Actor-Network Theory (ANT): An Assemblage of Perceptions, Understandings, and Critiques of this ‘Sensibility' and how its Relatively Under-Utilized Conceptual Framework in Education Studies can aid Researchers in the Exploration of Networks and Power Relations

Definitions Of Ant

Law (2007a) describes ANT as “a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis ... [it explores] the webs and the practices that carry them ... [and] the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors” (p. 2). In his exploration of the definition, Law (2007a) outlines four qualifications for this concept/approach. ANT is both theoretical and empirical, as theory is embedded and extended in empirical practice. Law (2007a) refuses to regard the actor-network approach as a theory, for him it is a ‘toolkit’ rather, a ‘sensibility’ for the exploration of relations and how these assemble. He even refuses to define it as a theory, preferring the term ‘material semiotics’ rather than ‘actor-network theory’, as it better captures the open, uncertain, revisable, and diverse nature of this approach, all this hinting at Law’s desire to keep it implicit and volatile, he refuses to have it pinned down to something concrete. Callon (1999) denies the claim of ANT being a theory, at the same time stressing that this “gives it both its strength and its adaptability ... we never claimed to create a theory. In ANT the T is too much (‘de trop’)” (ibid, p. 194). Law (2007a) further acknowledges the relationality of texts, thereby indirectly admitting to the subjective nature of ANT, with no researcher able to make objective claims. He describes it as neither ‘a creed’, nor ‘a dogma’, with humility as a leitmotif. Latour (1999a) outlines the agenda of ANT as comprising: the attribution of both human and nonhuman characteristics; the distribution of properties among them; the connections generated; the circulation of these elements; as well as their transformation. Thus, ANT incorporates both relational materiality and performativity (Law, 1999). It takes a semiotic world-view, embracing a negation of conventional social dualisms, where divisions are understood as ‘effects’ or ‘outcomes’ rather than being inherent in entities – “essentialist divisions are thrown on the bonfire of the dualisms” (ibid, p. 3). As a consequence of this ‘semiotics of materiality’, entities are performed in, by, and through those relations.