Reading educational reform with actor network theory: Fluid spaces, otherings, and ambivalences

In considering two extended examples of educational reform efforts, this discussion traces relations that become visible through analytic approaches associated with actor-network theory (ANT). The strategy here is to present multiple readings of the two examples. The first reading adopts an ANT approach to follow ways that all actors – human and non-human entities, including the entity that is taken to be ‘educational reform’ – are performed into being through the play of linkages among heterogeneous elements. Then, further readings focus not only on the material practices that become enacted and distributed, but also on the otherings that occur: the various fluid spaces and ambivalent belongings that create actor-network(s) but also escape them. For educational research, particularly in educational reform and policy, it is argued that ANT analyses are particularly useful to examine the complex enactments in these dynamics. That is, ANT can illuminate movements of ordering and disordering that occur through minute socio-material connections in educational interventions. ANT readings also can discern, within these attempts to order people and practices, the spaces of flux and instability that enable and protect alternate possibilities

Exploring professional engineers' knowings-in-practice in an emerging industry: An Actor-Network Theory approach

This thesis presents a sociomaterial perspective on how everyday engineering work practices are being changed by the complexities and tensions prevalent in emerging industries. Presenting the wind energy industry, in the renewable energy sector, as a case, this study contends that current engineering education practices are not adequately preparing and supporting students and professionals for work in highly volatile, precarious industries. This study pays close attention to how engineers enact competent knowing and learning strategies to respond to, and navigate, these complexities and tensions. Traditional engineering education practices tend to frame engineering work as a bounded, stable, rational, and technical endeavor, where knowledge is regarded as a commodity to be acquired. Rather than treating professional knowledge as an independent reality of the engineering field, this thesis argues that education practices can be informed by making visible mundane and taken-for-granted aspects of engineers’ everyday work, and reconfiguring conceptualisations of engineering knowledge as situated, collective, on-going, and materially-mediated performances. To do so, this study draws on concepts of knowing-in-practice and Actor-Network Theory, which position engineering work as heterogeneous assemblages of social and material relations. An ethnographic methodology afforded the tracing of social and material relations between 13 participating engineers and the objects of their practice in a wind energy organisation located in a Scottish city. Following six months of observations and interviews, three activities that generated high intensity in the engineers' everyday work were analysed: securing a signature on a contract, the unfolding of a specific organising process, and implementing a new technology. Analysis revealed four tensions that needed to be constantly negotiated, which included balancing: commercial objectives and client needs with traditional engineering concerns; standardising practices with innovating practices; acceptable practice with allowable deviation; and visibility with invisibility. Emerging from the findings were clear indications that the multiple knowings-in-practice enacted to negotiate these tensions were interdependent, yet partial, fluid and multiple, sociomaterial performances. This thesis offers recommendations for education practices based on these findings, which challenge dominant representational and individualistic conceptualisations of engineering education and workplace learning. Furthermore, a ‘dynamic stability’ sensibility is offered as a pedagogical approach that encourages attunement to the performance of fluid and informal infrastructuring practices, which tolerate volatility and high-change in work practices

Relational social recommendation: Application to the academic domain

This paper outlines RSR, a relational social recommendation approach applied to a social graph comprised of relational entity profiles. RSR uses information extraction and learning methods to obtain relational facts about persons of interest from the Web, and generates an associative entity-relation social network from their extracted personal profiles. As a case study, we consider the task of peer recommendation at scientific conferences. Given a social graph of scholars, RSR employs graph similarity measures to rank conference participants by their relatedness to a user. Unlike other recommender systems that perform social rankings, RSR provides the user with detailed supporting explanations in the form of relational connecting paths. In a set of user studies, we collected feedbacks from participants onsite of scientific conferences, pertaining to RSR quality of recommendations and explanations. The feedbacks indicate that users appreciate and benefit from RSR explainability features. The feedbacks further indicate on recommendation serendipity using RSR, having it recommend persons of interest who are not apriori known to the user, oftentimes exposing surprising inter-personal associations. Finally, we outline and assess potential gains in recommendation relevance and serendipity using path-based relational learning within RSR

Network alliances: precarious governance through data, standards and code

First paragraph: We share the general concerns of this book about the ways in which education, alongside most other social services from health care to air travel and banking, is being managed through comparative technologies. These effectively translate complex knowledge processes and human relationships into data. Such translations render processes calculable, and enrol them into massive digital networks that track, sequence, assess, procure and direct most social activity in advanced societies. To better understand how these processes mobilize particular educational practices, we argue for the utility of network analysis following Bruno Latour (2005). While controversial, versions of actor-network theory are increasingly brought to bear in educational studies of governmentality and knowledge. These approaches tend to avoid the limitations inherent in explanations that rely upon dominant ‘paradigms' and political ideologies. They also deliberately decentre human actors, their meanings and politics. Instead, we argue for analysis that traces myriad negotiations among material devices, embodiments, and technologies with social desires and discourses. Through these sociomaterial vitalities, particular forms of knowledge become performed and stabilized

Connecting worlds: the translation of international auditing standards into post-Soviet audit practice

This paper analyses the use and circulation of nternational auditing standards within a large post-Soviet Russian audit firm, as it faces up to the challenges of international harmonisation. It describes this process as one of ‘connecting worlds’ and translation. In a detailed field study based investigation, it traces various attempts to articulate and link Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, old and new imagined audit worlds. The paper underscores the fragile and precarious nature of international standardisation projects. It shows how ideals of audit universalism and international comparability become enmeshed in, and challenged by, global divisions of audit labour, problems and practices of power and exclusion, and struggles for intra-professional distinction, which in turn undermine as well as promote the connecting of worlds through standards