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Over the past 2 decades, ethnographic, historical, and philosophical studies of science and technology have revealed the central role inscriptions play in the construction of knowledge. Inscriptions take this central role because they can be circulated intact, as immutable mobiles, in large actor networks. Inscriptions reduce the complexities of lived experience into a small number of dimensions: In the process of their production, the lives, work, and voices of those being inscribed and of many who participate in their inscription are made invisible and deleted. Inscriptions are produced and circulated in complex actor networks. Some actors take crucial positions in network at obligatory passage points, which confer power. Inscriptions are boundary objects when they are used in multiple communities. In this situation, inscriptions can be used to articulate and coordinate the activities across different communities despite their different inscription-related discourses and meanings. In this article, we first develop the analytical framework in which inscription and actor network are the central notions. We then exemplify this framework in a case study of grades and grading practices. Our analyses indicate how one type of inscription, grade, and its associated practices are aspects of knowledge and power, in Foucault's sense, that bring about and stabilize an educational actor network. We conclude by showing how the framework can be used to provide constructive poststructuralist analyses and how the efforts of critical and liberation pedagogies are undercut by the stability of existing networks and the grade-based technologies of differentiation they embody. J Res Sci Teach 35: 399–421, 1998.
Roth et al. (Wed,) studied this question.