ABSTRACT
When we talk about ANT and its possibilities for educational questions and inquiry, we are inevitably asked: ‘Yes, but how does one do ANT in educational research?’ Students complain that published ANT studies tend to either obscure their actual approaches in the telling, or to insist that method is an inappropriate discussion for ANT. One writer who devoted her doctoral study to develop methods for studying the materiality of learning working with ANT, notes that ‘The logical meaning and coherence of the concepts we use is less important: what is crucial is how they help us do empirical studies and analyses and the kinds of studies and analyses in which they result’ (Sørensen 2009: 12). Law’s book (2004b) exploring the whole question of research methods, while not explicitly linking itself to ANT, is infused with its constructs, sensibilities, and examples from research that are inspired by or situated within ANT approaches. Law tellingly names his book After Method, and positions it to address the question: how might method deal with mess? This is not a question that is limited to those drawing upon ANT, and is consistent with debates and positions drawing upon, for instance, branches of post-structuralist and feminist research. For Law (2004b), most phenomena of interest to social science research, such as education, are slippery, uncertain, constantly changing, emotional, vague and diffuse. In a more recent discussion, Law (2007: 596-7) writes that:
In practice research needs to be messy and heterogeneous. It needs to be messy and heterogeneous because that is the way it – research – actually is. And also, and more importantly it needs to be messy because that is the way the largest part of the world is: messy, unknowable in a regular and routinized way. Unknowable, therefore, in ways that are definite or coherent.
