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The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory
DOI link for The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory
The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory book
The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory
DOI link for The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory
The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory book
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ABSTRACT
This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of ‘second generation’ ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities.
The companion has 38 chapters, each answering a key question about ANT and its capacities. Early chapters explore ANT as an intellectual practice and highlight ANT’s dialogues with other fields and key theorists. Others open critical, provocative discussions of its limitations. Later sections explore how ANT has been developed in a range of social scientific fields and how it has been used to explore a wide range of scales and sites. Chapters in the final section discuss ANT’s involvement in ‘real world’ endeavours such as disability and environmental activism, and even running a Chilean hospital. Each chapter contains an overview of relevant work and introduces original examples and ideas from the authors’ recent research. The chapters orient readers in rich, complex fields and can be read in any order or combination. Throughout the volume, authors mobilise ANT to explore and account for a range of exciting case studies: from wheelchair activism to parliamentary decision-making; from racial profiling to energy consumption monitoring; from queer sex to Korean cities. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the significance of ANT more broadly and provides an overview of the volume.
The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences, including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS, and anyone wishing to engage with ANT, to understand what it has already been used to do and to imagine what it might do in the future.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part Section 1|72 pages
Some elements of the ANT paradigm(s)
chapter 7|9 pages
How to use ANT in inventive ways so that its critique will not run out of steam?
part Section 2|82 pages
Engaging dialogues with key intellectual companions
chapter 10|11 pages
What did we forget about ANT’s roots in anthropology of writing?
chapter 13|10 pages
How does thinking with dementing bodies and A. N. Whitehead reassemble central propositions of ANT?
chapter 14|11 pages
What is the relevance of Isabelle Stengers’ philosophy to ANT?
part Section 3|78 pages
Trading zones of ANT
chapter 20|10 pages
How to stage a convergence between ANT and Southern sociologies?
part Section 4|62 pages
Translating ANT beyond science and technology
chapter 23|10 pages
What might we learn from ANT for studying healthcare issues in the majority world, and what might ANT learn in turn?
chapter 24|8 pages
What is the value of ANT research into economic valuation devices?
chapter 26|10 pages
How to study the construction of subjectivity with ANT?
part Section 5|63 pages
The sites and scales of ANT
chapter 28|8 pages
Are parliaments still privileged sites for studying politics and liberal democracy?
chapter 29|12 pages
How does an ANT approach help us rethink the notion of site?
chapter 30|10 pages
How does the South Korean city of Kyŏngju help ANT think place and scale?
chapter 31|9 pages
How can ANT trace slow-moving environmental harms as they become eventful political disruptions?
chapter 32|8 pages
Is ANT equally good in dealing with local, national and global natures?
chapter 33|12 pages
What happens to ANT, and its emphasis on the socio-material grounding of the social, in digital sociology?
part Section 6|54 pages
The uses of ANT for public–professional engagement