Having a Say: Voices for all the Actors in ANT Research?

Abstract

This article explores some of the issues associated with giving non-human actors a voice of their own in actor-network theory based research. What issues do we face in doing so? Does doing so increase understanding of the issue to hand, bring to life and make more accessible and interesting the stories of these actors? Or does this anthropomorphism detract from the issues at hand? We discuss these broader issues and then present some findings from an ANT field study which investigated the implementation of institutional repositories and their relations with the spread of open access to scholarly publishing. We experiment with allowing some of the non-human actors to speak for themselves. We conclude with a discussion which opens the debate: does giving voice to non-human actors bring them to life and make them better understood as intimately entangled with each other and human actors in the sociomaterial practices of the everyday? And what are the challenges in doing so?