High Educ DOI 10.1007/s10734-013-9639-3
Networks of knowledge, matters of learning, and criticality in higher education Tara Fenwick • Richard Edwards
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract Higher education in the UK has become preoccupied with debates over the authority of knowledge and of criticality. In this article we argue that approaches to knowledge in higher education might benefit from a network sensibility that foregrounds the negotiated processes through which the material becomes entangled with the social to bring forth actions, subjectivities and ideas. We draw from a set of analytic perspectives that have arisen from actor-network theory traditionally associated with the writings of Bruno Latour. These approaches emphasise the contingent in knowledge production, even to claim that objects, knowledge or otherwise, come into being through enactment as effects within particular webs of relations. What becomes visible in such analysis is the precarious fragility of concepts and categories often assumed to be immutable, and the work required to establish their stability. We argue that this actor-network analysis helps to move away from a focus on separate entities and individuals to understand their material relationality. This analysis also foregrounds the controversies that tend to be foreclosed in what Latour calls ‘matters of fact’, and makes visible the different worlds in which knowing is evoked in practice. From this departure point the issue of interest is not which knowledge accounts are superior but how and when particular accounts become more visible or valued, how they circulate, and what work they perform in the process. These approaches afford a criticality that we argue open important entry points for rethinking curriculum, teaching and learning in higher education. Keywords Actor-network theory Bruno Latour Knowledge disciplines Curriculum and pedagogy Criticality
T. Fenwick (&) R. Edwards School of Education, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK e-mail:
[email protected] R. Edwards e-mail:
[email protected]
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Introduction Higher education is fundamentally constituted by knowledge practices. Such practices often purport to establish the authority of knowledge based upon some criteria of truth or canon of quality, but integral to such practices is also the authority of scepticism, about how to be critical. Often knowledge and scepticism are positioned as binaries, linked to other simplistic dichotomies such as truth and relativism. However, the constitution of all such accounts, their circulation, and their power to direct and assess activity such as curriculum and teaching are far more fragile endeavours than they may appear. Furthermore, these accounts are inseparable from the materials that infuse them and the material worlds they help to bring forth. In this article we argue for a criticality that traces these fragile associations and ‘matter-ed’ worlds of knowledge, inspired by network analyses of Bruno Latour (2005). From this departure point the issue of interest is not which knowledge accounts are superior but how and when particular accounts become more visible or valued, how they circulate, and what work they perform in the process. In common sense understandings of higher education knowledge practices, academics are employed to generate and modify knowledge, assess and challenge it, and to help others to engage with it. The state and students in various ways pay for the privilege of encountering and connecting with knowledge and knowledge-making processes, while an army of administrators and other staff create knowledge about funding, marketing, managing and warranting the entire enterprise. The problem, as analysts from a variety of traditions have long pointed out, is the normative deciding of what from among these myriad practices constitutes proper or academic ‘knowledge’ in different disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. There is also the question of when the various entities enrolled in processes of making, engaging and extending knowledge become sedimented as accounts that can be identified as authoritative, e.g. with sufficient status to be enlisted into the knowledge practices of higher education. Some have tried to establish this authority more on the basis of epistemology, while others have explored it in relation to the variously conceptualised practices of higher education (e.g. Trowler 2012) Coming-to-know something is also a set of practices that can be more or less systematic and rigorous. Knowings can accumulate and begin to circulate. They can be verified and recognised as ‘truth’, ‘good’, ‘powerful’ or ‘evidence’ depending upon regimes of authority within which they are mobilised. If these truth-naming practices are sufficiently credible to those actors or activities most influential in determining what knowledge has most authority in a particular situation, the knowledge may become codified and identifiable as a commodity, a ‘body of knowledge’. Such embodiment can be seen as attempts to ‘black-box’ the authority of knowledge and erase the authority of criticality in the enactment of that knowledge. Knowledge in higher education is codified and sedimented in a variety of repositories: as received concepts, textbooks, prescribed curricula, instruments such as a calibrated measuring tubes, technologies such as diagnostic machines or open access data bases, assessment forms, teaching protocols, even architecture and the modular organisation of students (Nespor 1994). These different materialisations of identifiable knowledge embed particular histories of innovation. They bring certain discourses and styles of thinking into presence, and in so doing, seek to make their alternatives fade or vanish altogether. They represent knowledge as well as values describing and explaining the world. They prescribe how it should be engaged, and direct human action in ways that perpetuate certain practices for authorising specific knowledge. There is now a well established research literature, particularly in the natural sciences, tracing these practices (e.g. Latour and Woolgar 1979; Latour 1987).
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This research suggests that these authorisations of knowledge are more precarious than may be assumed. While they can appear to be settled, perhaps even immutable, each is actually sustained by multifarious capillaries of associations and activity. These associations link together a range of materials and technologies as well as human intensities, such as desires, choices, discourses and behaviours. Yet often, such codifications are treated as though they are indeed, ‘matters of fact’ in the language of Latour (2005). They are treated as ‘knowledge’, even ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young 2009), depending on normative designations related to particular purposes of problem-solving, cultural transmission or subjectification. Here knowledge tends to be founded on an authority of certainty, whereas we are suggesting such authority can, does and should always contain scepticism and criticality. The question is not about whether we support a view of knowledge as a body of settled concepts or as a flow. This would simply be a matter of reconciling the rhetoric: we could agree to call all appearances of sedimentation ‘knowledge’, and all activities of generating or using these sedimentations ‘knowledge process’. ‘Learning’, then, might refer to the experiences of newcomers encountering these knowledge sediments, and ‘teaching’ to the practices of inducting these encounters. But this does not particularly help us to understand why and how some knowing becomes sedimented, how it circulates and gains or loses power as de facto ‘knowledge’, or what practices sustain or dissolve it—including newcomers’ entanglements, resistances, subversions etc. Nor is the question here about how to distinguish disciplinary or ‘scientific’ knowledge (systematically generated through accepted traditions of scholarship) from knowing produced through contextualised problem-focused practices, what used to be called ‘Mode One’ and ‘Mode Two’ knowledges (Gibbons et al. 1994). For many years, scholars in feminist studies (Alcoff and Potter 1993; Harding 1991 inter alia), science and technology studies ( Latour and Woolgar 1979), sociologies of knowledge (e.g. Knorr Cetina 2007) and, more recently, Indigenous knowledge (e.g. Villegas et al. 2008) have shown that scholarship practices of making or using knowledge cannot be separated from everyday practices and experiences of knowledge generation. In fact, disciplinary knowledge is teeming with a myriad of everyday human and material processes, interests and politics. The task is to avoid foreclosing these difficult controversies for the sake of determining what is authoritative ‘knowledge’, which can then become shrouded as the ‘subjects’ of a higher education curriculum. The challenge is to keep these controversies visible, and to hold them critically multiple. A curriculum then combines specific forms of authorising practices, of certainty and criticality, in the enactment of knowledge. This argument is developed from our engagements with the works of Latour (2005, 2011, 2013). In particular, we focus on his argument for understanding knowledge in terms of network dynamics, and his distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern. While Trowler (2012) argues for examining disciplinarity as practices, his approach combines what we feel are incompatible theories of practice from Latour, Bourdieu and Giddens, among others. Our argument is derived more particularly from Latour and what is popularly if controversially referred to as actor-network theory (ANT) (Latour 1999). Here knowledge is not only continually a play of authorities, but is also sociomaterial and distributed in heterogeneous assemblages. While this sensibility has been justifiably critiqued for certain oversights in its earliest instantiations (see Fenwick and Edwards 2010 for a review), over time many innovative developments and studies of knowledge have emerged from its precepts. As Law (2009: 141) suggests, actor-network theory is a disparate set of
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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. For us, this approach and its many diasporic variations in sociotechnical studies and socalled ‘after-ANT’ postulations offer ways to intervene in the practices of knowledgemaking and representing, not theories about what to think. We explore these in the following sections. First, we begin with an overview of actor-network approaches to knowledge and curriculum, which treat knowledge as an effect and focus on the negotiations of materials as well as human intensities that produce what appear to be stabilised systems of knowledge. The second section introduces recent actor-network concerns with different worlds of knowledge, their production through material associations, and the problem of working across them in higher education. The third section explores the implications of these actor-network sensibilities for curriculum and pedagogy in higher education. Overall our discussion is theory-driven, exploratory, and suggestive rather than definitive.
Networks of knowledge and curriculum: precarious authority The network metaphor has become ubiquitous in educational circles these days. An enormous range of authors discuss the implications of ‘network society’ notions, expound theories of networked learning, or revisit older theories of social networking to analyse emerging educational arrangements. In this short article we do not engage with any of these debates because they are not particularly relevant to the work of Latour, our main interest here, beyond using the word network. In Latour’s project (1999: 16), networks are sociomaterial enactments that perform knowledge as well as activity: ‘a series of transformations—translations, transductions’. For Latour, networks are not flat linear chains, but webs of associations among heterogeneous things and forces that grow and become extended as more connections become added. The connections can be thick and thin, prescriptive or negotiated, close or distant. Despite the issues of misinterpretation and problematic associations with the term ‘network’, Latour continues to insist on its utility to explain how knowledge is authorised. For this reason, we use this term here. However, it is also important to bear in mind that the network metaphor is an actor-network. One can use networks to describe and explain, but the ontology of Latour is performative; practices are enacted through the relations within which they emerge.
Knowledge as an effect Others have drawn from Latour’s network ontology to propose different gathering metaphors that work equally well to understand the constitutive entanglements of human and nonhuman elements in bringing forth knowing. Mol and Law (1994) suggested thinking about regions and fluids. Orlikowski (2007: 1435) refers to sociomaterial assemblages that are continually making and unmaking themselves through ‘the constitutive entanglement of the social and material in everyday life’. Ingold (2011), an anthropologist, suggests the concept of meshwork as an alternative to that of network to focus more on threads and traces than nodes and connectors. The point is that knowledge, as well as subjects, objects
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and systems, is taken to be an effect of connections and activity, performed into existence in webs of relations. There are no received categories. Disciplinary canons then are not simply received; their reception requires certain practices, discourses, inscriptions and rituals (see, for example, Swales 1998; Trowler et al. 2012). As Latour (2005) has long argued, we tend not to see the networks that are continually assembling and reassembling to bring forth and to sustain what we authorise as knowledge. This is because we tend to treat objects of knowledge—as well as material objects—as black boxes with clear boundaries and reliable content, as matters of fact and certainty: Take any object: at first, it looks contained within itself with well delineated edges and limits; then something happens, a strike, an accident, a catastrophe, and suddenly you discover swarms of entities that seem to have been there all along but were not visible before and that appear in retrospect necessary for its sustenance (Latour 2011: 797). However, even in established scientific knowledge, what lies at the core are not foundations of information but many networks, and many negotiations translating dynamic entities to become enrolled and inscribed into settled linkages. Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) study of science practices showed how the messiness of laboratory work was translated through inscription in texts into representations of neatly bounded experiments with clear methods, where the activities necessary to produce such texts were completely excised from their content. Another example is Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Latour shows—drawing on historian Simon Schaffer’s diagrams of the information networks around the globe that Newton brought together—that this great work was never a body of settled knowledge principles but actually a web of connections involving many witnesses carrying information back and forth. Here again, the notion of networks points to a transformation in the way action is located and allocated. Here again, what was invisible becomes visible, what had seemed self contained is now widely redistributed (Latour 2011: 798). The Principia is both an assemblage or network of things that became connected in a particular way, and an actor itself that has produced new models and methods, variations and rebuttals, and standards of mathematics curricula. Hence, the use of the term actornetwork. The book has been circulated in far-flung spaces and time periods, always generating and being modified by the new networks created through its allies—and completely dependent on the work of these associations to sustain its presence and its power as knowledge. Newton, the named author, is not the sole or even the main actor, but is himself an effect of a particular network of associations. Here then we begin to examine knowledge practices as not simply the work of human subjects’ research and learning, but as assemblages of ‘knowing locations’ (McGregor 2004).
Negotiations of materials: more than human A key departure point in actor-network analyses is that human beings, with all their intentions and intelligence, are not allotted privileged status in understanding how these networks assemble, because ‘without the nonhuman, the humans would not last for a minute’ (Latour 2004: 91). Everyday things and parts of things, animals, texts, technologies, bacteria, furniture, chemicals, plants … all things are assumed to be capable of exerting force and joining together, changing and being changed by each other. As they assemble, they form associations or networks that sometimes keep expanding to extend
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across long distances or time periods—and sometimes fail to sustain and mobilise their assembling. This approach is useful when trying to understand a conundrum in considering knowledge, pedagogy and curriculum: why certain concepts and models, despite rigorous validation and promotion, fail to survive or influence practice, while others such as ‘learning styles’ spread rapidly to become extended and durable, despite much supporting evidence or scholarly approval. In other words, it provides a way of engaging with the authorities of certainty and criticality in the curriculum practices of higher education. Innovation studies working with an actor-network approach to trace such implementations, for example, have shown that human intention or creativity are only one dimension enrolled in these assemblings. They depend upon linkages among, for instance, coded infrastructure of software, equipment, particular texts, small parts of larger machines, planning practices, timetabling, unplanned events and so forth (Luck 2008; Nespor 2011; Sørensen 2009 inter alia). One objective with actor-network approaches then is to investigate how these things come together—and manage to hold together however temporarily—to form associations that produce those effects that become most visible: knowledge that becomes considered powerful, particular identities, routines, policies, and regulatory regimes. A network analysis can trace these negotiations and their effects, making visible the myriad network negotiations involved in generating and sustaining particular received categories and dichotomies (in higher education, for example, teacher/learner, formal/informal learning etc.), particular discourses (e.g. deep and surface learning, widening access, e-learning, plagiarism etc.), and particular practices (credentialing, exam boards, and so forth). Each of these distinctions can be examined as themselves network effects. Translation is the term used by Latour (1987, 2005) to describe what happens when entities come together and connect, changing one another to form these sorts of networks. At each of these connections, one entity has worked upon another to translate or change it to become part of a collective or network of coordinated things and actions. The question becomes, in examining the different associations that collectively hold these actor-networks together, how these connections came about and what sustains them. These include negotiations, forces, resistances and exclusions, which are at play in these micro-interactions that eventually forge links. Translation is ‘the process… which generates ordering effects such as devices, agents, institutions, or organisations’ (Law 1992: 366). In higher education, this analysis shows how common categories of knowledge subjects, tutors, curriculum modules, evidence-based practice etc. are each assemblies of myriad things. They order objects and actions, but are precarious and require a great deal of ongoing work to sustain their linkages. For Harman (2007), the important challenge is tracing exactly how entities are not just effects of their interactions with others, but are also always acting on others, subjugating others. All are fragile, and all are powerful, held in balance with their interactions. None is inherently strong or weak, but becomes strong by assembling other allies. Translation is the only encounter between them.
Network analysis in higher education In an oft-cited actor-network analysis of higher education, Nespor (1994) compared the different curricular knowledge and learning patterns of undergraduate studies in physics and management with the sociomaterial networks organising their activity. Physics instruction was organised in traditional cohorts following linear, rigidly sequenced courses. Space and time were compressed to ‘cover’ prescribed content, resulting in long days of
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classes and study. Management instruction, however, comprised many electives in a modular programme, and expected students to engage in diverse networks across campus and with employers. Two performances of knowledge and higher education might be adduced. In one, higher education is reproduced through the disciplines, while the other enacts higher education within the forms of knowledge and subjectivity, in part, demanded by particular segments of the economy. It may be no historical accident that the latter has grown in significance as a greater range of professional education has entered the university, thereby reframing its external relations with professional groups, employers, etc. and the internal relations with its weakly framed disciplinary knowledge base. This is suggestive of the different networks that have been attempting to enrol higher education with specific effects. Nespor also contrasts the isolated, bunker-like materiality of the Physics building with the newer, lighter, more open spaces of the Business School, showing how subjectivities are influenced through the materials to be utilized as well as the utilization of those materials. ‘Unlike the austere physics building, the business school wasn’t geared solely to academic or scholarly activity… [The] public interior space was organized in large part to simulate corporate spaces and function as a stage for the display of sociability’ (Nespor 1994: 111). Nespor observed that the physics students demonstrated a strong disciplinary subjectivity that was tightly-bound in dense networks with one another. The management students demonstrated a more enterprising subjectivity, expecting to make choices and demonstrating more concern with doing management practices in employment than with academic understanding about management. These distinctions are enactments of knowledge as well as subjectivity: knowing what content and registers of knowledge are most important, the role and position of the knower, and one’s relation to knowledge change. This knowledge clearly cannot be isolated from its constituent sociomaterial networks, some more visible or obvious than others, as though there are distinct ‘subjects’ of physics and of management. This would be a commonplace observation derived from any constructivist analysis. An ANT approach simply makes visible the variety and extent of these networks, as well as their heterogeneous composition. This visibility can assist higher education participants and stakeholders to negotiate, critique, resist or amplify these network effects—starting with how the networks actually work materially to make some knowledge more authoritative or powerful than others, bearing in mind that authority does not guarantee power nor vice versa. A network sensibility can also show how such assemblages can be unmade as well as made, how attempts to assemble networks can fail, and how counter-networks or alternative forms and spaces can take shape and develop. These can be both internal to higher education, such as digital pedagogies (e.g. Goodfellow and Lamy 2009), or external, such as calls to enhance market responsiveness. They can rest on variously authorised or transgressive forms of criticality. For example, in their research, Wright and Parchoma (2011) show how mobile technologies quickly became assimilated as ‘affordances’ for formal learning. The prevailing assumption was that these devices could convey selected course content, such as peer reviewed literature and prescribed podcasts for ‘anytime anyplace learning’. However, studies showed that the library databases required for this content were not accessible anyplace or anytime, and that the flexible multi-modal practices that inscribed mobile devices into student lives were not easily aligned with didactic pedagogy. Higher education’s formal incorporation of mobile technologies had often been ‘pedagogically regressive’: existing actor-networks have so successfully stabilised traditional curriculum-making practices and their knowledge assumptions that these resist alternate forms and of dynamics of knowing that might be afforded through the new
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technologies. Meanwhile students are engaged in many other actor-networks circulating in and through mobile devices, which Wright and Pachoma claim are not visible in many existing studies of student learning. Networks can never be complete or totalizing. There are always gaps, holes and tears, and multiple networks simultaneously vying to be effective. Further, ANT analyses show how knowledge is generated and authorised through the practices and effects of these assemblages coming together. In this approach, learning is not simply an individual or cognitive process, nor is it solely a social achievement. Learning itself becomes enacted as a network effect, a way of ‘matter-ing’ (Law 2009). We will now outline what we mean by this.
Making matters visible: different knowledge worlds In higher education there is much emphasis on learning as knowing through (re)presentation of the world ‘out-there’ to the mind ‘in-here’. In conventional enactments, it is often suggested by realists and social constructionists alike that there is one world about which humans can have one or diverse perspectives. This assumption underpins a certain common form for education and in so doing enacts what it assumes: Representationalism takes the notion of separation as foundational. It separates the world into the ontologically disjunct domains of words and things, leaving itself with the dilemma of their linkage such that knowledge is possible… representationalism is a prisoner of the problematic metaphysics it postulates (Barad 2007: 137). Knowledge and learning as representation already emerges from a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions of separation that are taken to be foundational, when this need not be the case. Separating meaning and matter, significance and substance, representing and doing, ideas and the real, theory and practice, is only one way of enacting being-in-theworld. ANT is suggestive of knowledge as a matter-ing practice—materialising activities that bring forth substance and significance. Following the alternative logic of networks, associations and interventions, this singular world that can never be fully represented begins to multiply through the practices of matter-ing which embrace the material and normative.
Matters of fact, matters of concern Latour explores these issues through a distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern, playing on the different framings of matter. Broadly, within a representationalist enactment of knowledge, practices produce matters of fact through the representation of objects with properties by the knowing subject. By contrast, in a performative materialist enactment of knowledge, practices gather different things as matters of concern through their own forms of engagement and intervening. Here matters of fact also might be considered a particular form of gathering, a particular matter-ing, as the practices through which they are gathered and assembled become part of the topography to be explored. Things may be gathered and separated as objects, but in examining their gathering, objects may also become things. Thus we are not using matters of fact and matters of concern as a binary. Indeed matters of fact might be said to be a particular way of enacting matters of concern. As Latour (2004: 232, emphasis in original) argues
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matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could be called states of affairs. Matters of fact are based upon drawing distinctions and objectifying the other, while matters of concern might be thought of as entangling with the other through what Barad (2007), drawing on the work of Bohr and Foucault, refers to as apparatuses. The material is dependent upon the apparatus through which it is enacted, as for instance, in the way that, in physics, matter can be both a particle and a wave. Practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world. Which practices we enact matter – in both senses of the word. Making knowledge is not simply about making facts but about making worlds, or rather it is about making specific worldly configurations – not in the sense of making them ex nihilo, or out of language, beliefs, or ideas, but in the sense of materially engaging as part of the world in giving it specific material form (Barad 2007: 91, emphasis in original). The enactment of knowledge as matter-ing does not sit comfortably with discourses common in HE of knowledge and curriculum representing canonical facts and ideas. Rather than the subject representing the object through sense data of, for instance, observation, we enter practices of gathering, assembling and intervening. Knowing is not separate from doing but emerges from the very matter-ings in which we engage. This matter-ing relies on specific apparatuses, specific entanglements and authorisations. These apparatuses are integral to the materialising of worlds. They ‘are not mere observing instruments but boundary-drawing practices—specific material (re)configurings of the world—which come to matter’ (Barad 2007: 140, emphasis in original). It is through the specific forms of boundary drawing that the enactments of knowledge as apparatus materialise the world. ‘Apparatuses are the practices of mattering through which intelligibility and materiality are constituted (along with an excluded realm that doesn’t matter’ (Barad 2007: 170). Things are gathered through the practices with which they coemerge. Differences are not simply about matters of opinion and truth, but about ways of becoming and doing. The educational implications of this are interesting, both for researching higher education practices, but also for curriculum and pedagogy. Knowing might be conceived as fragile performances in multiple ontologies (many worlds), rather than, for instance, multiple perspectives framed within a single ontology (one world, many perspectives) (Mol 2002). The worlds of the laboratory, seminar room, lecture theatre, online environment, are not simply about different ways of representing knowledge and enacting curriculum, but might be approached as different worlds of knowledge performance, different matter-ings of association and intervention. Knowledge then is not a representation, after the fact, of some past event or accumulation of conceptions, but an active intervention bringing forth particular objects, understandings and subjectivities. Consider medical students learning through simulation exercises, perhaps to diagnose a patient in acute trauma. Typically in such exercises, some will be working as an emergency ward team, manipulating a rubber patient doll such as ‘Sim-man’ which can breathe, vomit, and bleed. Others will be viewing this action through a one-way window in a separate room, seeing not only the simulated action but also the various electronic patient monitors and X-rays, and ‘behind-the-scenes’ microphones and telephone calls helping to create the simulation. All students will have previously participated in a classroom lecture
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instruction in specified protocols for treating trauma (check airways, breathing, cardio, etc.). All situations are presumably about the same knowledge. Yet the specific forms of knowing produced, entangled with the dynamic relations of students and materials in each of these environments, will be performed much differently in these diverse worlds—and different again to the knowing that may be generated in hospital emergency wards. Of course representations circulate as an important part of the materiality of these worlds. But representation is part of the enactment, not an abstract meta-reflection of it. This point, elaborated through sociomaterial studies of Berg and Mol (1998), Mol (2002) and those who have applied this work to education (e.g. Fox 2005; Oliver 2012), is developed in the next section.
Difference, discipline, and material practice As higher education expands its remit to engage in inter- and multi-disciplinary knowledge generation as well as co-production of knowledge with various communities, a key problematic is the fundamental differences among systems of knowledge, authority and practice at play. Higher education tends to emphasise disciplinary bodies of knowledge, definable standards of achievement, competitive structures, timetables and measurable outcomes. These emphases enact different logics and assumptions than those often held by communities external to HE about what constitutes legitimate knowledge and knowledgemaking activity. We witness the collision of these logics in discussions such as the economic relevance of arts and humanities, or the active involvement of the public in coproduction of research. There is a constant contest of authority and criticality at play. As indicated above, Berg and Mol (1998) among others have shown how these differences are not simply a matter of diverse perspectives but actually represent different worlds of being sometimes co-existing in the same place. In relation to curriculum and pedagogy this involves practices of what Mol (1999) has called ‘ontological politics’. In her studies in health care, for example, Mol (2002) shows how a disease can be performed into existence completely differently in different communities. In her detailed study of lower-limb atherosclerosis, she followed its enactment in physicians’ discussions with the patient, radiology’s focus on comparing images, laboratory examinations of artery fragments, and surgical procedures. Mol (2002) concluded that this apparently single knowledge object of ‘atherosclerosis’ actually materialised as a very different thing in each of these spaces. A unique assemblage of routines, discourses and instruments not only created a different world, but produced a different atherosclerosis. Yet of course, all of these coexist—they are patched together so that the patient can proceed through diagnoses and treatment. Indeed, the actors involved might assume they are all dealing with the same phenomenon, if perhaps from different standpoints. But as Mol argues persuasively, the actual objects of atherosclerosis enacted in their different practices bear little similarity. In analysing Mol’s work and its implications, Law (2004: 55) wrote: And this is where the question of difference, of multiplicity, raises its head: when medicine talks of lower-limb atherosclerosis and tries to diagnose and treat it, in practice at least half a dozen different method assemblages are implicated. And the relations between these are uncertain, sometimes vague, difficult, and contradictory….We are not dealing with different and possibly flawed perspectives on the same object. Rather we are dealing with different objects produced in different
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method assemblages. Those objects overlap, yes. Indeed, that is what all the trouble is about: trying to make sure they overlap in productive ways. Practitioners who must move across these different worlds of radiology, surgical theatre, community health clinic and so forth need to create passages among their different worlds, and to somehow communicate across these ontologies. This communication is a critical problem. How can we presume to understand what is sometimes the radical difference of a world in which another dwells, without folding it into our own worldview by treating the difference as a simple case of diverse perspectives? This becomes sharpened as an ethical and political issue when different worlds command very different authorities. For example, the hierarchies of knowledge enacted in different worlds of health care (medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, etc.) are well known. Broader examples are apparent in the tensions of partnerships, such as when university researchers work with community agencies or professional associations. Globally, we observe fundamental fault lines between what may be described as western scientific ontology and those working from indigenous ontologies. We can view the struggles over knowledge and curriculum in higher education in a similar fashion.
Knowledge matters across worlds: higher education and community An attempt to embrace different worlds of knowing in relation to higher education in Australia is presented by Somerville (2013). The project focused on the case of the Murray-Darling basin (MDB) river system which has become a prominent example of the global crisis in water shortage. Perspectives among government, local towns, businesses, environmental groups, and the many Aboriginal peoples affected by the MDB’s rapidly dropping water levels are sharply divided. Somerville and her academic colleagues partnered with Aboriginal communities and artists to develop new ways to share knowledge and collectively learn new approaches to respond to the MDB crisis. Using an arts-based research approach that Somerville refers to as ‘enabling place pedagogies’, the initiative sought to both bridge these different knowledge networks and authorities, and to mobilize new knowledge. Paintings and other art pieces were produced to invoke Aboriginal knowledge about the water basin, and presented to groups with oral stories that helped bring to life the complex and elusive networks of events, relations and beings associated with the water. Somerville (2013) describes the overall approach as a pedagogical one, avoiding the authoritative closure of the already-known, and working in the space between the different worlds of knowing to enact critical new questions and network connections. One pedagogical encounter was a ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremony opening the exhibition to the public. The welcome was led by a Wiradjuri Elder wearing a traditional possom skin cloak, marked on one side with designs signifying a person’s tribal and country connections, as well as being an important protector and source of warmth, a wrap at birth and a shroud at death. The academics explained the gathering purpose, to share knowledge about MDB issues, and the underpinning ideas of place, people and pedagogy. Then stories were offered speaking of the people’s different connections to water, and showing the artworks as an opening for different ways of thinking about water. One story explained the teller’s deep attachment to the threatened Narran lake, and how much she feared it turning into ‘a body after an autopsy’. An artist told of a possom cloak that she made to wrap a baby, bearing the traditional maps of home and family: ‘This is my country, where I come from’ (Treahna, from Somerville 2012: 93). This cloak, however,
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was made for the baby granddaughter of one of the academic researchers, and the baby was dying. The cloak is thus embedded not only with the story of country and river identity inscribed on it, but with webs of emotional and embodied connections among the communities of the river and the project. The baby’s cloak is unfolded for the audience to reveal the maps it contains, then placed in the centre of the room to be touched by all present. As Somerville (2012: 93) explains, ‘When the many people feel the cloak with their hands they are participating in a ritual of place, touching identity, and touching country. Through the cloak as a sensory object they are offered a bridge into a different way of knowing’. The cloak is a transitional object: an artwork mapping the river, a deeply personal story of body, a symbol of people’s bonds with country, a material link between artists, participants and academics, and a connection to energies of birth, renewal and creation. Later, audience participants were invited to share questions, and new stories emerged of people’s attachments to the land and memories of the water. Through the responses of the artists and academics, Somerville (2012) explains, ‘the conversation flowed from the space of the exhibition with its artworks and stories, to larger questions of caring for the environment, to climate change, to the fate of the earth, and to the relationship of all this to global indigenous knowledges of place. The final conversation was about the importance of cultural flows’. In analysing pedagogical events like this, the academics found that, drawing on the metaphors of the river system itself, networks of knowledge could be enabled across vastly different worlds patched together by shared issues. In this particular project, the first step was opening a deep recognition of the ways Indigenous water knowledge is circulated through the networks embedded in art: story, song, dance, possom cloak maps, body painting, etc. The second was in enabling non-Indigenous engagement with these artistic representations—particularly in ways that, Somerville (2012: 97) explains, create connecting ‘flows of knowledge between places, between peoples, and between people and places’. In such practices, the power of knowledge rests in assemblings that are not enacted simply around the singular or canonical. In a sense, it is precisely through their capacity to network that such knowledge can become more powerful. A beginning point is acknowledging elemental difference not just in worldviews, but also in ontological worlds of knowing and authority that co-habit. Further, it was important to engage with one another’s material enactments of knowing, or matter-ings, which inscribed these worlds: in this case we highlighted the ways Indigenous water knowledge was circulated through networks embedded in story, song, art, possom cloak maps, and so forth. For Mol (2002) in her examination of healthcare communities, the challenge requires practices of ontological politics such as patching together different knowledge systems in a juxtaposition that may feel incoherent. For Somerville (2013), in the Aboriginal-academic partnership seeking new ways to share water knowledge together, the challenge is to enter a community’s world and discourses, of being sufficiently open to flows between it and other worlds. For both, difference is taken seriously as a difficult and deeply material (en)counter—a bringing together that contains multiple forms of relating, knowing and criticality. Difference is not to be resolved, in these crossings, but to be honoured on its own terms as a profound experience that cannot be known prior to engagement. This is learning to interrupt the very structures of knowledge, to recognize multiple ways of enacting reality and to even manoeuvre among these different realities. This is one challenge for higher education curriculum and pedagogy opened by actor-network approaches that trace dynamic sociomaterial enmeshments and their effects. The shift is away from thinking about entities to understanding that, as Verran (2007: 38) describes it:
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All entities lie suspended between enactments of their possibilities. Entities lurk or loom in the interstices between the repetitions by which they are done. The relationalities through which they exist are external to their being ‘clotted’ entities. That is how all entities express relationalities; how entities (actors or actants) are networks; and how networks of relations are entities.
Conclusion: implications for curriculum and pedagogy If we follow Latour and others who recognise the networks and materials at play, knowledge cannot be viewed as coherent, transcendent, generalisable, unproblematic or inherently powerful. The preceding examples and studies show also that knowledge and the real emerge together. The thing is not separate from the knowing that gathers and authorises it as a thing. Furthermore, a thing can be enacted through multiple knowings or ontologies that co-exist, in a contentious and discontinuous dynamic. This has implications for higher education processes of curriculum and pedagogy. As Fox (2005) explains in analysing higher education learning processes from an ANT perspective, competence or knowledge is not an inherent attribute of any one element or individual, but a property ascribed to particular actions as a network becomes enacted into being. In this process of enactment, ‘learning … is seen as the outcome of a process of local struggle and that struggle is many-faceted involving the self acting upon itself, as well as upon others and upon the material world (Fox 2000: 860). This treatment of learning steps outside of enculturation projects that impose some future ideal on present human subjects and activities, with the objective of developing learners’ potential to become knowledgeable, civic-minded, self-aware, and so forth. In terms of curriculum and pedagogy, we might consider what the displacing of representationalism might entail. Students in education learn much about the world through representation, but what would a curriculum of matter-ing look like? In an era of overwhelmingly complex concerns ranging from climate change to food security, does learning through representation about matters of fact provide a basis for intervention? Perhaps a purpose of higher education could be oriented more to enact and intervene, rather than to learn about and of subjects. Perhaps education could focus less on subject-centring and more on destabilising and decentring the certainties that have accumulated to authorise particular subjects in particular historical and regional contexts. In such an approach, the discourses of learning could be less reductive and even provide the basis for multiple forms of authoritative criticality. As a concrete example, Fountain (1999) was among the first educators who developed curricula integrating ideas inspired by ANT. She challenges conventional science knowledge that privileges detached, scientific reasoning [and] will fail to recognize the complex interpenetration of the various factors which make up these issues. It will also mean taking a political position which often denies the involvement, interests, and complicity of science in the issue in question (Fountain 1999: 355). Her alternative strategies are designed to move pedagogy from (re)presentations of facts to practices of critical experimenting and intervening. For example, instead of simply applying scientific formulas, students are encouraged to map the associations that are employed to produce and to represent these particular scientific explanations, and then to examine the associations in higher education that enable or constrain particular points of
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view. Students also seek the associations that do not appear, the things that are not mentioned or are discredited, the things that are not yet imagined but that may be at work, as well as those things and people that have been rallied and mobilised to enact and authorise particular concepts. These kinds of pedagogies, contends Fountain (1999: 339), can move education ‘from a rhetoric of conclusions towards a rhetoric of contentions’. Here education is in part about engaging with the infrastructures of authority in knowledge practices. On a similar tack, Gough (2004) suggests a pedagogy of interference, actively engaging students in inventing or imagining new ways to experiment with the real—knowledge— and make it move. Informed by actor-network tactics, Gough engages students in mapping the seemingly infinite networks, objects, and coded technologies among things and people that hold together any mundane everyday task in a particular moment, such as making a cup of coffee or obtaining an article from the library. But the main lessons, for Gough, come when students go beyond tracing existing networks of the ‘real’ to interfere with these networks and imagine new associations. Gough suggests engaging students in critically subverting fixed knowledges like science texts, inventing cyborg fabulations that gather stories, facts and materials in unexpected configurations, and generally to open spaces of ambiguity. Overall, we have argued that the network analysis promoted by Latour (2004, 2005, 2011) and others cited throughout this discussion highlight the precarious links and contingent entanglements of human and nonhuman elements that bring forth knowledge systems. Knowledge is revealed to be, not a body or an authority, but an effect of connections performed into existence in webs of relations that are worked at, around and against constantly. These are always precarious because they are filled with ongoing controversy, ‘matters of concern’, despite the press to resolve and black box these. They also require a great deal of work and bolstering from other allied networks to survive. Network approaches trace the process through which diverse elements become combined into knowledge networks, and how some networks stabilise, extend, enrol others and circulate to exert power, while others dissolve, distort, mutate or become appropriated. This can be particularly useful in higher education where highly entrenched knowledges of discipline and pedagogy jostle with fragmented mobile virtual worlds, markets and employability demands, league tables, and other systems attempting to enrol and calculate processes of teaching and learning. Rather than limiting knowledge to human consciousness and endeavours, a network analysis also helps illustrate the more-than-human assemblings that perform knowledge in higher education: the coded software infrastructures and electronic records, buildings and timetables, historic discursive-material practices, and myriad apparatuses—method assemblages—that bring forth and sometimes reify particular ideas and activities. These assemble different sociomaterial worlds, not just different worldviews. Network analysis traces the different, often conflicting co-existing knowledges and practices in these spaces and explores ways of juxtaposing, bridging or even revealing these different worlds to one another. The question is not simply which knowledge is most valuable, but rather, what knowledges are circulating here, how are they being constituted and extended, what work are they performing, and what (desirable or undesirable) consequences of regulation and possibility are they producing? This is a criticality that, as Latour suggests, seeks to hold open controversies to prevent their premature closure into certainties. However, openness is not an end in itself. The play of matters of concern entails sociomaterial interventions to transgress established authorities of knowledge and criticality. These will be specific to the situations to be enacted. One
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obvious point is that we need to consider the different apparatuses through which higher education curricula and specific educational practices become phenomena that matter. If we are critical of current higher educational practices, then we need to consider how practices of critique are currently performed, and what specific gatherings might transgress or interrupt these practices. We might entertain a more widespread discussion about the particular authority of criticality in our continuing debates about the authority of knowledge in curriculum enactments.
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