Introduction
In higher education, as elsewhere, sociomaterial approaches focus not on an individual learner or an individualās skills, but on the collective, where this embraces the human and non-human. In this collective, we need to recognise the ways that materiality of all kinds ā both the human and non-human ā actively enable, influence and constrain what people think and do, the patterns in which they move, and the consequences of their activities. āStuffā matters, and it is matter. Knowing and capability are not generated and controlled only through humans. They are more-than-human, produced at least partly through the ways things work on, with and through humansā perceptions, emotions, practices and judgements (e.g. Nespor 1994, Edwards 2011, Fenwick & Edwards 2014).
Yet materials are often missing from accounts of higher education, and specifically in programmes and events that focus on learning to teach in higher education. Materials tend to be accepted simply as part of the backdrop for human action, overlooked because of a preoccupation with consciousness and cognition, or relegated to brute tools subordinated to human intention and design. Clearly, in higher education, a range of materials shape practice and pedagogy: textbooks and tests, digital broadband and databases, grassy commons and car parks, locked doors and passwords, dust and bodies, etc. These things each embed histories as well as values, and are deeply bound in the politics of what it becomes permissable to know and to do. As such, they raise questions for how we approach teaching and how we understand our own pedagogic practices.
However, a sociomaterial approach is not characterised by an enumeration of objects. The emphasis is not just on acknowledging all these things, but on analysing webs of relations ā the entanglements of material with social forces. These entanglements bring forth what appear to be particular separate objects, communities, or spaces. For instance, while most educators appreciate the importance of their environments of practice, these environments actually are comprised of a myriad of specific relations among technological, affective, natural, manufactured, symbolic and bodily sociomaterial dynamics. Human thought, intention and feeling are woven into these dynamics ā neither subordinate to them, but not governing them, either. These relations and the particular ways that they exert influence to enable or constrain ideas and actions are too often washed into vague references to big categories: cultures and structures, like racism or curriculum. While such categories may be useful shorthand descriptions to refer to broad patterns, they tend to reassert the centrality of human activity, meanings and identities ā even when writers think to add āecologicalā considerations to their analysis to remind us of contextual issues affecting human activity.
The main problem is when such big categories become identifiable, commonplace, even inevitable entities to organise the flux of existence. Wielding such categories to understand the complexities of what becomes enacted in higher education teaching and learning, we can quickly lose the capacity to discern critical nuances that make all the difference. How do particular human and non-human things assemble and change one another to produce important (problematic or desirable) effects, in terms of whatever educative purpose is adopted? Or even, what new purposes are being suggested through these relations? How are capacities produced (as a collective phenomenon)? What constraints or exclusions are generated through certain sociomaterial relations? What new productive possibilities are emerging that could be amplified? While such questions are significant for all educational practices, they are especially important where there are explicit attempts to develop a higher education to support justice and equity rather than simply reproduce existing hierarchies and inequalities. Yet how frequently do we address such questions when learning to teach?
This chapter offers a brief, introductory account of sociomaterial understandings and how these might both inform our pedagogies as well as, in the spirit of this volume, support higher education as a critical and just practice.1 It is in four parts. First, we introduce some shared ideas informing a variety of sociomaterial approaches and some of their differences. Second, drawing specifically upon the work of Bruno Latour (2004), we outline an approach to critique derived from actor-network theory and some of the implications for higher education as a just practice. Third, given that criticality is often perceived to be a key purpose of higher education, we will explore the implications of sociomateriality for critical higher education pedagogies. Finally, we draw out some general points and issues for further consideration. The argument is suggestive rather than exhaustive. For fuller discussion and illustrations, see Fenwick and Edwards (2010), Fenwick et al. 2011 and Fenwick and Landri (2014).
Sociomateriality ā itās matter that matters
By sociomateriality we refer to a broad arena of academic endeavour which is seeking to revalue and reconceive the role of matter and material relations in human practices. Sociomaterial approaches help to make visible the material dynamics in practice situations ā the moving relationships among bodies, substances, objects, technologies and settings as well as symbols and desires, human interactions and emotions. A sociomaterial approach treats the material and the social as mutually implicated in bringing forth everyday action and knowledge. The emphasis shifts away from preoccupations with language, communication, discourses and identity. Instead, materiality is foregrounded as a critical force in relation with the social. It is in the relations among both material and social forces that everyday practices are produced. Capacity is thus viewed as distributed; agency is not a capacity inherent in human actors alone, but in their relations within the more-than-human.
For us, sociomateriality embraces certain strands of work in, for instance, actor-network theory (ANT) and its many āpostā ANT performances, posthumanism, new materialism, practice-based theories, spatial theory, non-representational theory and complexity theory. In referring to a range of different academic endeavours like this, we recognise the need to keep open their points of difference as well as their affinities. Although they are all distinct and have important differences, we could argue that they share at least three broad overlapping common elements.
First, they do not erase human activity, but help to highlight the ways materiality enables, expresses, shapes and extends it. In higher education, we often focus on cognition, meaning-making, dialogue and reflection. We tend to lose sight of how physical settings shape the possible meanings and solutions, how tools embed knowledges and elicit particular ways of using them, and how particular bodies evoke particular forms of dialogue. We also tend to focus on individual human beings as though they act separately from the material objects, technologies and settings that penetrate us and one another, āintra-actingā to bring forth what appear to be solid separate things (Barad 2007).
One example of this can be seen in our own studies of simulation education involving mannequins (e.g. SimManĀ®) and simulated hospital wards, tutorsā instructions from the side, and video cameras through which studentsā performance is observed and assessed. Studentsā activity and knowledge is brought forth in material spaces that are simultaneously pedagogical, pretend-real medicine, and real materials entangled with what students do:
For many students entering the SimManĀ® scenario with the acute trauma, an initial difficulty is simply entering and engaging with the built simulated environment. It is foreign, they appear initially awkward, as though suddenly conscious of their bodies and hands as intruders in this space. One performs a rectal examination but forgets a glove. When SimManĀ® āvomitsā (gagging sounds from the room speaker), the tutor is side-coaching ā Get your hands in there! Really get into his mouth!
In the multi ward scenario the student doctor enters a cubicle, the patient is sitting in the bedside chair. The student draws near to take the history and sits on the bed, a cardinal error which he realises immediately but then seems unable to correct. He is also aware that he may now have failed the simulation. Yet he feels stuck there, unsure how to change the arrangements or conclude the session effectively. As one tutor explains, students find it difficult to respond proactively to the environment ā they react as though other people and events are doing things to them.
(from Fenwick & Abrandt Dahlgren 2015, p. 362)
Second, phenomena are taken to be gatherings of heterogeneous natural, technical, human and non-human elements. What appears to be an independent āobjectā, such as the mannequin students practice on, is not a static thing with inherent properties that sprang into being. Rather, it has been brought about through a history of negotiations, which generated its design and accumulated uses. If we examine the SimManĀ® mannequin now, in a particular situation, we realise that it is not separate from the particular ways in which it is being used. It is performed into being in this gathering of human and non-human dynamics ā it is an effect of these sociomaterial relations. Researchers examine these gatherings, asking how and why some elements become combined, some become included and others excluded, and most importantly, how elements change as they come together, as they intra-act. Everything ā such as standards of teaching practice, disciplinary identities, laboratory skills as well as objects and environments ā is performed into existence in webs of relations. Materials are enacted, not inert. They act, together with other types of things and forces, to exclude, invite, and regulate activity. This is not arguing that objects have agency (the capacity to act). Any educational practice, even one as commonplace as lecturing, is a collective sociomaterial enactment, not a question solely of an individualās cognitive and practical skills, as anyone whose computer has crashed in the middle of a presentation will testify.
Third, many sociomaterial perspectives accept uncertainty as an operating principle in everyday life, as well as in the knowledge, tools, environments and identities that are continually produced within it. Uncertainty is not just ambiguity: it means that chance and emergence are always operating in the unfolding configurations, which continually open a multiplicity of possibilities. Unpredictable novel patterns are always emerging. Sociomaterial theories offer specific analytic tools that can examine much more precisely just how these new assemblages, or combinations of things, are emerging, why they come together to produce and mobilise particular effects, and when they do not.
Within these broad common elements, there are very different approaches and views among sociomaterial perspectives. Here we provide a very brief introduction to four that are influential within the discussion of different aspects of higher education pedagogy ā actor-network theory (ANT), complexity theory, practice theory and new materialisms.
ANT is a methodology, not a theory, emerging from poststructural orientations and STS (Science and Technology Studies). It treats human and non-human elements as co-contributors to networks, which assemble and reassemble to generate the things of the world (e.g. Latour 2005). When anyone speaks of a system or āstructureā, like capitalism or racism, ANT asks, how has it been compiled? Where is it? What is holding it together? ANT traces how these assemblages are made and sustained, how they order behaviours as well as space and objects, but also how they can be unmade. ANT therefore is very good at examining taken-for-granted practices, such as curriculum implementation or assessment practices (e.g. Nespor 1994; SĆørenson 2009; Edwards 2011).
Complexity theory offers a range of approaches emerging chiefly from evolutionary biology and physics, cybernetics and general systems theories. Most view phenomena, events and actors as mutually dependent and mutually constitutive, emerging together in unpredictable, dynamic patterns. Emergence occurs through myriad interactions among diverse elements: these are non-linear and freely forming, have some overlap and a few simple constraining rules, but crucially have bottom-up organisation and multiple feedback loops. Complexity theorists in education such as Davis and Sumara (2006) and Osberg and Biesta (2007) are particularly interested in how to introduce these dynamics of emergence, nested systems, and self-organisation into classrooms, as well as how to help students learn to negotiate the dynamic complexity of life. It is important to mention the growing higher education interest in āpractice theoryā. This often works from conceptions of āknowing-in-practiceā, where knowing is a continuous enactment performed through assemblages that are taken to be more-than-human (e.g. Hager et al. 2012, Nicolini 2012). A wide range of research using these theories is tracing practice in different organisations. Studies might ask, how do different groups negotiate ways to work together when each is shaped by very different logics, instruments, material procedures, etc? Or, how does the introduction of a new technology reshape not only how people work and learn, but also their relations with others, their identities, and their knowledge?
Finally, an important branch of studies that is gaining widespread influence in educational research is calling itself ānew materialismsā to differentiate their approach from historical materialism rooted in Marxist conceptions (e.g. Coole & Frost 2010, Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012, Lenz Taguchi 2010). These are particularly interested in bodily meshings with materials of all kinds, and often work from ideas of philosopher Gilles Deleuze of process ontology and continuous ābecomingā, or Karen Baradās vocabulary of āintra-actingā to examine how particular social and material forces bring forth very different ways of being. Many chapters of this book develop these ideas in detail so we will not dwell on them here.
In general, sociomaterial approaches help us to examine established practices that have become taken for granted and entrenched: blackboxes, in Latourās (2005) words. Examples in higher education might include systems of establishing student records or timetables, spaces such as VLEs (virtual learning environments), lecture theatres, slide presentation software, and so forth. For higher education pedagogy, sociomaterial approaches offer resources to open the material relations holding such practices in place, and the ways in which many forms of inequity may be enacted through them. Concurrently, sociomaterial sensibilities attune to the unpredictability as well as the patterns that offer new possibilities, as well as the emergent effects of any attempts to change practices. Increasingly, some higher education researchers in developing countries, and particularly those focused on technology-enhanced learning, are turning to sociomaterial approaches to provide better ā more nuanced ā understandings of the complexities involved in the inextricable entanglements of diverse people and beliefs, policies and politics, technologies and environments (Quimno et al. 2013). Sociomaterial approaches offer methods by which to recognise and trace the multifarious struggles, negotiations and accommodations whose effects constitute the āthingsā in education, whether oneās focus is upon teaching and learning, identities and recognition, participation and access, research and the politics of knowledge, or freedom and justice. Rather than such concepts be taken as foundational categories, or objects with properties, they can be explored as themselves effects of heterogeneous relations. The concepts can also help us to open up the black boxes of the purposes of higher education and here we come to the discussion of criticality and pedagogy.
