You are on page 1of 9

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/254335153

Materialities, Textures and Pedagogies: Socio-material Assemblages in


Education

Article  in  Pedagogy Culture and Society · March 2012


DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2012.649421

CITATIONS READS

57 236

2 authors:

Tara Fenwick Paolo Landri


University of Stirling Italian National Research Council
104 PUBLICATIONS   2,734 CITATIONS    20 PUBLICATIONS   180 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Digital Technologies and the Governance of Education View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Tara Fenwick on 11 March 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.


This article was downloaded by: [University of Stirling Library]
On: 11 March 2015, At: 08:56
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Pedagogy, Culture & Society


Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpcs20

Materialities, textures and pedagogies:


socio-material assemblages in
education
a b
Tara Fenwick & Paolo Landri
a
School of Education University of Stirling , Stirling , UK
b
CNR-IRPPS (Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche
Sociali) , Italy
Published online: 27 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Tara Fenwick & Paolo Landri (2012) Materialities, textures and pedagogies:
socio-material assemblages in education, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20:1, 1-7, DOI:
10.1080/14681366.2012.649421

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2012.649421

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Pedagogy, Culture & Society
Vol. 20, No. 1, March 2012, 1–7

INTRODUCTION
Materialities, textures and pedagogies: socio-material assemblages
in education
Tara Fenwicka* and Paolo Landrib
a
School of Education University of Stirling, Stirling, UK; bCNR-IRPPS (Istituto di
Ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali), Italy
Downloaded by [University of Stirling Library] at 08:56 11 March 2015

Research in learning and pedagogy has for some time been turning away from
preoccupation with individual learners, teachers or minds to embrace the situ-
atedness of these processes and their many interrelations. Some researchers
have explored socio-cultural or activity conceptions, some spatiality
approaches, some ‘practice-based’ conceptions of learning, and some even
draw from complexity science.1 All of these have sought to decentre a long-
term educational focus on the individual human subject. They also eschew
the domination in education of representationalist conceptions of knowledge,
and explore ways that learning and knowing are rooted in action – including
the ongoing action that brings forth the objects and identities constituting our
worlds. At the same time they attempt to move beyond overly simplistic
notions of ‘participation’ and ‘community of practice’ that have been so
widely critiqued (inter alia Hughes, Jewson, and Unwin 2007).
This issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society joins this developing tradition,
but with a special interest in foregrounding the materiality of educational
processes. The problem with educational views that are overly preoccupied
with developing a particular kind of human subject is that materials –
including human material – become invisible or subordinate to human cog-
nition and agency. In this issue we challenge this hierarchy theoretically and
empirically, and foreground the ‘matter’ of education as the mutual
entailment of human and non-human energies in local materialisations of
education and learning.
Sociomaterial studies in education have been slowly emerging in the past
two decades or so. In a review of this work, Fenwick, Edwards, and
Sawchuk (2011, 1, 3–4) explain:

[W]hat is material is often taken to be the background context against which


educational practice takes place or within which it sits, and material artefacts are
often taken to be simply tools that humans use or objects they investigate. While
giving a focus to the materiality of education therefore, both approaches still

*Corresponding author. Email: tara.fenwick@stir.ac.uk


ISSN 1468-1366 print/ISSN 1747-5104 online
Ó 2012 Pedagogy, Culture & Society
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2012.649421
http://www.tandfonline.com
2 T. Fenwick and P. Landri

tend to privilege the intentional human subject, which is assumed to be different


or separate from the material; the material is the non-human. In educational
research therefore, Sørensen (2009: 2) argues that there is a ‘blindness toward
the question of how educational practice is affected by materials’, and suggests
that its consequence is to treat materials as mere instruments to advance educa-
tional performance … What socio-material approaches offer to educational
research are resources to systematically consider both the patterns as well as the
unpredictability that makes educational activity possible. They promote methods
by which to recognise and trace the multifarious struggles, negotiations and
accommodations whose effects constitute the ‘things’ in education: students,
teachers, learning activities and spaces, knowledge representations such as texts,
pedagogy, curriculum content, and so forth. Rather than take such concepts as
foundational categories, or objects with properties, they become explored as
themselves effects of heterogeneous relations.
Downloaded by [University of Stirling Library] at 08:56 11 March 2015

In particular, this issue is devoted to exploring one of the more radical socio-
material orientations that educators are beginning to apply to studies of learn-
ing and pedagogy, drawing upon frameworks such as actor-network theory
(ANT), ‘after-ANT’ and feminist ANT studies, and the broader realm of sci-
ence and technology studies (STS). These orientations are highly diffuse, with
many tributaries, voices and critiques. While it is a mistake to attempt to pin
down and explain the ever-evolving experiments of ANT as though it were a
monolithic theory, its overall approach can be described broadly as:
tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social
and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations
within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form
outside the enactment of those relations. (Law 2008, 141)

Education and educational things in an ANT approach are, as Fenwick and


Edwards (2010) suggest, not seen as pre-existing objects of enquiry, but as
emerging through enactments of various forms of association, as network
effects. Here education, or the social more generally, is viewed as assembled
and only becoming possible through its own enactment as a separate domain.
Most important, ANT should not be viewed as a theory prescribing a way to
think, but as ‘a way of intervening in educational issues to reframe how we
might enact and engage with them’ (Fenwick and Edwards 2010, 11).
In a similar way, science and technology studies are characterised by a
heterogeneity of themes, research and theoretical interests. Plurality and the
maturation of the field are represented by the diverse versions of STS hand-
books (Spiegel-Rösing and de Solla 1977; Jasanoff et al.1995; Hackett
et al.2007). A standard story of the STS field (Sismondo 2007) calls us back
to Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962/1996). From there we
might consider STS development through the articulation of the ‘strong
programme’ of the sociology of knowledge (Bloor 1976; Barnes 1974), the
empirical programme of relativism (Collins 1985), the studies of laboratory
(Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr Cetina 1981; Lynch 1985), the social con-
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 3

struction of technology (SCOT, in Pinch and Bijeker 1987), the symbolic


interactionism study of scientific under the rubric of work, studies of co-pro-
duction (Jasanoff 2004) and so forth. Some have deliberately attempted to
bridge the worlds of education and STS (e.g. Roth and McGinn 1997).
In education, studies drawing from these orientations explore ways that
human and non-human materialities combine to produce particular purposes
and particular effects in education. They examine the messy textures woven
through different kinds of networks – and the resulting ambivalences – that
intersect in pedagogical processes. Actually, the human/non-human distinc-
tion becomes very problematic in these sociomaterial conceptions. Most
phenomena are understood to be hybrid assemblages of materials, ideas,
symbols, desires, bodies, natural forces, etc. that are always active, always
Downloaded by [University of Stirling Library] at 08:56 11 March 2015

reconstituting themselves. Sociomaterial studies shift the conversation from


issues defined by the personal and the social to questions about these assem-
blages, how they move, and how they produce what may appear to be dis-
tinct objects, subjects, and events. How and why do certain combinations of
things come together to exert particular effects? For example, what knowl-
edge is produced through patterns of assemblage? How do some assem-
blages become stable, and what force do they wield? How can more
oppressive assemblages be interrupted and weakened?
Such sociomaterial research still remains somewhat marginal in educa-
tion, even though it is proliferating rapidly in other social sciences such as
geography, environmental studies, gender studies, digital humanities, organi-
sation studies and new sociologies. Even the growing field of STS itself has
devoted scarce attention to the sociomaterial practices of education in spite
of classic studies examining the role of education for science (Polanyi 1958;
Kuhn 1962/1996) or which analyse sites of education in terms of social
technologies of disciplining (Foucault 1975). Sociomaterial researchers in
education are gradually creating an in-between place of sociomaterial/STS
studies and education, and showing this to be an important area of inquiry.

New questions, new vocabularies


The authors in this issue, while drawing from orientations associated with
ANT, each expand and push forward ANT or STS conceptions of pedagogi-
cal enactments. Pedagogy here is understood to encompass a broad range of
pedagogical encounters and situations. Some authors address curriculum and
practices related to public schooling, others examine learning and pedago-
gies in the workplace, community, and post-secondary institutions: wherever
learning is occasioned through specific purpose, content and activity.
Most express concerns about visions of education that emphasise output-
driven learning, accountability, standardisation, performativity, representa-
tionalist forms of knowledge, and so forth. They use sociomaterial
approaches to analyse and interrupt such enactments by making visible the
4 T. Fenwick and P. Landri

everyday, particular micro-dynamics of education and learning. The authors


articulate their problematisations in different ways, and in some respect their
articles may be regarded as experimental trials producing complex accounts
of material educational practice. Some authors, such as Dianne Mulcahy and
Helen Aberton, start by considering the lack of bodies and affects in domi-
nant psychologised, individualistic descriptions of education. Others, such as
Terri Lynn Thompson or Arva Mathisen and Monika Nerland, problematise
learning processes entangled in widespread uses of new digital technologies.
They examine how (apparently) simple devices like Thompson’s ‘delete but-
ton’, or Mathisen and Nerland’s ‘complex infrastructure’, are entry points
for describing complex assemblages of objects, people, and knowledges.
Carlijne Ceulemans, Maarten Simons and Elke Struyf follow the making of
Downloaded by [University of Stirling Library] at 08:56 11 March 2015

‘a self-evaluation report’ in a Flemish teacher programme to understand its


effect on the educational reform process. Tobias Roehl focuses on the way
in which material machineries in science classrooms contribute to evoking
particular human presences and participation.
The vocabulary of post-humanism emerges in these sorts of analyses, in
the sense of reconsidering what is ‘human’ when we accept the relational
entanglement of human and nonhuman intensities. However, the post- is not
anti-humanistic: ‘It is not “after” in terms of going beyond, but in terms of
offering a constant experimentation with or questioning of the human’
(Edwards 2010). Thus these authors consider with Latour (2005, 71) that
‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an
actor’. In following this route these authors transform materialities of educa-
tion from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’. They ask not only how
human/nonhuman entanglement affects educational practices and policies,
but also where are the openings for change.
Thus this attention to socio-materialities and assemblages in education
and learning raises important critical questions. For example, Dirk Postma
argues for a ‘materiality of critique’. He criticises approaches (Marxism,
neo-Marxism, and post-modern approaches) that are deeply embedded in
humanism for limiting the boundaries of critique within linguistic discursivi-
ty. By interconnecting ANT with Butler’s notion of performativity (1990),
the ontological politics of Mol (1999), and the agential realism of Barad
(2007), Postma reimagines a critical educational challenge to hegemonies of
exclusion: ‘This sociomaterial conception does not see critique in the first
place as a form of theorising but as something present within practices’.

New approaches: for pedagogy and pedagogical research


Methodology is an ongoing struggle for researchers attempting to work with
these sociomaterial approaches. Prominent commentators in the ANT
tradition have emphasised the importance of following details in the every-
day, to look down at the particular, not up at abstract categories that homog-
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 5

enise and control (Law 2004), because the local is all there is. The particular
and local is not assumed or understood to be an instance of, nor situated
within, a larger social system. But when the focus is particularly meant to be
on materiality, and when material assemblages are meant to be taken as they
arise rather than interpreted through prior categories, how can the presence
and shaping influence in these phenomena of the human researchers and
their inevitable pre-conceptions be explained? Researchers are commonly
reminded that they must be reflexive about what is actually going on in con-
structing such research, and highly reflexive researchers struggle with the
processes through which they translate material enactments into symbolic
representations. How does one reconcile what is conjured into view and
what is flattened? What categories, ultimately, is one using to shape, repress,
Downloaded by [University of Stirling Library] at 08:56 11 March 2015

highlight and inscribe? How are materials being anthropomorphised through


a researcher’s intervention? Whose meanings constitute what is claimed to
be materiality? In this issue, we see authors working through these issues in
different ways. Some, such as Arve Mathisen and Monika Nerland, have
relied upon interviews with human participants which they analyse to fore-
ground the material interactions embedded in people’s narratives about their
practice. Others such as Helen Aberton and Terri Lynn Thompson work pri-
marily with interviews but also include observations of interviewees-in-
action which are then photographed and discussed with the interviewees to
surface significance material interactions. Dianne Mulcahy works with video
recordings to explore teachers’ bodily affectivity, examining moments that
‘move and affect teachers and learners as embodied practices of assembly,
which are often mundane, everyday, and seemingly trivial’.
The appropriate balance between showing and telling is difficult to assess
or achieve. Sociomaterial studies would be expected to show diverse mate-
rial enactments and the forms of knowledge they perform. However, the
fine-grained tracing of detail necessitates a great deal of what seems like
telling. We see this difficult balance in the study presented by Carlijne
Ceulemans and her colleagues, who trace how teachers’ ‘standardisation-in-
the-making’ occurs: they analyse documents specifying standards for teacher
competencies as well as textual traces of teacher activity such as self-evalua-
tion reports, examining the resulting assemblages of texts, teachers and
events that produce standards.
Finally, turning to pedagogy itself, these sociomaterial orientations treat
pedagogy as uncertain and heterogeneous assemblages – not as an identifi-
able or prescribable event, and certainly not as the exclusive concern of a tea-
cher. This approach opens important questions about what appears to be
inevitable and who is responsible: as Dianne Mulcahy writes in this issue,
‘thinking pedagogy as an assemblage affords a sense of collective responsi-
bility’. In contexts of schools and children, this approach helps to unpick the
apparent black boxes of much curricular knowledge and educational practice,
and offer resources to trace the many webs and players and noncoherences
6 T. Fenwick and P. Landri

embedded in them. Studies such as Tobias Roehl’s in this issue illuminate


how particular knowledges such as scientific ‘evidence’ and practices based
on them become powerful through obligatory passage points, gatekeepers,
and supporting networks. Students, too, can be taught how to critically ana-
lyse their worlds with a sociomaterial sensibility: tracing the micro-strategies
of power in the ways that entities including themselves can become translated
into networks that normalise, and examining how all things are effects –
unstable alliances – produced in continuous webs of action.
In community contexts such as the voluntary organisations that Helen
Aberton writes about, important everyday learning achieves an unusual visi-
bility when it is appreciated as material enactments: this visibilisation throws
up critical questions about how ‘pedagogic authority’ codifies and values
Downloaded by [University of Stirling Library] at 08:56 11 March 2015

some knowledges and overlooks others. In workplace contexts, sociomaterial


analysis can make visible those aspects of infrastructure that function peda-
gogically. In this issue for instance, Arve Mathisen and Monika Nerland show
how a software system becomes a pedagogical device forming the sociomate-
rial organisation of processes through which practitioners engage and develop
knowledge: their analysis reveals what sorts of ‘epistemic agency’ as well as
knowledge resources become produced through people’s interactions with this
software. These sorts of analyses reveal the ubiquitous political negotiations
and inscriptions that occur through sociomaterial interactions. Power relations
and the politics that infuse pedagogy are by no means confined to human
interests and ideologies, but are created and sustained through materialising
processes indelibly enmeshed with the social and semiotic. Ultimately, these
sociomaterial analyses open new directions and vocabularies for reconceptual-
ising what is taken to be pedagogy, where and how pedagogical processes
occur, and what effects they have on culture and society.

Note
1. One way to show the proliferation of this literature is to note special issues of
scholarly journals that examine these different conceptions on terms of learning
and/or pedagogy: see for example Management Learning 40, no. 2, 2009, ‘The
Practice-based Turn’; Pedagogy, Culture & Society 12, no. 3, 2004, ‘Space, Iden-
tity and Education’; Educational Philosophy and Theory 40, no. 1, 2008, ‘Com-
plexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education’; and Educational Philosophy
and Theory 43, no. 9, 2011, ‘Actor Network Theory in Educational Research’.

References
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entan-
glement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barnes, Barry. 1974. Scientific knowledge and sociological theory. London: Routl-
edge & Kegan Paul.
Bloor, David. 1976. Knowledge and social imagery. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 7

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New
York: Routledge.
Collins, H.M. 1985. Changing order: Replication and induction in scientific prac-
tice. London: Sage.
Edwards, R. 2010. The end of lifelong learning. A post-human condition. Studies in
the Education of Adults 42 1: 5–17.
Fenwick, Tara, and Richard Edwards. 2010. Actor-network theory and education.
London: Routledge.
Fenwick, Tara, Richard Edwards, and Peter Sawchuk. 2011. Emerging approaches
to educational research: Tracing the socio-material. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir, naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard.
Hackett, E.J., O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, and J. Wajcman. 2007. The handbook
of science and technology studies. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Hughes, Jason, Norman Jewson , and Lorna Unwin, eds. 2007. Communities of
Downloaded by [University of Stirling Library] at 08:56 11 March 2015

practice. Critical perspectives. London: Routledge.


Jasanoff, Sheila, ed. 2004. States of knowledge: The co-production of science and
social order. London: Routledge.
Jasanoff, Sheila, G.E. Markle, J.C. Peterson, and T. Pinch, eds. 1995. Handbook of
science and technology studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Knorr Cetina, Karin D. 1981. The manufacture of knowledge: An essay on the con-
structivist and contextual nature of science. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1961/1996. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory life: The social construction
of scientific facts. London: Sage.
Law, J. 2004. And if the global were small and noncoherent? Method, complexity, and
the baroque. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1: 13–26.
Law, J. 2008. Actor network theory and material semiotics. In The new Blackwell
companion to social theory, ed. B.S. Turner, 141–58. Chichester, UK: Wiley-
Blackwell.
Lynch, Michael. 1985. Art and artifact in laboratory science. A study of shop work
and shop talk in a research laboratory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mol, A. 1999. Ontological politics. A word and some questions. In Actor-network
theory, and after, ed. J., Law and J. Hassard, 74–89. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pinch, Trevor J., and Wiebe E. Bijker. 1987. The social construction of facts and
artifacts. In The social construction of technological systems: New directions in
the sociology and history of technology, ed. W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, and T.J.
Pinch, 17–50. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Polanyi, Michael. 1958. Personal knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Roth, W.M., and M.K. McGinn. 1997. Science in school and everywhere else:
What science educators should know about science and technology studies.
Studies in Science Education 29: 1–44.
Sismondo, S. 2007. Science and technology studies and an engaged program. In
The handbook of science and technology studies, 3rd ed., ed. E.J. Hackett, O.
Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, and J. Wajcman, 13–32. Cambridge, MA and Lon-
don: MIT Press.
Sørensen, Estrid. 2009. The materiality of learning: Technology and knowledge in
educational practice. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Spiegel-Rösing, Ina, and D.J. de Solla Price, eds. 1977. Handbook of science, tech-
nology, and society. London, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

View publication stats

You might also like