ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the construction of agency in the Sociology of Translation. The chapter examines how a place for non-human agency was forged by a turn to semiotics, narratology, and literary poetics. It is argued that the symmetric notion of agency is dependent on a specific genre, which we call the ‘ANT account’, a narrative genre devised to capture the agency of non-human actors—the trademark of the Sociology of Translation. To account for the formation of a specific notion of agency operating within the Sociology of Translation, a close reading of one of the seminal texts within the genre, Michel Callon's Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay (1986) is performed. Moreover, the chapter examines the intertextual links behind Callon's development of a generalized symmetry of ‘actors’, and the specific construal of agency it works with—as well as Latour's later reconfiguration of the actant.
