Co-Creating Higher Education Reform with Actor-Network Theory: Experiences from Involving a Variety of Actors in the Processes of Knowledge Creation

Ethnographies of Higher Education and Modes of Existence: Using Latour’s Philosophical Anthropology to Construct Faithful Accounts of Higher Education Practice

“…Actor-network theory remains an under-used sociological/philosophical approach within educational research compared to Bourdieusian or Foucauldian studies. It has been employed to explore a number of diverse aspects of educational provision, including university physics and business curricula (Nespor, 1994), PISA testing (Gorur, 2011), higher education policy and the Bologna Process (Sarauw, 2016), teaching in nurseries (Plum, 2018), professional standards for teachers (Mulcahy, 2011), the relationship of technology to theory in education research (Thumlert et al, 2015) and the construction of knowledge through ethnographic research in education (Larsson, 2006). It has been described as: a component of ethnography that is concerned with "the processes of ordering that generate effects such as technologies" (Law, 1994: 18); a "way of talking… [that] allows us to look at identity and practice as functions of ongoing interactions with distant elements (animate and inanimate) of networks that have been mobilized along intersecting 3 trajectories" (Nespor, 1994: 12-13); and a "sociology of the social and … [a] sociology of associations" (Latour, 2005: 9).…”

“…The medical education curriculum that is delivered in the lecture hall and the training ward (but of course not only in these two places) and that enrols staff, laptop computers, students, furniture, cameras and so forth, is a [NET], an actor-network (Tummons et al, 2018), as are the undergraduate physics and business curricula explored by Nespor (1994). The body of policy documents derived from the Bologna Process that are created, distributed, and then read at a university in Denmark constitute a [NET] (Sarauw, 2016), as does a set of professional standards for teachers and the teachers and accreditation offices who read them (Mulcahy, 2011). But our inquiry needs to go further.…”

Higher education, theory, and modes of existence: thinking about universities with Latour

“…Research adopting this standpoint departs from the commitment of 'early' ANT to ethnographic fieldwork (Law, 1994) and instead applies an ANT 4 perspective to other methodological perspectives. Examples include research into higher education policy (Sarauw, 2016) and curriculum (Mulcahy, 2011). Some users of actor-network theory actively resist defining it in any specific way, referring instead to the possibility of a multiplicity of versions and a concomitant undesirability to adhere to just one (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010;Law, 2004): an approach such as this informs the standpoint occupied, for example, by Decuypere and Simons (2019) who eschew the theoretical essentialism of an actor-network standpoint in favour of a more generous sociomaterialist methodology in their exploration of academic practice.…”

“…But they are self-evidently not 'the same:' the practices of a physics department are clearly different from those of a management department. And the ways in which they are different from each otheras actor-networksare clearly of a different quality and order to the differences between the policy actor-networks of the Bologna Process (Sarauw, 2016) and the curriculum actornetworks of the teaching profession (Mulcahy, 2011).…”