Translation and network effects

Actor-network theory (ANT) can be traced in a lively trajectory through the social sciences, from its emergence in the early 1980s at the Centre Sociologie de l’Innovation of the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, to its current profusion of highly diverse practices and assertions. Largely associated with its progenitors in science and technology studies, including Bruno Latour, John Law and Michael Callon, ANT has catalysed analytical approaches that rupture central assumptions about knowledge, subjectivity, the real and the social. ANT’s analyses trace how all things – natural, social, technical or, more accurately, the messy mix of these – become assembled and enacted in networked webs, how they associate and exercise force, and how they persist, decline and mutate. Nothing is anterior in ANT approaches. That is, what we think of as the human, the social, subjectivity, mind, the local, social structures and other categories common in educational analyses are not accepted as given. All of these things are, in ANT readings, effects of particular assemblages and enactments. ANT traces how these effects arise through network processes that manage to gather and translate or transform human and non-human elements so that they link together to act. ¹