Making Conversation: Surface Encounters and Material Exchange Between an Artist-Researcher and a Tree

This article explores the application of actor-network theory (ANT) to the nursing profession, proposing a novel perspective in understanding nursing in the context of modern digital healthcare. Traditional grand nursing theories, while foundational, often fail to encapsulate the dynamic and complex nature of nursing, particularly in an era of rapid technological advancements and shifting societal dynamics. ANT, with its emphasis on the relationships between human and nonhuman actors, offers a framework to understand nursing beyond traditional paradigms. This article makes two key arguments: first, that nursing can be viewed as a highly organised social assemblage, where both human (nurses, patients and policymakers) and nonhuman actors (technologies, medical equipment, institutional policies) play a crucial role, and second, that ANT can be used to enhance existing nursing theory to better understand the role of technology in nursing practice. The article considers how ANT can provide a more holistic and adaptable model for describing the nursing profession, particularly in an era where technology plays an integral role in healthcare delivery. It discusses the implications of viewing nursing through ANT, highlighting the need for nursing education and practice to adapt to the interconnected and technologically advanced nature of modern healthcare. The article also acknowledges the limitations of ANT, particularly its potential oversimplification of the complex ethical dimensions inherent in nursing and its focus on observable phenomena.

When humans interact with nonhuman nature in seemingly normative ways, through consumption, recreation, admiration, romanticizing, etc., an imperfect but intact binary is often perpetuated; that is, humans are positioned as distinct from nature. Posthumanist political ecology destabilizes the human experience as the sole source of nature-society knowledges. With contributions from actor-network theory and assemblages, posthumanist political ecology provides systems-based analyses where nonhuman actants are underscored within socioenvironmental systems. This research leverages posthumanist political ecology to approach experiences and perspectives concerning unsheltered homelessness, with particular attention to individuals living in urban parks. Using etic and emic accounts, our developed network critically considers nonhuman, wild, and sociopolitical contributions to a contested, dynamic system of unsheltered homelessness. We present posthumanist political ecology as an avenue for leisure research and scholarship to contest problematic binaries concerning nonhuman nature and to more critically address issues of social and environmental injustice.

Sustainable development is one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century. The engineering profession is central to achieving sustainable development. To date, engineering contributions to sustainability have focused on reducing the environmental impacts of development and improving the efficiency of resource use. This approach is consistent with dominant policy responses to environmental problems, which have been characterised as ecological modernisation. Ecological modernisation assumes that sustainability can be addressed by reforming modern society and developing environmental technologies. Environmental philosophers have questioned these assumptions and call into question the very nature of modern society as underlying the destruction of nature and the persistence of social inequality. Central to the crises of ecology and human development are patterns of domination and the separation of nature and culture. Engineering has a clear role to play in ecological modernisation, but its role in more radical visions of sustainability is uncertain. Actor-network theory provides an analysis of socio-technical systems which does not require the separation of nature and culture, and it provides a way of thinking about how engineers are involved in shaping society and its relationship to the environment. It describes the world in terms of relationships between human and non-human actors. It shows that social relationships are mediated by technologies and non-human nature, and that assumptions about society and behaviour are "baked-in" to technological systems.

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ <i>Life in the Iron Mills</i>

Learning sciences have emphasized teaching practices that engage the student in deeper and more demanding processes. The resulting learning activities are inherently complex, particularly in modern, digitally intensive science classrooms where students actively engage in collaborative investigations with digital tools. The resulting complex learning settings challenge current research methods. Inspired by methodological and theoretical developments in science education research, namely network analysis and materiality, we present a new methodological approach that is based on a combination of social network analysis and actor-network theory. Actor-network is conceptually different from social network, however it is possible to introduce the non-human actors of actor-network theory into social networks and then apply methods of social network analysis. The methodological development is presented through a case in which three students use computer-based data logging and investigate the motion of a car on a track. From this case, we report the roles, importance, and interaction patterns of actors engaged in collaborative knowledge construction. The results show the benefits and the importance of including the non-human actors from actor-network theory in quantifying the importance and the roles of the different actors. This combination allows better understanding of learning in a complex setting of human and non-human actors.

We compare the scheme for educational dialogue analysis (SEDA) to the actor-network theory (ANT) for the analysis of educational dialogues. We show that ANT unearths the socio-material structure of classroom talk as networks in which human and non-human actors (texts, diagrams, instructions, etc.) exert power on each other. The application of ANT to classroom talk led us to identify (non-)dialogic networks when human actors are not subordinated (resp. subordinated) to other actors. Roles in networks are not predetermined but translated in interactions, and networks are often blackboxed, as the original process and circumstances of their creation might be ignored. We show then that the adoption of ANT (resp. SEDA) uncovers phenomena that SEDA (resp. ANT) did not identify. SEDA helps observe the co-construction of ideas and describe shifts from the dialogic to the non-dialogic but does not explain the mechanisms that lead to these shifts. ANT explains shifts from one network to another, as it conveys the change of power relations between the different actors, role of non-human actors, and shows how they shape the dynamics of networks in classroom talk. We draw from this comparison implications both for research and educational practice in dialogic education.

A variety of healthcare robots for elderly care have been developed. However, as the elderly and caregivers experience psychological resistance towards not only new technologies but specifically to robots, the adoption of healthcare robots has scarcely progressed. This article aims to develop a service design method, which consists of a design process including design tools to identify jobs in an elderly care facility and to reveal what kinds of jobs to assign to service robots and to caregivers. This article develops a design method which is composed of six steps and adopts original design tools to identify jobs needed in elderly care facilities and assign them to human and non-human actors, including service robots. The tools include an actor map to visualize the Actor to Actor (A2A) network, a current jobs to be done (JTBD) worksheet to visualize existing jobs, a new JTBD worksheet to visualize new jobs, and an actor worksheet to summarize information about each actor including their philosophy. With this design method, we conducted a series of workshops with the aim to develop a service fulfilled by humans and non-humans at an elderly care facility in Shizuoka prefecture in Japan. The results of questionnaires administered to the workshop participants demonstrated the effectiveness of all the tools except the new JTBD worksheet. Also, the results of interviews with employees in the elderly care facility indicated the effectiveness of the approach, which reveals visible and invisible regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements through interviews with human actors, and embeds them in the service design process. The design method including the original design tools proposed in this article contribute to a service design method for the use of robots in elderly care facilities by allocating jobs to human actors and non-human actors appropriately, and it also contributes to the issue of psychological resistance to the adoption of service robots in these facilities, which brings efficiencies to society. The contribution of this article is to reframe the issue of resistance to the adoption of service robots in elderly care facilities to the issue of what kinds of jobs in an elderly care facility should be assigned to service robots or caregivers, and the development of a service design process including original design tools.

The adoption of Korean children has played a significant role in the practice of intercountry adoption in Australia since the 1970s and represents the majority of overseas born children adopted into Australia. Its influence on policy and practice is explored in this thesis through the Queensland experience. From its outset the adoption of children from overseas has been characterised by polarised perspectives and vested interests. Actor Network Theory, the theoretical lens through which this phenomenon is viewed, allows for the exploration of controversies and multiple perspectives that have featured in over thirty years of Korean intercountry adoption practice in Australia. This thesis aims to identify which actor networks were influential in the emergence, diffusion and continuation of Korean intercountry adoption; and to explore the translations, an important concept in Actor Network Theory, and the tactics used by these networks to spread particular discourse to meet network goals. The methodology is qualitative and approaches Korean intercountry adoption as a case study. The data corpus, collected from 2004 to 2007 comprised text and interviews. Text included Queensland government archival records; submissions provided to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services Overseas Adoption in Australia 2005 and public hearing transcripts; parliamentary documents; media reports; computer-mediated communications such as internet sources and email discussion groups. Interviews were conducted with key stakeholders from interest groups and organisations with administrative roles in intercountry adoption practice in Australia. Korean intercountry adoption has proved influential in developing expectations concerning how intercountry adoption should be practised in Australia. Three actor networks, proponent, opponent and nonpartisan were identified during the diffusion and continuance periods. Actor Network Theory helped understand how the proponent network became dominant in the Australian context. A number of highly effective tactics have been used to expand and increase the influence of the proponent network through translations. However, a number of threats to continuation such as the growth of the opponent network and the promotion of Korean domestic adoption have emerged. Actors have responded to these threats in a number of ways. Detours have been proposed by proponent actors to help them reach their goals though these may bring unintended consequences. An Actor Network Theory perspective reveals the important role of the Internet; helps understand how controversies are created and perpetuated; how intercountry adoption has become politicised in Australia; and highlights the risks to child centred and knowledge based practice that politicisation brings. The significance of this study lies in the insights provided by exploring power interrelationships between actor networks and how these shape particular phenomenon, in this case, Korean intercountry adoption. Intercountry adoption in Australia is poorly understood at a macro level as are the controversies surrounding it. Its practice has been heavily influenced by the interests of the dominant network with scant attention to research in the local context. Actor Network Theory that allows for the inclusion of human and nonhuman actors such as the Internet has proven useful for developing contemporary understandings of such a complex, global phenomenon. These understandings provide opportunities for individuals, groups and governments to address controversy in ways than do not contribute to its perpetuation and to refocus their attentions on the factors that contribute to the relinquishment of children in the first instance. This thesis highlights how politically driven agendas that serve the interests of one network can marginalise voices that bring more complex understandings to the intercountry adoption phenomenon. An Actor Network Theory analysis exposes the lack of investment by governments, organisations and individuals in community programs and services that address the causes of child relinquishment and empower Korean families and communities to seek their own solutions.

Beyond order, beyond the human

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how nonhuman actors contribute to solidarity in independent new film production. Specifically, it examines independent new film productions from a relationalist perspective, using actor-network-theory (ANT), which considers humans and nonhumans as equivalent actors and analyzes phenomena based on their interactions with each other. The research method used was ethnography with a focus on participant observation. One of the authors, a filmmaker and researcher, observed the inner workings of the filmmaking activity, while the other author observed the observer from an anthropologist’s perspective. In a previous paper, we found from the process of translation that the two nonhuman actors of the film’s original story and funding are inextricably linked, and the agency of the human actors surrounding them interacts with and transforms the nonhuman actors (Coney and Ito, 2021). In the present study, we analyzed the interaction with the solidarity among human actors in the process of film production by closely following the linkage of nonhuman actors such as provisional publicity materials, in addition to funds and scripts. In the process of filmmaking, the nonhuman actors often encounter unforeseen circumstances such as budget adjustments and filming postponement, but despite the setbacks, the nonhuman actors form a network in which they accept each other’s roles, and filmmaking is promoted by solidarity as human actors of the film become more interdependent through the agency working as an inclusive collective. The results of the study revealed that the human actors in film are interdependent and that their solidarity promotes filmmaking.

BackgroundThere is an increasing public, societal and policy imperative for effective integration of healthcare delivery systems. Central to integration in healthcare is a focus on people-centred health, access, patient empowerment, interprofessional teamwork and collaboration between all healthcare stakeholders – difficult to achieve in current silo-driven bureaucratic health organisations. Therefore, actor-network theory (ANT) offers a theoretical approach to understanding the complexities of healthcare delivery by unpacking the type of actor’s interplay between social elements and immaterial objects, their interactions, interdependencies and power dynamics.AimsThe first of its type, this systematic review aims to identify, synthesise, and appraise extant literature on the use and application of ANT in healthcare contexts.MethodsThis systematic review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines and registered with PROSPERO. The authors generated a search strategy utilising 31 Boolean terms, conducting electronic searches of MEDLINE, CINAHL Complete, SCOPUS, PubMed, APA PsycINFO, Business Source Complete and Academic Search Complete. The studies obtained were evaluated for inclusion based on their alignment with the specified inclusion and exclusion criteria. Studies were independently evaluated by the authors, with all data synthesised using a thematic analysis.ResultsFrom an initial 2,533 studies, the systematic review included 103 studies which utilised ANT within a healthcare context. The analysis of the studies identified trends in the application of ANT across healthcare which we categorised into four themes: healthcare delivery systems, technology and data, integrated care, and innovation management. The findings demonstrated variability and fragmentation in the application of ANT, often diverging from its fundamental principles.ConclusionsDecluttering the literature suggests three dimensions for understanding the relationships of actors, unidimensional ANT – based on single actors, bi-dimensional ANT, the relationship between two actors and multi-dimensional ANT, where human and non-human actors interact to impact healthcare outcomes. The limited number of studies on the use of ANT for integrated healthcare research highlights both its importance to the topic and the considerable research gap that must be addressed.

Cinematic tourism is an expanding phenomenon that examines the interaction between audiovisual products and tourist behavior, and their impact on destinations. This field investigates how films and TV shows shape perceptions of destinations and attract visitors, creating new tourism flows and economic opportunities. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) provides a nuanced approach to this study by considering the complex networks of human and non-human actors involved. Developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law, ANT highlights the significance of these networks in shaping social and economic phenomena. Applying ANT to cinematic tourism reveals how films, tourists, destinations, and local actors are interconnected. This theoretical perspective involves using various research methods, including interviews, discourse analysis, and field observations, to understand how audiovisual representations influence tourist attraction and how destinations respond. ANT helps identify gaps and opportunities in the tourism sector, such as the underutilization of the audiovisual sector by many destinations. Van der Duim, Ren, and Jóhannesson (2013) emphasize ANT’s focus on multiplicity and ontological politics, arguing that tourism is composed of multiple realities and organizing attempts. They suggest that ANT provides a richer understanding of tourism dynamics by analyzing diverse interactions. Paget, Dimanche, and Mounet (2010) demonstrate how new associations between human and non-human actors, facilitated by a "leader translator," can drive a company’s success within a tourist destination by reconfiguring resources into innovative products. Chen and Wu (2013) further illustrate this by using ANT and social affordance to analyze how postmodern attractions, like those themed around Jimmy, are constructed through relational networks. This approach offers a dynamic perspective on tourism attractions, revealing how various actors shape their development.

Objective: This study examines the efficacy of enculturation of academic integrity, in the context of an automated student plagiarism management system (ASPMS) at a private higher education institution (PHEI) to provide heuristics for related endeavours. Theoretical Framework: In this topic, the main theory underpinning the research is the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Method: The methodology adopted for this research comprises a mixed approach, incorporating both qualitative thematic analysis of transcripts of interviews with human actors and quantitative analyses of data gathered from the ASPMS. Results and Discussion: A nuanced, gestalt-like composition of ANT relationships emerged, from which many meaningful heuristics could be derived for both enhancing, and avoiding pitfalls in, enculturation of academic integrity. The ANT perspective allows for the essential roles of human and non-human actors in the network to be assessed for efficacy in achieving the objectives of the network. Overarching heuristics include ongoing cyclic-iterative refinement of the automated system; the underpinning regulatory framework and related organisational structures; and the education/training of human actors. Research Implications: Incorporating automation in academic integrity measures, allows for the delegation of onerous tasks to non-human actors in the system. Notwithstanding, acknowledged disruptors in this evolving context, such as the advent of Large-Language Model Artificial Intelligence (LLM-AI) tools (notably, Chat-GPT), increasingly confound the detection and assessment of plagiarism. Advancing heuristics towards designing systems for enculturating academic integrity– and for concomitant evaluation of the efficacy of such actor networks (as per ANT) – comprises the major implications of this study. Originality/Value: While this study involves a relatively esoteric context – a case study involving a bespoke ASPMS at a single PHEI campus in South Africa – the heuristics have application in many systems (actor networks), with or without automation, in which academic integrity is fostered.

본 연구는 기존의 표준관련 연구가 실제로 표준이 만들어지고 보급되는 제반 사회적 환경과 다중 이해관계자가 존재하는 복합적인 사회시스템에서의 행위자 역할 및 변화과정을 조망하는 작업이 충분히 이루어지지 못했다는 데에서 문제의식을 갖고 출발한다. 이를 배경으로 본 연구는 사회-기술적 제도 환경의 맥락에서 각기 다른 이해관계를 가진 참여자들이 혁신적인 기술을 개발해 표준화해가는 동태적 과정을 사회-기술적 접근으로 재구성하는 것을 목적으로 수행되었다. 이를 위한 세부 목표는 첫째, 표준화 과정을 둘러싼 사회-기술적 네트워크에서 인간 행위자 간, 인간과 비인간 행위자와의 상호작용 관계의 특징을 살펴보는 것이다. 둘째로는 표준화 과정을 선도한 핵심 행위자의 활동과 역할의 변화를 관찰하고자 하였다. 이를 위하여, 행위자-네트워크 이론(Actor Network Theory)에 기초하여 한국에서 진행된 고화질 3DTV방송기술의 표준화 과정의 동태적 속성을 분석하였다. 분석방법은 연구자가 행위자-네트워크에 직접 참여하여 동태적 특성을 분석하고, 설문 인터뷰와 심층 인터뷰를 통한 질적 연구의 방법을 적용, 표준 형성과정에 나타난 제반 환경-행위-기술 동학을 고찰하였다. This study is devised out of the recognition that the existing standardization-related research has not sufficiently examined the overall social environment where a standard is actually made and diffused and the roles of the actors and the changes in them in the complex social system where multiple stakeholders exist. Against this backdrop, this study purports to reconstruct the dynamic process of developing and standardizing an innovative technology through a socio-technical approach involved by multiple stakeholders with different interests in the context of a socio-technical institutional environment. The specific goals to achieve the purpose include first, inspecting the characteristics of the interactions between the human actors and between the human and non-human actors in the socio-technical network surrounding a standardization process. Second, the study aimed to observe the activities of the focal actor who led the standardization process and its changing role. To that end, it analyzed the dynamic features of the process of standardizing a HD 3DTV broadcasting technology that took place in South Korea based on the actor network theory. As for the analysis method, the researchers personally took part in the actor network involving the new technology to analyze the dynamic characteristics of the network, applying the qualitative research method of survey and in-depth interviews and exploring the overall dynamics of environment, behavior and technology observed over the course of the entire standardization process.

This article is devoted to the history of the principle of generalized symmetry in the actor-network theory (ANT), and, especially, in the particular, Bruno Latour’s approach.The starting points for generalized symmetry are the semiotic concept of the Paris Semiotician School (in particular, the concept of actants), D. Bloor's strong program (especially the principle of symmetry, which in actor-network theory was spread beyond the explanations of sciences to the explanations of human and non-human actors) and anthropology.The principle of generalized symmetry allows us to give symmetrical explanations of the agency of human and nonhuman actors, describing them in the same terms. It also allows you to switch between the reducibility and the irreducibility of the same actant, or entity.However, it brought some problems: the unification of heterogeneous actants, implicit preservation of the dichotomy culture-nature, from which Latour tried to move back even in his earlier texts.The rejection of generalized symmetry, however, does not solve the problems of actor-network theory, in particular, the role of human and non-human entities, in various texts (including Latour’s), varies between dissolution of actions and self-referencing (which is a special case, and does not receive satisfac- tory conceptualization within ANT).