Sociomaterial Studies Research Articles

“Keeping the Queen’s Peace”: A Sociomaterial Study of Police and Guns in a “Mangle of Risk”

This sociomaterial study analyzes the ways that material agency plays a key role in the organizing dynamics of risky work through a study of the carrying and use of handguns by U.S. and U.K. police officers. Qualitative data (interviews and focus groups) were collected over a three-year period with police (N = 61) in New York, where officers routinely carry guns, and in London, where they typically do not. Police unanimously describe the agentic role non-human artefacts like guns play in: a) framing their cognitive processes, b) influencing their behaviour and decision-making processes, and c) impacting individuals around them. Expanding Pickering's theorization of a mangle of practice, we inductively develop a mangle of risk to explain how human and non-human agency become entangled in risky work contexts, where danger is real and time pressure is high. Understanding these dynamics requires analysis of both frontline police narratives and the prescribed organizational policies, procedures, and routines intended to contain risky situations. Findings reveal that the tools provided to police to do their job both frame and constrain operational capabilities, potentially escalating danger for police, suspects, and the community in a mangle of risk.

Students' learning in theory-based simulation: A socio-material study.

Simulation-based education (SBE) is crucial to prepare nursing students prior to their clinical learning experience. Theory-based simulation learning is increasingly important for analysing how students learn. This study describes and analyses how nursing students learn through simulation in the context of palliative care communication under a socio-material approach and explores the transfer of their knowledge and skills from simulation to clinical practice. Twenty-seven final-year nursing students in six groups participated in two simulated scenarios, followed by a debriefing and post-clinical focus groups to capture their reflections and learning. Fourteen of them joined the post-clinical focus groups after completing their clinical placements. Video recordings of the simulation, and the audio recordings from the debriefing, and post-clinical focus groups were transcribed and coded based on the human and non-human elements that were observed. These were triangulated with data collected through team participant observations, an analysis of the existing syllabi and curriculum, and a participant mapping exercise after the simulation. These various data sources illustrate how student learning and reflections took place. The three themes of student learning derived from the results and analysis were (1) students' expanded learning of health care communication through a socio-material approach in the context of palliative care; 2) students' discovery of the diverse and complex relations and interactions between humans and materials and (3) students' new perspectives on health care communication and the transfer of knowledge and skills through a socio-material approach in clinical practice. This study highlights how SBE can be further expanded using a socio-material approach to prepare students to learn beyond standardised and cognitively driven approaches and procedures. Student learning demonstrates that SBE may develop beyond high fidelity and standardisation to leave room for emergent learning and increased awareness in learning for students and teachers to optimise learning outcomes and competence.

Doing sociomaterial studies: the circuit of agency

ABSTRACT In recent sociomaterialist, materialist and post-human theorizing which foregrounds the importance of objects and bodies, ideas of consciousness and intentionality are seen as potentially tainted either with Cartesian mind-body splits or with subjectivities that are too discursively constructed. At the same time, new theories of affect as something pre-personal and corporeal further marginalize the notion of human agency. But could the pendulum have swung too far in outlawing the human in favour of the pre-human and post-human? How can sociomaterial theories be reconciled with educators’ ongoing commitment to give their pupils voice and identify effective pedagogies for teaching digital media? This paper analyses data from a study of online multimodal writing practices in a London primary school to expand current theorizing about agency. It proposes the idea of a phenomenologically-inspired circuit of (sociomaterial) agency as a way to bring back the ‘human’ and incorporate the middle ranges of agency.

Foreign Natives: Psychoactivity, Policing, and the Elusive Corporeality of the Post-Soviet Rave

This article focuses on the rave subculture of St. Petersburg in the 1990s and demonstrates how new forms of psychoactive control and resistance emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse. By staying sensitive to the material and corporeal aspects of these phenomena, it contributes to the socio-material studies of drug control and emphasizes that the physical body itself should be an important venue for drug research. In doing so, we build on existing literature that discusses bodies as information resources to detect drug use and identifies resistance strategies to increasingly technological drug control measures. We advance this discussion by suggesting that the psychoactive setting of rave in post-Soviet St. Petersburg gave rise to a highly particular yet notably elusive and difficult-to-define type of corporeality. On the one hand, this corporeality could be positively interpreted as a marker of resistance and belonging on the “inside.” At the same time, it could also be employed strategically by law enforcement officers to detect and prosecute drug-consuming individuals. Moreover, we propose to view this psychoactive “rave body” as deeply embedded in its spatio-temporal context—thus accounting for the influence of time and space on the materiality of drug control and resistance. In examining these dynamics, we draw on a wide range of sources, including memoirs, press materials, early Internet archives, publicly printed interviews, photographs, and video materials.

Focus on Methodology: A sense of sociomaterialism: How sociomaterial perspectives might illuminate health professions education

Emerging from the field of socio-technical studies (STS), “sociomaterial” refers to a diverse group of theoretical approaches that, broadly speaking, share a commitment to symmetrically privileging both social and material elements. Not surprisingly, the ways in which a sociomaterial researcher engages in the process of collecting and analysing data will differ from studies that foreground a more human-centered point of view. This paper introduces researchers to the principles informing sociomaterial research and demonstrates their application in the context of a problem that has reached rampant levels among healthcare professionals—burnout. In this paper, we provide an accessible, in-depth description of what we mean by the sociomaterial, describe its historical roots and elucidate what it means to engage in empirical sociomaterial work. In so doing, our goal is to illuminate the potential of sociomaterial studies for exploring the complexity of health professions education.

Investigating digital doings through breakdowns: a sociomaterial ethnography of a Bring Your Own Device school

ABSTRACTAs personal digital devices have become increasingly embedded in schools, what they do tends to silently fall into the background and generally be taken for granted. In order to scrutinize the silent doings of digital devices, this paper explores how attending to breakdowns as a methodological heuristic device can be an insightful entry point to surface and analyze these doings. By conducting a sociomaterial ethnographic study in one Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) school, this paper disentangles four different breakdowns that occurred during the ethnographic study. The analysis reveals a particular mode of digital doings at school, coined as digital pedagogics, that characterizes the school space–time as plastic and poly-synchronous and curates lesson activities. Moreover, this mode is heavily conditioned by and through the school’s sociomaterial infrastructure. The paper concludes that in the wake of the breakdowns, the school’s infrastructure comes into being not merely as a bundle of cables and basic structures that make the school function, but more importantly as a complex configuration of clouds, software and interfaces, algorithms and patterns, standards, protocols and negotiations. This sets the condition for framing contemporary digitized schools within a particular techno-scholastic milieu.

Making the material routine: a sociomaterial study of the relationship between police body worn cameras (BWCs) and organisational routines

ABSTRACT This article employs a sociomaterial perspective adapted from information systems and management studies to examine the potential impact of body worn cameras (BWCs) on police organisations. Based on 42 semi-structured interviews with police employees, the study illustrates how wearable camera technology is seen to ‘afford’ officers and agencies the ability to modify their work routines. Further, these modifications occur in conjunction with particular dimensions of body camera system’s material agency. Through the performativity of video recording devices to move, see, hear, and record, officers report altering how they approach patrol work by displacing certain tasks onto their material associates, which allows them to better carry out their duties. Through the interoperability of the cloud storage systems, departments describe being able to reorganise critical information processing routines in support of criminal prosecutions. Through the objectivity of the digital files produced by body-worn camera systems, departments note effortlessly creating packets of events bearing the impression of truth and legitimacy with which they are able to more easily resolve citizen complaints. These findings underscore the importance of remaining attentive to the materiality of technology in policing and law enforcement research.

‘Keeping the Queen’s Peace’: A Sociomaterial Study of Police and Guns in a ‘Mangle of Risk’

An inclusive society is also a disruptive one, challenging individual’s sense of safety and security. This paper conducts a sociomaterial study of UK and US law enforcement practices by examining t...

Enacting learning citizenship: a sociomaterial analysis of reflectivity and knowledge negotiation in higher education

ABSTRACTAcross international university contexts, on-campus physical learning spaces are increasingly implemented with the aim of fostering active, collaborative, and student-centred learning. This paper theorises learning environments as complex sociomaterial assemblages of pedagogic approaches, material spaces and technologies, teachers, and learners that shift and flow in synergy to enact and refine students’ dispositions for reflective practice. The article presents data from pre-service teachers and teacher educators as part of a broader case study investigating the pedagogic enactment of an innovative learning space in a regional Australian university. Sociomaterial studies of learning spaces are under-represented in understanding reflective practice. Staff and student narratives of practice illustrate processes of negotiating meaning and critical reflection within an embodied learning community. The findings illustrate the ways both social and material actors work in conjunction to enable learners’ knowledge negotiation and reflective practices, and foster the dispositions and skills important for collaborative active citizenship.

Attuning to Crisscross Applesauce as Affective Flow and Material Agency in a Public K-5 Classroom: Studying School-Based Mindfulness Under Sociomaterial Circumstances

In this article, the authors illustrate efforts toward adopting methods germane to the emerging field of sociomaterial studies while examining the integration of schoolwide mindfulness practices. Informed by a posthumanist perspective, sociomaterial studies in education work to reveal the ways in which the bodily and other material aspects of educational practice are entangled with the social contexts of schooling. Significance of this discussion includes the ways in which aspects of the study’s methodology shift conventional humanist models for researching educational meanings held by students, teachers, and researchers, to include a perspective that promotes a focus on the social- with-material dimensions of data, analysis and their multisensory productions.

Temporalities of learning: lessons from a socio-material study of allotment gardening practice

ABSTRACTPractice-oriented, socio-material investigations have surfaced the emergent nature of professional knowing and the significance of things for organising such knowing. However, in these accounts, one significant organising actor is largely overlooked: time. This paper foregrounds time, exploring how different temporalities orchestrate knowing in practice. The empirical study for this article is not of professional practice, but the work of allotment gardening and it is, in part, this attending to everyday practice which unsettles routinised ways of seeing and allows unnoticed actors such as time to emerge. The use of Actor-Network Theory sensibilities further disrupts habitual ways of seeing, as the practice of gardeners on an English allotment site is shown to be distributed over a multitude of socio-im/material actors, mobilising five temporal regimes which order learning. This article theorises that such temporal patterning is particularly enabling for learning and indicates that attending to temporality extends the parameters for understanding learning beyond the case of the everyday, to professional knowing and learning more generally.

Residents’ use of mobile technologies: three challenges for graduate medical education

IntroductionThe practice of medicine involves, among other things, managing ambiguity, interpreting context and making decisions in the face of uncertainty. These uncertainties, amplified for learners, can be negotiated in a...

Sobre el potencial crítico de los enfoques sociomateriales en educación

Este artículo tiene como argumento central que el recientemente emergente enfoque sociomaterial tiene un inherente potencial crítico para la educación, pero esta capacidad no ha sido completamente puesta en práctica o explorada en estudios educativos. Para argumentar estas ideas, este artículo empieza, en primer lugar, con una concisa descripción de representacionalismo en contraposición al pensamiento relacional, y propone que los estudios sociomateriales deben situarse en esta última corriente. En consecuencia, la función crítica que es ampliamente apoyada en el pensamiento representacional –que es una función principalmente dirigida a desacreditar y develar– requiere ser repensada. Para concebir nuevamente esta función, el artículo en segundo lugar profundiza sobre las principales características de los estudios sociomateriales en educación para demostrar que tal pensamiento relacional toma forma dentro y durante la realización de la investigación sociomaterial. Estas características son decisivas para aprehender completamente la perspectiva crítica de los enfoques sociomateriales en educación. La función de la crítica, entonces, equivale a una actitud comprometida con las prácticas objeto de investigación y dirige la atención hacia la creatividad crítica que ofrece algunos horizontes de cambio.

Relational thinking in education: topology, sociomaterial studies, and figures

Over the last few years, different sociomaterial research orientations have emerged. In this article, we argue that most of these orientations are relying on a relational mode of thinking, that is, a way of conceiving of educational practices in terms of the relations between the different actors present in these particular practices. In doing so, these various sociomaterial studies share many of their theoretical assumptions with social topology, an approach inspired by the mathematical field of topology. In educational research, however, this connection between sociomaterial and sociotopological accounts is not commonly made. Therefore, this article calls for a more intricate interweaving of topological thinking with better-known sociomaterial approaches. Furthermore, we assert that using visualisations might play a crucial role in this respect. To that effect, we introduce the Foucauldian and Deleuzian notion of the diagram. This notion of the diagram, as the technique that brings the orders of the visual and the articulable together, is conceived as a promising technique in order to investigate different aspects of educational practices. In a concluding section, the article offers some suggestions as to what the general potential of adopting such relational studies in the field of education might be.

The rise of the video-recorder teacher: the sociomaterial construction of an educational actor

This paper draws on actor-network theory and on the sociology of cultural consumption to examine the phenomenon of corporate Massive Open Online Courses. Through an analysis of texts available in the public domain, the paper argues that over a short period (between 2012 and 2013) digitisation technology became associated with the emergence of a hybrid ‘actor’: the digital video-recorder teacher. A parallel is drawn between the ‘interactive affordances’ of digital instruction and the playback and cataloguing options that have contributed to shifts in television viewing habits. The digital video-recorder teacher is described as an artefact in the service of a postmodern project of self-improvement through cultural consumption, which recruits digitisation to meet a growing demand for ‘upgrades to the self’. In the conclusion, the paper explores how the study of digital education could benefit from an interface between sociomaterial studies and the sociology of culture.

Product development as reading and writing doings within sociotechnical practices: the reciprocity between engineers and artefacts

This ethnographic study aims at understanding how product development of wind turbine controls unfolds as ongoing engineer-artefact reciprocity. We adopt a Deweyan constructionist and Science-Technology-Society approach to contribute to product development and sociomaterial studies by emphasising the role of reciprocity between engineers' experience and artefacts through reading and writing doings. Reading doings involve texts such as specifications, minutes, sketches and components. Writing doings create/modify the same type of texts. In one project, convergent reciprocity enabled the development. Another project's development was blocked, restarted and completed internally at the producer. Enablers included repositioning of working practices, application of various artefacts/tools, heterogeneous engineers and creation of common ground. Constraints involved lack of openness, too malleable artefacts, no common ground and radical change of the development trajectory. The engineers' learning depends on these constraints and enablers. Three types of reciprocity occur: convergent, faded away and blocked.

The role of OD practitioners in developing corporations’ capacity to practice corporate citizenship

Purpose – This study aims to analyze how organization development (OD) practitioners develop corporate citizenship for the purpose of increasing their organization’s capacity to practice corporate citizenship. Research shows that very few corporations have the organizational capacity to practice corporate citizenship. Evidence exists that ever more corporations adopt programs of corporate citizenship development to increase this capacity. However, there still is a general lack of a strategic understanding of how corporate citizenship development occurs. The potential of OD frameworks and tools for developing corporate citizenship have been highlighted. Nevertheless, how OD practitioners develop corporate citizenship has not been studied empirically so far. Design/methodology/approach – A sociomaterial case study design was used. The work of six OD practitioners when developing corporate citizenship in one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations was studied over several months, based on interviews, observations and document analyses. Findings – The findings presented offer model practices of corporate citizenship development, in the form of five core strategies and five core behaviors that increase an organization’s capacity to practice corporate citizenship. Research limitations/implications – With this study, the notion of corporate citizenship development has become established as a distinct research area. The study might encourage further research in this important niche area. Practical implications – The findings have direct practical implications for at least seven different stakeholder groups. Originality/value – The findings shed new light on both the epistemological and practical foundations of the concept of corporate citizenship, and hint to a new role of the fields of OD and human resource development in the twenty-first century.

Material entanglement in a primary school learning network

Activity in learning networks is often digitally mediated. By virtue of this, studies of learning networks have not focused solely on human-human relations, but have acknowledged the role of digital infrastructure in mediating relations between people. This research draws on sociomaterial studies of learning and theoretical approaches from anthropology and archaeology to investigate the connection between activity and the setting in which it occurs. In exploring relations between humans and things, sociomaterial studies of learning surface the role of materials in learning practice. Whilst sociomaterial descriptions are used to examine the nuanced relations between humans (H) and things (T) they often fail to consider the object nature of things. Archaeologist Ian Hodder addresses this issue highlighting that things are not isolated or inert, that they endure over different temporalities and where we see them as non-things or fail to see them at all, we are unable to trace their effects. In this paper, we argue that educational designers, teachers and others involved in networked learning would benefit from understanding the object nature of things (T) and their entanglement with humans (HT), as they engage in creating new resources for networked learning. Furthermore, it will be fundamental to understanding the changes that these ever-evolving and increasingly ubiquitous technologies will bring to future place-based instantiations of networked learning. This paper discusses these issues through the analysis of a learning network within a primary school context and whilst schools have not customarily been considered sites of networked learning, we argue that the way this school uses online structures to co-ordinate face-to-face activity necessitates the network attribution. Our research is based on an ethnographic study conducted in a digitally enabled, open plan learning space that is home to 180 year five and six students and their team of seven teachers. We present an analysis of a single, seventy-five minute episode selected from 549 hours of observation. Our analysis, whilst particular to this moment in time, draws on what was observed over a nine month period and the encounter was selected as illustrative of the intricate entanglement of place, task and social organisation that is characteristic of learning activity at this site.

An Atlas of Academic Practice in Digital Times

In the current literature on the university it is generally accepted that processes of digitization play an important role regarding both the daily functioning of the university as an institution and the academics that give shape to it. This article contributes to our understanding of the role that digitization plays in contemporary academic practices and does this by adopting a relational theoretical framework informed by sociomaterial studies. Furthermore, the article introduces a specific interview technique as methodological approach and makes use of topological visualizations in order to qualitatively analyze the composition of academic work in digital times. As such, combining textual and visual analysis, the article should be conceived as an explorative atlas. The atlas gives an account of how daily academic practices are relationally composed, by focusing on the spatiotemporal constellations enacted in these practices, and on how the digital acts and operates in these practices. Based on three profiles of academic practices, this atlas concludes by exploring whether contemporary academic practices are characterized by a typical mode of existence, and gives some pointers as to how this mode of existence of the university is typically enacted nowadays.

Mobilising ethnographers investigating technologised learning

This paper intends to problematise understandings of the ethnographer's presence in investigating contemporary forms of technologised learning. The ubiquity of new educational technologies raises questions concerning the spaces of education and learning, and challenges, at the same time, the sense of ‘being there’ in terms of the face-to-face interactions fundamental in ‘standard’ descriptions of educational ethnography. This paper – drawing theoretically on sociomaterial studies of education and on the description and comparison of two ethnographic accounts – proposes to consider ethnographer's presence while studying contemporary forms of technologised learning as embodied, distributed and mobile.