This paper presents a brief overview of the salient features of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the methodological approach of Actor Network Theory (ANT), and, using empirical examples, demonstrates how these theories and methodologies can be deployed in the study of education policy sites. In particular, it will elaborate the notion of `mundane governance’ (Woolgar and Neyland, 2013), and describe how inscriptions and translations engage in the production of power. It will elaborate how the STS focus on performativity can provide new forms of critique and engagement in the study of contemporary education sites. A controversial approach to the agency and ontology of objects and the focus on mundane practices are the hallmark of STS. The use of STS to study laboratory work and the production of ‘scientific knowledge’ is well established (for example, Latour, 1987, Latour and Woolgar, 1979). More recently, STS concepts are being deployed in the study of social phenomena such as the growth of quantification as trustworthy and the proliferation of numbers in education policies and practices (for example, Gorur, 2011, 2014). The material-semiotic approach of ANT, which grew out of STS direct analytical attention to the practices that create, mobilise, sustain and challenge relations between actors in a social phenomenon. Using empirical case studies, ANT researchers describe the mundane and everyday practices through which, eventually, ideas are stabilised, systems established, and actors become powerful. ANT studies attempt to open up the black boxes of the taken-for-granted and reclaim their tentativeness and contingency by tracing their routes to naturalisation. For ANT researchers, material entities are important participants in the social. They attend to the performative functions of material-semiotic inscription devices such as evaluative tools, computer software, academic writing, forms and surveys in their studies of standardization, contextualization and universalization. Latour (2005) describes ANT as the ‘sociology of associations’, focusing as it does on how the various interests of actors are translated as they are enrolled into networks. ANT is less concerned with why than how – it focuses on the practical accomplishments of power. Using specific examples, this paper will demonstrate how the unique features of STS and ANT might be deployed in the study of education policy sites, arguing that not only do they provide a lively account of education and education policy phenomena, but that they also offer interesting ways to interfere in these phenomena.

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