A Routledge Companion to Actor-network Theory

This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of ‘second generation’ ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities.

The companion has 38 chapters, each answering a key question about ANT and its capacities. Early chapters explore ANT as an intellectual practice and highlight ANT’s dialogues with other fields and key theorists. Others open critical, provocative discussions of its limitations. Later sections explore how ANT has been developed in a range of social scientific fields and how it has been used to explore a wide range of scales and sites. Chapters in the final section discuss ANT’s involvement in ‘real world’ endeavours such as disability and environmental activism, and even running a Chilean hospital. Each chapter contains an overview of relevant work and introduces original examples and ideas from the authors’ recent research. The chapters orient readers in rich, complex fields and can be read in any order or combination. Throughout the volume, authors mobilize ANT to explore and account for a range of exciting case studies: from wheelchair activism to parliamentary decision-making; from racial profiling to energy consumption monitoring; from queer sex to Korean cities. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the significance of ANT more broadly and provides an overview of the volume.

The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS, and anyone wishing to engage with ANT, to understand what it has already been used to do, and to imagine what it might do in the future.

Anders Blok is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. He is co-author (with Torben E. Jensen) of Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World (Routledge 2011) and co-editor (with Ignacio Farias) of Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, Atmospheres (Routledge 2016).

Ignacio Farias is Professor of Urban Anthropology at the Humboldt University Berlin. He is co-editor of Urban Assemblages. How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (Routledge 2009, with Thomas Bender), Technical Democracy as a Challenge for Urban Studies (2016, with Anders Blok) and Studio Studies. Operations, Topologies & Displacements (Routledge 2015, with Alex Wilkie).

Celia Roberts is Professor in the School of Sociology, Australian National University. She is co-author, with Adrian Mackenzie and Maggie Mort, of Living Data: Making sense of health biosensors (2019) and author of Puberty in Crisis: The sociology of early sexual development (2016).