Assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research

Abstract

Assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research. Territory, Politics, Governance. The concept of assemblage has captured the attention of critical social scientists, including those interested in the study of policy. Despite ongoing debate around the implications of assemblage thinking for questions of structure, agency, and contingency, there is widespread agreement around its value as a methodological framework. There are now many accounts using assemblage-inflected methodologies of various sorts as analytical tools for revealing, interpreting, and representing the worlds of policy-making, though few are explicit about their methodological practice. In this paper, we identify a suite of epistemological commitments associated with assemblage thinking, including an emphasis on multiplicity, processuality, labour, and uncertainty, and then consider explicitly how such commitments might be translated into methodological practices in policy research. Drawing on a research project on the development and enactment of homelessness policy in Australia, we explore how three methodological practices ¿ adopting an ethnographic sensibility, tracing sites and situations, and revealing labours of assembling ¿ can be used to operationalize assemblage thinking in light of the challenges of conducting critical policy research. AbstractThe concept of assemblage has captured the attention of critical social scientists, including those interested in the study of policy. Despite ongoing debate around the implications of assemblage thinking for questions of structure, agency, and contingency, there is widespread agreement around its value as a methodological framework. There are now many accounts using assemblage inflected methodologies of various sorts as analytical tools for revealing, interpreting, and representing the worlds of policy-making, though few are explicit about their methodological practice. In this paper, we identify a suite of epistemological commitments associated with assemblage thinking, including an emphasis on multiplicity, processuality, labour, and uncertainty, and then consider explicitly how such commitments might be translated into methodological practices in policy research. Drawing on a research project on the development and enactment of homelessness policy in Australia, we explore how three methodological practices-adopting an ethnographic sensibility, tracing sites and situations, and revealing labours of assembling-can be used to operationalise assemblage thinking in light of the challenges of conducting critical policy research.

Reassembling the city through Instagram

“… Our relational framework is inspired by assemblage thinking without fully embracing assemblage theory (see Baker and McGuirk ). …”

Snail assemblages: interrogating an environmental controversy involvingPowelliphanta augustaand the mining industry inAotearoaNewZealand

“…DeLanda () stresses the importance of realism and nested assemblages. Among geographers, assemblage thinking is a device to show the complex parts of a whole: from science systems (Greenhough, ), critical policy analysis (Baker & McGuirk, ), and bushfire risk (Ratnam & Drozdzewski, ) to integrated steel mill complexes (Swanton, ). Although there is little explicit agreement about what exactly constitutes assemblage thinking, there are debates about whether actor‐networks and assemblages are interchangeable (Law, ) or irreconcilable (Müller & Schurr, ).…”

Unravelling the Global Wool Assemblage: Researching Place and Production Networks in the Global Countryside

“…Assemblage approaches understand the social realm as ‘materially heterogeneous, practice‐based, emergent and processual’ (McFarlane , p. 561), which, when translated into research practice, foregrounds an attention to processes of both stability and change. As Baker and McGuirk (, p. 431) elaborate:

In methodological terms, a focus on the processes through which assemblages come into and out of being lends itself to careful genealogical tracing of how past alignments and associations have informed the present and how contemporary conditions and actants are crystalizing new conditions of possibility.

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