Session Information
Paper Session
Contribution
Qualitative educational research has been exploding massively over the last decades, with more and more scholars taking up multifarious and largely differing subjects of enquiry. The majority of this diverse gamut of research initiatives tends to focus either on human factors (that is, the individual, the group, etc. – often considered to be situated at some sort of micro-level) and/or on structures (that is, discourses, fields, etc. – often considered to belong to some kind of macro-level). In the meantime, however, socio-technical approaches more broadly known as science and technology studies (STSs) and incorporating specific strands as actor-network theory (ANT), post-feminist studies, material culture studies and political ecology, have amply shown that this particular division between the micro and the macro, between individual and structures, between the human and the non-human is not only unfruitful to some extent, but in various situations even problematic. Instead, socio-technical approaches accentuate the intricate mixture of, and the according fuzzy distinctions between, ‘the social’ and ‘the material’, ‘the human’ and the ‘non-human’ – and, hence, the otiosity of maintaining these often taken-for-granted ontological divisions (Latour, 2005; Miller, 2009). The consequential focus of socio-technical approaches, then, is the ethnographic analysis of emerging assemblages at the level of the interplay between specific actions and devices in their material/immaterial environment.
Educational research, however, has been rather slow in the uptake of these research strands and consequential attempts to decenter the human subject in educational studies in favor of treating educational realities as composed, and at least partly material, assemblages (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Sørensen, 2009). This paper not only wants to draw attention to this gap but also, and more importantly, aims to show to what extent and how educational research can benefit from the adoption of STS-approaches. Specifically, the focus will lay upon the experimentation with and inauguration of ethnographic methodologies faithful to a socio-technical approach, and the ‘messiness’ inextricably coupled with the conduct of research in this vein (Law, 2004). To this effect, and by means of concrete illustrations of different research methodologies currently being developed by the authors, the paper wants to show 1) possible new and experimental ways to conduct educational research, 2) the attractivity of socio-technical methodologies focusing upon assemblages (and more specifically assemblages formed by means of digitization and standardization) 3) what is revealed by means of experimental ethnographies of this kind (and what, accordingly, tends to be underexposed in more conventional methodological approaches). The notion of experiment has to be understood here in a very particular sense, i.e. as a material-semiotic assemblage referring towards a situation in which you don’t know what you don’t know (Ahrens, 2010).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ahrens, S. (2010). Experiment und exploration. Bildung als experimentelle Form der Welterschließung. Bielefeld: Transcipt Verlag. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor-network theory in education. London: Routledge. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press. Law, J. (2004). After method. London: Routledge. Miller, D. (2009). Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sørensen, E. (2009). The materiality of learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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