(un) Doing Education with Actor Network Theory

Tara Fenwick University of Stirling

….. 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. Law, 2007

How do people, tools, technologies, texts move and become combined? What happens when they are hooked up with other networks?How do human and nonhuman materials change in their intra-connections?What kinds of forces, practices and knowledges emerge?Who/ what gets excluded?

Educators ANT-ing ….

How does a network come into being??Moments of “translation”:

-framing particular problem

-enlisting actors-shaping relations,

behaviors-mobilizing whole

network

Once mobilized,actor-network becomes a“black box”

Negotiations of building the network are forgotten

ANT Problemsheroic actorfocus on powerful, visible actorsflat networks focus on ‘ordering’ practicestotalized representations (incl the ‘Other’)infinity of networksimplies stable, durable realitiesre-presents other times/places with tools of the present‘moments of translation’ became a fixed model