This symposium explores contemporary policy trends through actor-network theory (ANT). Keeping in mind the Conference theme of Creativity and Innovation in Educational Research, and the Network 28 interest in ‘political sociology,’ it engages with the question: How can the theoretical, methodological and analytical resources of ANT be innovatively and creatively deployed in studying contemporary trends in education policy? 

Policies can be viewed as attempts at ordering and organizing society to achieve rational outcomes. Contemporary attempts to standardize, measure and compare with national and global indicators and tools are examples of such regulating and ordering. Our starting point is that such modernising policy projects are never complete; complexities, hybridities and multiplicities (Latour’s ‘monsters’) abound, challenging the efforts to standardise, universalise, separate and contain.

Drawing on empirical studies in Mongolia, Laos, Denmark and Australia, the papers in this symposium collectively make the case that actor-network theory (ANT) can be usefully deployed in the study of contemporary policy, because it facilitates accounting for the hybrid, multiple, and practical constructions and maintenance of policy, moving us outside the traditional focus on administration, management and rationality. The papers demonstrate empirically how ANT enables the following:

• Understanding how policy is done, transformed and maintained in everyday practices. Policy does not travel effortlessly through space but travels through association and translation in heterogeneous practices. This allows both for the study of (local) translations and the handling of multiplicity.
• Looking into infrastructures and assemblages that make possible inscriptions, summing ups, and calculations, thereby constructing schools and pupils as entities to be mapped and compared on global scales.
• Exploring the role of materiality in the construction of policy. How does it contribute to their durability and stability? How is agency shared among humans and non-humans in the making, maintenance and transformation of policy trends?
• Revisiting classic sociological distinctions such as local/global, nature/culture, and subject/object in order to explore how policy constructs, configures and translates these distinctions.

A particular strength of this symposium is the international nature of the contributions. The Danish study (by Ratner) engages with an equity issue (‘inclusion’), analyzing how policy concepts reconfigure special needs from a natural to a social phenomenon. The Mongolia and Laos study (by Addey) engages with international literacy assessments within the ‘governance by data’ trend. The third paper (by Gorur) demonstrates, using Australia’s ‘education revolution’ as an empirical instantiation, that the bid to find clarity and to systematise the education policy terrain entails an on-going struggle to tame complexity. The three case studies together demonstrate how scholars in different parts of the world are using ANT to study contemporary policy trends and make a case for the use of such an analytic.

The three presentations will be enriched by the insights of the Discussant, Prof Mary Hamilton, who is an experienced ANT researcher engaged in researching contemporary policy phenomena such as the globalisation of social statistics and literacy measurements. As such, she is uniquely placed to generate discussion and to comment on the papers in the symposium.