My question of inquiry is “What becomes of pedagogical relations after Latour’s non-modern assumption of equality?”. I leverage Latour’s invention of the Non-Modern Constitution to perform anew the “pedagogical relation” in educational research. I draw initially from Rancière’s assumption of equality in the pedagogical relation to posit that Latour’s Non-Modern Constitution also prepares the ground for theorizing “pedagogy after equality”. I explicate why this possible and how I theorize pedagogical relations after Latour’s equality assumption in ways novel to educational research.

I first review how Rancière’s “attending to a thing in common” 1) highlights how pedagogy is inherently relational, 2) requires embracing uncertainty in the pedagogical relation, and 3) nurtures coming into presence of what and who we do not already know. I, then, posit that Latour makes a similar equality move. His “ontological flattening” and how that is consistent with and illustrated in his Non-Modern Constitution provides a window of opportunity for pedagogical theorizing similar to Rancière’s. In explicating how assumptions of inequality in the Modern Constitution are consistent with the “pedagogical relation” commonly found in education literature, I highlight how our dependence upon human intermediaries - in their need for correspondence - dichotomize and decontextualize relations in pedagogy. This need for correspondence, therefore, disrupts the possibility for pedagogy to occur at all.

The assumption of equality in Latour’s Non-Modern Constitution, then, treats relations as irreducible mediators in translation. I theorize “translationships” (in a space where correspondence is not presupposed and non-representation can flourish) as the pedagogical powerhouse of translation’s pedagogy. This distinction (and extension of what is currently available in educational literature about pedagogical relations) includes human and more-than-human, linguistic and more-than-linguistic, representational and more-than-representational approaches to theorizing who and what participates in the non-modern collective of pedagogy and curriculum. This, I illustrate in a graphic of what I call “non-pedagogy”, and I trace out four implications of this approach to performing anew “pedagogical relations” as “translation’s pedagogy” in educational research: 1) The location of pedagogy, 2) The study of pedagogy as effect, 3) The study of pedagogy as opening blackboxes, and 4) Making pedagogy more real: building allies.

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