Paolo Landri - Actor Network Theory and the Investigation of Education Policy and Practice: an Introduction

1. ACTOR NETWORK THEORY AND THE
INVESTIGATION OF EDUCATION POLICY
AND PRACTICE. AN INTRODUCTION
Paolo Landri - CNR_IRPPS_ITALY
SUSEES - SUmmer School In Sociologies of Education and Higher Education
University of Strasbourg
p.landri@irpps.cnr.it

2. I AM NOT…

3. …..HOWEVER, I CONTRIBUTED
TO THE CIRCULATION OF ANT IN
ITALY
1996
2000
2000
2000

4. QUESTION 1
a) What is Actor Network Theory ?

5. A STANDARD STORY OF
ACTOR NETWORK THEORY
The term ‘Actor-Network’ is the literal translation from the French
‘Acteur Réseau’. The addition of ‘Theory’ led to the acronym of ANT
that spread quickly in the English speaking scientific communities.
Originally, it was intended to convey the sense of relationality,
precariousness, and contingency of actors and networks at a time
when the concept of ‘network’ suggested a metaphor of becoming in
contrast with the solidity of ‘system’, ‘structure’
ANT comes from STS (Science and Technologies Studies), an
interdisciplinary research that includes philosophers, anthropologists,
sociologists, etc. and was conceptualized during the ‘80s by Michael
Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law (see Law, 2009). It is then a trans-
national and trans-disciplinary vocabulary that emerged to adjust social
theory to science and technology studies

6. ANT IS A THEORY ? OR A
SENSIBILITY ?
ANT problematizes also the notion of ‘theory’, therefore is not a theory in
the traditional and common sense of social theory that assumes an all-
embracing position and provides explanations
‘actor network approach is not a theory. Theories usually try to
explain why something happens, but actor network theory is
descriptive rather than foundational in explanatory terms, which
means that it is a disappointment for those seeking strong accounts.
Instead it tells stories about ‘how’ relations assemble or don’t . . . [I]t
is better understood as a toolkit for telling interesting stories about,
and interfering in, those relations. More profoundly, it is a sensibility
to the messy practices of relationality and materiality of the world.
Along with this sensibility comes a wariness of the large-scale
claims common in social theory: these usually seem too simple’
(Law 2009)

7. ANT IS A THEORY ? OR A
TRAVEL GUIDE ?
…..’where to travel’ and ‘what is worth seeing there’ is
nothing but a way of saying in plain English what is
usually said under the pompous Greek name of
‘method’ or, even worse, ‘methodology’. The advantage
of a travel book approach over a ‘discourse on method’
is that it cannot be confused with the territory on which it
simply overlays. A guide can be put to use as well as
forgotten, placed in a backpack, stained with grease
and coffee, scribbled all over, its pages torn apart to
light a fire under a barbecue. In brief, it offers
suggestions rather than imposing itself on the reader’
(Latour, 2005)

8. BASIC GLOSSARY:
EXEMPLARY CASE STUDIES

9. A BASIC GLOSSARY.
ENTITIES IN MAKING:
ACTORS, ACTANT
‘An actor is what to made to act by many others’ (Latour, 2005)
The approach consider symmetrically humans and nonhumans. It does not assume
that entities have pre-formed characteristics, their features are always contingent
and empirical, entities are propositions, namely “in the ontological sense of what an
actor has to offer to other actors” (Latour, 1999). Actors and networks coevolve, and
define reciprocally, therefore we come to the term ‘actor-networks’.
Objects have then agency, configure users, translate interests, are delegated to do
things, consolidates relationship (technology is society made durable), partecipate
to politics, are technologies for putting policies in practice. ANT brings
sociomateriality at the forefront !!!!!
Actors are defined by their performances under trials (what they do in situation of
trial). The term actant comes from semiotics to extend to notion of agency also to
nonhumans

10. A BASIC GLOSSARY. HOW
ENTITIES CONNECT ?
TRANSLATION
Callon’s stages of translation (1986):
problematisation, where a problem is articulated in such a way that
the articulators can then become indispensable to the solution;
interessement, in which actors come between other actors and
their desired goals;
enrolment, in which actors are assigned specific roles and
relationships;
mobilisation, a process by which one set of actors gains the ability
to become spokespersons for the collective

11. A BASIC GLOSSARY. HOW ENTITIES
CONNECT ? INSCRIPTION, IMMUTABLE
MOBILES
A general term that refers to all the type of transformations
through which an entity becomes materialized in a sign, an
archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace. Usually but
non always inscriptions are two-dimensional,
superimposable, and combinable’ (Latour, 1999, p.306 in
Pandora’s Hope)
Inscriptions may be combined while keeping some aspects
of the relation intact. That way, they may circulate, and
make the entity mobile. They can be so to speak ‘immutable
mobiles’.

12. A BASIC GLOSSARY. HOW ENTITIES
CONNECT ? MEDIATORS,
INTERMEDIARIES
An intermediary ‘transports meaning or force without transformation… even
if it internally made of many parts (Latour, 2005, p. 39). On the other hand,
‘Mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the
elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour, 2005, p.39).
In practice, there is a constant uncertainty about whether an entity (text,
technology, people, etc.) may behave as mediator, or intermediary; it
depends on how it comes to be associated in the assemblages of humans
and nonhumans.
The particular mix of intermediaries and mediators in a growing assemblage
permits to map the relative state of order/disorder. So, the unfolding of an
assemblage can move from complication (a stabilized state no matter how
many intermediaries are in there) to complexity (a fluid state, where the drive
to disorder leads to a growing number of variables not to be considered
separately).

13. A BASIC GLOSSARY. HOW ENTITIES
CONNECT ? CENTRES OF
CALCULATION
Centres of calculation is a site where inscriptions can be
combined and it is possible a calculation. These sites can be
a laboratory, a statistical institution, a databank

14. A BASIC GLOSSARY.
STABILISATION OF ACTOR-
NETWORK
The associations of humans and nonhumans entities come to stabilised, and
some extent blackboxed.
Blackboxing occurs when a technology, an artifact, an object, etc is made
invisible by its own success. It happens when a car runs efficiently, a matter
of fact has been settled, a controversy is fixed. Here, the attention is on the
inputs and the outputs of the technology, of the matter of fact, on the solution
as a whole, and not on its internal complexity. As a result, the more a
scientific and technological work succeed, the more is a black-box
More in general, and a result of the successful association of entities, some
aspects of the assemblages of humans and nonhumans become taken for
granted. To underline this, several concepts have been proposed: black box,
obligatory point of passage, punctualization, etc.

15. CRITICS: ANT AND AFTER

16. QUESTION 2
How to use ANT to do research in education policy and
practice ?

17. ANT AND EDUCATION

18. FOLLOW THE ACTORS !
ANT accounts are mostly case studies carried out by using
ethnographic projects (participant observations, interviews,
conversations, note taking), or historical reconstruction
(letters, documents, and other traces of the past)
ANT inspired education policy studies implied the collection
and the analysis of policy documents, media reports,
interviews, observation

19. Examples of ANT-ish tales in education
policy
❖ Towards a Sociology of Measurement in
Education Policy, RADHIKA GORUR
❖ What – If Anything – Do Standards Do in
Education? Topological Registrations of
Standardising Work in Teacher Education,
CARLIJNE CEULEMANS
❖ Making sense of the educational present:
problematizing the ‘merit turn’ in the Italian
eduscape, EMILIANO GRIMALDI & GIOVANNA
BARZANO’

20. • Towards a Sociology of Measurement in Education
Policy: RADHIKA GORUR
❖ Australia was shocked to find itself ‘inequitable’ – it was declared ‘high quality, low
equity’ in PISA 2000. However, by 2006, Australia had shifted into the ‘good
quadrant of ‘high quality, high equity’ (…) Australia’s absolute scores had not actually
changed, I heard. Rather, its rating changed because of a slight variation in the way
‘equity’ was measured in PISA”
❖ OECD fabricates spaces of commensurability. In PISA, the measurement of equity
depends on ESCS Index (Economic, Social & Cultural Status). ESCS index= HISEI +
ISCED + other PISA indicators (Social and Cultural Family Capital and Wealth). By
looking at HISEI, ISCED and Pisa Indicators are fabricated, it is highlighted how the
practice of doing commensurability is infused by passion, discussion, persuasion. At
the same time, a work of depuration is done in the writing of the report for policy-
makers. The incompleteness of these objects are displaced in the technical report.
❖ In performing such an analysis, this research is not concerned with ‘exposing’ the
limitations of comparison or challenging their validity. Rather, based on the work of
Steve Woolgar and other scholars, it attempts to mobilise a ‘sociology of
measurement’ that explores the instrumentalism and performativity of the
technologies of international comparisons.

21. What – If Anything – Do Standards Do in Education? Topological
Registrations of Standardizing Work in Teacher Education: CARLIJNE
CEULEMANS
❖ Keeping track of the Flemish teacher’s profile in the course of their application within one specific
teacher training institute. Registration of the type of work done by the profile and the core
competences in practices of self-evaluation.
❖ Building on Bruno Latour’s exercises of socio-technical analysis, the article offers a topographic
rendering of such practices. What is visualized in such a rendering are not chronologies,
articulations or significations. Rather, it displays the (net)working which is necessary to enact
some-‘thing’ as an assemblage or entity (Latour, 2005).
❖ The socio-technical exercise shows how the mise en scene implies: a) a gathering of people to
evaluate teacher training program against the standard teacher profile b) cascades of inscriptions
aimed at realizing the self-evaluation in durable and mobile forms. In particular, by looking at the
practices it is revealed the workings of the inscriptions (the translation of an entity in a sign): excel
files, representations creating collectives of discussion with the World Cafè technique, the
judgement of the inspection committee.
❖ “First, standardization turns out to work by means of constant mobilization, not by stabilization. (…)
Second, the list of teacher core competences, which, in various forms and shapes returns in each
of the inscriptions we collected, seems to be acting on its own terms here (as a ‘factish’, cf. Latour,
2010a). (…) Third, the leading mechanism in standardization work seems not to give way to
deliberation on what one is doing and why. Rather, it seems to be procedural: what it makes those
involved be concerned about, is to meet up with the procedures”.

22. Making sense of the educational present: problematizing the ‘merit turn’ in
the Italian eduscape: EMILIANO GRIMALDI & GIOVANNA BARZANO’
❖ This article focuses on the recent ‘merit turn’ in the Italian education system.
❖ The merit turn is described as a consequence of the mobilizing of a key set of global
ideas, technologies and authorities about the ‘modernising of education’ that criss-
cross the European education space and the regional borders of the Italian education
system.
❖ The picture of the emerging problematisation about the ‘merit revolution’ in Italian
education is enriched describing the dynamics of the processes of interessement and
enrollment through which the translation of such a policy recipe has happened in
practice. The ongoing formation of a dispersed assemblage of policies, institutions,
humans, technologies and materialities and the displacement of goals, strategies,
actions and results are described in detail, in order to show the patterned messiness of
these policy processes (Urry, 2000: 189).
❖ Finally, the mobilization of new subjectivities is addressed, exploring the implications of
the processes of problematisation, interessement and enrolment for the constitution
(and reframing) of some key subjectivities of the Italian education scape, namely head
teachers and teachers.

23. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
ANT-IS TALE (LAW, 2009):
semiotic relationality (looking at a network whose elements define
and shape one another),
heterogeneity (there are different kinds of actors, human and
otherwise),
materiality (stuff is there aplenty, not just “the social”).
insistence on process and its precariousness (all elements need to
play their part moment by moment or it all comes unstuck).
attention to power as an effect (it is a function of network
configuration and in particular the creation of immutable mobiles), to
space and to scale (how it is that networks extend themselves and
translate distant actors).

24. QUESTION 3
To what extent ANT contributes to renew sociology of
education, and in particular, the investigation of
Europeanisation of education ?

25. MOBILE SOCIOLOGIES OF
EDUCATION

26. ❖ a) shifts the unit of analysis from societies to
assemblages
❖ b) analyses the fabrication of assemblages and the
circuits of knowledge that enact and sustain such
associations
❖ c) focuses the analysis on the materialities of circuits
(how they stabilise networks and how they complexify
them)
❖ d) understands the social consequences of
assemblages.
MOBILE SOCIOLOGIES OF
EDUCATION:
EPISTEMOLOGY/ONTOLOGY/ETHIC
S

27. MOBILE SOCIOLOGIES OF
EDUCATION:
EPISTEMOLOGY/ONTOLOGY/ETHIC
SUnderstanding the construction of new eduscapes namely the
European space of education and the globalized spaces of
education.
Education policy and practice, therefore, are captured as
something to be assembled (or to be recomposed) where
regional spaces of education, spaces closed and bound to the
nation-states are confronted with the pressures of global
networks and flows of education practice and policy.
These networks and flows destabilize regional spaces of
education, and enact novel and unexpected assemblages of
education that need to be investigated.

28. ❖solicits to look beyond the equivalence society= nation-state (it is post-
national sociology);
❖considers the ‘social’ as heterogeneous by constitution (human-
nonhuman, nature-society). It redistributes the agency among
humans, objects, things, natures, etc. (it is to some extent a post-
humanist sociology);
❖has implicitly a inclusive and compositionist agenda, i.e. it is not critic
in the classic meaning, to some extent it is a post-bourdeusian
sociology ! It inherits from the past, yet it does not reifying categories.
It rather plays with the current regimes of visibility in the
governamentality, by displaying their limitations.
MOBILE SOCIOLOGIES OF
EDUCATION:
EPISTEMOLOGY/ONTOLOGY/ETHIC
S

29. FURTHER THREADS OF INVESTIGATION IN THE EMERGING
LANDSCAPE OF A POST-NATIONAL SOCIOLOGY OF
EDUCATION
❖ Beyond the comprehensive school
❖ Transnational spaces of education and hybrid dynamics of
governance
❖ Mobility, Space and Education
❖ Knowledge, Expertise e Standards in Education
❖ Sociology of education in Europe.
❖ Post-Comparative Education

30. KEY READINGS
Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor-Network Theory and Education. London:
Routledge.
Gorur, R. (2015) Situated, Relational and Practice-Oriented. The actor-network
theory approach, Gulson, Kalervo N.; Clarke, M. & Pedersen E. (2015) Education
Policy and Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge
Landri, P. & Neumann, E. (Eds) (2014) Mobile Sociologies of Education, Special
Issue EERJ, Vol. 13 (1)
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-
Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Law, J. (2009), Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics, in Bryan S. Turner
(Ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. London: Blackwell
Publishing