Multiple Bodies, Actants, and a Composition Classroom: Actor-Network Theory in Practice

Abstract

James Berlin’s pedagogy employs generalized heuristics grounded in human agency and social-epistemic critique to enable political awareness. By contrast, actor-network theory (ANT) does not explain the composition of reality through pre-fixed heuristics but instead seeks to describe the unique composition of political objects through symmetrical accounts of human and nonhuman agency. ANT-as-pedagogy can be productively applied in the classroom to realize students’ capacities as moralists who comprehend the rhetorical difference between explanation (Berlin) and description (ANT) with regard to their political agencies as writers.

Notes

1. ¹Many thanks to Rhetoric Review’s reviewers Don Bialostosky and Julie Jung for their generous feedback on this essay as well as to Scot Barnett who commented on an early draft.

2. ²Nathaniel Rivers’s call for “a [public rhetoric] pedagogy that asks students to trace how nonhumans compose publics” (para. 5) is a notable exception. Unfortunately, his essay was published during my final editing stages, and I am unable to offer his work the substantive engagement that it merits.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Holmes

Steve Holmes is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the Department of English at George Mason University. His research interests include modern rhetorical theory and digital rhetoric. His published work appears in PRE/TEXT, Fibreculture, and various edited collections. He is currently working on a monograph that considers rhetorical ontology and embodiment in relationship to procedural rhetorics and the current era of algorithmic regulation.