Technological agents? : Exploring the ethics, risks and politics of researching non-human actants

I am very interested in information technology and its uses, in particular the design and implementation of educational technologies used to support teaching and learning in higher education. I use actor-network theory (ANT) as a conceptual framework to research these technologies. ANT employs a sociotechnical approach that requires all actants (human and non-human) to be treated equally for the purposes of analysis. As a human and an ANT enthusiast, I found my ethics and research perspectives in conflict: is it intellectually desirable and politically responsible that 'agency' may be ascribed to nonhuman actants that are not able to speak for theluselves? In this chapter, I draw on ANT to investigate reflexively the role, risks and uncertainties of the researcher when researching non-human actants. Nonhuman actants do not have the same competencies as humans. It is impossible to interview a non-human actant. Instead the researcher relies on detailed descriptions of the network performances as evidence of the way that actants translate or exercise power within the network. Exanlples that illustrate how to construct the non-human actants' accounts of a network are drawn from a case study that investigates the implenlentation of an interactive videoconferencing (IVe) network at a multi-campus, regional university in Australia. There are many uncertiainties in researching educational technologies, such as the ethics of giving technical objects a 'voice' equal to that given to people. I use three key principles of ANT (agnosticism, generalised symmetry and free association) to describe some strategies that could be used to address the uncertainties that surround ascribing agency to technical objects in an ANT influenced research study of an educational technology.