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Lighting up darkness is a material practice shared across many cultures. Lighting up winter darkness is a particular concern in urban areas in order to make urban spaces feel safer and more welcoming. Temporary lights, often characterised as 'Christmas' or 'Winter' lights, are installed over the darkest period of the year (December in the northern hemisphere) in town and city centres to attract shoppers and tourists. This paper examines the lights displays installed over the Christmas/ New Year period in two British towns. In each case the lights are installed by volunteers, who also arrange a 'switch on' community celebration. The research argues that the architecture of the lights signifies and reinforces the identities of the communities involved. In particular, the paper examines: the importance of infrastructure for the ongoing creation of community; the creative potential of these temporary structures for community identity; and the essential materiality of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic low back pain is characterised by multiple and overlapping biological, psychological, social and broader dimensions, affecting individuals' lives. Multidisciplinary pain services have been considered optimal settings to account for the multidimensionality of chronic low back pain but have largely focused on cognitive and behavioural aspects of individuals' pain. Social dimensions are usually underexplored, considered outside or beyond healthcare professionals' scope of practice. Employing Actor Network Theorist Mol's concept multiplicity, our aim in this paper is to explore how a pain service's practices bring to the fore the social dimensions of individuals living with low back pain. Drawing on 32 ethnographic observations and four group exchanges with the service's clinicians, findings suggest that practices produced multiple enactments of an individual with low back pain. Although individuals' social context was present and manifested during consultations at the pain service (first enactment: 'the person'), it was often disconnected from care and overlooked in 'treatment/management' (second enactment: 'the patient'). In contrast, certain practices at the pain service not only provided acknowledgement of, but actions towards enhancing, individuals' social contexts by adapting rules and habits, providing assistance outside the service and shifting power relations during consultations (third enactment: 'the patient-person'). We therefore argue that different practices enact different versions of an individual with low back pain in pain services, and that engagement with individuals' social contexts can be part of a service's agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sockeye salmon have been returning to the Adams River in British Columbia for thousands of years. They are an ecological and cultural keystone species and a significant contributor to the rural tourism economy. However, salmon populations are in decline throughout the Pacific Northwest, putting rural communities, economies, and entire ecosystems at risk. The Salute to the Sockeye [the Salute] is a nature-based tourism festival celebrating the return of wild salmon to the Adams River. In this paper, we used Actor Network Theory as a lens to identify actors associated with the Salute and examine the relationships among them. Guided by a community-based participatory research methodology, we conducted 31 semistructured interviews with stakeholders involved in the Salute to assess how the tourism festival can impact sustainability at the Adams River. We found that the Salute is an example of a nature-based tourism festival that contributes to socioeconomic and environmental sustainability at rural, local and regional levels. Through active incorporation of Indigenous and local knowledge, the Salute can contribute to the sustainability of a species, support healthy ecosystems, and be a driver for change through environmental advocacy and education. This was particularly the case when a strong bridging organization was at the core of the tourism event, and stakeholders worked collaboratively with local Indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an implementation of Connected Spaces (CxS)—an ambient help seeking interface designed and developed for a project‐based computing classroom. We use actor network theory (ANT) to provide an underutilized posthumanist lens to understand the creation of collaborative connections in this Computational Action‐based implementation. Posthumanism offers an emerging and critical extension to sociocultural perspectives on understanding learning, by pushing us to decenter the human, and consider the active roles that human and non‐human entities play in learning environments by actively shaping each other. We analyse how students in this class adjusted their help‐seeking and collaborative habits following the introduction of CxS, a tool designed to foster (more inter‐group) collaboration. ANT proposes generalized symmetry—a principle of considering human, non‐human and more than human entities with equivalent and comparable agency, leading to describing phenomena as networks of actors in different evolving relationships with each other. Analysing collaborative interactions as fostered by CxS using an ANT approach supports design‐based research—an iterative design revision process highlighting understandings about design as well as learning—by providing a temporal and informative lens into the relationship between actors and tools within the environment. Our key findings include a framing of technologies in classrooms as bridging agentic gaps between students and becoming actors engaging in different behaviours; learners enacting new agencies through technologies (for instance a more comfortable non‐intrusive help seeker), and the need for voicing and teachers to connect help networks in CxS equipped classrooms. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Collaborative learning is a valuable skill and practice; opportunities to mentor others are critical in empowering minoritized learners, especially in STEM and computing disciplines.School norms solidify a power and expertise hierarchy between teachers and learners and fail to productively support learners in learning from each other.Additionally, lack of awareness about peers' knowledge is a common hindrance in students knowing who to ask for help and how.What this paper adds An example of a designed interface called Connected Spaces with potential to foster more inter‐student collaboration, especially outside of mandated within‐group collaboration—in the form of cross‐group help seeking and help giving.A design based research study using actor network theory highlighting the limitations of Connected Spaces in sparking notable behaviour change among students by itself but being retooled as a teacher support tool in enabling cross‐group collaborations.Presenting conceptions of collaboration through technologies as bridging agentic gaps and acting with new agencies in performing help‐seeking related actions.Provoking the idea of testing emerging technologies in classrooms along with sharing our analyses and reflections with the classroom as a key idea in computing education—surfacing the gap between designed intentions and the different kinds of extra social work needed in the on‐ground success of different technologies.Implications for practice and/or policy Designers and researchers should create and test more interfaces alongside teachers across different classrooms and contexts aimed at supporting different kinds of voluntary collaborative interactions.Curricula, standards and school practices should further center providing students with opportunities to engage as mentors and build communities of learning across disciplines to empower minoritized students.Researchers engaging in design based research should consider using more posthumanist lenses to examine educational technologies and how they affect change in learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature on international health partnerships is largely normative, with an evaluative interest in their impacts in terms of learning and knowledge transfer. Rarely has research attended to how learning and knowledge transfer transpire in practice. This paper addresses this gap with a case study of a partnership between two hospitals in Canada and China. Conceptually, drawing on Actor Network Theory, it posits learning and knowledge transfer as a process of translation. Empirically, it traces the assembling of the programme, and identifies the pedagogical features at nodes of associations. It reveals that health professionals in both countries have expanded their clinical and medical knowledge and practices, and professional senses and sensitivities, which were subsequently amplified, deferred or diminished within their respective practices. It argues that the capacity of individuals to translate learning into practice is contingent on institutional and cultural differences that constitute the ecology of work for health professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rock climbing is frequently constructed as a tourism practice that exemplifies rational, solo, masculine quests to conquer the natural world. This paper troubles such gendered norms through an investigation of Southern Ontario's Niagara Escarpment (Canada) as a space of climbing tourism. Drawing on actor-network theory, our aim is to situate the drifts and dissolutions of affect through the narrative capacities of rock climbing. Specifically, we engage with the Escarpment as a rock climbing tourismscape to illuminate the unexpected and productive qualities of affect in rock climbing, a process we describe as defacing. Defacings reconfigure how climbing feels, shift perceptions of conservation and sustainability away from human interests, and ultimately alter climbers' relationships to natural spaces, prompting ways of knowing and being that trouble masculinist, rational conventions. In the context of welcoming creative solutions for promoting sustainable tourism, we illustrate how attending to the affective capacities of climbing can foster new, interesting, and vital possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the existing urban land-use regulatory framework and its associated planning practices in Chile have contributed to disaster risk construction in urban areas. It uses Actor Network Theory as an analytical framework, and in-depth interviews and focus groups to analyse the existing urban land-use regulatory framework and its innovation process. Drawing on the knowledges and perception of practitioners, and the revision of a case study, the paper unpacks the agency of the existing urban land-use regulatory framework in enhancing disaster risk, and how its rigidity and the obstacles for its modification, prevents the advance towards disaster risk reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights about the process of adaptation of countries' accounting standards to the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS). Using a comparative international perspective involving Portugal and Spain, the paper relies on the concept of "translation", developed under the actor-network theory, to understand how the IPSAS became an obligatory passage point and how its implementation became a public policy introduced in the public sector accounting reforms in these countries, and what have been the main drivers and actors in the process. It contributes to showing how, in practice, countries are mobilized and enrol in the adoption of IPSAS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon Actor Network Theory (ANT) to explore material and social dynamics of a coastal community garden site on public housing grounds in Rockaway, NY after Hurricane Sandy. Through a participatory design-research project, we examine shifting associations between humans and non-humans as a way of interrogating agency, power dynamics, and governance. Acknowledging our own outsider status, we draw upon the frame of 'contact zones' for thinking through encounters in conditions of power differentials. In describing our encounter with the Beach 41st Street Community Garden as a contact zone, we identify three assemblages with different governance arrangements – tidal shore, garden plots, and treed lawn. These assemblages are networked through material flows and include nonhuman actants such as freshwater, soil, plants, and wood. Unruly actors and actants – people, saltwater, poison ivy, dogs, and trash – can spark controversy and resist governing. We reflect upon the role of design, research, and community organizing as interventions that can cause rearrangements of the assemblages, shedding new light on power dynamics and potential apertures for change in a dynamic site. In so doing, we mobilize contact zones and ANT to better understand and act within shifting associations between humans and non-humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study empirically analyzes the Ben Gurion International Airport (NATBAG) expansion project, with specific reference to aircraft noise measurements. Drawing on Actor Network Theory (ANT), the study traces a non-human actor—a noise level formula—that participates in the NATBAG planning process. In particular, we conduct an exploration of how a noise level formula engages different actors, concepts and entities, while also playing a pivotal role in social struggles over the airport's operation. The paper draws on the qualitative methods of in-depth interviews and content analysis. Following the empirical examination, the paper argues for ANT to be employed as a useful toolbox to analyze present-day planning processes. The conclusion suggests that planning scholars should acknowledge the role of non-humans in shaping planning processes, the relational constitution of planning categories and vocabularies, and the processuality of planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the complexities, contingencies and tensions involved in the creation of a new, 'scientific' assessment in what we call Prefecture A in Japan. We start with a thick, granular description of the complicated and ongoing narrative of a new policy emergence. This descriptive account serves as a precursor to our application of an Actor Network Theory (ANT) approach, particularly the concepts of assemblage and assembling, while at the same time eschewing its depoliticising effect of a flat ontology. Our account details that much work and strategising went into achieving the new assessment but also into holding it in place. This included, strategising inside and across the Prefecture, with the National Ministry, with edu-businesses that had psychometric expertise, with politicians and the board of education and with the OECD and the Director of its Education and Skills Directorate. The analysis illustrates the complex, multi-directional and topological cartographies of power that now work in contemporary education policy processes. As such, we suggest a way to transcend the binary of methodological nationalism and methodological globalism evident in much policy sociology in education work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2017, the 'abortion pill' was finally used legally in Canada. This paper provides a sociotechnical analysis of the controversy surrounding RU486 in Canada, focusing on its entry into public discourse, 1990-1995. The case study draws primarily on statements made about the pill, both in Canadian media and in various actors' print communications. Using approaches from science and technology studies, the analysis identifies the multiple human and nonhuman actors, their discursive mobilizations of RU486 and each other, and their contingent alliances, illustrating how RU486 mediates and shapes the communication that attempts to define it. Unpacking the network's complexity illuminates how these sense-making practices established the early setting of the technology's path, a first step in understanding why Canada has been a laggard in making the pill available. The discussion illustrates the tensions, instabilities, and reversals in the network that have hindered RU486's movement from development to diffusion. Finally, the paper suggests a framework for future sociological research on controversial reproductive technologies in their shift from discursive to material diffusion, one that recognises the integral role of women as users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New socio-economic conditions have necessitated different approaches to professional learning and decision-making and alternative perspectives are required to properly understand and engage with the complexity of the world of work, learning and doing. This paper considers the international literature in relation to professional learning in the context of evidence-based practice and knowledge exchange, and considers how we might overcome existing barriers to implement a more knowledge-based approach to social work practice. By adopting actor network theory and socio-material theories, this paper begins to consider alternative perspectives on professional learning and knowledge exchange as implementation in social work. The paper argues that the production of knowledge itself is not enough to guarantee that even the best knowledge will have any utility in practice and that we now need to search for more effective ways of generating and implementing new knowledge. Furthermore, more attention needs to be given to how current approaches to research design, dissemination and implantation could become more meaningful for practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 'woman 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For all its hermeneutic density the voice is a profoundly malleable object. By drawing our attention away from the 'grain' of the voice to networks of vocality, this article explores how modern mediations of the voice--from the microphone to auto-tune--illustrate its co-evolution with a history of non-human circuits and exchanges. The voice is categorized as an assemblage in the sense suggested by Deleuzian theoretical currents and actor network theory: a multi-scalar, human-non-human hybrid that emerges through nested constellations. Four vocal modalities--synthesis, deconstruction, auto-correlation, and simulation--are identified as integral to a modern history of vocal breaching experiments that transform what voices can be and how they are heard. The final part of the paper explores how these extensions play out in relation to the Japanese virtual singer, performer, and idol, Hatsune Miku. Miku's voice, it will be argued, is constituted at the intersection of crowd-sourcing, corporate investment and the algorithm. But it also illustrates the distributed ontology of all voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between research data management (RDM) and data sharing in the formulation of RDM policies and development of practices in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Design/methodology/approach – Two strands of work were undertaken sequentially: first, content analysis of 37 RDM policies from UK HEIs; and second, two detailed case studies of institutions with different approaches to RDM based on semi-structured interviews with staff involved in the development of RDM policy and services. The data are interpreted using insights from Actor Network Theory. Findings – RDM policy formation and service development has created a complex set of networks within and beyond institutions involving different professional groups with widely varying priorities shaping activities. Data sharing is considered an important activity in the policies and services of HEIs studied, but its prominence can in most cases be attributed to the positions adopted by large research funders. Research limitations/implications – The case studies, as research based on qualitative data, cannot be assumed to be universally applicable but do illustrate a variety of issues and challenges experienced more generally, particularly in the UK. Practical implications – The research may help to inform development of policy and practice in RDM in HEIs and funder organisations. Originality/value – This paper makes an early contribution to the RDM literature on the specific topic of the relationship between RDM policy and services, and openness – a topic which to date has received limited attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2012, the French car company Renault turned Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, a town on the outskirts of Paris, into a test and demonstration laboratory. The company introduced a fleet of 50 electric cars as part of a car-sharing system without fixed stations calledTwizy Way. This scheme was a component of the manufacturer’s development strategy for the electric car market. This paper analyses this initiative in order to account for an experimental mode of industrial innovation. Characterised by the use of sociotechnical instruments in order to explore social and technical uncertainties and produce public demonstrations, this experimental mode is based on various kinds of experiments. Building onScience and Technology StudiesandActor Network Theory, this paper discusses two of them, which are in the same time two propositions for the organisation of codesign: a planned field test designed by Renault; and the collection of inquiries that resulted from the extension of the number of experimenters. These descriptions point to the analytical interest of the study of experimental trajectories in public and private interventions related to industrial projects, particularly in situations where the scope of the involved actors is not pre-given. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on ethnographic data collected in a police station, renamed Blue Hills police station, located on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape of South Africa. The data is presented as three vignettes, each focusing on the production of a police docket and its movement across branches of the criminal justice system of South Africa. Particular attention is paid to the move of each docket from the Uniform Branch to the Detective Branch (both being part of the same institutional network, but represented by different actors pursuing specific goals). My analysis draws on actor network theory used to conceptualize the creation of networks as a translation process. In this paper, I concentrate on problematization – representing the first stage in the translation process and a core element of defining network relations (Callon 1986). As my analysis will show, “problematization” is at the core of creating stable network relations in my case, and a salient feature observable in trans-contextual meaning making around dockets as a moving object. I also draw on the notions of “enactive work” and “recognition work” (Gee 2000). to explore how the police docket, understood as a boundary object, is created and re-interpreted across contexts, being the nexus point through which various and often contradictory ontologies flow, intersect and mingle. I argue that tensions which arise when police dockets travel trans-contextually – in this case from the Uniform Branch to the Detective Branch – are tamed (Mol 2002). This taming is the outcome of an interplay between enactive work performed by officers in the Uniform Branch and recognition work performed by officers in the Detective Branch. I argue that this interplay is necessary in order to create network stability across sites of practice, especially given the fact that police dockets are boundary objects which possess a “high degree of interpretive flexibility” (Dugdale 1999). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper offers a defence of sociology through an engagement with Actor Network Theory (ANT) and particularly the critique of ‘critical’ and politically engaged social science developed by Bruno Latour. It argues that ANT identifies some weaknesses in more conventional sociology and social theory, and suggests that ‘critical’ and ‘public’ orientated sociologists can learn from the analytical precision and ethnographic sensibilities that characterize ANT as a framework of analysis and a research programme. It argues, however, that Latour et al. have too hastily dispensed with ‘critique’ in favour of a value neutral descriptive sociology, and that the symmetrical and horizontalist approach adopted in ANT is particularly ill‐suited to the development of scientific knowledge about social structures. It argues that a more straightforwardly realist sociology would share many of the strengths of ANT whilst being better able to interrogate, empirically and normatively, the centres of contemporary social power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1917, Max Weber (paraphrasing Schiller) famously proclaimed modernity's "disenchantment of the world." Weber was speaking specifically about the waning of belief in the cold light of science, secularism, and rationalized, bureaucratic capitalism, but his dictum has proven remarkably resonant beyond the social science quad. Indeed, disenchantment in various forms arguably pervades the postmodern humanities, as both diagnosis and method: the critical theorist disenchants, unmasks, demystifies. Most music theorists, it need hardly be said, do something quite different. As the SMT celebrates its 40th year, music theory--with its wide-eyed enthusiasms and unapologetic close readings, its loving attention to the sonic and the aesthetic, its frequent aloofness from the social and political--remains a discipline apart, a sort of blissed-out, sylvan glade within the Left-melancholic academy. Depending on one's intellectual commitments this may be cause for celebration or withering critique. But before we exult or condemn, we should try, once again, to understand why, as music theorists, many of us are so prone to enchantment (despite frequent admonishments from our academic neighbors), and what this might mean for our discipline's future, its place in the academic ecology, and its ethical commitments. This paper considers these questions in connection with the song "Poor Places" by the band Wilco, using it as a case study to stage a Active encounter between (unabashedly enchanted) music analysis and more critically wary perspectives. I end with broader ethical considerations about enchantment's potential to effect social change, drawing on the work of political theorist Jane Bennett. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates concerning hip-hop have tended to centre on controversy. For example, critics of hip-hop have focused on its association with bads such as violence, misogyny and drug use, gangsta culture, and the vandalism associated with graffiti art, while hip-hop's defenders have celebrated the enactment of goods such as youth expression and empowerment. Increasingly, practitioners and educators have sought to mobilise particular forms or activities of hip-hop in order to draw on the potential of hip-hop in youth work. This article draws on an ethnographic study that explored how hiphop activities were produced across a range of youth work sites in Christchurch, New Zealand. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT) the study traced how hip-hop controversies were negotiated within youth work sites of practice, illustrating the collective editing work that was undertaken in order to handle these controversies (bads). The ANT approach to consider what is sometimes referred to as the 'mess' of social reality [Law 2004, 230 After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge] was well suited to the study's goal of understanding the complexities involved in using and assembling hip-hop in youth work contexts. This paper provides 'snapshots' of the study's findings, to reveal the collective work in the editing of hip-hop music to avoid hip-hop bads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the distinctive features of the critical agenda associated with the ‘Social Life of Methods’. I argue that although this perspective can be associated with the increasing interest, often associated with scholars in Science and Technology Studies, to reflect on how methods can become objects of inquiry, it also needs to be rooted in the current crisis of positivist methods. I identify the challenge for positivism in terms of the decreasing ability of its procedures to effectively organize increasingly ‘lively’ sources of standardized data, which can now be assembled using aesthetic registers. In developing this argument, I dispute the idea that this development is due to historical shifts linked to the way that methodological devices are playing an increasingly significant role in contemporary social life, which might be argued by writers such as Thrift or Castells. I also argue that by opening up issues of method to the aesthetic, we also recast the relationship between theory and method, pointing to the exhaustion of a certain kind of cultural theory within the social sciences. I contextualize these issues by considering how methods are implicated in the intellectual differentiation between scientific and humanities expertise. Rather than conceiving the ‘Social Life of Methods’ in terms of the rise of instrumentalist modes of governance, it is preferable to place it within the dialectic of transparency and the relationship between the implicit and explicit. These issues are addressed through introducing the papers in the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: The nightclub as a space is presented as a free and hedonistic place for pleasure. This space is also part of a wider socio-spatial-economic framework in which various forms of regulation apply to clubbers and the cultivation of affects. This paper researches marginal and contested forms of experiences within a club as a way of understanding the complexities of pleasure. The study does so by addressing experiences through the concept of affects, which is situated within a framework of a non-representational theory of space. Anxiety, pride, anger, shame and embarrassment are embodied simultaneously with the affects of love, joy, sympathy and so on. Alcohol, illicit drugs, bouncers, music and other human or non-human actants are part of the place. It is within this heterogeneous assemblage that affects become embodied. The data consists of 273 cases from a large Copenhagen nightclub where guests have complained about being rejected or being given quarantine. The paper suggests that if the space of the club is approached as being more than a mono-affectual space of either risk or pleasure, then it would be possible to reduce conflicts and produce more inclusive spaces. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper critically examines the ways in which inclusion and equity are constituted through education development policies in India. Programmes implemented under global and national Education for All (EFA) policies have largely involved the quantification of ‘equity’ whereby schooling processes are measured against broad targets for school outcomes – focused mainly on student attendance, retention and academic achievement. Drawing on perspectives from Actor Network Theory, the paper puts forward the view of development reforms as ‘networks of translation’ in order to trace the shifts and vicissitudes of educational ideals. Reporting on ethnographic data of two reforms in the south Indian state of Karnataka, we show how narrow understandings of equity are produced through target-driven approaches to EFA. In doing so, the paper highlights the performative effects of education development policy and its potentially counterproductive consequences in contexts of poverty and marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Birth is usually depicted as a moment of celebration, of love and tenderness. The often sanitised image of birth, however, belies the ways in which birth spaces are spaces of acute geopolitical contestation. At the centre of this contested space is the birthing body. That body is a strange hybrid: it belongs in part to the woman who labours, the becoming-mother, and in part to the not-yet-child she is working to bring forth. In part it belongs to the labouring process, the flood of hormones and waves of contractions that carry a woman off to labour land. Or, it is a body that becomes subject to the tools and technologies of a medicalised birth. What the sanitised images of birth conceal is that a woman's birthing body is overdetermined by competing rationalisations of obstetricians and nurses, midwives and doulas, and her own hopes and expectations about the kind of birth she wants. Here the discursive and the material intermingle in the spaces of birth and in the moment in which both a new child, and his or her new mother, come into being in the world. In this paper I begin to map the networks of human and non-human actors that shape the space of birth and compete to govern the birthing body. Working with preliminary results from ethnographic research with mothers I argue that a closer examination of the intricacies of birth experiences reveals this as the site of an intimate geopolitics, where women's bodies are the territories contested through multiple and overlapping claims of diverse actants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the multiple spatialities bound up with the consumption of units as the dominant means of diagnosing 'health-related' alcohol problems and measuring 'drunkenness' in international alcohol policy and research. In order to question the power afforded to units, we work at the intersection of theoretical debates concerning biopower and governmentality; emotional, embodied and affective geographies and actor network theory. Presenting empirical research from the UK we contribute to geographical agendas that seek to consider the ontological and epistemological understandings of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. The paper concludes by calling for dialogue between social, health and medical scientists in order to develop more pertinent ways of understanding and representing the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When PhD students complain it is assumed there are problems and that troubles talk is evidence of a ‘sick’ research candidature or culture. This paper argues that such a one-dimensional reading fails to attend closely to the academic identity work that is done when students talk together. Identity work has become a useful way of thinking about the nature of PhD study in the production of thesis texts, the development of PhD students as scholars and in the practices of everyday doctoral life. This paper extends this work by analysing various instances of PhD student ‘troubles talk’ in everyday interactions between peers and in online spaces where PhD students congregate. Attention to troubles talk allows us to explore how doctoral students might do academic identity work in the ‘hinterlands’ where academic subjectivity and other forms of subjectivity (wife, husband, parent, son, daughter etc.) start to blur into each other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on Latour’s (1987) concepts of the sociogram and the technogram, this paper develops the concept of what we term the chronogram, a third axis along which each network actor is mapped so as to analyse its specific temporal network position and stability. The paper uses an empirical example of the television ‘live’ broadcast within the genre of 24-hour rolling news which relies so heavily upon the ‘live’ event, to argue that such an occasion enables actors to construct various simultaneous and sometimes conflicting chronograms which are performed or enacted within network space alongside ‘Newtonian time frames’. The theoretical intervention being explored here is that such an event as the extended ‘live’ news coverage of a particular story – here the release of the BBC journalist Alan Johnston from having been held hostage in the Middle East – is best explored through the lens of the chronogram, to reveal how the mechanics of the production of the television ‘live’ constructs or enacts various fluid temporal zones that exist alongside one another within networked space and that many of these zones remain deliberately and crucially concealed from the television audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines an incidence of fear that a resident experienced in a council tower block in inner London. Thinking through this 'building event', the paper returns to earlier work that called for a move towards 'a critical geography of architecture' and draws on the work in so-called new geographies of architecture over the past decade. A series of arguments related to the human experience of buildings is made. Latourian actor network theory-type approaches in architectural geography are criticised for having little to say about emotion. An argument is made that the work on affect in geography needs to develop a more complex sense of human subjectivity and to take the force of the material more seriously. More generally new critical geographies of architecture are urged to attend to the theoretical, conceptual and methodological intricacies of affect/emotion, materiality, immateriality and human subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work practice invariably means attention to both human and non-human aspects of the work. It is now widely argued that spending time on computers and bureaucratic requirements comes at the expense of direct work with families and children. But this is a simplistic dualism. This paper advocates a move beyond this dualism through three broad aims. First, this paper argues that social work has been rather slow at rendering non-human 'things' of interest to practice debates, and the literature is reported on to show how this has happened. Second, a theoretical model is presented in order to overcome this. Actor Network Theory is offered as a theoretical and practical method where 'things' in practice can be conceptualised as partners in the work. The third aim of the paper illustrates this method in action in one local authority setting through a brief anonymised practice illustration. 'Child In Need' plans are drawn on to show that for empowerment to be successful social work must draw on its non-human partners. A related aim is to add to the 'child in need' practice literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details how patent law purifies “the” inventing subject of big science while simultaneously disqualifying others from patent eligibility for practicing a similar form of collective authorship. The author begins by detailing what is known as the romantic author trope - the assumption within (Western) patent law that invention is the product of one (versus many). The romantic author trope, however, runs counter to the (collective) inventive process in developing countries. Yet this raises the question: are not the inventions of global capital collective in nature? To understand how the collective nature of invention becomes masked by patent law I introduce the idea of corporate authorship. The paper concludes by making visible the inventive assemblages that make the patentable artifacts of big science possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superficially, Actor Network Theory (ANT) and critical realism (CR) are radically opposed research traditions. Written from a realist perspective, this paper asks whether there might be a basis for finding common ground between these two traditions. It looks in turn at the questions of realism, structure, and agency, analysing the differences between the two perspectives and seeking to identify what each might learn from the other. Overall, the paper argues that there is a great deal that realists can learn from actor network theory; yet ANT remains stunted by its lack of a depth ontology. It fails to recognize the significance of mechanisms, and of their dependence on emergence, and thus lacks both dimensions of the depth that is characteristic of critical realism's ontology. This prevents ANT from recognizing the role and powers of social structure; but on the other hand, realists would do well to heed ANT's call for us to trace the connections through which structures are constantly made and remade. A lack of ontological depth also underpins ANT's practice of treating human and non-human actors symmetrically, yet this remains a valuable provocation to sociologists who neglect non-human entities entirely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether the deployment of a topographical metaphor may add value to the recent discussion of networked relations. The paper discusses how viewing relations as part of a relational landscape may add a third dimension to the discussion by allowing an appreciation of the strength, or entrenchment, of relations, and how these entrenchments impact on the development of new relations and the resistance to watershed events. The heuristic device is explored through the case of air survey in the 1920s and 1930s. This illustrative case demonstrates how relations are held together, resisted and reformed to different degrees depending on the varying topography of the relational landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic science is making ever-expanding claims about the (mal)functioning of the body. The `geneticisation' of health and medicine is extending from rare single gene conditions to more common multi-factorial disease, such as heart disease. The dominant behavioural and socio-spatial explanations of heart disease are now being challenged by genetic claims of deterministic biological causes. This paper builds an account of the transformation of heart disease in the new genetics era, by applying actor network theory (ANT) to the production of genetic knowledge of one aspect of heart disease -- hypertension -- within a medical genetics laboratory in Glasgow, Scotland. Using this approach, the paper shows that there is no straightforward geneticisation of heart disease. Instead, there is a contested, complex and uncertain understanding of heart disease as genetic, a product of the many people, technologies, natural elements and spaces involved in the network of genetic science knowledge making. The paper concludes that a `critical' ANT could be developed that acknowledges the inherent unevenness of the network, and connects genetic and socio-spatial explanations of heart disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing has emerged as an important ICT (information and communication technology) innovation that could potentially revolutionize the way computing resources are consumed and provided. In emerging economies, such innovation is regarded as the new way to provide information infrastructure that has the potential for further economic upgrading. In this paper, we investigate the initiation and growth process of the cloud computing industry in China, based on an in-depth case study. We discover that the development of China׳s cloud computing industry that emerged from an initial concept involves the co-evolution of technological and institutional infrastructure leading to a preliminary cloud ecosystem. We also find that such a process involves a wide range of different actors, from the government side to the business side, the interaction among which, in pursuing their own interests, drive the development of the cloud computing industry into being. Finally, situated in the institutional context of China, the government–business relationship is witnessed to have changed and evolved along development of such an emerging industry, demonstrating the important and unique roles of both sides in industrial (or even national) wide diffusion of the ICT innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine how clinicians at a clinic for developmental disabilities in the United States determine whether children being evaluated for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) showed symptoms of that condition. Drawing on a convenience sample of 61 audio and video recorded case conferences from two time periods (1985 and 2011–15), and combining Conversation Analysis with insights from Actor Network Theory, I find that clinicians describe (via a representational practice called “citation”) children's conduct in ways that advance diagnostic claims. More specifically, they portray key actants in the assessment process in patterned ways: the test instrument is represented as a neutral tool of measurement, the clinician as administrator and instructor; and the child as the focal figure whose conduct is made to appear independent of the other participants and suggestive of diagnostic symptoms. These tacit representational conventions conform to and reproduce the assumptions of standardized testing, according to which clinicians and tests are to be neutral arbiters of the child's abilities, and thereby provide for objective, warrantable findings. At the same time, however, by designing representations around the child's symptomatic conduct in this way, clinicians may minimize or elide their own contributions, and those of the test instrument, to the child's performance, and thereby make the child alone appear responsible for what are, in fact, interactionally-occasioned behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With crowdsourcing, design activities traditionally performed by a designated agent are outsourced to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. The quality of crowdsourced ideas and solutions has been discussed, but the idea of crowdsourced design has not been well investigated, especially as it pertains to complex engineering systems. Building a crowdsourced design team is a challenge; various risks are associated with the anonymity of participants involved in product design. Potential contributors must meet formal requirements before they can apply to be part of the design and decision-making team. In this paper, we define the following constructs in the context of crowdsourced design team building based on the concept of translation (from actor network theory): problematization, enrollment, interessement, and mobilization. The process of translation is mapped onto four stages of crowdsourced design team building. We propose three formal measures (i.e., time, reputation, and task fitness) to support the process of building a crowdsourced design team. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed model constructs is discussed in the context of a real crowdsourcing service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Recent health care policies have supported the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) but examples of failed ICT projects in this sector have highlighted the need for a greater understanding of the processes used to implement such innovations in complex organizations. This study examined the interaction of sociological and technological factors in the implementation of an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system by a major national hospital. It aimed to obtain insights for managers planning such projects in the future and to examine the usefulness of Actor Network Theory (ANT) as a research tool in this context. Methods: Case study using documentary analysis, interviews and observations. Qualitative thematic analysis drawing on ANT. Results: Qualitative analyses revealed a complex network of interactions between organizational stakeholders and technology that helped to shape the system and influence its acceptance and adoption. The EMR clearly emerged as a central 'actor' within this network. The results illustrate how important it is to plan innovative and complex information systems with reference to (i) the expressed needs and involvement of different actors, starting from the initial introductory phase; (ii) promoting commitment to the system and adopting a participative approach; (iii) defining and resourcing new roles within the organization capable of supporting and sustaining the change and (iv) assessing system impacts in order to mobilize the network around a common goal. Conclusions: The paper highlights the organizational, cultural, technological, and financial considerations that should be taken into account when planning strategies for the implementation of EMR systems in hospital settings. It also demonstrates how ANT may be usefully deployed in evaluating such projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Recent health care policies have supported the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) but examples of failed ICT projects in this sector have highlighted the need for a greater understanding of the processes used to implement such innovations in complex organizations. This study examined the interaction of sociological and technological factors in the implementation of an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system by a major national hospital. It aimed to obtain insights for managers planning such projects in the future and to examine the usefulness of Actor Network Theory (ANT) as a research tool in this context. Methods: Case study using documentary analysis, interviews and observations. Qualitative thematic analysis drawing on ANT. Results: Qualitative analyses revealed a complex network of interactions between organizational stakeholders and technology that helped to shape the system and influence its acceptance and adoption. The EMR clearly emerged as a central ‘actor’ within this network. The results illustrate how important it is to plan innovative and complex information systems with reference to (i) the expressed needs and involvement of different actors, starting from the initial introductory phase; (ii) promoting commitment to the system and adopting a participative approach; (iii) defining and resourcing new roles within the organization capable of supporting and sustaining the change and (iv) assessing system impacts in order to mobilize the network around a common goal. Conclusions: The paper highlights the organizational, cultural, technological, and financial considerations that should be taken into account when planning strategies for the implementation of EMR systems in hospital settings. It also demonstrates how ANT may be usefully deployed in evaluating such projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various forms of digital devices have established themselves as resources within constructions of professional practices in early childhood education. This article is centred on the question of how we might rethink an example of digital practice based on a Foucauldian understanding of discourse and a rhizomatic understanding of digital practice through the actor network theory. The article puts forth several theoretical arguments to examine data illustrating recurring situations from an ethnographically inspired fieldwork in Norwegian kindergartens. Acknowledging how material agency destabilises human knowledge, the final section of the paper presents the Deleuzian concept of ‘event’ to examine some elements that evoke forces and actions in the network. The article argues that the potential of these forces can both open up pedagogy in relation to digital practices and challenge notions of agency when non-humans are understood as actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have increasingly come to recognize that the discipline has unduly privileged textual representations, but efforts to incorporate visual and other media are still only in their beginning. This paper develops an analysis of the ways objects of knowledge are translated into other media, in order to understand the visual practices of sociology and to point out unused possibilities. I argue that the discourse on visual sociology, by assuming that photographs are less objective than text, is based on an asymmetric media-determinism and on a misleading notion of objectivity. Instead, I suggest to analyse media with the concept of translations. I introduce several kinds of translations, most centrally the distinction between tight and loose ones. I show that many sciences, such as biology, focus on tight translations, using a variety of media and manipulating both research objects and representations. Sociology, in contrast, uses both tight and loose translations, but uses the latter only for texts. For visuals, sociology restricts itself to what I call 'the documentary': focusing on mechanical recording technologies without manipulating either the object of research or the representation. I conclude by discussing three rare examples of what is largely excluded in sociology: visual loose translations, visual tight translations based on non-mechanical recording technologies, and visual tight translations based on mechanical recording technologies that include the manipulation of both object and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last forty years, nursing's claim to professional expertise has been expressed in terms of its care-giving function. Informed by a distinctive ‘holistic’ approach, models of nursing identify therapeutic relationships as the cornerstone of practice. While ‘knowing the patient’ has been central to clinicians' occupational identity, research reveals that nurses not only experience significant material constraints in realising these ideals, their contribution to healthcare extends far beyond direct work with patients. Amidst growing concern about healthcare quality, a body of critical commentary has emerged proposing that the contemporary nursing mandate, with its exclusive focus on care-giving, is no longer serving the interests of the profession or the public. Drawing on an ethnographic study of UK hospital nurses' ‘organising work’ and insights from practice-based approaches and actor network theory, this paper lays the foundations for a re-conceptualisation of holism within the nursing mandate centred on organisational rather than therapeutic relationships. Nurses can be understood as obligatory passage points in health systems and through myriad processes of ‘translational mobilisation’ sustain the networks through which care is organised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ontological debates on the nature of affordances muddy the waters for interpreting, comparing, and critiquing research on technological affordances. The widespread use of affordances has naturalised the term, often masking the import of its evolving social science definitions. Diversity in applications of affordances across disciplines has led to calls to abandon the term altogether. Following an abridged survey of ontological debates about their general and more specific technological nature, I examine a selection of thematically linked and often-cited papers on technological affordances. I compare those with evolving social science theories of affordances and with various conceptualizations of technical affordances. Implications are discussed of ontological debates around subject–object and directions of agency for research on technological affordances for collaborative learning and co-creation of new knowledge. A rationale is posited for including actor network theory-informed research practices as a route toward richer understanding of technological affordances among the mesh of meaning making, knowledge sharing, and creation practices in networked teams’ activities. Such rationales may shed further light on the extent to which technological affordances interact as in situ enablers, restrictors, and regulators in the knowledge production activities of distributed collaborative teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the absence of evidence to show for its utility, the notion of ‘development’ has been fraught with many debates over the years. This paper is concerned with re-examining the future of development studies, based on its past and present trajectories. The argument here is that development may be useful if its norms and practices become context-specific and are made to benefit its purported beneficiaries. The chronology spans the period after World War II to the present day, and thus covers theories that envision alternatives. While this chronology is overlapping, we hope to show that development studies has been marked by both continuities and discontinuities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is psychoanalysis scientific? Which Oedipus is the “correct” Oedipus? Questions like these have divided psychoanalysis and fueled debates about it since its inception. In this paper, I explore these issues by outlining and adopting an “intertextual” perspective, not to answer such questions but to establish a metatheoretical position that might enable us to step outside of them to consider the broader relationship between theory, myth, literature, and the clinical session. I discuss how concepts such as narcissism and the Oedipal arrangement signify a deeper need for affiliation beyond the content of the myth itself but fromwithinthe psychoanalytic field; that they provide a flexible resource but also accrete a historical residue presenting as inertia against a unified psychoanalytic approach. In doing so, the termtheory driftis developed to argue that psychoanalytic theory might in part develop through idiosyncratic “etymological” processes that reflect an obligation to retain concepts such as Oedipus and a reluctance to break with existing forms and practices. Finally, I discussemergenceand how it signifies the imponderability of the literary and clinical material with which psychoanalysis works, and look to actor network theory to conceptualize the fluid, intertextual networks within which we exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When patients need information, they may visit a doctor, ask a nurse, or look online. But these are not the only sources of information used by patients. This paper examines discussion threads in online renal support groups to describe how people living with kidney failure conceive of help, information and support. I use Actor Network Theory to locate unexpected sources of information and authority such as information obtained from lived experiences, from bodies or from the machinery used to maintain health. By virtue of being embedded in networks of interrelating elements, the patient emerged as a potential information locus: potentially able to confirm information such as medical measurements, make measurements themselves, generate information related to their own sensations, and summarise information about the trajectory of their illness. Implications for practice include an expanded conception of health information literacy for patients, and expanded possibilities for health information service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: An innovation is almost never a thing-in-itself. To be sure, there is often what looks like a thing – a newly invented or modified way of thinking or acting, or an artifact, or a system – that is identified in everyday talk as something new. In healthcare, as in almost every other area of human organization, innovations often involve highly organized, institutionally sanctioned, and systematically regulated changes in the structure and delivery of services. This paper presents a theory of implementation and embedding of innovations – Normalization Process Theory – and explores its application to a highly complex ensemble of socio-technical practices, clinical shared decision making. The theoretical analysis presented here shows how implementation as a process and embedding as a state can be conceptualized in terms of social mechanisms that effect changes in the ways that agents'' contribute to normative restructuring, the reworking of relational conventions and group processes, the enacting of practices, and their projection into the future. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]