STS in/as education: where do we stand and what is there (still) to gain? Some outlines for a future research agenda

In his review of Kohn’s (2013) excellent book How forests think, Latour (2014) discusses differences and similarities between actor-network theory (ANT) and the semiotic ethnography as advanced by Kohn. In this essay, Latour – reflecting back on ANT’s adoption throughout the social sciences – provocatively states that ANT has turned into being ‘inoperative’. Whilst during its advent in the 1980s ANT had some powerful and generative effects, Latour argues, these effects were ‘short-lived’ because their generative potential shrunk very fast: scholars were saying largely similar things about different practices studied. Clearly, Latour was up to something. A similar argument was made a year before in the seminal An inquiry into modes of existence (2013), where he eloquently describes the first attempts of an (imaginary) anthropologist in effectuating ANT-inspired research. It is worth quoting the argument at length: