Social capital has been the object of several scientific publications for decades, especially in the field of education. Although there is a degree of conceptual similarity across the many and multi-disciplinary approaches to social capital (such as networks, norms, and trust), there remains an ontological issue: an absence of consensus on what social capital actually is (Gearin, 2017; Ivana, 2017; Van Deth, 2008). Yet, the apparent “overuse” of social capital to explain the hows and whys of collectivities’ social and political practices has turned the concept into a “contradictory” one (Gearin, 2017). In this study, I recognize the conceptual messiness surrounding social capital in order to examine one facet of the global education space.  Based on empirical research with mobile students and assemblages of non-human actors, the paper offers a critique of the Bourdieusian approach to “social capital”, while demonstrating the relevance of materiality for empirical social capital investigations in international education spaces. I build my argument through research on the shifts in social capital of students engaging in long-distance mobility (Brazil to Ireland) in the course of their higher education.

Mobile students negotiate multiple attachments in a new space/reality (Saito, 2010). For these students, the loss of the characteristics of previously performed assemblages demands new gatherings, which in turn produces new effects. In global student mobility landscapes, change experiences are heightened as mobility potentially denudes previously existing networks with their respective norms and degrees of trust enacted among their members. That there are diverse actors that assemble in unique configurations in the practices of global student mobility would suggest the need for particular ontological elaborations that are capable of capturing the complexity of those practices. The step towards capturing such complexity consists of one ontological reformation: the democratisation of agency; or the inclusion of non-human entities as legitimate participants – or shapers – of a given course of action.

Despite the ontological security social capital has managed to obtain, the consideration of the performative role of non-human entities in the context of global student mobility enacts other venues for possible articulations of how humans gain support from other actors, as they pursue various forms of “capital” to aid their endeavours. This study is aligned with the recently outlined discussion on STS educational research agenda, moving away from an unwanted STS “conceptual fatigue” (Decuypere, 2019; Gorur et al 2019; Salomão Filho & Kamp, 2019). The search of new research venues in education also dialogues with the pressing need for enacting Other analytical efforts to help us understand Europe’s current and multi-faceted mobility challenges. 

This study was designed as an Actor-Network Theory–inspired case study, bringing reflexivity as a pivotal actor. Drawing an association with Callon (1986), I was concomitantly a "scientist" (translator) and a "scallop/fisherman" (quasi-object). Despite ANT’s acknowledgement that researcher and object of study become inevitably closely related, my relationship with the latter strengthens this notion. In a sense, I was the very first "entry point" of the fieldwork as I investigated global student mobility as a mobile student myself. Over a one-year period, two rounds of in-depth interviews were conducted with twelve Brazilian students in Dublin, Ireland – three ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), three undergraduate, three Master’s, and three PhD students. The research participants were recruited by snowballing sampling, a procedure that aided the process of assembling a mobile-student-net-work. The interviews with the students generated individual case studies with a focus on their attachment negotiations and shifts in social capital enactments as they performed mobility. The analysis was guided by translation processes and the work done by mediators (Latour, 1999; 2005). The study involved the process of consciously pursuing symmetry as well as “betraying” ANT: the constant effort to follow the actors rather than resorting to pre-fabricated explanations (Mol, 2010).

This study examines the “logic of tactics” (Law, 2015) of social capital in global student mobilities. Objects do enact social life, but not exclusively within assemblages of knowledge production. Rather than focusing on more stable assemblages and their vehicles of power, mobile students are analytically considered as translators. Regardless of their “size”, influence, or extension, entities negotiate the enactment of a possible reality by enrolling others who can in some form contribute to such process – from language skills acquisition to associations with fellow students and lecturers. The study shows empirically how mobile students struggle to obtain support from other actors via a series of translations. Such “support” or “capital” is, first, a net-work effect. The important consideration here is the analysis, conducted in an ontologically symmetrical manner, of how positive effects are generated by the orchestration performed by the actors aiming to crystallize a given reality in a given moment in time. Despite well-documented incompatibilities between Latourian and Bourdieusian approaches (Kale-Lostuvali, 2016; Schinkel, 2007), their common concern with the relational offers a fruitful space for theoretical connectives (Law, 2007). Engaging with relational ontologies teachings, which advocate the constant mutation on “existing theoretical repertoires” (Mol, 2010; p. 261) generates some effects. The association between ANT and “social capital” creates a hybrid theoretical blend that embraces all the actors that demonstrate agential capacity, rather than relying on the quasi-objective movements individuals make across social structures as they acquire diverse forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986).

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