Actor Network Theory (ANT)

The article addresses the complex relationship between practice theory and actor-network theory (ANT). It closely examines the similarities and differences between the two and asks how the ANT perspective can be beneficial for practice theory. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens and Theodore Schatzki's work, this study briefly identifies the theoretical and methodological standpoint of practice theory. It then turns to Bruno Latour's ANT, discussing his methodological approach towards the social. Next, it identifies the differences between the two approaches, offering a critique of ANT from the perspective of practice theory. In the conclusion, the contribution identifies the potential of ANT approaches for practice theory at the methodological level. It argues that the methodological principles of ANT can integrate with practice theory to form what I call a 'transitive methodology'. This analytical perspective does not locate sub-jectivity and agency at a single spot. Instead, it situates them in a heterogeneous network of practices and materialities.

Im Zuge der Debatten um ökonomische wie soziale Nachhaltigkeit und angesichts der Tatsache, dass Soziologie und Kulturwissenschaft die Dinge vermehrt hinsichtlich ihrer Rolle in gesellschaftlichen Prozessen reflektieren, sind soziale Dimensionen des Designs in den letzten Jahren besonders virulent geworden. Gegenwärtig entsteht verstärkt eine Designkultur, die ihre Zeitgemäßheit auf unterschiedliche Art und Weise durch soziale Relevanz herauszustellen versucht und im Zuge dessen auch vermehrt mit der Reflexion der eigenen Praxis beschäftigt ist. Das Design wird nicht nur deshalb zunehmend politisiert, weil globale soziale Missstände – wie Chancen- und Verteilungsungerechtigkeit oder Flucht und Migration – medial vermittelt besonders sichtbar sind, sondern auch weil sich das Verständnis sozialer Prozesse geändert hat. Der Beitrag zeichnet diese Änderung des Verständnisses von 'Social Design' anhand einer ethischen, immateriellen und interaktiven Lesart nach und entwickelt ein einleitendes Verständnis der zwischenmenschlichen Dimensionen von Design.

Eine kontrovers diskutierte, sehr junge Theorie-Strömung ist die "Symmetrische Archäologie". Unter diesem Begriff wird eine fundamentale Kritik von Grundannahmen archäologischer Forschung zusammengefasst. Anstatt wie üblich von der strikten Trennung von Menschen und Dingen, Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Forschung und Gesellschaft auszugehen, denkt die "Symmetrische Archäologie" in komplexen Netzwerken, Verknüpfungen und Symmetrien durch Raum und Zeit.

This is the penultimate typescript of Chapter 2 _of Scientific Communication: Practices, Theories, and Pedagogies_, edited by Han Yu and Kathy Northcut. The chapter attempts to contribute to our understanding of scientific communication by exploring the ethics of scientific authorship. Specifically, we explore the historical, practical and theoretical implications of the (non)decision of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the nation's highest ethical office, not to include authorship issues in its definition of research misconduct.


Formed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 1992, the ORI defines research misconduct as "fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism" (FFP). However, a host of other authorship issues in addition to plagiarism are important in science (e.g., authorship credit, author order, etc.) and are regularly encountered and often violated by scientists. However, our research also reveals that there are many sources of ethics in scientific communication-some in conflict with each other, just as the ethics are often in tension (e.g., the drive for originality and credit vs. the need to collaborate and share)-and that scientific organizations and journals, combined with social, personal, and other systems of morality and values, create "ethical lines and fields of force." It is within these shifting ethical fields of force, rather than the power of the ORI, that scientists work every day. (In this, we recognize of both Actor-Network Theory, and posthumanistic understandings of the limitations of human agency in continuously emergent and mostly unpredictable ecologies, here applied specifically scientific/authorship ethics.) 


The ORI's decision to exclude authorship ethics other than plagiarism provides a unique opportunity to interrogate the supposed and real power of the ORI; to begin to map the ethical lines and fields of force that impinge on scientists; and to explore the role and implications of ethics in authorship as a fundamental concern in scientific research as well as communication.

The Dewil Valley is a part of the unique natural and cultural landscape of northern Palawan (Philippines) characterized by the occurrence of characteristic limestone karst formations – so-called towers. According to archaeological and ethnographic evidence, they have been symbolic places for different communities for at least 14 000 years. The aim of this work is to answer the question: why the rock formations of the Dewil Valley have been places of ritual human activities over centuries? The analysis is based on two kinds of empirical data: archaeological (collected as a part of the Palawan Island Paleohistoric Research Project) and ethnographic (gathered during interviews conducted in the 2019 season). An attempt to answer these questions is based on several theoretical concepts: the Actor-Network-Theory, landscape phenomenology, and landscape biography. The methods that have been used allow a critical assessment of the research and interpretation process. The final result of the work is a polyphonic, multi-layered narrative about the past of the Dewil Valley.

El presente trabajo emerge desde un territorio de asombro etnográfico en el que
tecnologías multiculturales, en este caso píldoras para dormir, inadvertidamente
obscurecen y amenazan la alteridad. Esto último es examinado a través del poderoso
carácter relacional de mundos y prácticas –humanas y no-humanas–, que se resisten a
ser clasificados. En particular, reflexionaré sobre cómo ciertas “cuestiones médicas”
actúan en situaciones controvertidas para configurar lo que yo llamo “trastornos
ontológicos”. A lo largo de este escrito, he intentado respetar cuidadosa y seriamente la
lucha concreta por la vida -en toda su inclasificable intensidad- librada por una de mis
interactuantes en el sur de Chile. En su honor, este trabajo indaga territorios
etnográficos donde el mundo indígena es llevado al límite, y donde tomar una postura
onto-ética es la única manera de escapar de una equivocación casi fatal.

This thesis was submitted as part of my MSc., Digital Marketing program.

Quantified Self  is a movement that encourages the idea of involving technology to track and acquire data on various aspects of the human body and daily life. Past research enquiries on quantified life have been in the area of human computer interaction and design; there have not been many studies that deals with the consumption aspects of this fast growing segment.

This research project is aimed at exploring the consumption practices of Quantified-Selfers and explains how they co-construct their gamified selves through their practices.

Since this research aims to explain the phenomenon of co-construction of gamified self, it uses Actor-network theory as a research methodology with data collected through 15 phenomenological interviews of respondents who use fitness trackers and apps on a daily basis.

Actor-network theory is employed in order to identify how non-human actors play an important part in the co-construction of their gamified self. Based on the findings, the research explains how Quantified-Selfers gamify their bodies and also discusses the implications for different actors in the Quantified Self network. The research identifies how the devices influence the definition of ideal self and how they impact changes in behaviours. It also discusses the effects of gamification and the difference between “gaming with oneself” and “gaming with the social group”. It concludes that people the co-construct a gamified self that impacts their behaviour in both positive and negative ways. The research critically deliberates on how the non-human actors are involved in behavioural changes of human beings through Quantified Self.

The subject today seems decentered in and by language, split by the unconscious, deformed by social forces, governed by ideology, and is either seen to have succumbed to the postmodern condition or to never have existed in the first place. Neither idealist philosophies nor new materialist approaches have adequately addressed the relation between subject and materiality.
Every materialist theory of the subject depends on a conception of materiality, which can delineate the character of what the material reality that the subject is constituted in consists of. This book offers readings of the approaches of Marxism, (post-)structuralism, and material semiotics and explores the relations between materiality and the subject in each approach.

The recent rapid growth of “craft beer” has led to a search for definitions and categorisation of that sector with “beer style” used as one criterion. This thesis explores the origins of these style definitions and how they act as a technology of classification which affects how sensory judgments are formed and expressed in practice, and how judges are examined and certified. The investigation draws on actor-network theory and ethnomethodology to trace how taste descriptions are assembled and translated into test items in an online exam. The material orderings and classification practices which assemble competition judging are then explored ethnographically by following the trajectory of a beer through these situated actions. The magnification is increased through developing original methods utilising digital pens, and draws on principles from conversation analysis to explore the sequential and categorial aspects of judging talk and its co-ordination with writing and form-filling. Finally, auto-ethnographic and material-semiotic explorations are used to explore how a blind beer tasting exam is assembled, and the models of learning and assessment it enacts. The historical construction of the contemporary language of sensory assessment supports the construction of the style guides. Once assembled into an information infrastructure the style guide is extended to act in multiple different ways: its propositions are translated into testable facts with multiple choices, it functions as a technology of material ordering and coordination, as a regulatory technology placing limits on how taste judgements can and cannot be expressed or recorded, and as a re-enactment and materialisation of individual cognitivist models of assessment. Through exploring the ways a classification system is assembled, translated and made authoritative this thesis extends the conceptualisation of what is considered a technology in technology enhanced learning, and extends the dialogue between that disciplinary field and scholarship in science and technology studies.

The term "cable," as used in the context of diplomacy, is ambiguous. It denotes both a message and its technological messenger. Telegraph wires were used around the middle of the nineteenth century to connect the capitals of Europe. The network soon expanded, and by 1870, with the laying of submarine cables, fast-traveling telegraphic messages could be sent between Britain, Continental Europe, North America, the Middle East, and India. Through these cables, diplomatic posts communicated with their ministries back home. But the term "cable" also came to denote the message that was sent by telegraph. In this chapter I use this ambiguity as an entry point for an exploration of what the new materialist turn can bring to Diplomatic Studies. I will demonstrate how at three particular points in history the cable, as both diplomatic message and technological messenger, made a difference to how things played out. To make sense of this, one needs to be perceptive of the myriad ways in which meaning and materiality intertwine in the making of what we call diplomacy. What is called for is, in other words, a material-semiotic analysis of diplomacy...

This two day workshop will explore analytic approaches and concepts that address the intimacies, conflicts and synergies between pleasure and risk in gay men’s sexual practices, cultures, and communities over the past two decades of HIV/AIDS. 

Participants will consider key problems and controversies punctuating this history, and explore how different analytic and methodological approaches participate in – and/or attempt to transform – the formation of these problems. 

By the end of the workshop, participants will have enhanced their familiarity with key concepts and approaches in HIV social research, queer theory and actor-network theory (Science & Technology Studies).  They will be introduced to ways of using these literatures to devise new approaches to HIV and drug research that engage with, and intervene constructively into, sexual practices, cultures and public health problems as currently practiced.

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

In 2004, Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk (b. 1965) released her fifth solo album Medúlla, made almost exclusively with human voices. After outlining what I have termed ‘the elastic self’, which recognises both personal and external agency, this dissertation first examines how Björk uses technologies of the studio, using Actor Network Theory. Often mechanical manipulation is an attempt to depict powerlessness, whilst her employment of beatboxers’ interplay with technology is to express the body. . I will explore how Björk conceptualised and conceived Medúlla (2004), an album made almost entirely from human voicesI then perform an organicist motivic analysis of the album, studying motives used in different songs and links made across the musical foreground and background and the resulting unity. Through the concept of the rhizome and Actor Network Theory, I expand my analysis of motivic unity outside of the album, suggesting that the album can also be read as a network or as ‘elastic’. This study will attempt to understand how Björk’s idea of the self and body were transferred to the musical work.

Ph.D.-thesis accounting for mediated modes of visiting at the museum of natural history, Naturama, Denmark.

Mobile phone cameras, exercise pamphlets and dress-up animal costumes shape museum visits. The three very different mobile, mediating technologies play a central role when visitors relate to a museum exhibition. When these mobile, mediating technologies link visitors and the exhibition, they simultaneously create their own distorted version of the exhibition and conjure three very different versions of the visitor.

Actor network theory (ANT) and related post-Ant studies invorm the analysis of ethnographic fieldwork carried out at a museum of natural history. The analyses show how mobile, mediating technologies, visitors and exhibition are intertwined during museum visits. This leads to an understanding of the museum visit as consisting of multipe, mediated modes of visiting.

Each technology mediates a mode of visiting and as visitors shift between mediated modes of visiting, they shift between multiple exhibition realities.

Sommario: 1. Parco giochi con pena di morte: la Smart city come elemento di ingegneria sociale.; 2. Le città intelligenti tra governo del territorio, razionalità costituzionale e microfisica del potere ; 3. Smart citizenship: diritto e cittadinanza digitale; 4. Capitalismo di sorveglianza, dati e dimensione urbana ; 5. La tripla convergenza: concorrenza, innovazione e regolazione nel prisma della Smart City ; 6. Verso un principio costituzionale di precauzione per il governo razionale della città intelligente e della società digitale. "La città è il laboratorio dell'umanità, il luogo in cui le persone si radunano per sognare, creare, costruire e ricostruire insieme" Edward Glaeser, Il trionfo della città 1. Parco giochi con pena di morte: la Smart city come elemento di ingegneria sociale Nell'aprile 2019 il New York Times 1 ha dato conto delle risultanze di un esperimento socio-scientifico, dal limitatissimo costo di sessanta dollari, che ha trasformato una telecamera cittadina, posizionata nel lato est del Bryant Park nel Midtown Manhattan, in un sistema di riconoscimento biometrico facciale. Il match tra gli oltre duemila volti dei passanti immortalati nei singoli scatti e le foto da questi caricate online, facilmente rinvenibili su motori di ricerca o social network, e che rispondevano ai medesimi parametri biometrici, portava ad una quasi totalitaria identificazione dei cittadini stessi; professori universitari, broker, studenti, turisti, una vasta umanità in transito che veniva scandagliata, analizzata, capillarmente catalogata 2 e identificata 3. * Scritto sottoposto a referee. 1 S. Chinoy, We built an Unbelievable (but legal) facial recognition machine, New York Times, 16 Aprile 2019. 2 Sui rischi intrinsecamente connaturati in prospettiva dei pubblici poteri alla prassi, per ora solo poliziesca, dello stop and frisk, consistente nell'immortalare su smartphone o iPad il volto di un sospetto o di un semplice fermato per strada e immetterlo in un sistema cloud per verificare la sussistenza di precedenti penali, misure cautelari o comunque restrittive, ampiamente C. O'Neil. Armi di distruzione matematica, Milano, Bompiani, 2017, pp. 148 e ss, la quale riporta i casi che usualmente occorrono nella città californiana di San Diego. Naturalmente il meccanismo, limitato alla sfera dell'anti-terrorismo o della pubblica sicurezza, urbana o nazionale, è già ampiamente sfruttato in ottica commerciale, sia per quanto riguarda la veicolazione commerciale e la polarizzazione consumeristica sia, in termini di sorveglianza mercatoria, per iniziare a generare modalità di comportamento coartato, artificiale, guidato da chi ha intenzione di lanciare sul mercato un certo prodotto. 3 Una questione analoga, con tutte le varie implicazioni connesse, era per altro stata già affrontata e discussa dalla dottrina americana, si veda L. Lessig, Code 2.0, NYC, Basic Books, 2006, p. 218.

The growth in the populations of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) has stopped growing since 2009. The arguments for why this has happened typically focus on the humans that play them whether that be psychological, financial, or lifestyle factors. However, these previous enquiries have failed to address MMORPG players as both a result of not just the human and social, but also of technological actants. Through the semi-structured interviews of sixteen participants obtained through a snowball sampling strategy within the MMORPG of Final Fantasy XIV, this thesis uses a novel application of Actor Network Theory to trace their MMORPG play. This led to the uncovering of important non-human, technological actants, that formed an important part of the construct of MMORPG play and the player itself, and, have been underserved by previous research. The first finding is that humans, more specifically, those who study participants considered as “friends” throughout MMORPG play were actually found to be fragile and non-essential to sustaining that play; the second finding is that humans do not hold as privileged a position within the sphere of MMORPG play and development, and that non-human, technologies often have as dramatic an effect on play; thirdly, this thesis finds that the way in which MMORPG play occurred and MMORPG players came to be could not be classified with rudimentary taxonomies as had been attempted previously, rather each occurrence of play and each player construct was unique through formation; and, finally, the fourth finding is that how one eventually comes to be an MMORPG player is the realisation of a complex tapestry of potentialities, sometimes years in the making. These findings through the application of Actor Network Theory alter the current understanding of the MMORPG player and allow us to answer the thesis question of “how have we misunderstood MMORPG play?”

In this thesis, I argue that a new, ambitious variety of literary utopia, which I call an ecosystem utopia, has developed over the past forty years, chiefly in science fiction and fantasy. My primary examples are Paul McAuley’s novels The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. An ecosystem utopia portrays a dynamic network of societies in a text’s fictional time and space. Like a traditional utopia, it explores the structure and functioning of individual utopias, and like the critical utopia, their flaws and ambiguities. Sociopolitically complex, it explores threads of influence, alliance, conflict, exploitation, and dominance within and between multiple societies. To analyze such a complex system, I have created a hybrid methodology, econet criticism, which blends ecology with a variant of Actor-Network Theory to analyze individual utopias and trace their interactions. This is an exploratory work, a first step toward developing a new way of conceiving and analyzing utopia.

Most of the stuff that today’s political scientists are interested in is not bounded by a ‘field’. By abandoning the concept of field, several genuine methodological problems of interpretive political analysis come to the fore and it is these that require close consideration. I start with a discussion of what is problematic about the concept of field and the epistemic practice of field work. I argue that once we abandon the concept of field, a range of problems seem less important - such as the problem of 'access', while others come to the fore. We need to pay particular attention to the practical problems of multiplicity, temporality,
access, and proximity. My core intention is to contribute to conceptual awareness in the dialogue of anthropology and political science, and the need to focus on concrete and practical problems of research practice.

Die Praxistheorie bietet einen kultursoziologischen Ansatz, das sinnhafte menschliche Tun in seiner Alltäglichkeit und Vielfältigkeit zu analysieren und dabei Fehlschlüsse anderer sozialtheoretischer Perspektiven zu vermeiden, indem insbesondere die Relationalität, Zeitlichkeit, Räumlichkeit, Körperlichkeit und Materialität des Sozialen anerkannt werden. Der Beitrag zeichnet die Entwicklung der Praxistheorie und ihre Konstitution als Theoriebewegung nach, fasst einzelne praxeologische Positionen zusammen und arbeitet die Charakteristika der Praxistheorie systematisch heraus. Abschließend wird auf aktuelle Debatten und Forschungsfelder verwiesen. Ein Schwerpunkt liegt dabei jeweils auf den Bezügen zur Kultursoziologie.

Текст диссертационной работы, защищенной 3 марта 2015 года в диссертационном совете по социологии РГГУ.
Работа нацелена на систематизацию теоретических идей и практических наработок сетевого подхода в социологии и определение его места и роли в структуре социологического знания. В работе проанализированы теоретико-методологические основания трех направлений сетевого подхода в социологии – анализа социальных сетей, реляционной социологии и акторно-сетевой теории. Результаты исследования могут быть полезны для широкого круга исследователей и академических работников, а также студентов факультетов социальных наук и могут быть использованы в рамках преподавания курсов по истории социологии, современной социологической теории, методологии и методики социологических исследований, а также при реализации эмпирических исследований.

The representations of Egyptian female king Hatshepsut are, as a consequence of a binary heteronormative sex/gender bind, continuously queered in scholarship. Statements on her body and identity are often made by directly equating her representations with the corporeal. This paper offers a critique of the heteronormative interpretations of Hatshepsut, which often identify her as a cross-dresser, gender-bender or Bwoman with a beard.^An alternative approach will be attempted with the discussion of her imagery in the context of queer and Actor Network theoretical encounters. This paper argues that the binary bind of the sex/gender system can be traversed through a complex network of actants, including bodies, ancestors, relatives, gods, and material culture.

I, Olufemi Jagunmolu Johnson, declare that the contents of this thesis represent my own unaided work, and that the thesis has not previously been submitted for academic examination towards any qualification. Furthermore, it represents my own opinions and not necessarily those of the

From ubiquitous surveillance to drone strikes that put “warheads onto foreheads,” we live in a world of globalized, individualized targeting. The perils are great. In The Eye of War, Antoine Bousquet provides both a sweeping historical overview of military perception technologies and a disquieting lens on a world that is, increasingly, one in which anything or anyone that can be perceived can be destroyed—in which to see is to destroy.

Arguing that modern-day global targeting is dissolving the conventionally bounded spaces of armed conflict, Bousquet shows that over several centuries, a logistical order of militarized perception has come into ascendancy, bringing perception and annihilation into ever-closer alignment. The efforts deployed to evade this deadly visibility have correspondingly intensified, yielding practices of radical concealment that presage a wholesale disappearance of the customary space of the battlefield. Beginning with the Renaissance’s fateful discovery of linear perspective, The Eye of War discloses the entanglement of the sciences and techniques of perception, representation, and localization in the modern era amid the perpetual quest for military superiority. In a survey that ranges from the telescope, aerial photograph, and gridded map to radar, digital imaging, and the geographic information system, Bousquet shows how successive technological systems have profoundly shaped the history of warfare and the experience of soldiering.

A work of grand historical sweep and remarkable analytical power, The Eye of War explores the implications of militarized perception for the character of war in the twenty-first century and the place of human subjects within its increasingly technical armature.

When artists first started to engage with the volatile and ephemeral forces of video technology, they were grappling with phenomena that seemed to undermine human concepts of control, design, and memory—a technical corollary to avant-garde ideas of undoing authorial mastery and entering new media reality. But what if the critical question of early video art was no longer that of artistic control? What if the video signal and its microtemporal speeds could be seen to have purposes of their own, powers to unfold within an artistic setting that provided a different set of possibilities and constraints than the realm of TV production and broadcasting? What if video was not simply a technology used by artists, but an agent that deployed artistic frameworks, personnel, and competences in the process of exploring its own technical capacities? In such an account, video would no longer be a standardized operational system subtending a cultural layer of aesthetic, journalistic, or actionist content, but a multiplicity of temporal technical operations forging new associations or alliances with the surrounding world. It could be seen as a form of live memory in action, spurring on new forms of social reflection and organization—in short, new social realities. In this innovative text, Ina Blom traces the autobiography of video as enacted in the field of early analog video art. She documents, among other things, the becoming of video through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration. This is a book about technology and social memory in the field of twentieth-century art.

This paper is about explaining political communication in an age of both extreme interconnectedness and fragmentation. It argues that we cannot understand the political implications of the communication processes that saturate the world we inhabit unless we engage with the material and everyday micro-reality of a wider range of actors than " traditional " elected politicians and their organizations. The findings presented, based on 71 interviews conducted over the last six years, are part of a study aimed at explaining the communication practices of foreign diplomats and journalists across the UK, Norway and Somalia. The analysis shows the fruitfulness of addressing the social, material and spatial context of communication, beyond the conventional focus on the production, content and reception of messages. In doing so it takes on ambitious challenges: to question current approaches to the study of political communication, to problematize the very notion of what is " politics " in the digital age; to suggest new methodological avenues to explore connections and discontinuity within and beyond national borders.

This paper examines the law enforcement mechanism for the implementation of the Anti-illegal Camcording Act of 2010 in selected Philippine cinemas against film piracy and illegal camcording. Using sociological perspectives, especially some tenets of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and qualitative data from testimonies of 20 student-informants who witnessed actual illegal camcording of some cinemas in Metro Manila, interview from the chairperson of the Optical Media Board (OMB), Philippines' lead agency against media piracy, personal observation and experience of the author as a movie goer, media reports, and secondary literature and the Actor-network Theory (ANT) as the primary theoretical framework, it argues that an effective law enforcement against illegal camcording entails an efficient and effective use of human and technological surveillance and policing using the latest digital technologies. Results showed that that illegal camcording which occurred in some cinemas in Metro Manila as witnessed by the study's student informants, were primarily caused by the lack of efficient human monitoring by cinema personnel and government agents, as well as by the absence of the latest surveillance and detection technologies which could have deterred illegal recording of films by pirates inside the movie theater. The recommends an efficient human and technological surveillance in cinemas employing the latest anti-piracy technologies to implement the law.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Evidence based policy making (EBP) has become the dominant practice in education policy globally. How do certain policy ideas and practices become pervasive? How is knowledge produced, validated and rendered authoritative? What are the institutional practices and routines through which ‘policy doings’ occur? How do policy actors gain the capacity to act? These are some of the questions this thesis attempts to answer.
In this study, I explore how EBP is assembled, promoted and stabilised. I follow closely the practices by which evidence is ‘gathered’: how entities are rendered calculable and the means by which calculation is effected. Drawing upon the theoretical and conceptual resources of material semiotics, I examine two performances of EBP: the OECD’s well known survey, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), in which education systems are evaluated and compared; and a national school reform effort, Australia’s Education Revolution, where EBP is employed to standardise, centralise and organise the system. Using documentary evidence and interviews with 18 policy actors, I analyse EBP’s ordering practices and the practical politics by which it is performed. 
EBP seeks to close off debates and settle understandings by seeking ‘what works’ and identifying ‘best practice’. It seeks to trump uncertain politics with certain science. Its politics lies in creating a divide between an apparently neutral and apolitical ‘science’ on the one hand and an uncertain, prejudiced ‘politics’ on the other, so that employing reliable and good science can be presented as an antidote to untrustworthy politics. Rather than seeing science as politics by other means, as Latour suggests, EBP proposes that politics is science by other means.  In this study, I demonstrate how this division between science and politics is achieved in EBP.
Closing off spaces for debate prematurely through ‘scientific evidence’ comes at the high cost of diminished understanding and unwarranted certainty. In short, the clarities sought in EBP can be blinding rather than illuminating. Through this detailed empirical study, I show that EBP is a techno-political assemblage. Following my ethical impulse, I reintroduce politics into the apparently purely technical and turn ‘matters of fact’ into ‘matters of concern’. This opens up new spaces for intervention, new ‘assemblies’ where debate and openness and a desire to do ‘good’ are admissible.  It is my hope that this thesis will encourage a shift to more creative and more considered ways of ‘doing’ EBP.

The French sociologist of science Bruno Latour argues that visualising matters of concern is a pivotal design task for the future. In Part 1 of this chapter, the author subjects
Latour’s argument to a critical examination in the context of design research fields. Part 2 relates Latour’s ‘matters of concern’ concept to the challenge not only of visualising
but also of designing concerns. The main hypothesis developed here is that concerns can serve as attractors for organising and interpreting values, needs, issues, and
frames. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship of design to social change and the potential contribution to future transformation design that building on Latour’s perspective may make possible.

Compilado de notas de aula de vários cursos sobre Latour e sua Teoria do Ator-Rede, partes de diversas disciplinas de Atualização e Prática do Direito que ministrei na Faculdade de Direito (UnB) entre 2019 e 2021.

O propósito é meramente expositivo e didático, e não substitui a leitura das obras completas.

Prefaciei este compilado de roteiros com breve notas acerca da origem e evolução do pensamento latouriano nas últimas décadas, bem como os princípios e conceitos gerais que perpassam sua obra.

This thesis is about creative strategies for staging places as performances. To remain viable in the rapidly changing technological and social context, architecture needs to extend its engagement with research, reappraise its fundamental goals and develop creative strategies adequate to new challenges.

However, utilisation of research in design disciplines is still immature and the methodologies of this utilisation remain a matter of controversy and active debate. In particular, the potential of cross-pollination between designing and research requires further clarification. This thesis addresses this need by developing a methodological approach that combines participant observation and investigative designing. Utilising these methodologies, this thesis considers several case-studies, including interactive installations and virtual environments.

Engagement with case-studies through participant observation and investigative designing in this thesis motivates a discussion that reinstates place as the focus of architectural practice. Existing discourse and practice in architecture often assume retrograde, romantic, essentialist and exclusionary understandings of places, for example as singular, bounded and static. By contrast, this thesis highlights an open and flexible vision of places as performances. Considering the possible roles of architectural designing in place-making, it suggests that architects cannot produce ready places but can engender placemaking performances and influence their growth with provocative, open and collaborative creative-design strategies.

Having established the case for distributed, polyphonic, campaigning creativity in place-making, this thesis considers whether design computing can support its performative needs. Commonly, researchers and practitioners in architecture express concerns that design computing can hinder human creativity. By contrast, this thesis demonstrates that design computing can support distributed creativity by staging multiplicious, open, flexible, idea- and insight-generating participatory exchanges. In the process, this thesis considers interactive cinematography and procedural designing as place-making actions. This re-conceptualization demonstrates that design computing can usefully support creative place-making and sometimes be indispensable for its success.

This thesis contributes to knowing by 1) utilising and presenting an unorthodox methodological approach to architectural research; 2) presenting an approach to understanding and making of places novel to the field of architecture; and 3) re-conceptualizing innovative design-computing as an important creative resource for placemaking.

The book presents a socio-material analysis of the British milk industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces the dramatic development of the milk trade from a cottage industry into a modernised and integrated system of production and distribution, examining the social, economic and political factors underpinning this transformation, and also tracing the important roles played by various nonhumans, such as microbes, refrigeration technologies, diseases of cattle, and even cows themselves. The book also examines the emergence of milk inspection, showing how the commodification of milk and the growth of the large dairy corporations was made possible by the earlier work of local health officials, milk inspectors, veterinarians and medical officers of health. The analysis draws upon actor network theory in order to present a sustained critique of modern knowledge-practices, and particularly of the humanist discourse which assumes that human beings inhabit a unique domain incommensurable with the nonhuman world. This is systematically challenged by tracing how the separation of humans and nonhumans is continually accomplished and reproduced in everyday life, so that the book represents a critique of modernity worked through milk itself.

My basic claim is that Actor Network Theory (ANT) is a practice, like art, rather than a specific theory. This equivalence has four dimensions. First: both practices are a consequence of the conditions of contemporaneity. Second: as a result of this consequence, both describe and exemplify those conditions which are characterised by logic of information as it is distributed over systems of communication and control. Third: these conditions are underwritten by a particular understanding of what the human subject is; that is as one distributed and dispersed over those social systems. Fourth: ANT is as much an aesthetic as it is epistemic practice.

As an alternative reading of anime’s global consumption, this paper will explore the multiple layers of transnationality in anime: how the dispersal of agency in anime production extends to transnational production, and how these elements of anime’s transnationality are engaged with in the transnational consumption of anime. This will be done through an analysis of Shirobako (an anime about making anime), revealing how the series depicts anime production as a constant process of negotiation involving a large number of actors, each having tangible effects on the final product: human actors (directors, animators, and production assistants), the media-mix (publishing houses and manga authors), and the anime media-form itself. Anime production thus operates as a network of actors whose agency is dispersed across a chain of hierarchies, and though unacknowledged by Shirobako, often occurs transnationally, making attribution of a single actor as the agent who addresses Japan (or the world) difficult to sustain. Lastly, I will examine how transnational sakuga-fans tend to focus on anime’s media-form as opposed to “Japaneseness”, practicing an alternative type of consumption that engages with a sense of dispersed agency and the labor involved in animation, even examining non-Japanese animators, and thus anime's multilayered transnationality.

Since the early 1990s ‘Dutch Design’ has become increasingly visible in the international design field. Publications that attempt to explain its essence appeal to the idea that Dutch Design artefacts are somehow ‘typically Dutch’, where ‘Dutchness’ is explained as a mix of recurring factors: conceptualism, Calvinism, the artificially constructed and densely populated Dutch landscape, the Polder Model, social responsibility, entrepreneurship, and a shortage of natural materials and industries, among others. However, the problem with such narratives is that they participate in the construction of an idealized Dutch cultural identity and its material production rather than analytically describing their constructions. Perhaps this explains why these reiterations never seem able to settle the controversy once and for all so that the quest for the essence of Dutch Design continues until today. The purpose of this paper can be stated quite simply: it too will look for the essence of Dutch Design. But it will do so wisely advised by Bruno Latour who argues that “an essence does not lie in a definition but in a practice, a situated, material practice that ties a whole range of heterogeneous phenomena in a certain specific way.” Thus, rather than asking what Dutch Design is, this essay asks: how is it practiced? The hypothesis is that the essence of Dutch Design can be found not in abstract definitions of Dutchness but in situated material practices. As a case study this paper pragmatically traces the discursive and material construction of Autarchy (2010), a design project by studio Formafantasma, into an icon of Dutch Design [Figs. 1-4]. To do so, it employs Albena Yaneva’s adaptation of Bruno Latour’s ‘Actor-Network-Theory’ (ANT) to the study of design as a vector between studio practices and broader social and material networks. This framework allows this paper to abstain from generalizations and stereotypes of Dutch culture and identity and instead to provide a detailed description of Autarchy as a “star-like connecting site,” as a local place that idiosyncratically ties together a host of heterogeneous elements between the studio, the home, the media and the market. As such, this paper offers an original contribution to the study of design as a situated material practice at the intersection of so-called ‘micro’ analyses and ‘macro’ frameworks.

More so than in any other sphere of social existence, the brute physicality of war confronts us with the pervasive role that material objects occupy in the life (and death) of human collectives. But while the rapid and dramatic changes in the practices of warfare experienced in the modern era can be directly correlated to the evolutions of technique, we should be wary of simplified linear accounts that all too hastily read developments on the battlefield as incipient to the character of specific technical objects. It is only when these are related back to the wider sociotechnical assemblages in which they are embedded that we can begin to draw out the complex interdependencies and co-constitutive interactions that make up the war machine. Such an intellectual endeavour can contribute to developing more sober and nuanced appreciations of the transformative potential of technological developments than those which have animated RMA enthusiasts and at times intoxicated policy-makers.

This book chapter provides a succinct introduction to Actor Network Theory (ANT) and how it has been discussed in International Relations. Arguing that ANT offers "empirical theory" we review a range of classical ANT studies and discuss what concepts they develop. We continue in exploring what one can 'do' with ANT to study international relations and global politics.