Actor-network Research Articles

Ecogothic Interpretations of the Anthropocene

The so-called nonhuman turn has a great role to play in theoretical elaborations of the Anthropocene. This broad tendency of thought incorporates contemporary non-anthropocentric schools of thought such as Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and posthumanism. These various sociological and philosophical directions have one thing in common: the rejection and transcendence of anthropocentrism, as well as a new sensitivity to the heterogeneous, irreducible and multiple nature of reality. Openness to post-anthropocentrism is a general characteristic of authors who work in Anthropocene theory today. However, posthumanist philosophy, while it decenters and deconstructs the human, is also committed to an aesthetic of uncertainty, fear, and even horror. Simon C. Estok, in his highly important article “Theorising the EcoGothic,” shows that during the ecological crisis philosophical thought must traverse unknown terrain, while also emphasizing the darker aspects of sociocultural constructs. Posthumanism must, by its very nature, prepare for the unthinkable in a quite literal sense according to Stefan Herbrechter. The Anthropocene constitutes an opening to what Nick Land calls “Outsideness”. A future condition “after” the human can be understood as a condition that opens onto a dark, monstrous, threatening or, in a word, hybrid future beyond any anthropic measure.

Felski’s Literary Sociological Thought From the Perspective of Actor-Network Theory

Felski’s Literary Sociological Thought From the Perspective of Actor-Network Theory

Actor-networks in sustainable transport transformation: the case of the Catharijnesingel restoration

As cities evolve, navigating the complex interplay between social and technical elements is crucial for achieving sustainable urban development. This paper uses a case-study approach and applies actor-network theory (ANT) to understand the sociotechnical complexities of urban transformation, with a specific focus on transport projects at the municipal level. ANT serves as a qualitative analytical framework to investigate the successful restoration of Catharijnesingel in Utrecht. Interviews with ten field experts have provided valuable insights into the transformation process, revealing the underlying paradigms at play. Specifically, this study used Michel Callon’s ( 1984 ) concept of translation to analyze how agency is enacted in decision-making processes. By focusing this research on actor-networks related to the theme of sustainable transport, the study has identified five transformation mechanisms involved in removing the 20th-century city highway and restoring the original canal, offering valuable lessons for similar projects in various contexts. This study contributes to the existing ANT literature by presenting a robust framework for analyzing actor-networks in transport infrastructure transformation projects, thereby opening new avenues for future research and practical applications in urban planning.

Countering surveillance: using actor-network theory to understand how organised crime is displaced and harms arise as offenders become invisible to the gaze of electronic monitoring and law enforcement

Countering surveillance: using actor-network theory to understand how organised crime is displaced and harms arise as offenders become invisible to the gaze of electronic monitoring and law enforcement

Exploring health inequities through the actor‐network theory lens

AbstractSocial theory plays an important role in the nursing discipline and nursing inquiry as it helps conceptually embed nursing in the larger picture of the social world. For example, a broad category of critical theory provides a unique lens for uncovering social conditions of inequity and oppression. Among the sociological theories, actor‐network theory (ANT) is an approach to research and analysis that has recently gained interest among nurse philosophers and researchers. Studies guided by ANT seek to understand phenomena of interest as constituted within the relationships between human and nonhuman actors to understand how care practices are co‐created/enacted and how they can be made more humane. In this paper, we describe the benefits of ANT for examining healthcare access for incarcerated individuals with life‐limiting illnesses accessing palliative care and for people using illicit drugs. We argue that attention to the materiality of care practices can contribute to efforts of advancing health equity for these groups.

Contesting the framing of digital risk: An analysis of Australian children’s experiences

ABSTRACT Children’s social lives are mediated increasingly by digital tools, thereby making new modes of home-school-world relationships possible. In this context, children’s digital out-of-school social practices continue to be associated with risk. Children are construed as an “at risk” and vulnerable population by adults who frame children’s everyday digital social life with ambivalence. This framing is used to justify imposition of constraints in the present, with children’s digital engagement a key site of regulation. The study we report here problematises research that separates risk from children’s digital social participation. To challenge dominant views of children being vulnerable to risk, we use Actor Network Theory to provide a nuanced exposition of concepts of “digital risk” and agentic self, relevant to children’s digital social lives. From the findings of the present study, involving 62 10–11-year-old children in 3 Australian schools, we argue that “digital risk” framing of children’s social lives underplays children’s agency and voice in digital environments. Additionally, what is missing in the framing of digital risk is recognition that children utilise digital tools to ameliorate non-digital risk. In other words, risk is not only digital; and there is more to digital participation than risk.

Materialities of progressive curriculum reform: a case study of one kindergarten classroom

ABSTRACT Objective This study reviews the status of materials in curriculum and reform, as reflected in a network case study of curriculum in one kindergarten classroom in the United States. This paper focuses on the events leading up to and building upon one inquiry unit that became a focal point in promoting progressive curriculum reform at the school. Method Methods from Actor Network Theory are employed to attend to a wide cast of human and nonhuman actors, trace their mobilities, and map them into curricular networks. Data, collected over 9 months of one school year, included field notes, audio recordings of conversations, and images of classroom objects and arrangements. Results Three material assemblages—a closet, a bulletin board, and a curriculum timeline—are viewed as agents assisting in stabilizing the inquiry unit and sustaining further student-centred inquiries amidst competing curricular reforms and policies. Findings demonstrate how teachers may mobilize such assemblages to accomplish multiple objectives, as is necessary when navigating tensions from multiple parties or reform mandates. Conclusion This study contributes to scholarship conceptualizing the status of curriculum materials, with particular attention to their functionality at the nexus of both the micro-interactions of curriculum enactment and the macro-politics of educational reform.

Rethinking the Social Determination of Food in Chile Through Practices and Interactions of Actors in Food Environments: Nonexperimental, Cross-Sectional Study.

Food environments are crucial for promoting healthy and sustainable eating and preventing obesity. However, existing food environment frameworks assume an already installed causality and do not explain how associations in food environments are established or articulated, especially from an integrative and transdisciplinary approach. This research attempts to bridge these gaps through the use of Actor-Network Theory, which traces the relationship network between human (and nonhuman) actors in order to describe how these interact and what agencies (direct or remote) are involved. This study aims to explain the practices and interactions of actors in food environments in order to approach the problem of unhealthy eating with a transdisciplinary approach. This is a nonexperimental, cross-sectional study. Due to the complexity of the study phenomena, a mixed methods approach with 4 consecutive phases will be developed in Chile. Phase 1 involves a systematic literature review of food environment evidence since 2015, following the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) protocol; phase 2 involves the application of a shortened version of the Nutrition Environment Measure Scale-Perceptions adapted to Chile (NEMS-P-Ch) in 2 neighborhoods with different socioeconomic levels; in phase 3, six focus groups in each neighborhood will be conducted to address social determinants such as gender, employment status, and migration; and in phase 4, participant observation and in-depth interviews will be used to analyze the direct and empirical exploration of the actors in their daily interaction with food environments. The triangulation and complementarity of the data will allow us to create a practical model about the practices and interactions of actors in their food environments, which reflects the complexity and transdisciplinary nature of the study. We have advanced in phases 1-3 of the study. In phase 1, a total of 109 manuscripts are being revised for data extraction. In phase 2, we applied the NEMS-P-Ch to 785 people, 49.4% (388/785) of whom belong to a low socioeconomic neighborhood. Participants from phase 2 are being contacted to participate in the focus groups (phase 3). By the end of July, we have conducted 6 focus groups with 5-11 participants. This study will provide a comprehensive understanding of how individuals interact with their food environments, offering deep insights into the factors influencing their food-related decisions. In addition, the study aims to develop a model that more accurately reflects reality by examining not only the food environments themselves but also the interactions among various stakeholders within these environments and their daily practices. The findings of this study will offer evidence-based insights to inform public policies tailored to the specific territories and communities under investigation or those with similar characteristics. DERR1-10.2196/62765.

DDPG-AdaptConfig: A deep reinforcement learning framework for adaptive device selection and training configuration in heterogeneity federated learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that protects user privacy by collaboratively training shared models across devices without sharing their raw personal data. Despite its advantages, FL faces issues of increased convergence time and decreased accuracy due to the heterogeneity of data and systems across devices. Existing methods for solving these issues using reinforcement learning often ignore the adaptive configuration of local training hyperparameters to suit varying data characteristics and system resources. Moreover, they frequently overlook the heterogeneous information contained within local model parameters. To address these problems, we propose the DDPG-AdaptConfig framework based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) for adaptive device selection and local training hyperparameters configuration in FL to speed up convergence and ensure high model accuracy. Additionally, we develop a new actor network that integrates the transformer mechanism to extract heterogeneous information from model parameters, which assists in device selection and hyperparameters configuration. Furthermore, we introduce a clustering-based aggregation strategy to accommodate heterogeneity and prevent performance declines. Experimental results show that our DDPG-AdaptConfig achieves significant improvements over existing baselines.

The role of non-human actors in the acceptance of management accounting: the case of a Moroccan public establishment

Like private companies, public service establishments are seeking to improve their performance by adopting management control tools. However, their acceptance in this context raises specific challenges. Unlike the private sector, where profitability is often the main driver for the acceptance of such tools, the public sector has to deal with more complex organizational dynamics involving many actors. This article examines the reasons underlying the acceptance of a management control tool, in particular a management accounting system, in the Moroccan public sector. The research is based on a qualitative case study carried out in a Moroccan public establishment that recently introduced a management accounting system, using the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), also known as the translation theory, developed by Callon and Latour in the 1980s. Traditionally mobilized to analyze the innovation diffusion process, this approach is used in our research to study the pre-adoption, or ex-ante, phase of innovation introduction. The results of this study highlight the complex dynamics of management accounting acceptance in the Moroccan public sector, showing how non-human actors play a crucial role in the pre-adoption phase of management control instruments. Our research reveals the decisive influence of the tax variable, as a non-human actor, on the acceptance of the management accounting system. This link between taxation and management accounting is a significant contribution, particularly due to the lack of studies on legal and fiscal variables in management control. These results underscore the importance of considering both non-human and human actors equally in the translation process (generalized symmetry).

Bringing the Future to Geomedia Studies: Geomedia as Sociotechnical Regime and Imaginary

Geomedia, representing an epochal shift in spatial mediations and spatialized media, changes daily life. This future-directed thematic issue advocates for contextualized understandings of geomedia that transcend contemporary hegemonic representations of technology. It recognizes the transformative powers of geomediatization processes and asks what “geomedia futures” such processes might bring about. Bridging critical geomedia studies and critical future studies, it challenges dominant narratives about tomorrow’s technological society and promotes the exploration of diverse, equitable, and sustainable futures with and under geomedia. Through numerous methodological approaches, the collected articles examine the role of geomedia in contexts such as urban planning, tourism, surveillance, governance, and policy. The thematic issue emphasizes the importance of envisioning alternative futures that resist technological rationalization and unethical exploitation of geospatial data, supporting more inclusive and human-centered mediatized places. This work contributes to ongoing debates in geomedia studies, highlighting the need for critical and interdisciplinary approaches to understand and shape our technological future.

Planners Becoming Visualizers in the Mediatized World: Actor-Network Analysis of Cairo’s Street Billboards

While visual communication is crucial in urban planning, there is a gap in understanding how dominant narratives and visuals affect professional planning practice and planners’ roles, particularly in mediatized urban environments. This study addresses this gap by examining street billboards in Cairo to understand how planning visualizations contribute to the restructuring of the planning profession. It explores how these visual tools shape the practice and roles of urban planners, who are increasingly becoming visualizers. Employing actor-network theory, the study traces the relationships between billboards, planners, and other network actors. The primary research question is: How and why does the use of planning visualizations (billboards) restructure the profession of planning, including planning practice and the roles of planners? Utilizing a qualitative exploratory methodology, the study focuses on billboards along Cairo’s 6th of October Bridge. Data were analyzed through visual and content analysis of 209 billboards to understand their language, content, patterns, and geo-positioning. The analysis revealed that billboards in Cairo significantly impact urban landscapes and the visual culture of urbanization, often promoting exclusive real estate projects to a socio-economic elite. The research highlights the dilemmas in the changing professional roles of planners within a mediatized world and underscores the need for more inclusive planning practices. By employing actor-network theory, the study provides a nuanced understanding of the complex relationships that shape and are shaped by the visual culture of urban planning, offering insights into how planners can navigate and influence these dynamics for more equitable urban development.

Analisis Actor Network Theory Dalam Program Pusat Pembelajaran Pemberdayaan Perempuan (Putaran) di Kota Surabaya

The establishment of the Women's Empowerment Learning Center Program (PUTARAN) certainly requires a driver or main actor and supporting actors who are the implementers. With the involvement of the main actors and supporting actors, it will cause interaction in realizing the Women's Empowerment Learning Center (PUTARAN) program. This research was compiled with the aim of knowing the role of the main actors in making policies for the Women's Empowerment Learning Center (PUTARAN) program and knowing the interaction between the main actors and supporting actors in realizing it, in order to achieve the fulfillment of the rights of women online motorcycle taxi drivers and people with disabilities in Surabaya City. This research uses a qualitative method with a descriptive approach through interview techniques. This research uses Actor Network Theory according to Callon (1986) which has four groupings, such as problematization, interessement, enrollment, and mobilization. It shows that both in terms of roles and relationships between the main actors and supporting actors interact well, this can be seen from the success of the Women's Empowerment Learning Center Program (PUTARAN) which has been realized in accordance with its duties and functions.

Unpacking conflict-ridden everyday life: Perspectives from life-environmentalism

This paper examines the concept of life-environmentalism ( seikatsu kankyō shugi), which emerged in the 1980s as a shared research framework among Japanese social scientists studying the adverse effects of modern industrialization of everyday life in rural communities. Despite its recognition in Japan, the life-environmentalist approach remains largely unknown to Anglophone literature. While the recently published book, Everyday Life-Environmentalism, provides an introductory English-language text, it lacks thorough theoretical articulation of the approach in relation to contemporary Anglophone approaches. This paper centers on actor-network theory, a widely circulated approach within post-human and more-than-human geographies, as a comparative frame of reference to elucidate key characteristics of life-environmentalism. Through a comparative examination of the applications of these approaches to a local case study, we suggest that life-environmentalism offers valuable insights when analyzing socioenvironmental controversies and community-level responses, particularly in contexts where a long-standing social community is central to the analysis.

Sweet Archipelagos: Sugar, Empires, and the Making of a Transpacific Insect Trail

Abstract: In 1854, a whaling vessel brought two bundles of sugarcane from Tahiti to Maui, marking the beginning of the Lahaina cane's history and the socioecological transformation of the Hawaiian Islands and the Asia-Pacific. This essay tells a history of sugar through the transpacific crossings of three nonhuman species: sugarcane, the sugarcane beetle borer, and the tachinid fly. It situates nonhuman actors within the historical context of plantation agriculture, capitalist imperialism, and biological globalization of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Pacific to reconceptualize entomological categories like "pest" and "parasite." Engaging with actor-network theory, animal studies, and island studies, the essay attempts to offer insights into historical agency, human–nonhuman relations, and large-scale ecological change.

ADP-based online compensation hierarchical sliding-mode control for partially unknown switched nonlinear systems with actuator failures

This article investigates an adaptive dynamic programming-based online compensation hierarchical sliding-mode control problem for a class of partially unknown switched nonlinear systems with actuator failures and uncertain perturbations under an identifier-critic neural networks architecture. Firstly, by introducing a cost function related to hierarchical sliding-mode surfaces for the nominal system, the original control problem is equivalently converted into an optimal control problem. To obtain this optimal control policy, the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation is solved through an adaptive dynamic programming method. Compared with conventional adaptive dynamic programming methods, the identifier-critic network architecture not only overcomes the limitation on the unknown internal dynamic but also eliminates the approximation error arising from the actor network. The weights in the critic network are tuned via the gradient descent approach and the experience replay technology, such that the persistence of excitation condition can be relaxed. Then, a compensation term containing hierarchical sliding-mode surfaces is used to offset uncertain actuator failures without the fault detection and isolation unit. Based on the Lyapunov stability theory, all states of the closed-loop nonlinear system are stable in the sense of uniformly ultimately boundedness. Finally, numerical and practical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of our presented online compensation control strategy.

Optimized Backstepping Cooperative Control for Output-Constrained Stochastic Nonlinear Network Systems via a Multibridge-Hole Function.

In this article, a new leader-following tracking control approach is investigated for stochastic multiagent systems with multibridge-hole output constraints. The multibridge-hole output constraints mean that the output of the system is constrained in some intervals and unconstrained in other intervals. The constrained and unconstrained intervals can be set arbitrarily. By designing a new shift function to construct the barrier Lyapunov function, the optimal controller is constructed by combining the backstepping technique with the adaptive dynamic programming technique. The model network is used to estimate the unknown disturbances and uncertainty terms in the system. The critic network and the actor network are constructed such that the designed controller adheres to the Bellman optimality principle and gives the optimal solution of the system. The proposed control method is versatile and compatible with various types of output constrained control problems, such as unconstrained control problems, constrained control problems, and delay constrained problems without changing the structure of the controller. Finally, some simulation results are given to verify the effectiveness of the method.

An Analysis of Cybersecurity Policy Compliance in Organisations

In the contemporary digital landscape, cyber-attacks and incidents have placed cyber-security at the forefront of priorities in organisations. As organisations face cyber risks, it becomes imperative to implement and comply with various cyber-security policies. However, due to factors such as policy complexity and resistance from employees, compliance can be a challenging task. The study, which took a comprehensive approach, investigated the variables that affect an organisation's adherence to cyber-security policies. The findings of this study provide insights into the challenges and factors influencing compliance with cyber-security policies in organisations. A case study design was chosen as part of a qualitative approach to answer the research question. For data gathering, semi-structured interviews were performed, and existing documents were also considered when available to supplement interviews. The gathered data was meticulously organised, coded, and analysed using the Actor-Network Theory perspective, with a focus on its four moments of translation: problematisation, interessement, enrolment, and mobilisation. The analysis revealed that insider threats and phishing attempts are the two cyber threats that affect organisations; behavioural challenges and enforcement limitations are factors that influence and contribute to the non-compliance of cyber-security policy; phishing exercises and policy development processes are used to enforce cyber-security policies.

A reinforcement learning based sliding mode control for passive upper-limb exoskeleton

Rehabilitation devices such as actuated exoskeletons can provide mobility assistance for patients suffering from paralysis or muscle weakness. In order to improve the well-being of patients, the control design of exoskeletons is of paramount importance and highest priority. In this paper, we present a sliding reinforcement learning (RL) method control for an upper-limb exoskeleton, enabling it to learn following a desired trajectory in the Cartesian space. The deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) using an actor-critic architecture is employed to continuously adjust the non-singular terminal sliding mode control (NSTSMC) control inputs, based on previous experiences. The designed actor network learns the policy and the critic evaluates the quality of the actions chosen by the actor. The robustness of the proposed approach is studied when the system is subjected to random disturbances. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach based on the RL method effectively fulfills exoskeleton tracking tasks. Moreover, a comparative analysis with the standard NSTSMC, computed torque (CT), and RL-based CT shows the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of position tracking error. These findings are further confirmed by various performance evaluation metrics.

Actor Networks and Environmental Conflicts: The Case of Benoa Bay Reclamation (2014-2019)

This study explores the formation of actor networks in developing conservation areas, specifically focusing on the Benoa Bay conservation area in Bali from 2014 to 2019. This period marks the beginning and temporary cessation of reclamation development permits in the area, instigated by a Presidential Decree. The study examines how actor networks form through material negotiations, categorizing actors into pros (supporting reclamation) and cons (opposing reclamation). It employs the Actor Network Theory (ANT) framework, particularly the moments concept developed by Callon, to analyze these networks and negotiations. The research is qualitative, using case studies and field data collected through interviews with relevant stakeholders. The primary findings reveal that actors on both sides—pro and con—form networks based on the material narratives they promote. For the pros, the need for tourism space justifies reclamation, while the cons focus on conservation values upheld by the Balinese community. The reclamation issue acts as a moment of problematization, bringing these opposing material narratives into conflict within the conservation area. The study follows ANT’s stages from problematization to mobilization, highlighting how the conflicting material narratives of both pro and con actors interact and influence the network formation. Ultimately, the research illustrates the dynamics of actor networks in the context of reclamation, showing how material negotiations shape these networks and the contestation over spatial production in Benoa Bay networks.