Literacy practices through the lens of Actor-Network Theory: Compared cases

Abstract

This paper presents findings from empirical and theoretical research aimed at addressing new literacies from a relational perspective. Such a perspective is deemed relational insofar as it keeps technology, society, language and the literate subject on the same ontological plane, and emphasizes the tools and processes of circulation and mediation between what, from another viewpoint, might be called the local and the global/universal. Using concepts and insights from Actor-Network Theory, the study produced and compared two cases in which informants were taken as the central entrepreneurs of literacy networks. Empirical strategies for the generation of data included (i) keeping records of the informants’ online activities produced by specialized software (ii) participant and non-participant observation of literacy events and practices in which the informants were involved, and (iii) semi-structured interviews before, during, and after (i) and (ii). The data was then used to describe, through the lens of Actor-
Network Theory, how the informants related to their various literacies. The findings include the identification of a set of boundary objects and boundary practices which allowed informants to productively connect literacies distributed in different institutional, spatiotemporal and thematic contexts to a more global enterprise defined as the production of their own subjectivities. Such findings are discussed in the light of current research efforts geared towards the  development of a post-social approach to literacy studies. 

Key words: new literacies, subjectivity, Actor-Network Theory.