On the Modes of Existence of Educational Beings
摘要
Bruno Latour’s comparative anthropology An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) brings together the many strands of his intellectual career—social studies of technological innovations, of law and of scientific practice, variously underpinned by Actor-Network Theory—into a single project that continues his life’s work of the unravelling of Modernity. Latour framed this project as open-ended, of being capable of incorporating new areas for exploration alongside those that he had already established. In this chapter, I accept Latour’s invitation to contribute to AIME and propose that the exploration of education—here understood in a broad sense and not simply as a formal organisational process within schools or universities—can be included within AIME, thereby offering new lines of inquiry for researchers in the field of education studies. Drawing on ethnographies of education as a methodology for empirical inquiry and for establishing objectivized knowledge concerning education in a manner that is commensurate to the underpinning epistemological and ontological principles of AIME, I propose that education, here understood as a social and cultural practice, be added to Latour’s schema as an additional mode of existence.