The theme of ECER 2016 challenges us to stay professionally responsible and autonomous within a policy environment that increasingly requires knowledge of ‘what works’ from the research community. This session takes up that challenge to explore what STS (Science and Technology Studies), and ANT (Actor-Network Theory), can contribute and how they can speak back to the ‘what works’ culture in contemporary education policy.

STS theories challenge the ‘what works’ approach from a distinctive angle, by making visible the enormous work that is required to make certain understandings of truths and rationalities stick as scientific beliefs (Sismondo, 2010). The questions of interest to STS are pragmatic and profoundly practical and they help us investigate how some has come to be regarded as knowledge in the first place. They ask: how does it work, this ‘what works’? Why does it work? What truths, politics, and values are made in these ‘workings’? By examining the linkages of networks as socio-material entities it is possible to see the actors that are connected or convinced to make ‘what works’ work (Latour, 1987). 

Scholars in education are increasingly turning to material-semiotic approaches in order to challenge and interfere with a variety of contemporary education phenomena (Fenwick & Edwards, 2012). This trend is reflected in ECER. A brief survey of the paper presentations in ECER 2015 points not only to the increasing popularity of STS, but also to its presence in a range of networks such as Ethnography (n. 19) and Sociology of Education (n. 28), where these theories have been at work for some time, and in networks like Research in Health Education (n. 8) and Language and Education (n. 31), where it is relatively more recent.

This symposium presents empirical examples in which STS theories have been deployed in researching education sites.

Paper 1 outlines some of the concepts of STS and ANT and explains how they might be deployed in the study of education policy, focusing on the role of the material-semiotic in stabilising phenomena, the translations which enable actors to become associated with each other, and the performativity of calculations. It clarifies some of the major conceptual and methodological aspects of STS and ANT and argues that they provide novel resources for the study of power and politics.

Paper 2 presents the use of valuation theory, or valuography (Dussage et al, 2015), when exploring how the value of reading is made in various practices. Although seemingly self-evident and matter-of-fact, it demonstrates that the valuation of reading is not innocent and free of ideology and power.

The study of academic writing presented in paper 3 demonstrates how STS can illuminate the ways in which the academy maintains and renews itself through writing tasks performed as part of the mundane governance of the university.

Paper 4 presents an examination of the assembled work and networked processes, decisions, problems, and relations that went into producing entries of an encyclopaedia, using archival material.

Together, the papers demonstrate how STS sensibilities can be deployed to study a variety of educational phenomena. They show how agency is inscribed into and carried through such everyday activities as reading and writing. They argue that STS and ANT provide the conceptual resources to describe how once-controversial issues come to be settled, and help us explore how they enact their politics. The particular contribution of these theories is that they draw attention to the ontological politics of mundane and taken-for-granted objects and practices at the heart of knowledge production: institutional life; the stabilisation, naturalisation and travel of ideas; the formation power and the rise of centres of calculation; and the assemblage of policy.

Dussauge, I., Helgesson, C-F., Lee, F. (eds.)(2015): Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (eds.)(2012). Researching Education through Actor-Network Theory. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action. How to follow scientists and engineers through society Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Sismondo, S. (2010). An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.