhuman things. Some of these connections link together to form an identifiable entity or assemblage, which is referred to as an ‘actor’ that can exert force. ‘Playground’, for example, represents a continuous collaboration of bats and balls, swing installations, fences, grassy hills, sand pits, children’s bodies and their capacities, game discourses, supervisory gazes, safety rules and so on. This playground is both a moving assemblage or network of things that have become connected in a particular way, and an actor that can produce fears, policies, pedagogies, forms of play and resistances to these forms—hence, actor-network. And the objects that have become part of this actor-network are themselves effects, produced by particular interactions with one another.

ANT analyses try to faithfully trace all of these negotiations and their effects. In the process, they show how the entities that we commonly work with in educational research—classrooms, teaching, students, knowledge generation, curriculum, policy, standardized testing, inequities, school reform—are in fact assemblies or gatherings of myriad things that order and govern educational practices. Yet, these assemblies are often precarious networks that require a great deal of ongoing work to sustain their linkages. So, such analyses can show how such assemblages can be unmade as well as made, and how counter-networks or alternative forms and spaces take shape and develop strength. The focus is on how things are enacted rather than attempting to explain why they are the way they are.

Those familiar with ANT debates will know that many speak of ‘after-ANT’ or ‘post-ANT’. Some avoid using explicit ANT terminology, characterizing their work as complexity, socio-materiality, material semiotics or STS. The frustration expressed by the most prominent ANT commentators is that many early ANT studies reified concepts such as networks, solidified particular models of analysis and 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, 1999) was premised on the assumption that ANT ideas proliferating throughout the 1990s had largely run into an impasse. At that time, Law (1999), for example, was worried that ANT’s topological assumptions had come to homogenize the possibilities of understanding complexity in spatial and relational socio-material events. Other authors, representing leading scholars associated with ANT at that time, declared various approaches forward 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, 13 years on from the publication of Actor Network Theory and After, there has been a remarkable profusion of ANT studies, critiques and hybrid theoretical blends as ANT has travelled across disciplines ranging from feminist technology studies to cyberpunk semiotics to environmental activism. Some authors have argued for ANT’s particular value in educational research (e.g. see Edwards, 2002; Nespor, 2002; McGregor, 2004; Waltz, 2006; Harmon, 2007; Mulcahy, 2007; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). These explorations have each helped to extend and reconfigure ANT ideas, opening challenging questions and ways of thinking for educational researchers. We believe that it is more helpful to use one term ‘actor-network theory’ to refer to this constellation of ideas that have associated themselves with ‘ANT’ at some point, rather than to attempt problematic periodizations of early-ANT, after-ANT, ANT-diaspora and so forth. We employ ANT as a marker—understood to be a contingent and conflicted signifier—for approaches that share notions of symmetry, network broadly conceived, and translation in multiple and shifting formulations.

Translation—How Change Occurs

In some early formulations, ANT has been described as a ‘sociology of translation’. Translation is the term used by Latour (1987) to describe what happens when entities, human and nonhuman, come together and connect, changing one other to form links. At each of these connections, one entity has worked upon another to translate or change it to become part of a network of coordinated things and actions. ‘Entity’ is a loose way to refer to various things that can be human and nonhuman, including different kinds of material objects and immaterial (conceptual, moral, virtual) objects and actions, that are not pre-given, essentialized and defined. As Law (1999) tries to explain, an entity is more than one and less than many, not a multiplicity of bits nor a plurality, a division into two or more others. In traditional ANT language, while the working entity is called an ‘actor’, the worked-upon entity is referred to as an ‘actant’. In other words according to Latour (1999, p. 18), when the actant becomes translated to become a performing part of the network, the actant behaves with what appears to be particular intentions, morals, even consciousness and subjectivity. In other words, when translation has succeeded, the entity that is being worked upon is mobilised to assume a particular role and perform knowledge in a particular way. It performs as an actor.

Translation is neither deterministic nor linear, for what entities do when they come together is probable but unpredictable. They negotiate their connections, using persuasion, force, mechanical logic, seduction, resistance, pretence and subterfuge. Connections take different forms, some more elastic, tenuous or long-lasting than others. Translations may be incremental, or delayed across space and time. Entities may only peripherally allow themselves to be translated by the network. In Latour’s (2005) ontology, entities undergo myriad negotiations throughout the process of translation. For Harmon (2007), this is an important contribution of ANT to education: tracing exactly how entities are not just effects of their interactions with others, but are also always acting on others, subjugating others and making things possible. All are fragile, and all are powerful, held in balance with their interactions. None is inherently strong or weak, but only becomes strong by assembling other allies.

Eventually these dynamic attempts by actors to translate one another can appear to become stabilized: the network can settle into a stable process or object that maintains itself. Like a black box, it appears naturalized, purified, immutable and inevitable, while concealing all the negotiations that brought it into existence. Examples would be a mandated list of teaching competencies, or an ‘evidence-based’ educational practice accepted as ‘gold standard’. Each entity also belongs to other networks in which it is called to act differently, taking on different shapes and capacities. A teaching contract, for example, is a technology that embeds knowledge, both from networks that produced it and networks that have established its use, possibilities and constraints. In any employment arrangement, the contract can be ignored, manipulated in various ways or ascribed different forms of power. Thus, no agent or knowledge has an essential existence outside a given network: nothing is given in the order of things, but performs itself into existence. And however stable and entrenched it may appear, no network is immutable. Counter-networks are constantly springing up to challenge existing networks. Continuous effort is required to hold networks together, to bolster the breakages and to counter the subterfuges.

Networks

If translation is what happens at the nodes of a network, where one entity successfully acts upon another, how does a network actually grow? One suggestion was offered in ANT’s early years by Callon (1986), in a much-cited and critiqued conception of networks assembling and extending themselves through ‘moments’ of translation. The critiques have centred on problematic applications of Callon’s ideas as a fixed model, which tends to distort the complexity it was intended to liberate. This is undoubtedly as true in educational research as it has been in other fields of social science. However, there also exist educational studies showing the utility of Callon’s moments of translation in illuminating how some networks become so durable and apparently powerful in education, exerting influence across far-flung geographic spaces and time periods. Callon (1986) proposed that some types of network begin with problematisation where something tries to establish itself as an ‘obligatory passage point’ that frames an idea, intermediary or problem and related entities in particular ways. The translations whereby separate entities are somehow attracted or invited to this framing and where they negotiate their connection and role in the emerging network Callon called interessement, which not only selects those entities to be included but also importantly those to be excluded. Those entities to be included experience enrolment in the network relations, the process whereby they become engaged in new identities and behaviours and increasingly translated in particular directions. When the network becomes sufficiently durable, its translations are extended to other locations and domains through a process of mobilisation.

In ANT terms, a network is an assemblage or gathering of materials brought together and linked through processes of translation, that together perform a particular enactment. A textbook or an educational article, for example, each bring together, frame, select and freeze in one form a whole series of meetings, voices, explorations, conflicts, possibilities explored and discarded. Yet these inscriptions appear seamless and given, concealing the many negotiations of the network that produced it. And a textbook or article can circulate across vast spaces and times, gathering allies, shaping thoughts and actions and thus creating new networks. The more allies and connections, the stronger the network becomes. Law (1999, p. 7) explains that in a network ‘elements retain their spatial integrity by virtue of their position in a set of links or relations. Object integrity, then is not about a volume within a large Euclidean volume. It is rather about holding patterns of links stable’.

ANT’s network ontology is particularly useful for enabling rich analyses of contexts, which have become increasingly important in educational analyses of pedagogy, curriculum and educational change (Edwards et al., 2009). Contexts such as schools, lecture halls and workplaces are created and continually shaped through social and material processes. These folds and overlaps of practises are very much about network relations. In fact, human geographers have long worked with ANT, using its ideas, critiquing and extending them, to understand social space as a multiplicity of entities engaged in fluid, simultaneous, multiple networks of relations (see Murdoch, 2006, for a review). Power is central to any understanding of space and context as produced through networks of socio-material relations. ANT analyses can also trace how assemblages may solidify certain relations of power in ways that continue to affect movements and identities. For example, the sedimentation of power relations in educational spaces and their continuing effects are ubiquitous. Nespor’s (1994) oft-cited study of the differences in social behaviour and curricula between physics and business students at a university examines the ways that architecture interacts with particular codified knowledge to order flows of action, people and objects, constituting space in fundamentally different ways.

In ANT’s early years, the notion of network was employed to suggest both flow and clear points of connection among the heterogeneous entities that became assembled to perform particular practices and processes. However, with the proliferation of technological network systems and the ubiquity of the network metaphor to represent such phenomena as globalization and social capital, the term has problematically suggested flat linear chains, enclosed pipelines and ossified tracks. Frankham (2006) points out how educators have particular reason for caution when networks are everywhere invoked to represent idealized learning communities that are homogenous and a-political. ANT-associated writings have explored alternate metaphors of regions and fluid spaces (Mol & Law, 1994) to approach the complexity of socio-material events and avoid imposing a linear network model on the ineffable and imminent. Some have explored ways of retaining notions of network by refusing pipeline associations and showing diverse shapes and forms that a network can assume. Some networks are provisional and divergent, while others are tightly ordered, stable and prescriptive.

One problem with this network conception is what and where one should focus in conducting educational research. Miettinen (1999) makes this point in his critique of ANT, arguing that the network ontology is infinite and therefore unworkable for researchers. Indeed ‘cutting the network’ (Strathern, 1996) has always been deemed a necessary aspect of using ANT in research, but being explicit about how that enacts the effects of research in certain ways. Wherever one marks boundaries around a particular phenomenon to trace its network relations, there is a danger of both privileging that network and rendering invisible its multiple supports. Critiques of ANT studies have noted their fondness for examining powerful, visible networks, and their tendency to reproduce network participants’ views of their reality (Hassard et al., 1999). Representations of networks are themselves concrete, implying the realities to be far more stable and durable than imminent, precarious shifting socio-material relations ever can be.

Familiar issues of reflexivity are no less problematic in ANT accounts, which can objectify networks as something produced solely in the eye of the researcher, and simultaneously forget to paint the researcher’s representations into the portrayal of network translations, thereby leaving the entire analysis in control of the researchers. This not only turns a supposedly heterogeneous, symmetrical perspective into a decidedly human-centred one, but also pretends to honour uncertainty and messiness in what is in effect a predetermined account. In choosing a focus for study, ANT researchers confront McLean and Hassard’s (2004, p. 516) challenge:

… to produce accounts that are sophisticated yet robust enough to negate the twin charges of symmetrical absence or symmetrical absurdity [and] to understand the paradoxical situations in which ANT researchers find themselves in conducting field studies and producing accounts, notably in respect of notions of power, orderings and distributions.

This is what the contributors to this book have attempted.

Effects of Networks—Agency, Power, Identity and Knowledge

The overriding insight of ANT views of the world is that all objects, as well as all persons, knowledge and locations, are relational effects. The teacher is an effect of the timetable that places her in a particular room with particular students, in a class designated as Social Studies 6, among textbooks, class plans and bulletin boards and stacks of graded papers with which she interacts, teaching ideas and readings she has accumulated in particular relationships that have emerged with this year’s class of children. In the pedagogical practices of her work, she is a ‘knowing location’. In one example, McGregor (2004, p. 366) traces how the teacher as knowing location is produced in Science classrooms through:

… the laboratory, with its electricity points, water and gas lines. The Bunsen burners and flasks set up by the technicians, who have also ordered and prepared the necessary chemicals according to the requisition sheet, the textbooks and worksheets that the students are using. Mobilized also are the teacher’s experience and education.

These are further affected by networks of activity that composed and timetabled the student group in a particular way and allocated the teaching assistants. These things that act at a distance—buzzer, database, textbooks—are what Latour (1987) originally called immutable mobiles. Immutable mobiles are only visible within a particular network of relations. They can be silent, ignored or overridden by other active objects. However, they have developed enough solidity to be able to move about and still hold their relations in place. In effect, they function as the delegates of these other networks, extending their power by moving into different spaces and working to translate entities to behave in particular ways. Law and Singleton (2005) explain that whether an object is more or less abstract (a pedagogical idea compared to an instrument) is less the point, because the key feature is that it is identified, has material effects, in particular networks of historical, cultural, behavioural relations that make it visible.

But many immutable mobiles are not at all immutable: they break and shift, grow and adapt and mutate as they travel. Returning to the teacher as a knowing location, what of her agency and subjectivity? She is planning lessons, choosing particular pedagogical approaches, deciding whether to solve the myriad classroom problems that emerge in this way or that. How does ANT avoid casting her as determined and recognize her own force exercised through her pedagogical participation? How does ANT understand the sources and effects of her intentions, her desires and the meanings she makes of her pedagogical encounters with students? Certain critiques of ANT have accused it of failing to appreciate what is fundamentally human and subjective in flows of action, suggesting that perhaps it ought to modify its stance of radical symmetry to admit that humans are different because they make symbolic meaning of events and exert intentional action (Murdoch, 1998).

However, ANT’s ontology of folding and unfolding networks is incommensurate with any agency/structure dualism. Nor does ANT conceptualize agency as an individuated source of empowerment rooted in conscious intentions that mobilize action. Instead, ANT focuses on the circulating forces that get things done through a network of elements acting upon one another:

Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled. It is this venerable source of uncertainty that we wish to render vivid again in the odd expression of actor-network. (Latour, 2005, p. 44)

What appears to be the teacher’s agency is an effect of different forces including actions, desires, capacities and connections that move through her, as well as the forces exerted by the texts and technologies in all educational encounters. While networks and other flows circulate through the teacher’s practices, her own actions, desires and so on are not determined by the network, but emerge through the myriad translations that are negotiated among all the movements, talk, materials, emotions and discourses making up the classroom’s everyday encounters.

Pondering ANT’s utility in overcoming the limitations of intersubjective or humanist conceptions of agency in education, Leander and Lovvorn (2006, p. 301) warn that ‘removing the agency of texts and tools in formalizing movements risks romanticizing the practices as well as the humans in them; focusing uniquely on the texts and tools lapses into naïve formalism or technocentrism’. Agency is directly related to the heterogeneity of actors in networked relations. These are not actors plus fields of forces or context, but actants which can only proceed to action by association with others who may surprise or exceed. As McGregor (2004, p. 367) concludes from her study of teachers in science education, ‘knowing is a relational effect where pedagogy is a collective accomplishment and learning a situated activity’.

Some immutable mobiles become what Latour (1987) has called obligatory points of passage, central assemblages through which all relations in the network must flow at some time. A teacher’s mathematics curriculum guide, for example, functions as an obligatory point of passage. Her lesson plans, her choice of texts and assignments must all at least appear to be aligned with it, and are at least partially translated by its prescriptions. Thus this teacher’s knowledge and activity, along with all the other mathematics teachers and classes, those that assist them, the administrators that supervise them and the textbook publishers preparing materials for them, must pass through this obligatory point, this curriculum guide, to form their own networks.

The network effects that produce these immutable mobiles and obligatory points of passage are important dynamics in the power relations circumscribing education. The circulation and effects of these objects can assemble powerful centres that accumulate increasingly wider reaches of networks to hold them in place. Delegation, the ability to act at a distance through objects, is one way that power circulates through a network. How fast these immutable mobiles move, their fidelity or how immutable they really are as they move through diverse networks, and what entities they encounter or damage they sustain to their internal network relations, are questions worthy of exploration in different educational interests.

Scale is another important area for consideration. In fact, as Law and Hetherington (2003) note, if space is performed, if it is an effect of heterogeneous material relations, then distance is also performed. What makes near and far, here or there, is not a static separation between two points that is travelled by some object. Instead, these concepts of distance and location are created by relations that are always changing. When multiple points are linked together through actor-networks, the concepts of micro- and macro-do not hold. The teacher planning her morning class and the final meeting of the curriculum guide developers simply represent different parts of a network that has become extended though space as well as time. There do not exist as separated spaces of the ‘local’ and ‘global’, as though these are identifiable and distinct regions. Instead, these are scale effects produced through network relations. A series of intricate links runs among the different enactments of, for example, an educational policy whether visible in OECD documents, school district databases, parent discussions or a teacher’s correction of a student. ANT analyses upend and play with notions of scale, eschewing scale as ontologically distinct layers or regions, in ways that help to penetrate some of the more nuanced and multifaceted circulations of power in educational practice and knowledge.

Similarly, macro notions of social structure are not comprehensible in ANT logic. When anyone speaks of a system or structure ANT asks: How has it been compiled? Where is it? Where can I find it? What is holding it together? Soon one sees a number of sites and conduits, and the connections among them. While some have criticized ANT for supposedly failing to address broader macro social structures of capitalism, racism, class–gender relations and so forth in a preoccupation with the local and contingent, ANT commentators reject the dualism of the micro and macro. There are no suprastructural entities, explains Latour (1999, p. 18), because ‘big does not mean “really” big or “overall” or “overarching”, but connected, blind, local, mediated, related’.

As much as network relations are useful to trace in these dynamics of delegation, obligatory points of passage and scale play, the temptation to collapse all interactions and connections into networks needs to be avoided. While most entities and forces are usefully viewed as effects within an ANT-ish gaze, not all relations that contribute to producing these effects will be networks. There are other types of regions, other kinds of connections, other forms of space and foldings that work alongside and through networks, as Hetherington and Law (2000) describe. Indeed, argues Singleton (2005) in analysing the enactment of public policy, the relative stability of certain networks occurs not through their coherences but through their incoherences and ambivalences. An overly narrow preoccupation with network relations speaks to a bias that will inevitably banish from sight some of the more puzzling messiness of educational phenomena.

This is not to downplay the importance of understanding entities and forces as effects. It is to encourage more open and rich exploration of the multiple forms, lines and textures of materials that come together in different ways to produce these effects. Similarly, learning in ANT logic is not a matter of mental calculation or changes in consciousness. Instead, any changes we might describe as learning, such as new ideas, innovations, changes in behaviour, transformation, emerge through the effects of relational interactions that may be messy and incoherent, and spread across time and space. As Fox (2005) explains in analysing learning processes in higher education, competence or knowledge from an ANT perspective is not a latent attribute of any one element or individual, but a property of some actions rather than others as a network becomes enacted into being. The process of enactment, this interplay of force relations among technology, objects and changes in knowledge at every point in the network, is a continuing struggle. This struggle is learning. This conceptualization offers a way to think about education that steps outside of the ‘enculturation’ project that typifies pedagogies ranging from the emancipatory to the transmissive. Regardless of ideological persuasion or educative purpose, they claim that education imposes some future ideal on present human subjects and activities with the objective of developing learners’ potential to become knowledgeable, civic-minded, self-aware and so forth.

However, since ANT views all things as emerging through their interconnections in networks, where their nature and behaviours are never inherent but are produced through continuous interactions and negotiations, there can be no conception of ‘future potential’. This is a powerful counter-narrative to the conventional view of develop-mentalism that dominates the pedagogical gaze, positioning learners in continual deficit and learning activities as preparation for some imagined ideal. ANT’s ontology forces attention on all the work that is too easily swept away by such neat developmental teleologies.

Translation, Devices and Assemblages in Education

In the chapters collected here, authors consider various cases of educational change through the analytic approaches afforded by ANT. Using ANT implies that to theorize is to intervene and experiment rather than to abstract and represent. Thus, the chapters attempt to enact ANT rather than simply, and as we have largely done in this introduction, enact about ANT. As Jan Nespor points out, ANT’s focus on objects such as technological ‘devices’ can unsettle the ways we consider educational change: ‘redrawing our understandings of the relations of globalizing and localizing processes, slow and fast networks—and of drawing attention to devices as relatively neglected elements of change processes’. In one case, Nespor follows the many translations enacted in setting up instructional television at one university during the 1970s, and its evolution in subsequent decades to interactive video. The translations link global networks such as the ITV device itself, broadcasts, visions for educational technology, etc. with local networks such as classrooms, curricula and the technology unit in the university. Nespor finds that some of these translations are reversible or short-lived, while others are ‘irreversible’ and persistent, just as some networks such as technological product development are ‘speeded-up’ while others such as behaviourist pedagogy are ‘slow, congealed’.