Reading is a fundamental part of knowledge claims of education all over Europe and the world. Such knowledge claims are valuated in ways that has effects on the means and goals of education, and places the students more or less far from these goals. What is considered educationally valuable is established, assessed, negotiated, provoked, maintained, constructed and contested in various mundane social practices and settings inside and outside the educational sphere. In this paper I examine values-in-the-making in a few specific sites or situations in which values about reading enact as settled, for example at a session about reading at the book fair in Gothenburg and an information brochure at health care centres about reading to toddlers. I have chosen to address a part of the STS-field that investigates how certain things come to be considered valuable and desirable – the valuographic/valuation approach (Dussauge et al, 2015). Valuography indicates a program of empirically oriented and analytically skeptical research into the enacting, ordering and displacing of values, as a means to explore how values on reading are established and what consequences this valuation might have in the changing landscape of language, knowledge and education. The question I address at this symposium is how this approach can contribute in investigations about reading. The STS-position of understanding how scientific facts and truths about the world become naturalized is a move from stability to a world in process (Law, 1999), into what Mol calls ‘ontological politics’, the way that the real and the political are linked (Mol, 1999; 2002). This means that the facts and naturalities of the world can be investigated as constructed and enacted in practices. The ontological move is a way to draw attention to objects and objectives that may otherwise appear finished, ready-made or completed (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013), including ideas and values: “We take as a starting point the fact that we can examine the taken for granted and putatively stable and demonstrate how things can be otherwise. This entails moving into positions that enable us to see values as enacted, ordered, and displaced rather than as fixed and constitutive forces” (Dussauge et al, 2015, p. 268). The taken-for-granted issues and things can be found in the mundane practices of everyday life, and the practice of reading might be the most mundane and taken-for-granted practice to be found in the educational setting.

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