Guest Editors: Radhika Gorur, Christian Lundahl, Elin Sundström Sjödin and Mary Hamilton
The field of education research has long played host to an eclectic range of theoretical and conceptual approaches. Although widely used in studies of organisations, environments, law, medical practice, and a variety of other fields, the theoretical traditions of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and actor–network theory (ANT) have been surprisingly late entrants into the field of education. They are now gaining momentum as more researchers are becoming attracted to the affordances of these approaches. The rise of practice-based theories has also contributed to the increased interest in STS and especially in the methodological and analytical approach of actor–network theory. Investigating educational issues using STS-informed socio-material theories and methodologies, scholars such as Nespor (Citation1994), Fenwick and Edwards (Citation2010), Hamilton (Citation2011) and Mulcahy (Citation2014) have led the way for the deployment of these theories and methodologies in education and education policy contexts.
This special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education aims to bring together a collection of studies that deploy the theoretical and conceptual resources of STS and ANT to study a variety of contemporary and historical education phenomena. It will showcase what STS and ANT can contribute to studies of knowledge-making and policy-making in education, and reflect critically on how these studies might participate in shaping and influencing both the field of education and educational research itself.
STS scholars from various disciplines have examined the interplay among knowledge, technology and society and explored how states and knowledge are intertwined and co-produced. As Sheila Jasanoff (Citation2004) explains, STS enables scholars to
explore how knowledge-making is incorporated into practices of state-making, or of governance more broadly, and, in reverse, how practices of governance influence the making and use of knowledge. … Knowledge, in particular, is seen as crystallising in certain ontological states – organisational, material, embodied – that become objects of study in their own right. (p. 3)
This focus on the intertwined nature of ‘science’ or ‘knowledge’ and ‘politics’ provides useful ways to understand several contemporary phenomena in the field of education, including innovations and implementation of reforms in education; the practices of evidence-making in policy; controversies in educational practices; regulatory efforts at various levels; and the assembling of particular policy ideas. As a result, a growing number of researchers are now drawing on the theoretical and philosophical work of STS to explore ‘how knowledge is produced, mobilised and validated, how it circulates and how it comes to be challenged’ (Gorur, Citation2015, p. 581).
The material-semiotic approach of ANT, which grew out of STS in the early 1980s, directs analytical attention to the practices that create, mobilise, sustain and challenge relations between actors in innovations, knowledge creation and various social activities (Latour, Citation1987). Using empirical case studies, ANT researchers describe the mundane and everyday practices through which, eventually, ideas and facts are stabilised and systems are established. They show how power operates as non-human actors are enmeshed with the social. ANT studies attempt to open up the black boxes of the taken-for-granted and of ‘common sense’ to reclaim their tentativeness and contingency by tracing their routes to naturalisation.
Education is constituted through material conditions and preconditions, but much educational theorising and analysis is built on a distancing of research from the material. That is, we speak of language, culture, subjectivity, discourse, norms, values and social constructions as something different from the material. This special issue proposes to highlight the importance of the material by inviting accounts of research that explicate the material and productive forces constituted through mixtures of human and non-human actors.
In this Special Issue, we seek to explore the different ways in which STS and ANT concepts and sensibilities are being deployed in the field of education and education policy. The topics on which papers will be considered may include, but are not limited to, investigations that focus on education reform practices, regulation, innovation, standardisation, scientisation, evidence, the establishment of new disciplines, interdisciplinarity, studies of epistemic cultures in different disciplines, knowledge-making practices, studies of educational institutions and their practices, mobility of knowledge and technologies, material-semiotic studies of learning, classroom practices and classroom research.
More broadly, we welcome contributions that engage with the making and unmaking of controversies in education and knowledge-making and the exploration of ambiguities, multiplicities and mess that are intrinsic to apparently clear and stable routines, and which promote the understanding of the performativity of mundane practices.
Please send a 300 word abstract by 15 June 2017 to [email protected]
If the abstract aligns with the focus of the Special Issue, we will get back to you by 15 July, with a request to submit a full paper submission by 1 November 2017.
All papers will go through the peer review process, with at least two reviewers, so an invitation to submit a full paper is not to be taken as acceptance of the paper.
In accordance with the aims and scope of the journal and in the spirit of the theories in focus, this special issue welcomes papers which explore speculative ideas, are written in innovative ways, or are presented in experimental ways.
Timeline
Call for Papers: April 2017
Abstracts due: 15 June 2017
Authors contacted: 15 July 2017
Papers due: 1 November 2017
Reviews due: 31 January 2018
Revised versions submitted: 15 March 2018
Second review due: 15 May 2018
All papers finalised: 15 August 2018
Submission of finalised SI to Discourse: 1 September 2018
References
- Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor–network theory in education. London: Routledge.
- Gorur, R. (2015). Producing calculable worlds: Education at a glance. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(4), 578–595.
- Hamilton, M. (2011). Unruly practices: What a sociology of translations can offer to educational policy analysis. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(1), 55–75. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00622.x
- Jasanoff, S. (2004). The idiom of co-production. In S. Jasanoff (Ed.), States of knowledge: The co-production of science and the social order (pp. 1–12). London: Routledge.
- Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Mulcahy, D. (2014). Re-thinking teacher-professional learning: A more than representational account. In T. Fenwick & M. Nerland (Eds.), Reconceptualising professional learning: Sociomaterial knowledges, practices and responsibilities (pp. 52–66). Routledge.
- Nespor, J. (1994). Knowledge in motion: Space, time and curriculum in undergraduate physics and management. Oxon: RoutledgeFalmer.