The Social Life Of A Herstory Textbook: Bridging Institutionalism And Actor-Network Theory [1st Edition] 9811543577, 9789811543579, 9789811543586

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Starting Point: The (Same Old) Representation Problem......Page 7
Herstory: Women History, Gender History, and Feminist Pedagogy......Page 9
The Case: La place des femmes dans l’histoire and the Education Nationale......Page 11
The Social Life of a Book......Page 15
A Twofold Story: Institutionalism and Actor-Network Theory......Page 16
Structure of the Book......Page 18
References......Page 20
2 A Story of Individuals and Institutions, Lessons from Institutionalism......Page 22
The Inhabited Institution Approach......Page 23
Individual Initiatives, Strategic and Opportunistic Action in Institutional Contexts......Page 25
Networking Across Institutional Contexts......Page 36
Limitations of the Institutionalist Version......Page 41
References......Page 43
3 A Story of Translations and Materiality, Lessons from Actor-Network Theory......Page 45
The Principle of Generalised Symmetry: Human and Non-human Actors......Page 46
The Principle of Isomorphism: Institutions as Chimeras......Page 49
The Network in ANT: What Does “Social” Mean?......Page 51
The Sociology of Translation: A Social Life of Displacements and Transformations......Page 52
The Contribution of ANT: A Plea for Theoretical Inconsistency......Page 54
A Story of (Material) Translation......Page 55
Materiality, Translation, and Education......Page 62
Bringing Institutions Back In: Translations in Institutional Contexts......Page 67
References......Page 73
Can the Sociology of Translation Be Institutionalist?......Page 75
Feminist Academic Activism in Education: Long-Haul Efforts, Piecemeal Achievements......Page 79
References......Page 83
Index......Page 85

Citation preview

The Social Life of a Her story Textbook Bridging Institutionalism and Actor-Network Theory

Massilia Ourabah

The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook “The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook is an original and exciting analysis by a hugely promising young scholar. It skillfully and elegantly bridges two theoretical frameworks typically seen as incompatible, and provides a rich ethnographic account of a timely, widely debated issue: how to do justice to gender and women’s perspectives in the context of mainstream education?” —Prof. Dr. Giselinde Kuipers, Research Professor of Sociology, Catholic University Leuven, Belgium “This is a very important and timely book. It moves beyond the mere observation of the inadequacy of gendered representations in education and asks: how does educational change happen in practice? Next to its empirical contribution, this book ingeniously brings together actor-network theory and the institutionalist sociological tradition. A must read!” —Prof. Dr. Jan Willem Duyvendak, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Massilia Ourabah

The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook Bridging Institutionalism and Actor-Network Theory

Massilia Ourabah Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences Université Libre de Bruxelles Brussels, Belgium

ISBN 978-981-15-4357-9 ISBN 978-981-15-4358-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4358-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

For this book, for helping me grow intellectually, for their wisdom and solicitude, I am indebted to the professors from whom I have learned so much. I wish to thank Dr. Herman Tak for his encouragement and wise advice, as well as my professors from the Research Master’s Social Sciences of the University of Amsterdam: Dr. Julie McBrien for being a model of kindness in a fierce academic world and Dr. Oskar Verkaaik for putting his trust in me. Finally, I am forever grateful to Dr. Marguerite van den Berg who has done all this and more, who has guided me, shielded me from drowning in self-doubt, and without whom this book would not exist. Thank you for everything Marguerite. Ce livre n’aurait pas non plus vu le jour sans la précieuse contribution des membres de l’association Mnémosyne et de toutes celles et ceux qui ont accepté de me rencontrer, de me parler de leur travail, ou de m’ouvrir leur salle de classe. C’est un chantier considérable que celui de la promotion de l’histoire des femmes et du genre, merci à elles d’apporter leur pierre à l’édifice. Enfin, ce livre doit énormément à celles et ceux qui ont, d’une façon ou d’une autre, tenu la plume avec moi. Merci à Aleth et Gonzague pour leur bienveillance infinie, merci à mes ami.es qui sont mes respirations – à Solène, Laura, Fripouille –, merci à ma famille, à ma tante et son soutien précieux, à Yanis et Anaïs que j’aime plus que tout, merci à mes parents que j’espère rendre fiers autant qu’ils me rendent fière, enfin merci à CH qui n’a jamais failli à me soutenir, m’encourager, et m’arracher par le rire à mes réflexions sociologiques. J’espère rire encore pour des années à venir. v

Contents

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Introduction

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A Story of Individuals and Institutions, Lessons from Institutionalism

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A Story of Translations and Materiality, Lessons from Actor-Network Theory

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Conclusion

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract The introduction contextualises the case study on the textbook La place des femmes dans l’histoire (LPFH). It reflects on the development of women and gender history and notes that this historiography has seldom been incorporated into French primary and secondary educational curricula. It explains the goal of the textbook LPFH to offer a more gender-sensitive narrative to history courses in the context of the French Education Nationale. This ambition aligns with the principles of feminist pedagogy which are briefly discussed. The introduction also describes the “social life of things” and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork approach. Finally, it presents the dual structure of the book which offers a version of the story grounded in the inhabited institution literature and another version grounded in actor-network theory. Keywords Gender and women history · Feminist pedagogy · Curriculum reform · Social life of things · Actor-network theory · Inhabited institution

What images do you like best on this cover? This one, ‘cause I know her from TV, and that one, ‘cause she’s pretty. —High school student about the cover of the textbook La place des femmes dans l’histoire (2010)

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Ourabah, The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4358-6_1

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Starting Point: The (Same Old) Representation Problem I am baffled by my own ignorance. This was my exact thought when I first heard about the procès de Bobigny. The procès de Bobigny was the trial of an underaged girl and the four women who helped her get an abortion after she had been raped in 1971 by one of her schoolmates. That trial had a crucial impact on the decriminalisation of abortion in France, and although I was born and raised in France, I had never heard about it until I was eighteen or nineteen. I remain regularly baffled whenever I encounter a historical event or personality as critical to women’s history as they are unfamiliar to me. Yet I went to school, attended history classes, did my homework, and read the assigned literature. So what went wrong? Why is it that Robespierre has been part of my French Revolution imagery for so long, but Olympe de Gouges is only a recent character? My wellattended history classes had to bear some responsibility. In 1975, the French Secretary of State for the Condition of Women Françoise Giroud commissioned a study on the representation of women in children’s textbooks. The study concluded that these texts conveyed a stereotypical image of economically unproductive women, an image that misrepresented the situation of women in the 1970s (Bousquet 1975). This report inaugurated a long tradition in France: fighting against sexist stereotypes and condemning the invisibility of women in textbooks and in the national curricula, the “school programmes ”. In the past forty years, many more studies, reports, and commissions have scrutinised the content of textbooks and programmes (e.g. Mang 1995; Février and Rouquier 1999; Sinigalia-Amadio 2011). Although the goal has remained the same over the years, the focus of analysis has notably evolved. Particularly, attention has shifted from misogynist stereotypes to all kinds of gendered representations, and the linguistic invisibility of women has become a growing concern. Despite efforts to eradicate the most caricatured gendered representations, what emerges from decades of scrutinising textbooks and programmes is the persistence of gender imbalance and stereotypes. For instance, the latest study shows that only 3.8% of biographies in history textbooks are about female figures, and that female scientists or artists are mostly described as wives or muses of their male contemporaries (Centre Hubertine Auclert 2011).

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This situation is not specific to France. The enduring under/misrepresentation of women is a shared characteristic of most educational curricula,1 and it is reasonable to presume that gender disparities can be found in virtually all school curricula. Moreover, the well-known self-fulfilling prophecy of under/misrepresentations has recently fed growing concerns for equal and fair representation of all in a variety of public domains, from figurative representation in the arts to democratic representation in politics. And considering the significance of primary and secondary school for early socialisation and education, efforts to undo the gross gender imbalance in educational curricula deserve close examination more than ever. Such is the aim of the present book. This book moves beyond the mere observation of the inadequacy of gendered representations in formal education in order to study an initiative whose goal is to effectively tackle the issue: a French history textbook focused on women and gender, La place des femmes dans l’histoire. Une histoire mixte (LPFH). In the form of a case study of the social life of this history text, this book explores a situated and material form of activism and considers the im/possibility for educational change in practice. In doing so, it asks the following questions: what levers of action can bring about educational change? How do various actors mobilise these levers in various institutional contexts? What is the role of material practices in education? Moreover, this book has an adjacent theoretical ambition. It approaches the case study from two different theoretical traditions: one grounded in institutionalist sociology, the other in actor-network theory. With this twofold theoretical approach, this book argues for the benefits of a dialogue between two distinct—oftentimes opposed—sociological traditions. The argument about feminist (academic) activism in education and the theoretical argument about institutionalism and actor-network theory are the two general aims of the present book, as presented in further detail in this introduction.

1 In 2007, the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring report noted “stereotypes persisting in learning materials and, too often, teachers’ expectations of girls and boys differing” (UNESCO 2006).

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Herstory: Women History, Gender History, and Feminist Pedagogy The choice to focus on the history curriculum in order to study gender in formal education is not incidental; it is to be understood in relation to the development of gender and women’s history. Initially, women’s history grew out of the 1960s’ women’s movement, thus grounding the origin of this scholarship in feminist activism. As Joan Kelly-Gadol (1987) argues, “women’s history has a dual goal: to restore women to history and to restore our history to women” (p. 15). Following this movement, the term “herstory” was coined as a not-so-funny pun intended to offer a historical narrative free of masculine biases. Women’s historiography started flourishing in the US in the late 1960s but took a few more decades to gain momentum in French universities. Notably, the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH) was founded in 1987, but Mnémosyne—the association which produced the textbook and French section of the IFRWH—was only created in 2000. On both sides of the Atlantic, the field has only attained academic legitimacy with difficulty, as the discipline has often been reduced to its feminist activist roots (Wieviorka 2004). The emergence and growth of this scholarship is also to be understood through the profile of its practitioners: in various national contexts, the development of women’s history was only possible because a generation of female historians had gained access to academia. Yet the historians who followed in their footsteps realised that to understand longlasting inequalities and the construction of femininities and masculinities alike, they needed to go beyond “women’s studies” and to explore the much wider field of “gender studies” (Kelly-Gadol 1987, p. 15). Fundamentally, women’s history and gender history are complementary. This complementarity is reflected in both the general aims of Mnémosyne—an association that states as its mission “the development and promotion of gender and women’s history”—and in the content of the LPFH textbook, as I shall explain later. In parallel and in line with the development of women’s and gender history, the 1960s’ women’s movement also saw the emergence of feminist pedagogy or, more accurately, feminist pedagogies. The plural is appropriate here, for there are virtually as many versions of feminist pedagogy as there are versions of feminism. So, while formulating an exhaustive definition of feminist pedagogy is a difficult task, it can nonetheless

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be noted that feminist pedagogues share two basic assumptions: the need for feminist emancipation, on the one hand, and the power of education for social change, on the other. Evidently, feminist pedagogues are first and foremost politically engaged feminists. As Kathleen Weiler (1991) explains, “feminist pedagogy is based on assumptions of the power of consciousness raising, the existence of oppression and the possibility of ending it, and the desire for social transformation” (emphasis added; p. 455). According to feminist pedagogues, this social transformation can come about through education. A few decades ago, Dale Spender (1982) noted that: Feminists are among those who are … beginning to assert that all educational institutions embody a particular way of viewing the world, that all educational institutions require their students to adopt this worldview and that it is a limited, distorted and destructive framework for making sense of the world. (author’s emphasis; p. 1)

Feminist pedagogues have questioned the idea that knowledge can be politically neutral and emphasised that it is always imbued with power relations (Jackson 1997, p. 459). It should be noted that the ambition of feminist pedagogues is significantly broader than merely changing the content of the lessons taught in school. Most of them advocate a radically different approach to education, for instance, one that blurs the teacher/student categories and values mutual development instead of competition, or one that promotes interdisciplinarity and team teaching. Yet the aspect of feminist pedagogy of most concern here is their critique of the supposed neutrality of “man made” knowledge (Spender 1980) and the corollary argument that “many of the legitimate meanings of our culture are false and misrepresentative” (ibid., p. 58). This argument is particularly relevant in the French context where the content of public education is conceived and celebrated as “universal”, yet “the universal is merely a half-universal” (Wieviorka 2004, p. 4); the criticism is here circumscribed to gender, but would be even more relevant from an intersectional perspective.

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The Case: La place des femmes dans l ’histoire and the Education Nationale How can the contribution of gender/women’s history and the principles of feminist pedagogy reach the classroom in an educational system largely impermeable to gender-related matters? This is ultimately the question asked by the present book. It is also the starting point for the writing of LPFH, which makes this manual particularly fit as the object of the present case study. The book, whose title translates to “The role of women in history: A diverse history” (although “diverse” is only the closest and imperfect translation of the French word “mixte”) is a history textbook centred on women and gender. As earlier noted, this book was produced by the association Mnémosyne and its publication has to be understood in relation to the historical development of the academic disciplines of gender/women’s history in France: the idea of a gender-oriented history textbook for secondary education was only possible once this historiography had acquired enough legitimacy within French academia, once this field was sufficiently elaborated and prolific, and once Mnémosyne historians had formally organised into an association. It then took a few more years to develop the project, produce the textbook, and then to publish it in 2010. The four-hundred-page textbook covers the totality of secondary education programmes . Thirty-three historians tackle the broad historical period that the book explores, from the birth of Egyptian and Hindu mythologies to the early twenty-first century. Some of these historians are women’s history specialists, others are gender historians, and the editors of the book deliberately wanted both “women” and “gender” chapters and case studies. For instance, the case studies titled “Gendered roles in agrarian calendars (eleventh/fifteenth century)”, “Men and women in slavery”, and “Masculinity and femininity in Nazi ideology” tend towards the gender side of the spectrum, while others, such as “The status of women in the Malian empire (thirteenth/fourteenth century)”, “Joan of Arc, history and myths”, and “The emancipation of women in the 1830s”, tend towards the women’s history side. Moreover, as these case studies suggest, LPFH offers both a social history of women and gender, and close-ups on remarkable, yet often forgotten, historical female figures. This double focus is, on the one hand, representative of the work of scholars specialised in women’s and gender history, and, on the other

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hand, motivated by a pedagogical impetus: social history breaks from the invisibilisation of women and the essentialisation of gender, while the spotlight on female historical characters introduces new role models for pupils (Dermenjian et al. 2010, p. 10). The book was a relative commercial success: since its publication in 2010, more than eight thousand copies have been sold. As it covers the national history syllabus, the text is mostly targeted at middle school (four years, from sixième to troisième) and high school teachers (seconde, première, terminale) who are eager to introduce a gendered and feminised dimension to their lessons. But it can also be used by primary school teachers and university students, or just read as an entry on women’s and gender history for anyone interested in the topic. The present study, however, focuses on the educational purposes and uses of the book in the context of the Education Nationale (the French educational system, higher education excluded). A French case study is particularly well-suited for studying the incorporation of gender-sensitive content in a formal educational curriculum. First of all, the French public administration is the typically centralised system, and notably for education. Since (at least) the birth of the Third Republic, public education has had a crucial role in the building of the French nation state (Johnson and Morris 2012). This legacy remains in the “strong conception of the role of school in the nation” (Falaize 2011, p. 87). Thus, decisions concerning the content of the programmes are highly centralised. As Leslie J. Limage (2000) explains, “the syllabus for each year of schooling is strictly decided by the Ministry of Education and teachers’ choice is limited to selecting the books that their pupils must purchase for their classes” (p. 77). It is within this defined space for action that the textbook navigates; although Limage’s statement should be nuanced, as French teachers apply an ill-defined principle of pedagogical freedom to more than the mere choice of textbooks. Moreover, the Conseil Supérieur des Programmes (CSP) in charge of drafting school curricula remains largely oblivious to the regular calls and recommendations formulated by multiple associations (Mnémosyne included) to incorporate gender-sensitive material in the school programmes . The resistance of the CSP to the inclusion of such material and the high level of centralisation of the French educational system makes it an appropriate site for studying alternative efforts to bring about educational change in a constraining institutional context.

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Moreover, the choice of a history textbook for the case study is not only justified by the developments of feminist academia but should also be considered in the context of the Education Nationale. The fact that a gendersensitive textbook such as LPFH has no equivalent in other disciplines is quite telling, especially when considering that the critiques of the lack of gender inclusiveness in history programmes and textbooks have been made about other school subjects as well (e.g. Centre Hubertine Auclert 2012, 2013). The production of a gender-oriented history textbook resonates with the very special position that the teaching of history holds in the Education Nationale. Within the history curriculum, the strong conception of the role of the school is even more pregnant, for history courses are thought to be the locus of the construction and transmission of the roman national (literally, “national novel”), as evidenced by the incorporation of civic education courses into the history-geography syllabus (Johnson and Morris 2012). Tellingly, the introduction to the 2010 seconde history programme (in effect when LPFH came out) states that history is the “necessary foundation for a citizenship that becomes effective in high school” (Ministère de l’Education Nationale 2010). The initiators of the LPFH project were well aware that the teaching of history can be a pathway for civic education. The explicit goal of the book is to allow pupils to better analyse the social mechanisms that produce gender inequalities and to offer girls and boys new role models. In line with feminist pedagogy and the feminist roots of women’s history, the historians who produced LPFH conceived it as an act of academic activism in favour of gender equality. Mnémosyne members are quite involved with the promotion of gender and women’s history within academia, but they reckon that their work will not be done until this discipline reaches primary and secondary education. Such was the intention behind La place des femmes dans l’histoire. The goal of LPFH was to offer a perspective on the national history programmes that questions their alleged universalism by adopting a gendered and feminised angle. In the present book, terms such as “gendered” and “feminised” are often used interchangeably for two reasons. First, as it was previously noted, the content of the book is quite diverse, and this diversity embodies the common roots as well as the porous boundaries between women’s history, gender history, and feminism. Second, there is no consensus among those interviewed for this case study on what LPFH is and does. The editors describe it as the product of academic (feminist) activism, while the publisher stresses that

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it is not an activist but an academic text (suggesting that these categories are mutually exclusive). As for the history teachers who use LPFH, some are very careful not to let their pupils think that they teach women’s history, otherwise, boys tend to feel discriminated against. Thus, the terminological ambiguity in the present book reflects a broader ambiguity surrounding the content and purpose of LPFH, and, more generally, a dense academic tradition that has often flirted with political activism.

The Social Life of a Book In order to understand how educational change can come about in practice, this book studies the multiple actors (non-human actors included), mechanisms, and institutional logics that can contribute to such change, or resist it. For this purpose, it adopts a material and situated approach borrowed from Arjun Appadurai’s (1988) Social life of things , building on his idea that that “from a methodological point of view it is the things-inmotion that illuminate their human and social context” (author’s emphasis; ibid., p. 5). Thus, the starting point for the case study was to consider the book as a thing-in-motion, a material entry into the study of the feminisation of education. Through the exploration of how the LPFH project came about, how the book was produced, and the journey it pursued, all the way down to the classroom, broader conclusions can be drawn about the possibility (or not) to teach a more gender-equal curriculum despite a constraining educational system. In telling the story of the social life of this textbook, the case study takes to heart the idea that “cases are stories with a message” (Herreid 1997, p. 92). Moreover, the benefits of a social-life-of-things approach to study educational change is that it offers a perspective on the whole educational chain, and highlights what goes into making a class and how. It is also in line with recent calls to study education through material practices (see Fenwick and Edwards 2011) and supports the argument that material practices are not incidental but central to educational practices and, consequently, to educational change. Therefore, the concept of the social life of the textbook structured the research design: the five-month fieldwork (conducted in 2017) started with the actors involved in the “birth” of the book, the editors and authors whose names and contact details were easily accessible and who were of crucial help for reaching other participants (using a “snowball strategy”). Following the chronological trajectory of the book, I then reached out to other actors involved in its production: the publisher

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and graphic designer. Finally, I focused on the distribution, promotion, and use of LPFH, and talked to local elected officials who bought it for schools in their districts, teachers who used it (or not) in the classroom, teacher trainers, and even a recreational reader of the book. Thus, this case relates a story that began in the past, years before LPFH was finalised and published in 2010, and ends in the present, in the classroom, with teachers and pupils. In order to trace the social life of the book, a multi-sited fieldwork was necessary. While most of the fieldwork was spent in Paris, following the thing-in-motion sometimes took on a very concrete geographical meaning as it occasionally required travelling to various parts of France. Three types of material were collected during this fieldwork: interviews, participant observations, and a variety of first-hand documents. Mainly, I conducted twenty-three semi-structured interviews (between thirty minutes and two hours in length) with people who had some relationship with LPFH. The interviews were conducted in French and recorded, then fully translated into English as they were being transcribed. A content analysis of the transcripts was then conducted based on several rounds of systematic coding and a constant comparison approach. I also conducted participant observation in three settings: a history class in a high school close to the southeastern mountain range, a historiographical workshop for teachers in the centre of the country, and a high school history class in a formerly industrial Parisian suburb. These participant observations were ideal for triangulation since I had also done interviews with the teachers there, so I could compare the two types of material. However, my main fieldwork frustration was certainly that I was only able to do three. The fact that it proved so difficult to find occasions to witness the book “live” is a triangulation tool in and of itself; it is evidence of the difficulty to effectively change the content of history lessons, since even teachers who said during the interviews that they used the book in class—or at least wanted to use it—never managed to do so in the five months of my fieldwork. Finally, I also collected various first-hand documents that were either accessible online or kindly shared with me by the participants in the study. To name but a few, this material includes: emails exchanged between editors and authors; drafts of chapters; the contract between the publishing house, the editors, and the association; letters sent to public authorities; history lessons; presentations to promote the book; videos of conferences; and more. These documents were also analysed using content analysis.

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A Twofold Story: Institutionalism and Actor-Network Theory This book recounts the story of the social life of LPFH. However, the story is not told once, but twice. There is a well-known literary and cinematographic trick that consists of chronicling the same events from the perspective of different characters. In these multiple-perspective films and novels, the point of view of one character allows for understanding aspects of the situation that remained invisible to the others. The juxtaposition of the different perspectives enables the viewer to have a better, more complete, idea of the situation. The present book offers a theoretical equivalent of this narrative technique: the story is first told from an institutionalist perspective, then from an actor-network theory (ANT) perspective. To readers familiar with these theoretical approaches, it may seem like an odd endeavour to associate them, for they appear quite antithetical. And indeed, they are. But just as in a multi-perspectival film, one theoretical angle on the story allows for understanding aspects left unaccounted for by the other version, and vice versa. They also emphasise different— yet complementary—implications of this case study for the broader topic of (feminist) educational change. Thus, the combination of both perspectives provides a more thorough analysis of the social life of LPFH. While the decision to adopt these two theoretical angles is grounded in the empirical journey of the textbook, the book’s argument goes well beyond the specific case study. Alongside conclusions that can be drawn about the feminisation of education, this book advocates building bridges between institutionalist and ANT sociologies. It argues that despite their contradictory assumptions, the strengths of one can adequately make up for the shortfalls of the other. Although a few scholars have considered drawing on other theoretical frameworks in order to dampen down some of ANT’s strongest epistemological assumptions (a topic discussed more in Chapters 3 and 4), there has not been—at least, to my knowledge— any attempt to reconcile these two sociological fields which largely evolve at a safe distance from each other. The mirroring and dual structure of this book is an exercise of doing critique dialogically and constructively: both scholarly approaches are extensively described in their respective chapters, which detail not only their potential connections and points of contact but also their contradictory assumptions and points of friction. Similarly, the feminist literature on education is too often isolated from

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other theoretical trends and debates, and thus barely benefits from them or contributes to them. Taking up institutionalism and ANT to study the gender mainstreaming of education is a plea to decompartmentalise feminist scholarship.

Structure of the Book Chapter 2 introduces institutionalist sociology, more specifically, the inhabited institution approach. The aim of this chapter is to identify the actors of the social life of the book, how they operate, and how the book travels. First, some theoretical clarifications about institutionalism are provided, which start by acknowledging the complexity and diversity that the notion of institution encompasses. This section contextualises the inhabited institution approach within the wider institutionalist scholarship, describes the specificity of this approach, and explains why the inhabited version of institutionalism is more suitable for the LPFH case. The main benefit of this approach—which is close to symbolic interactionism—is to reconcile an acute interest in individuals with a critical attention to the institutional factors that frame their (inter)actions. Then comes the institutionalist story of LPFH, a version that emphasises individual initiatives and opportunities for action in institutional contexts, showing how the individuals who take part in the social life of the book make strategic and opportunistic use of their institutional positions to do so. It shows that this book’s journey is only possible because the actors in its social life build and mobilise network ties that purposely cross institutional contexts. Finally, the last section of Chapter 2 reveals what is omitted by the foregoing institutionalist version of the story, the reason for this omission and, consequently, the perspective to adopt next. It argues that the institutionalist framework does not take into account the element of unpredictability in the book’s journey, and that it disregards the changes occurring to the book itself in the process of that journey. It concludes that these blind spots could be studied with an ANT-inspired approach, and so builds a bridge to the following chapter. Chapter 3 adopts a radically different theoretical perspective: the sociology of translation (or actor-network theory). This chapter relates what happens to the book during its social life through the concept of translation and, particularly, material translation. It begins by providing a thorough introduction to ANT, drawing from the original scholarship of Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law to present ANT’s

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epistemological stance and basic assumptions. It also explains how these assumptions can—or cannot—be of use to the present case. While it acknowledges that ANT’s attention to the making of associations and to materiality articulates well with studying the social life of a thing, it rejects ANT’s principles of generalised symmetry and isomorphism on epistemological, empirical, and ethical grounds. Moreover, it reflects on the possibility to mesh ANT with institutionalism, beginning by acknowledging that grand notions such as “institutions” and the analytical prominence granted to individuals in the inhabited institution approach are shunned by actor-network theorists. Instead of taking these contradictions as theoretical dead ends, this section argues that ANT can be used selectively, without some of its strongest assumptions. It also emphasises the contribution of the concept of translation, which is ultimately the main raison d’être of the ANT-inspired approach: the ANT conception of translations as dynamic, collective, and involving both transformations and displacements makes it a useful hermeneutic tool for studying the social life of LPFH. Occasionally, the introductory section of Chapter 3 takes some distance from the case study empirics in order to make space for a theoretical discussion on the benefits and limits of ANT. This is followed by the second version of the story, which focuses on the materiality of the book to specify how the manual evolves throughout its social life. It describes the various stages of its social life, as well as the materialisation and dematerialisation processes that occur between those stages. Afterwards, the significance of these processes for educational practice— specifically that materiality is not merely a theoretical concept, and that material concerns are crucial to teaching practices—is outlined. Finally, these translational processes are put back into their institutional context, in order to explore power imbalances within the translational chain. This final section makes the connection between the two theoretical frameworks, arguing that institutional contexts strongly impact translation processes. This means that actors in the social life of LPFH can have a more or less significant impact, depending on their respective institutional positions. I offer the concepts of institutional skills and opportunistic translations as productive combinations of institutionalism and ANT. Finally, the conclusion (Chapter 4) is twofold. First, it reasserts the main theoretical contribution of the book: the argument for bringing together institutionalism and ANT. It briefly reflects on the research process that led to this theoretical syncretism. The aim of this assemblage is to contribute to both the sociology of translation and the inhabited

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institution scholarship: the intuitionalist perspective can benefit from the dynamism and the focus on materiality of the sociology of translation; while an institutionalist approach can be an adequate antidote to ANT’s refusal to give analytical prevalence to human agents, to acknowledge their intentionality, and to consider the constraints and incentives of structural factors which significantly inform translation processes. The conclusion also reflects on how the research methods used relate to the different theoretical approaches. This theoretical discussion has implications for the book’s second, practical concern: what does the story of LPFH suggest about the prospect of feminist educational change? The textbook’s journey makes visible the great amount of work that a not-so-large group of people need to do to circumvent the top-down curriculum, only to produce a very marginal outcome. This is evidenced by the heavily diminished material form in which the textbook eventually reaches the classroom. The story of LPFH is thus placed back in relation to the tradition of feminist reformism, drawing attention to the difficulty of effectively practicing feminist education. It also notes the limits of market feminism, showing that purchasable goods, like textbooks, cannot effectively compensate for gender imbalances in a domain where the State holds such a dominant position. While this story is an inspiring example of academic activism, the case of LPFH highlights that, in a centralised educational system, change needs to be institutional to prove substantial.

References Appadurai, A. (Ed.). (1988). The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bousquet, C. (1975). “L’Éternel féminin” à l’école: Une étude sur l’image de la femme dans les manuels scolaires. L’Éducation, 241, 40–46. Centre Hubertine Auclert. (2011). Histoire et égalité femmes-hommes: peut mieux faire! La représentation des femmes dans les nouveaux manuels d’histoire de Seconde et de CAP. https://www.centre-hubertine-auclert.fr/ outil/la-representation-des-femmes-dans-les-manuels-d-histoire-de-secondeet-de-cap-etude. Accessed 27 December 2019. Centre Hubertine Auclert. (2012). Égalité femmes-hommes dans les manuels de mathématiques, une équation irrésolue? Les représentations sexuées dans les manuels de mathématiques de Terminale. https://www.centrehubertine-auclert.fr/sites/default/files/images/etude_math_2012_cha.pdf. pdf. Accessed 27 December 2019.

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Centre Hubertine Auclert. (2013). Les manuels de français se conjuguent au masculin. La représentation des femmes dans les manuels de français de Seconde. https://www.centre-hubertine-auclert.fr/outil/la-representation-desfemmes-dans-les-manuels-scolaires-de-francais-etude. Accessed 27 December 2019. Dermenjian, G., Jami, I., Rouquier, A., & Thébaud, F. (2010). La place des femmes dans l’histoire: une histoire mixte. Paris: Belin/Mnémosyne. Falaize, B. (2011). École, islam et roman national. Hommes et migrations. Revue Française de Référence sur les Dynamiques Migratoires, 1294, 84–88. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (Eds.). (2011). Actor-network theory in education: A focus on educational change [Special Issue]. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(1), 1–14. Février, C., & Rouquier, A. (1999). La part des femmes dans l’histoire enseignée. Cahiers Pédagogiques, 372(2), 48–52. Herreid, C. F. (1997). What is a case? Bringing to science education the established teaching tool of law and medicine. Journal of College Science Teaching, 27 (2), 92–94. Jackson, S. (1997). Crossing borders and changing pedagogies: From Giroux and Freire to feminist theories of education. Gender and Education, 9(4), 457–468. Johnson, L., & Morris, P. (2012). Critical citizenship education in England and France: A comparative analysis. Comparative Education, 48(3), 283–301. Kelly-Gadol, J. (1987). The social relation of the sexes: Methodological implications of women’s history. In S. Harding (Ed.), Feminism & methodology (pp. 15–28). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Limage, L. J. (2000). Education and Muslim identity: The case of France. Comparative Education, 36(1), 73–94. Mang, P. (1995). Les manuels d’histoire ont-ils un genre? In M. de Manassein (Ed.), De l’égalité des sexes. Paris: CNDP. Ministère de l’Education Nationale. (2010). Programme d’histoire et de géographie en classe de Seconde Générale et Technologique. Bulletin officiel spécial n° 4. Sinigalia-Amadio, S. (2011). Le genre dans les manuels scolaires français: Des représentations stéréotypées et discriminatoires. Tréma, 35/36, 98–115. Spender, D. (1980). Man made language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Spender, D. (1982). Invisible women: The schooling scandal. London: Women’s Press. UNESCO. (2006). Education for All Global Monitoring Report. Strong foundations: Early childhood care and education. Paris: UNESCO. Weiler, K. (1991). Freire and a feminist pedagogy of difference. Harvard Educational Review, 61(4), 449–475. Wieviorka, A. (2004). Quelle place pour les femmes dans l’histoire enseignée? Report for the Conseil Economique et Social, Paris.

CHAPTER 2

A Story of Individuals and Institutions, Lessons from Institutionalism

Abstract This chapter offers a version of the story of the book La place des femmes dans l’histoire (LPFH) grounded in the institutionalist literature, more specifically in the inhabited institution approach. First, the chapter provides theoretical clarifications on the inhabited institution approach and how this approach differs from other institutionalist trends. Then, the chapter proceeds with the story of LPFH. First, the emphasis is on individual initiatives and opportunities for action in institutional contexts. Secondly, the focus is on the constitution and use of network ties across institutional contexts. The last section identifies the elements omitted in the institutionalist story (unpredictability and materiality) and points to actor-network theory as an alternative theoretical framework for studying these undisclosed dimensions of the social life of the book. Keywords Inhabited institution · Institutional context · Institutional constraints and resources · Strategic and opportunistic action · Network ties · Negotiated order

The first version of the story of La place des femmes dans l’histoire is grounded in an institutionalist-inspired sociology. The aim of this version is to identify the actors of the social life of the book, how they operate, and how the book travels. We begin with some theoretical clarifications about institutionalism before turning to the story of LPFH, one

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that emphasises individual initiatives and opportunities for action in institutional contexts. A second focus of the story is the use of network ties across various institutional contexts. The chapter closes on a discussion of what elements are omitted in the institutionalist version of the story, and the reasons for this omission. This discussion paves the way for actornetwork theory as an alternative theoretical framework.

The Inhabited Institution Approach Providing a comprehensive definition of an institution is not an easy task. Certainly because “sociologists find institutions everywhere, from handshakes to marriages to strategic-planning departments” (Powell and DiMaggio 1991, p. 9). So Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio turn for clarification to the work of Lynne G. Zucker, who writes: institutionalization is both a process and a property variable: it is a phenomenological process by which certain social relationships and actions come to be taken for granted, that is part of the ‘objective situation,’ while at the same time it is the structure of reality defining what has meaning and what actions are possible. (Zucker [1983, p. 25] cited in Powell and DiMaggio 1991, p. 15)

Zucker’s definition is broad enough so as to encompass the diversity of institutional thoughts, for there is no such thing as institutionalism, really, only a body of scholarship loosely connected by the assumption that institutions are a key component of human societies and, therefore, should be the focus of sociological analysis. First, it is possible to distinguish between an “old” and “new” institutionalism. The “old” institutionalism—that of Talcott Parsons or Philip Selznick—tends towards the “action side” of the institutionalist spectrum, while the “new” institutionalism—that of Powell and DiMaggio—tends to focus on the “structure side” (Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997). More explicitly, this means that “old” institutionalists pay greater attention to the “guts” of institutions, that is, the people working within those institutions. This is the sort of institutionalism that is of interest in the LPFH case study. The relevant institutionalist trend here is that of the descendants of the “old” institutionalism, and notably Tim Hallett and Marc J. Ventresca (2006) who have appropriated and elaborated Maureen A. Scully and W.E. Douglas Creed’s (1997) concept of inhabited

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institutions . They make their affiliation with old institutionalists explicit by paying tribute to the conceptualisation of institutions as “composed of people who act, at times in concert and at times in conflict, within the confines of an immediate working context, and within a larger environment” (Hallett and Ventresca 2006, p. 214). They also emphasise the “embeddedness ” (authors’ emphasis; ibid., p. 231) of individuals within institutions, which is the aspect of the institutionalist scholarship most relevant to the present case. The shared goal of institutionalists, “old” and “new”, is to understand the workings of institutions: how they come into being, sustain themselves, reproduce themselves, change, evolve, and eventually die and make room for new institutions. But this is not the aim of the present study. Here, the focus is on individuals, those who “inhabit” institutions, since—as explained in more detail later—they are the engine of the social life of LPFH. However, a focus on individuals is not synonymous with an individualistic frame of analysis. As Powell and DiMaggio (1991) explain, the renewed interest in institutionalism is “a reaction against the behavioral revolution of the recent decades, which interpreted collective political and economic behavior as the aggregate consequences of individual choices” (p. 2). Consequently, they—and other neo-institutionalists—have opposed to the behavioural model a highly structuralist one. So structural at times, this model can resemble a sort of “disembodied idealism” (Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997). In contrast, institutionalist frameworks, such as the inhabited institution, aim for a middle ground: it shows an acute interest in people and their (inter)actions while also acknowledging the institutional logics that frame and inevitably impact such (inter)actions. The notion of inhabited institutionalism takes root in the symbolic interactionist tradition, and more specifically in the negotiated order approach, here summarised by Gary Alan Fine (1984): In observing organizations from a distance, we may believe we see a stable, unchanging system of relationships. Yet, the negotiated order approach has sensitized researchers to the fact that these relations are ultimately dependent upon the agreement of their parties and that they are constructed through a social, rather than entirely policy driven, process. (emphasis added; p. 243)

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Again, this study of the social life of LPFH does not aim to map out the functioning of organisations (and institutions more broadly) as the abovequoted passage suggests. But it does take inspiration from “research [that] centers on work activities as a kind of ‘agency’ within institutional contexts” (Hallett and Ventresca 2006, p. 215). A major goal of the institutionalist project is therefore to analyse the influence that institutional contexts hold over individuals. The conclusion that these institutionalists have come to is that the “embeddedness” of individuals in institutional contexts makes for an ambiguous situation: “institutions both enable and constrain social actors” (Fligstein 2001, p. 107). It should be noted that this conclusion derives from qualitative and agent-centred research. This is of importance because, in contrast with neo-institutionalists whose quantitative and regression analyses have led to “higher levels of abstraction” (Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997, p. 410), inheritors of the “old” institutionalism have opted for a more ethnographic methodology in “an effort to get closer to empirical reality” (Hallett and Ventresca 2006, p. 228). This methodological framework should be highlighted all the more in the context of the present study since it has implications for possible connections with ANT, as those theoretical approaches share methodological affinities. John Law (2009) writes: “[ANT] is grounded in empirical case studies. We can only understand the approach if we have a sense of those case studies and how these work in practice. … Some other parts of social theory (for instance symbolic interactionism) work in the same way” (emphasis added; p. 141). These few explanatory elements should help to better understand the first version of the story of the social life of LPFH, a story of individual initiatives and institutional contexts. Yet, as the story runs its course, other aspects of institutionalism come to the fore.

The Story of La place des femmes dans l ’histoire: Institutionalist Version Individual Initiatives, Strategic and Opportunistic Action in Institutional Contexts “So this textbook thing, do we make it or what?” Pascale—author and former president of the association Mnémosyne— recalls that when she got into the board, in the mid-2000s, Annie would always take the floor during annual general assemblies to bring up the

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topic. Annie is one of the editors of the book. Everyone agrees that she played a crucial role in the project. Yet she was not the only one. She needed the other three editors to orchestrate this enterprise with her: One day [Annie] came to a meeting, I can’t remember which one it was, and she said it would be nice to make a book … and she said “who would be interested? We would need people to coordinate etcetera” and so…Françoise, Irène and I agreed to devote our time to this. …The four of us committed to this, I did this on top of my own work; everyone did it in addition to their ongoing work, we did it because we could feel the relevance of the project. (Geneviève, editor and author)

LPFH is the product of volunteer work. The four editors decided to devote a significant amount of time and energy to the production of the book because they shared the same deep conviction: “the relevance of the project”. Although they do not have the same profession—university professor and researcher, high school history teacher, educational inspector, researcher, and textbook author—, they have all been trained as historians and have some knowledge of secondary education. Most importantly, they are well aware of the critique made against the lack of gender inclusiveness of school programmes . Some of them have even contributed to this critique and formulated recommendations to the Conseil Supérieur des Programmes—the institution in charge of drafting the national syllabi: Now the [former] history general inspector is retired, but Annie knew him well and when we asked the history general inspector to introduce a women dimension in the programme formulations he responded two things; the first one was “it’s not necessary because now it goes without saying” which is wrong, and the second one was “yes, but you understand that if I put women, I’ll also have to include Black people, homosexuals, Jewish and Muslim people, and so it’s dangerous” which are two arguments…you know, both equally stupid… (Irène, editor and author)

Confronted with the impossibility to substantially change the programmes , the Mnémosyne board opted for another channel of action. Action: this is a key dimension of the project. LPFH is the outcome of the collective work of a few motivated individuals who made the same observation—the invisibility of women and gender in the historical narrative taught in schools—and decided to take action, to do something about

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what they considered to be a problem. As mentioned in the introduction, the historians who initiated the project conceived it as academic activism: It’s true that now we have done a lot of things to criticise the representation of women in textbooks, but really we should also do things to help teachers do something else… It’s true that…it cheers me up to think about how we can change things, and not always just denouncing what is wrong. (Arlette, author)

In order to do something, they decided to make a thing, a book, a textbook for primary and secondary education: “So there was a whole reflexion which developed and eventually we thought ‘well of course, there needs to be a textbook in which women are really there…fully there’” (Mathilde, author and former board member). In these early stages of the social life of the book, they did not have a publisher yet. They nonetheless decided to start working on the project and, to do just this, they needed funding: first, to cover their expenses; secondly, to have a solid financial advance to convince potential publishers to invest in the production of the book. So they turned the Conseil Regional of the Ile-de-France region (regional government of Paris and its surroundings): We looked for subsidies and … we found a call for tenders from the Ilede-France regio about…I don’t know what the terms were exactly, a call for tenders which must happen every year for projects about equality of chances, or men-women equality or promoting equality, I don’t know what the term was. And so we applied…we replied to this call for tenders with our project of a textbook that promoted this equalitarian idea, the promotion [of this idea] etcetera etcetera … but these are always very boring forms to fill out you know….about the association, the project, you have to explain it with terms that are valid to the funders, so you have to make guesses on what they expect to read. (Françoise, editor and author)

Françoise’s account introduces two major mechanisms of the social life of LPFH: the strategic use of institutions and the reliance on opportunities for action. Let us begin with the strategic use of institutions. Françoise makes clear that when they applied for the regional subsidy, they did not just present their project and hoped for the best. Instead, they tried to anticipate what the Conseil Regional would be more likely to finance. They tried to fit into institutional guidelines. It is perhaps even more evidently illustrated in

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the subject of the letter that Françoise wrote to the president of another region (this time as she was promoting the book): Subject: Action in favour of men-women equality in secondary education (distribution of a mixte history textbook)

Here, Françoise purposely introduced her letter with terms that fitted the official regional policy—“actions in favour of men-women equality”. The strategic use of institutions is part and parcel of the way individuals deal with the institutional context. As Neil Fligstein (2001) notes: “New institutional theories emphasize the existing rules and resources that are the constitutive building blocks of social life. I want to add that the ability of actors to skilfully use rules and resources is part of the picture as well” (emphasis added; p. 107). Some of the editorial choices are also the product of this ability of actors to skilfully use rules and resources; in particular, the use of the programmes to structure the book. In the preface of the book, the programmes are described as “both a chance and an obstacle” (Dermenjian et al. 2010, p. 7); a phrase that comes very close to the institutionalist idea that institutions both enable and constrain. I asked Françoise to expand on that: Françoise: So a chance because the ministry guideline says, said, that women should be taken into account etcetera etcetera and a constraint because we had to… if we don’t follow the programmes, since teachers have the obligation to stick to them … they wouldn’t have enough time [to teach additional lessons]. So by sticking to the main themes of the programmes, by emphasising this ministry guideline, we justified the book. Massilia: And an obstacle? Françoise: Obstacle because there are things that we didn’t mention and…hum…there are blanks of course … hum…yes I think it is about having to stick to themes that are not necessarily the [most relevant] themes…

How editors and authors made strategic use of the institutional guideline of the programmes is quite straightforward: they used programmes to ease the work of teachers as well as to “justify” the book, again, to fit into institutional guidelines. However, Françoise’s explanation is slightly more confused when it comes to the constraining aspects of the programmes .

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This was a recurring observation in the production stages of the book (and an observation which ran against my expectations): in the production stages, programmes enabled more than they constrained. Whenever authors and editors were asked how constraining programmes were in the writing stages, they would respond with frowned eyebrows and unconvinced looks: Massilia: Going back to the writing of the book, were programmes a constraint? Or at least a guideline to… Arlette (author): Well actually I have to say that I didn’t look at all at what was written on slavery in the programmes. I know that there is probably not much about it and I’m not sure that they mention women in the history…of slavery! [laughing] … Here, since it is a much wider project, [primary and secondary] education as a whole, we didn’t have to worry too much about what was written precisely…

What Arlette’s last sentence suggests is not so much that programmes were irrelevant, but that the comprehensive structure of the book—which covers the totality of the programmes —allowed for some distance with the specific guidelines. Yet this comprehensive structure is not incidental. It is an editorial choice that is also shaped by institutional constraints, yet constraints from a different institutional field, the publishing field: So I can’t remember when we started sending projects to publishers, and I think that from there on we knew that we would … make only one textbook; making seven textbooks [one per secondary education level] was really too much, and first we said that we would make only one textbook in which we would include topics and themes which, in one way or another, whatever the phrasing, would eventually end up … in the programmes. We were in the midst of programmes reforms at the time… so first we said “let’s wait until all the new programmes are out” and then…eventually we thought “we have to go for it”… eventually we settled on a table of content and we said “yes programmes might change, but these chapters will always be useful.” (Irène, editor and author)

In the earliest stages of the social life of the book, Mnémosyne board members considered the option of making one book per middle and high school level. However, they were quickly confronted with the constraints

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of the publishing field: no publisher would make the highly risky investment of producing seven women/gender history textbooks. Thus, it is not so much that programmes were not constraining, but that the institutional constraints of the publishing field overtook those of the educational field. To the institutionalist assertion that “individuals shape their own actions in conformance with the structure, policies, and traditions of the social world around them” (Fine 1984, p. 242), I would add that they also have to navigate and articulate between several sets of such structure, policies, and traditions, that is to say between several institutional contexts. One of the ways that people can make strategic use of institutions is through seizing opportunities for action. This is how the book was chosen for publication: It’s true that there was both, there was a genuine demand from teachers regarding…you know, how to…how to talk about…how to balance the historical discourse which is obviously very…very masculine, and to see how…to both explain why it was masculine and also to offer different perspectives than the perspectives that are in school textbooks, so that teachers have more material, more resources. When I saw this project that was sent by Mnémosyne, I thought this could be the occasion to…to do such a thing. (Yves, publisher)

The publisher saw in the Mnémosyne project an opportunity—the “occasion”—to concretise a project that his company already had, to respond to a market demand already identified. What is also interesting in Yves’s account is the use of the first person: at the publication stage as well, the social life of LPFH is dependent upon an individual initiative: Massilia: Regarding the selection process of such a project, how does it work? Is it you who…? Yves: Yes it’s quite simple… There was a discussion between the history team, the general management, the commercial department and me but it’s more about [technicalities]. But regarding the choice to publish it or not …only the publisher is in charge of the decision.

Yves single-handedly made the choice to publish the book. To put it into institutionalist terms, he made skilful use of his institutional position as publisher to contribute to the social life of the book. The same holds true for the elected officials who promoted the textbook. I talked to two of them: Nathalie who held a mandate in a Conseil

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Regional, and Brigitte, in a Conseil Départemental (in France, departments are the level of local governance between the municipality and the region). I was able to talk to only two of them because, in all likelihood, Nathalie’s region and Brigitte’s department are the only two that bought and distributed the textbook to their schools—high schools for the region and middle schools for the department. They are the only two, out of the twenty-two Conseil Régionaux and nighty-eight Conseil Départementaux at the time. And it would not even have been the case, had it not been for the individual initiatives of Nathalie and Brigitte: Massilia: And so…how did it happen? Was it your decision? Brigitte: Yes it was my decision … I did not ask for the president’s opinion. Because well it was an amount of money extremely insignificant to us … So I talked to the vice-president in charge of education about it, who agreed to this quite easily because he was a convinced man. And then he gave the instructions to his department, I did not do much more than this. As long as the political instruction is given the staff follows the order. Massilia: Okay, so there weren’t any obstacle to this initiative? Brigitte: No, no at all. No…I had enough…let’s say power to be able to impose this in one way or another… But now with the current team in charge of the department I’m not sure that [it would have happened] [laughing]. The political sensitivities of this or that person are to be taken into account you know.

Nathalie’s experience is very similar to Brigitte’s. In both cases, the purchase of the book was the result of the individual decision of local officials who were sensitive to initiatives promoting gender equality, who could see the value of the book, and who had the adequate institutional position to buy and distribute a copy for every school in their district. As Brigitte explained later in our conversation: “I was in the right position for making decisions and taking action”. This opportunistic use of institutional resources to advance a political agenda resembles the work of “grassroot activists in the workplace” that Maureen Scully and Amy Segal (2002) have described. They have observed that these activists have “a piecemeal approach to change” (ibid., p. 126), and that “the sources of piecemeal change are opportunistic moments that employees can seize” (emphasis added; ibid., p. 128); opportunistic moments such as the publication of a gender-sensitive textbook for secondary education. Moreover, they make use of the institutional resources already at their disposal to advance their

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activist agenda (ibid., p. 153). In our specific case, buying books is part of such institutional means of action. This aspect is even more obvious when we consider the details of the purchase of the books: You have to keep in mind that the department’s budget is one point five billion Euros – so spending three thousand Euros is really not a big deal. I had a one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-Euros budget. Had the Youth Department not agreed to take care of this, I would have, with my own budget, but since they accepted well it was very fine; it was more money for me to spend on something else! (Brigitte)

Once Brigitte decided that purchasing copies of LPFH was a valuable investment, she would have made use of any institutional means available—here, any budget available—to make the purchase. It was, overall, a very easy procedure, and an informal one as well: Massilia: And in such cases, when you asked the Youth Department to purchase it and everything, are there archives of that work or is it just…? Brigitte: No I think it was done orally. I don’t think so…I didn’t have to…in my position I didn’t have to write a letter to my colleague. I just mentioned it, you know, in a hallway! [laughing]

Such informal encounters—that nonetheless result in concrete institutional outcomes—are familiar modalities of action to institutionalists (see O’Toole and O’Toole 1981). They contribute to drawing proponents of the inhabited institution approach (and other institutionalists with similar views) to the conclusion that “institutions are not inert cultural logics or representations; they are populated by people whose social interactions suffuse institutions with force and local meaning” (Hallett and Ventresca 2006, p. 226). Moreover, in this case, the ability of Brigitte and Nathalie to make strategic use of their institutional positions and resources largely counterbalanced the institutional constraints that they could have been confronted with; they were in a position that exempted them from bureaucratic procedures and budgetary restrictions. The mechanisms that are the engine of the aforementioned stages of the social life of LPFH are also crucial in the latest stages, that of the users and readers of the book. The teacher trainers I talked to, for instance, are quite aware of the possibility to make strategic use of one’s institutional position, and do not hesitate to do so. This is the case of Fanny, a high

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school history teacher who also works as a trainer in an ESPE—the French training schools for teachers. She described one of the training sessions that she had been in charge of: Fanny: And so that year the order was not at all…the order from the Education Nationale never goes in that direction [of gender and women’s history] [laughing]. The order was about differentiated instruction, and possibly something about learning to learn. So personally, pedagogical aspects, only pedagogical aspects, I’m not really interested when it’s just this. So I suggested a big chapter on differentiation but applied to women in the Revolution… Massilia: And these are not training sessions specifically about integrating women to…? F: No no. But it’s true that you know [laughing] I extensively use the examples that…for instance Emilie du Chatelêt [a French physicist] I use her for a lot of different training topics come to think about it. M: Okay, so you spread [women’s history] through the trainings sessions that you give? F: That’s it, exactly, as soon as I can.

It is mostly through the individual initiatives of actors seizing the opportunities offered by their institutional positions that gender and women history spreads to secondary and primary education and, more specifically, that the book LPFH travels. As Alice, author and high school teacher, confirms, “I often presented the book to other primary and secondary teachers during the training sessions I was invited to participate to”. Trainers like Fanny or Alice are typical of those “actors [who] can use existing institutions to found new arenas of action” (Fligstein 2001, p. 107). In their particular case, Fanny and Alice used ESPEs as such arenas of action. The ability of actors to make skilful use of their institutional positions does not mean, however, that institutional constraints are always so easily circumvented. When it comes to history teachers, the weight of institutional constraints heavily increases. First, while the writers and editors of the book agreed that programmes were not too constraining, teachers would undoubtedly beg to differ: Massilia: Okay, and so in the content of your classes do you try to integrate a gendered/feminised dimension?

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Cécile (history teacher and Mnémosyne board member): So…how to answer. Yes it is an ever-growing concern for me to do it. But it wasn’t obvious in the beginning because…in history and geography actually we have one big issue which is the programmes, the massive programmes. The first concern, I think for everyone, is … how to manage to finish – knowing that we never do … – but how to do the maximum of what we are supposed to do. And it’s a constraint that is really strong and personally, for a long time, I thought that it was not possible to give myself an additional constraint by modifying the content of the programmes, because at the end of the day this is what it means. And so for a long time I did a radical distinction between my teaching in high school and my work as a [women’s history] researcher which was a bit schizophrenic [laughing] but that was it!

Despite the heavily constraining aspect of the programmes , Cécile eventually decided—as she gained teaching experience—to limit the schizophrenia and integrate women and gender to her high school lessons. In order to do this, she made opportunistic use of the programmes . For instance, she decided to change the traditional outline of the seconde lesson on the Athenian society and give it a gendered twist. Below is the alternative outline from her lesson (emphases added): Part I: The Athenian city, a civic community in which men and women share respective roles A. The Athenian city and its spatial organisation B. The citizens: a free population of men, women, and children Part II: The Athenians: a political group composed solely of men A. B. C. D.

Equality before the law Restrictive citizenship Rights and duties of the citizens Democratic debates

Even though programmes are quite specific, the principle of pedagogical freedom allows teachers to approach guidelines as they please. It is in this institutional breach that teachers like Cécile can seize opportunities to teach a more gender-inclusive historical narrative. In the case of teachers as well, the social life of LPFH prospers in the articulation of individual initiatives, opportunities for action, and institutional constraints. The

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principle of pedagogical freedom is, in the context of the French Education Nationale, the sort of freedom that Fine (1984) emphasises: “social actors … have the freedom to operate strategically in organisational environments, despite real constraints” (p. 242). Yet “opportunistic moments for enacting passion” (Scully and Segal 2002, p. 147) cannot completely overthrow the burdening institutional constraints that the programmes represent. Even more so as the use of such opportunistic moments is entirely based on individual initiatives, which makes these opportunities very subjective. The Athenian lesson is a case in point for that matter. Some teachers, like Cécile, think that this chapter is particularly fit for the teaching of gender history, for instance Clémentine: For [the Greek Antiquity] yes I’ll be able to…I have some documents precisely…I have the story of a priestess in Athens for instance, to talk about the role of women in religion and, precisely, showing that women are excluded from citizenship in Athens and in Rome; there is the possibility to do things about this.

On the other hand, Fanny finds this lesson unfit for the integration of women and gender, and for the very reason that Clémentine argues the opposite: There are lessons in which it works out great, lessons in which it works out a lot less so I don’t have…I don’t manage for now to have a gendered dimension in all my lessons, in all my chapters… So now for instance about [the Athenian] citizenship, considering the fact that the lesson is really focused on…“why is the Athenian democracy pioneering at the time?” Since it creates the notion of citizenship and it gives power to a certain part of the population, well consequently it’s not central at all to mention the status of women in Athens etcetera, so I just mention it a bit but…just a bit because…because the programme is what it is.

Clémentine, Cécile, and Fanny might not find opportunities in the same programme chapters but they—and the other teachers I interviewed— all share Fanny’s conclusion: the impossibility to integrate women and gender to all their lessons. For some chapters, the programme guideline makes a gendered or feminised approach virtually unfeasible:

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And I try always…either the chapter is completely adapted to this … or I try to integrate the question “what about women in all this?” But it’s not always adapted to this. It has to remain coherent and should not be too artificial either. This is what I have to work on…when it’s really too artificial and I don’t manage to do it…I don’t try any harder. (Clémentine)

Clémentine’s account is a telling example of the institutionalist observation that “real constraints direct and channel the actions of individuals” (Fine 1984, p. 246). In the case of teachers, programmes are real constraints that inhibit their efforts to infuse feminised and gender-sensitive nuances to their teaching. So, if even highly motivated teachers struggle to include women and gender history, it seems logical then that the book LPFH only ends up in a small number of hands or, to the least, that it is effectively used by merely a handful of teachers. This is a fact that Cécile deplores: “I see it quite clearly in my high school, we have one copy in the library and one copy in the history cabinet…it’s not used, they are not used”. The social life of La place des femmes dans l’histoire is an inspiring story of individual initiatives which, on the downside, means that it cannot be much more than anecdotal. If individual initiatives are the engine of the story, they are also the very reason why the effect of this enterprise can only be limited in scope. LPFH is a drop in the ocean of the very masculine historical narrative taught in French schools. And yet, all along its social life, it required the active work of a few motivated individuals who organised strategically, and notably through the constitution and use of network ties—as we shall now see. Networking Across Institutional Contexts Since individual initiatives are so crucial to the social life of the book, a significant part of the success of this enterprise depends on the mobilisation of a network of social actors who can multiply these initiatives, a network as dense and diverse as possible. This is a major mechanism of the social life of LPFH, and a mechanism which informs an aspect of the story that has been neglected so far, that is, how the book travels. It is through the weaving and mobilisation of a network of social actors across various institutional fields that this journey is possible. Let us rewind the story and go back to the Mnémosyne board.

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Making a textbook is a great idea, but now someone has to write it. And since there are thirty-six chapters to be written, the editors turned to their network of women and gender historians for help. Mathilde, an author, recalls how she joined the project: So how…well it’s because I was part of the network of historians working on the topic of women, I was at the time a member of Mnémosyne, …, I know Françoise very well, we studied together a long long time ago, and so I was contacted…since they, they…the project had been built at Mnémosyne and then they started prospecting. And regarding religious issues there weren’t many people so I was quite…well immediately contacted … So…so that’s it, it’s through a network but actually it’s well-known, for such a collective book there is necessarily a network that is there and has the ability to mobilise, to ask, to prospect in order to find people to do the work. That’s it…

The reliance on a network of historians willing to contribute to the book was particularly crucial in this case since, for authors as well, it was volunteer work: Massilia: Regarding the authors, contacting them, was it easy? Were there negative responses?” Irène (editor): Yes…no it was not difficult because often they were friends. For the most part, not always but for the most part they were members of the association Mnémosyne, so people who would accept to work knowing that they would not get paid…with deadlines very often…

One of the correlations of an institutionalist approach that takes the work of individuals seriously is the emphasis on interactions. Gary Alan Fine and Sherryl Kleinman (1983), staunch interactionists, note that “the interactionist perspective emphasizes that individuals participate in relationships, which provide them with opportunities for expression and action” (p. 106). Here, the mobilisation of a network of historians willing to do unpaid work provides the editors with an opportunity for action in favour of gender and women’s history, that is, making an unconventional textbook. The interactionist approach is not restricted to network-building or network-mobilising activities. However, the focus on networks is in line with the interactionist perspective, as evidenced by Fine and Kleinman turning to Jeremy Boissevain’s network analysis

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to support their argument: “Network analysis is thus first of all an attempt to reintroduce the concept of man as an interacting social being capable of manipulating others as well as being manipulated by them. The network analogy indicates that people are dependent on others, not on an abstract society” (Boissevain [1973, p. viii] cited in Fine and Kleinman 1983, p. 99). And in the story of LPFH, people are indeed heavily dependent on others. It is the case for the constitution of a group of authors, it is also the case for the promotion of the book. The four editors and the president of Mnémosyne were well aware of the fact that: “Occupancy of different social positions … gives people knowledge of different schemas and access to different kinds and amounts of resources and hence different possibilities for transformative action” (Sewell 1992, p. 21). They knew that various institutional actors could access various resources to promote and distribute the book; in other words, that the network had to extend across institutional fields. Therefore, they had to reach out to these institutions. As Fine (1984) explains: Network connections allow for the interaction of parties who are variously situated in social worlds and therefore increase the possibility of collective action. To have successful interorganizational relations, one needs to know whom to contact and how to contact them. (emphasis added; p. 254)

This is an observation that Mnémosyne historians were well aware of, and that they put in practice by sending eloquent letters to various institutional actors. They shared with me some of this correspondence, among which are letters to the dean of the Inspection Générale of History and Geography, to the president of a Conseil Regional, and to the Delegate for Women-Men Equality of another region. Except for the letter to the dean—which was purely informative, to let him know about the publication of the book, so that he could spread the word to educational inspectors—, the other two letters asked the elected officials to purchase and distribute copies of the books to high schools in their regions. These were failed attempts. The difference between those two regions and Nathalie and Brigitte’s districts in which the purchase was effectively made was, quite evidently, the interpersonal connections. Most specifically, the relationship Nathalie and Brigitte had with Françoise, one of the editors: And so by hanging out in these [feminist] circles well I met Françoise … and so right away I heard…Françoise came to me with this book and I

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pitched it to Ségolène [the president of the region] and said “it’s crucial, youngsters must have it in their schools.” (Nathalie) Brigitte: So actually it’s… Françoise who participated to the edition of this book … she came to me, I was vice-president in charge, among other things, of men-women equality. And so she came to me and presented the book – that I found very interesting since…well I shared her opinion that women are forgotten in history – so I thought that her project was very important … Massilia: And so you knew Françoise? B: Yes, first she lives in [the department], [she is] a renowned historian, different local associations like the Observatoire de la Parité regularly invites her to discuss her work. So yes I personally knew her; so with me they had nothing to worry about, we’re working towards the same goal. But it’s not the case in all departments obviously.

The existing relationship between Françoise and these two elected officials was a solid basis for action. Evidently, in this case, Françoise knew quite well “who to contact and how to contact them”, to borrow Fine’s formulation. She also knew that these contacts could advance her agenda; that through these network ties, the skilful use of institutional resources was possible. For this reason, the concept of the network articulates quite well with the “inhabited institution” approach. As Fine and Kleinman (1983) note: “Rather than seeing individuals as interchangeable elements in a fixed social system, the original network formulation acknowledged that individuals have options in their behavior and can affect the social structures they produce” (emphasis added; p. 99). On the other hand, the gap between the success that Françoise encountered with Brigitte and Nathalie and the indifference of other local governments highlights the capriciousness of such interactionist achievements which are only possible because “some contacts will be more sympathetic than others and negotiations will be more successful in those cases” (Fine 1984, p. 254). The reliance on a social network, especially one that extends across various institutional fields, increases the possibility for action. However, it cannot fully compensate for the major drawbacks of social life of individual initiatives, that is, the sporadic achievements. This becomes even more obvious as we lower the scale; if we look at teachers for instance. LPFH also carries on its journey through a network

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of teachers who are interested in gender/women’s history and share the textbook—and other material for that matter—with their surroundings. This is the case of Véronique, a middle school history teacher: Massilia: And is the book accessible in your school library? Véronique: So…yes since I’m here it is. [laughing] I spread it across the [department], you can follow me across the [department] through the book. So it must be at the high school in xxx, it must be at the middle school in xxx, and so it is at the middle school in xxx.

In every school she worked at, Véronique asked the school librarian to buy a copy of the textbook. She, and other teachers like her, are part of those actors of the social life of the book who “give meaning to their relationships (network ties) … and, importantly, use them as the basis for action” (emphasis added; Fine and Kleinman 1983, p. 101). Through the help of school librarians, she managed to spread the book around. However, teachers like Véronique realise that their impact can only be limited, especially when it comes to sharing with fellow teachers their concerns for a more gender-balanced historical narrative. As Cécile explains: Massilia: Do you talk about [the book] with your colleagues in your high school? Cécile: Well…yes we talk about it but strangely, more with colleagues from other disciplines actually. For instance in social sciences, in philosophy…sure. But then for instance I have colleagues, I have one colleague who is very engaged in women and gender history so she’ll do it spontaneously. Others are not interested at all. So how to bring them to…at the end of the day the issue is how to bring these people to – people who are not interested – to do it anyway, in spite of their own preferences.

The mobilisation of network ties is a central aspect of the story of LPFH, as they are the tracks on which the book travels. And naturally, some actors in this network occupy institutional positions that allow them access to significant resources—for instance the elected officials—which then enable them to make a substantial contribution to the social life of the book. Nevertheless, the focus on network ties and the associated literature—which stresses the achievements that such ties enable—should

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not convey the distorted impression that such mechanisms can provoke groundbreaking change. Despite the goodwill of the protagonists in this story, their work cannot make up for “people who are not interested”, to quote Cécile, and for the strong institutional constraints at all stages of the social life of the book. At the end of the day, the textbook LPFH should only be taken for what it is to the people who designed it, “a necessary first step” (Dermenjian et al. 2010, p. 11).

Limitations of the Institutionalist Version The story of a book that travels through a network of individuals working in different institutional contexts is one perspective on the social life of LPFH. But that is all this is: one perspective, which only informs some aspects of this social life. The institutionalist story has shed light on the mechanisms through which the book travels and the role of the network of proactive individuals who are the engine of these mechanisms. And yet, some significant elements of the social life of the book remain unaccounted for after this first version. Specifically, this version suggests that the editors had a well-defined idea of the book they wanted to produce, that they submitted this idea to a publisher who signed off on it, materialised it into a final product and, ultimately, that the book was made available for teachers’ use as it was originally designed. This is a very smooth narrative that does not reflect a recurring element in the stories recollected: the unpredictability of the outcome. When the editors and authors who initiated the project were asked if the published book corresponded to what they had in mind in the beginning, the answers they gave were very similar: they did not have precise expectations of the result, and were surprised (mostly pleased) by the final product: You know there is always a small difference between what you have in mind and what you end up with … So we all have our own ideas and then we end up with a final product which is not necessarily the one we had in mind in the beginning but honestly which we could like, and I liked it. (Geneviève, editor and author) Well…it’s always different, that is…I think we did not picture it, I didn’t. And I think that one of the things that we did not foresee was…it sounds pretentious what I’m saying but it’s true …we did not imagine the beauty

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of the final product… I think that in the beginning, with our limited means we imagined something in black and white, you know what I mean? So this is one thing but…we could not picture it, I could not picture the final product. (Irène, editor and author) There have always been changes actually. I mean the initial project was to make one or several textbooks that could sensitise teachers, pupils, to this history but we did not start with a fully-formed idea, this was the interesting part as well; to build something that was…not immediately formalised and…and which would stay open until the end …. But…I think that it was not…it was not an order from a publisher so we didn’t have an idea, there, established from the start. (Sylvie, author)

The producers of the book also did not predict the trajectory that the book eventually took. Specifically, they were surprised by its commercial success and the readership that it found: What we did not imagine, what I said earlier, is how successful it has been with people who were not targeted, with a readership that was not targeted. I know a lot of people who have offered the textbook, who bought the textbook and who offered it for instance for Christmas…who were not…who had nothing to do either with history or with the history of women or with the Education Nationale. And actually when I presented it, I also presented the book in bookstores, it appealed to people who were…you know…who liked the book. So this…from that perspective it is in the audience that it found that it was unexpected. (Irène) But then you know, we presented the book, it was presented in Blois in 2011 and right away it was rather successful since quite a lot of people…specifically libraries in schools, school libraries often bought this book and then it was used… something that we did not imagine at the time, by many training centres. (Louis-Pascal, Author)

Something happened between the book-as-an-idea stage and the bookas-a-final-product stage that was not planned for. As one of the editors noted, “the book made a life of its own”. Such discrepancy between the original project and its outcome suggests that the social life of LPFH is not a case of a well-defined thing that remains unaltered as it travels through a network of individuals—otherwise, why would the original architects of the project be surprised by the final product? There is evidently an important element of unpredictability in this story, and yet, the

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first version does not lift the veil on the changes that occur in the book’s journey. This version does not shed light on how and why the book evolves as its social life unfolds. Arguably, the reason for this omission is that the perspective adopted in this chapter is merely concerned with the book’s social life, in the sense that it focuses exclusively on a social network of individuals. Consequently, we now know about the people who constitute this network and how they operate, but we still know very little about the book itself. Similarly, the above-quoted interview excerpts also point to an aspect largely disregarded in the institutionalist version: the materiality of the book. Therefore, the following chapter turns to the actor-network theory literature to gain complementary insights on these disregarded, yet major, elements of the social life of LPFH.

References Boissevain, J. (1973). Friends of friends: Networks, manipulators and coalitions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dermenjian, G., Jami, I., Rouquier, A., & Thébaud, F. (2010). La place des femmes dans l’histoire: une histoire mixte. Paris: Belin/Mnémosyne. Fine, G. A. (1984). Negotiated orders and organizational cultures. Annual Review of Sociology, 10(1), 239–262. Fine, G. A., & Kleinman, S. (1983). Network and meaning: An interactionist approach to structure. Symbolic Interaction, 6(1), 97–110. Fligstein, N. (2001). Social skill and the theory of fields. Sociological Theory, 19(2), 105–125. Hallett, T., & Ventresca, M. J. (2006). Inhabited institutions: Social interactions and organizational forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory and Society, 35(2), 213–236. Hirsch, P. M., & Lounsbury, M. (1997). Ending the family quarrel: Toward a reconciliation of “old” and “new” institutionalisms. American Behavioral Scientist, 40(4), 406–418. Law, J. (2009). Actor network theory and material semiotics. In B. S. Turner (Ed.), The new Blackwell companion to social theory (pp. 141–158). Oxford: Blackwell. O’Toole, R., & O’Toole, A. W. (1981). Negotiating interorganizational orders. Sociol. Q, 22, 29–41. Powell, W. W., & DiMaggio, P. J. (1991). Introduction. In W. W. Powell & P. J. DiMaggio (Eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (pp. 1– 38). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Scully, M., & Creed, D. (1997). Stealth legitimacy: Employee activism and corporate response during the diffusion of domestic partner benefits. Paper presented at the academy of management meetings, Boston. Scully, M., & Segal, A. (2002). Passion with an umbrella: Grassroots activists in the workplace. In M. Lounsbury & M. J. Ventresca (Eds.), Social structure and organizations revisited (pp. 125–168). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1992). A theory of structure: Duality, agency, and transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29. Zucker, L. G. (1983). Organizations as institutions. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2(1), 1–47.

CHAPTER 3

A Story of Translations and Materiality, Lessons from Actor-Network Theory

Abstract This chapter offers a version of the story of the book La place des femmes dans l’histoire grounded in actor-network theory (ANT). First, it critically assesses the main assumptions of ANT and evaluates their relevance to the present case. Notably, it questions ANT’s principles of generalised symmetry and isomorphism and defends the sociology of translation approach. It makes the argument for a “pick-and-mix” use of ANT. Then comes the empirical case with an emphasis on materiality and translation processes. The chapter also discusses the pertinence of this approach for the study of education. Finally, it reintroduces institutional elements in order to contextualise translation processes. It offers the concepts of institutional skills and opportunistic translations to open a productive dialogue with the institutionalist approach. Keywords Actor-network theory · Sociology of translation · Materiality · Generalised symmetry · Opportunistic translations · Education

Same trajectory, different story: let us now look at the social life of La place des femmes dans l’histoire with a focus on the book itself, instead of merely the people around it. This version finds inspiration in actornetwork theory (ANT), to ask what exactly happens to the book throughout its social life. With the concept of translation and a focus on materiality, the aim of this chapter is to understand how and why the book

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evolves along its journey, and to clarify the pertinence of this ANTinspired approach. To contextualise this version of the story, the first part of the chapter provides a theoretical introduction to ANT: it discusses and evaluates the main assumptions of this theory and their relevance to the present case, notably the notion of translation. After recounting the ANTinspired version of the LPFH story—emphasising (de)materialisation and translation processes—the significance of these processes for educational practices is outlined. Finally, we look once again at institutional aspects in order to contextualise translation processes, and to understand why some actors have more impactful translational abilities than others. The concepts of institutional skills and opportunistic translations are offered as ways to characterise translation processes. The final section of the chapter allows for a dialogue with the institutionalist approach developed in Chapter 2.

Theoretical Contribution and Limitations of Actor-Network Theory Actor-network theory is a theoretical approach from the field of science and technology studies (STS), which has gained considerable momentum since the late 1980s. Although a constellation of actor-network theorists has formed over the years, ANT is mainly the work of three authors: Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law. While this scholarship is not monolithic, it is possible to identify several defining traits: a recognition that both humans and nonhumans are actors; an emphasis on processes of translation between these actors; a related emphasis on the tracing of networks; and a suspicion of the sui generis explanatory power of concepts like ‘the social’, ‘social structure’, and ‘society’. (Sayes 2017, p. 294)

This section discusses these major ANT traits and assesses them for their pertinence to the LPFH case. The section discusses successively: the principle of generalised symmetry, the principle of isomorphism, the network in ANT, and the notion of translation.

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The Principle of Generalised Symmetry: Human and Non-human Actors One of the most notable features of ANT is its refusal to distinguish between human and non-human actors. Actor-network theorists argue that there is no fundamental difference between the action of humans and non-humans and, therefore, sociological analysis should not make any a priori distinction (thus no hierarchy) between the human and nonhuman world: this is the principle of generalised symmetry. For instance, in his foundational study of Saint Brieuc scallops, Callon (1986a) gives the same analytical prevalence to the action of the fishermen and that of the scallop larvae: both contribute to the sound development of the scallops. This aspect of ANT has aroused considerable interest, and probably just as much criticism. Let us consider both with regard to the present case. The account of the social life of LPFH presented in Chapter 2 does not, of course, abide by the principle of generalised symmetry, as it does not even mention non-human actors. Yet because the object of this research is an actual object, it could prove relevant to draw inspiration from ANT and take this non-human actor (and others) seriously by making them part and parcel of the analysis. A consequence of ANT’s acute attention to the non-human world is that it has developed into a field methodologically well equipped for studying non-human “actants” (to stay faithful to ANT terminology). ANT scholars have long investigated the development of scientific and technologic innovations—the electric vehicle for instance (Callon 1986b)—which, according to Latour (1991), are ideal subjects for producing narratives (p. 11). This is a distinctive aspect of ANT: its capacity for storytelling. The present narrative approach to the case study itself—which traced the chronological trajectory of the book—has been largely inspired by the ability of “actornetwork theorists [to] take mundane objects (such as the onions in a burger) and spin them into dense and complex tales ” (emphasis added; Mutch 2002, p. 483). One can discern the great affinity between ANT’s narrative approach to the non-human world and the social-life-of-things research strategy. ANT can thus enrich and refine the study of the social life of the book: it can address the material dimensions of the story neglected in the institutionalist version, and take seriously the notion that the book “made a life of its own” (to borrow the phrase of one editor).

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On the other hand, there are valid reasons to be wary of ANT’s denial of the specificity of human action. We can just take Latour’s (1996a) own word for it: “if a criticism can be levelled at [ANT] it is … its complete indifference for providing a model of human competence” (p. 7). He further notes that “social networks will of course be included in the description but they will have no privilege nor prominence” (ibid., p. 3). We shall leave ontological debates about what distinguishes human agency to philosophers, but, based on the present empirical material, the principle of generalised symmetry may legitimately be questioned. The main reason for this is that the generalised symmetry framework ignores the element of intentionality in human action. The purpose of the first version of the story was precisely to show how the intentionality of human actors—through their social networks— is the engine that shapes the social life of the book. Human intentionality should have analytical privilege, as it is what triggered the LPFH process and what sustained it: at every stage, people thought, “let’s do something against this unsatisfying situation”, and then acted upon that thought. It may very well be that the importance of individuals and their intentionality in this analysis is the result of the study’s methodology: the fieldwork focused heavily on human actors, as I mostly conducted interviews, which may have exacerbated their importance. However, methodology is not all there is to it. Ignoring the role of individuals and their intentionality would mean completely disregarding everything that my informants— and also what the rest of the material collected—recounted about their involvement with the textbook. It would mean looking the other way while being repeatedly told about the enthusiasm and the strong will of every person involved. As one of the editors, Geneviève, explained: “People were – I want to say ‘charmed,’ even if it’s not the word. People were very pleased with doing this work because we were under the impression that it filled a void, and it did”. Arguably, ignoring such intention would also be wrong on an ethical level, as it would rob my informants of the credit they legitimately deserve, especially when considering the amount of unpaid labour, time, and energy that some of them devoted to the enterprise. On this topic, Latour (1996a) writes that: The bottom of the misunderstanding [about ANT] is reached [in studies about] an individual human – usually male – who wishes to grab power,

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makes a network of allies and extends his power – doing some “networking” or “liaising” as Americans say. … This is alas the way [ANT] is most often represented. (p. 7)

His description of the “bottom of the misunderstanding” quite accurately summarises the case made in Chapter 2. However, I stand my ground that such a human-centred account is still valuable (and partly because, I should note, the individuals in this story are not power-seeking males). While the present book defends the analytical attention to human agency, it does so in full awareness that its focus on individuals goes against ANT’s basic principles, which should at least exempt this study from Latour’s charge of misrepresentation. The Principle of Isomorphism: Institutions as Chimeras Another distinguishable ANT characteristic is the assumption of isomorphism. The idea that all actors are isomorphic means that there is no essential difference between micro- and macro-actors, and, consequently, that no analytical difference between them should be posited. As Callon and Latour (1981) explain: There are of course macro-actors and micro-actors, but the difference between them is brought about by power relations and the constructions of networks that will elude analysis if we presume a priori that macroactors are bigger than or superior to micro-actors. … Too often sociologists change their framework of analysis depending on whether they are tackling a macro-actor or a micro-actor. (authors’ emphasis; p. 280)

The principle of isomorphism stems from the determination of actornetwork theorists to escape the agency/structure binary—or that between the individual and the collective—which they deem unfruitful for sociological analysis. This idea is embodied in the term “actor-network” itself— and, most specifically, in the combination of the two words—since it is “an intentionally oxymoronic term that combines – and elides the distinction between – structure and agency” (Law 1999, p. 1). In their opinion, there is no analytical value in “grand” concepts such as “the State” or “the economy”, and certainly no value either to the notion of institutions. Again, the present analysis of LPFH contradicts ANT on that front, since it pays special attention to institutional contexts and positions. And

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yet, it does so because institutional dimensions were also prominent in the accounts collected, so disregarding them would mean ignoring their empirical recurrence. Latour (1999) explains that ANT “always was, and this from its very inception … a very crude method to learn from the actors without imposing on them an a priori definition of their worldbuilding capacities” (p. 20). Consequently, their rejection of “grand” notions like “institution” is founded on the idea that these are part of the sociologist’s—not the actor’s—terminology. And, indeed, it would be misleading to claim that any of the people interviewed used the phrase “institutional position” to talk about themselves or others. However, they did make remarks such as: I try to spread this [the book] … so it’s true that my job as a trainer [emphasis added] is great for this. (Fanny, history teacher) I had a temporary position [emphasis added] in Créteil for this eighteenhour training programme … so we built a training curriculum, we all shared the same perspective. (Geneviève, former history teacher) I made an offer [to sell the book] to the Conseil General of the department – at the time I was teaching at [emphasis added] Sciences Po. (Mathilde, author)

The concept “institutional position” might be the sociologist’s concept, but its purpose is to capture the many references that actors themselves make to their situations—their job as a trainer, their temporary position in a training centre, or their teaching position at Sciences Po—and what these situations allowed them to do. Institutions and their effects are very real and tangible for actors and their “world-building capacities”, as we have seen in Chapter 2. The notion of institutional positions does not “impose” anything on actors; it is not (merely) an abstraction made by the sociologist, but is a reformulation of a concrete empirical reality that actors are acutely aware of in their everyday lives. So, here as well, it is in full awareness of the ANT argument that “we should miss the point completely, if we distinguish between ‘individuals’ and ‘institutions’” (Callon and Latour 1981, p. 280) that the present study does so, and maintains that this distinction has both empirical reality and analytical value. So far, the two ANT principles presented have been promptly rejected, and one could legitimately wonder: why invoke ANT at all, if it is to be

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discarded it so quickly? But its potential for analysing human agency or structural factors is not what spurred my interest in ANT for the present case: it was, instead, ANT’s attention to the material world (above noted), its concept of translation, and its notion of the network, to which we now turn. The Network in ANT: What Does “Social” Mean? While the concept of the network was used extensively in the previous chapter, it should be noted that the work of actor-network theorists is grounded in a remarkably distinct understanding of the term. In this scholarship, networks take on an ontological meaning, for they are what define and constitute any sort of entity. As Callon and Law (1997) explain: The sociology of science and technology makes this argument. Entities – human, non-human, and textual – aren’t solid. They aren’t discrete, or clearly separated from their context. They don’t have well-established boundaries. They aren’t, as the jargon puts it, distinct subjects and objects. Instead they are sets of relations, for instance in the form of networks. … But … sometimes, despite the endless flux and indeterminacy, networks of heterogeneous materials become more or less durable and achieve a degree of stability. (pp. 170–173)

For actor-network theorists, any kind of entity is composed of a dense and varied network and, if this observation seems counter-intuitive at times, it is simply because, over time, the network that composes certain entities has stabilised enough so as to make the entities appear bounded and discrete. For instance, the electric vehicle studied by Callon (1986b) is a network composed of the car company Renault, the energy provider Electricité de France, the French government, and consumers, but also accumulators, fuel cells, and electrodes. This ontological meaning explains the hyphen between “actor” and “network” in “actor-network theory” since “actors are both networks and points. They are both individuals and collectives” (Callon and Law 1997, p. 174). Considering the world as populated by actor-networks has implications for the work of the sociologist. To the question, “What then is a sociologist?” Callon and Latour (1981) provide an answer that is grounded in their relational ontology (and makes room for non-human actors):

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Someone who studies associations and dissociations, that is all, as the word “social” itself implies. Associations between men? Not solely, since for a long time now associations between men have been expanded and extended through other allies: words, rituals, iron, woods, seeds and rain. (emphasis added; p. 300)

This specific understanding of the social is a dimension of ANT that is particularly interesting for the present case. ANT scholars maintain that there is no such thing as a social domain and, consequently, that it cannot be an explanatory category. Instead, the social as the making of associations is what should be accounted for (Latour 2005). In that sense, the ANT project articulates well with the idea of a social life. Therefore, the present study which traces the social life of LPFH is in accordance with the ANT pursuit to “redefin[e] sociology not as the ‘science of the social,’ but as the tracing of associations ” (author’s emphasis; ibid., p. 5). Reflecting back on the development of actor-network theory, Latour even argues that a more appropriate name for this scholarship, one better suited to convey its specificity, would have been “sociology of associations” (ibid., p. 9). The significance of relationality in ANT makes it an interesting framework for the study of collective action. The importance of the collective also derives from the centrality of the network since any sort of action necessarily stems from an assemblage of heterogeneous elements, as the case of the electric vehicle illustrates. Here, the network should be understood quite literally: according to Latour (1996a), ANT “makes use of some of the simplest properties of nets and then add to it an actor that does some work” (author’s emphasis; p. 4). To reformulate Latour’s idea, ANT argues that action is not passively carried through networks but that networks actively allow for and shape action: networks are not passive; they are, fundamentally, actor-networks. This collective framework for action is particularly interesting for the present case, as the success of the enterprise was heavily based on the ability to mobilise a group of actors. Still, we must pay attention to the non-human actors also mobilised, which the second version of the story intends to do.

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The Sociology of Translation: A Social Life of Displacements and Transformations Finally, the dimension of ANT most relevant to the present study is the notion of translation. The fact that ANT is also referred to as the “sociology of translation” already indicates the centrality of the concept, so central, indeed, that Callon (1986a) writes that “translation is the mechanism by which the social and natural worlds progressively take form” (p. 215). So what does this mechanism consist of? “Translation” is obviously not a term one encounters for the first time when getting acquainted with the ANT literature. ANT scholars have merely appropriated existing meanings of the word, as Silvia Gherardi and Davide Nicolini (2000) explain: “The word ‘translation’ conveys both the original semantic meaning of the Latin word translatum in physics and mechanics, and the linguistic one of undertaking a change from one language to another in which betrayal is inextricably implicated” (p. 333). There are two major aspects to the notion of translation: movement and transformation. Let us start with the linguistic-inspired understanding of translation as transformation, the most intuitive one. Quite straightforwardly, processes of translation are processes by which one entity is turned into another. This operation is tightly linked to the existence of the network and is of crucial significance in ANT, since the translation process occurs as the thing travels through a network and is shaped and reshaped by this network: The chain is made of actors – not of patients – and since the token is in everyone’s hands in turn, everyone shapes it according to their different projects. This is why it is called the model of translation. The token changes as it moves from hand to hand and the faithful transmission of a statement becomes a single and unusual case among many more likely others. (author’s emphasis; Latour 1986, p. 267)

This modification of the token, which is intrinsic to the process of translation, is often epitomised by the phrase “traduttore-traditore” (Callon 1986a)—literally “translator-traitor”—, a pun whose awkward rendition in English adequately illustrates the meaning. The second dimension of the translation process is movement. Translation is the movement of a token across a network, just as it is the modification of the token in the course of this very movement; “to translate

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is to betray” (Latour 1996b, p. 48), but “to translate is [also] to displace” (emphasis added; Callon 1986a, p. 215). The articulation of these two mechanisms of translation results in the unpredictability of the process, as the initial statement is continuously being modified by the network: “translation is neither deterministic nor linear, for what entities do when they come together is unpredictable” (emphasis added; Fenwick and Edwards 2011, p. 4). At the end of Chapter 2, unpredictability was identified as precisely what the institutionalist story could not account for. This is already a clue that the concept of translation can inform different, yet equally relevant, aspects of the social life of the book. The Contribution of ANT: A Plea for Theoretical Inconsistency If we keep score on the various ANT characteristics assessed so far, we are left with: a rejection of the principle of generalised symmetry but an encouragement to pay greater attention to the non-human world, a full rejection of the principle of isomorphism, an interest in the idea of the network entity composed of the collective action of various actors, and finally, a productive idea of translation as displacement and transformation. With such a messy assessment, how to determine whether or not to follow ANT’s path? My argument is to opt out of this choice, to cherish the perks of indecision, and to borrow conveniently from ANT by selecting what is relevant to our case and disregarding the rest. In other words, I argue in favour of some theoretical “pick-and-mix”. The novelty of the ANT framework has allowed it to spread out of its original STS field into virtually every corner of the social sciences. In the process, ANT has been celebrated for its innovative insights, but it has also been heavily distorted (more or less voluntarily) and heavily criticised. The dissatisfaction with some of ANT’s most basic traits (and notably the lack of consideration for structural factors and power relations) has led some scholars to opt for a creative and constructive approach to ANT, one that acknowledges the insights of this framework, while rejecting some of its ontological assumptions or analytical inferences. The present study follows those who have not refrained from using ANT selectively and/or articulating it with other (and sometimes opposed) research traditions (e.g. Elder-Vass 2008; Mutch 2002; Sayes 2017; Whittle and Spicer 2008). And since Law (1999) maintains that “only dead theories and dead practices celebrate their self-identity. Only dead theories and dead practices hang on to their names, insist upon their perfect reproduction”

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(p. 10), I can only hope that the present distortions would contribute to keeping ANT well alive. Now that the theoretical framework for the second version of the story has been established, we can dive back into the social life of LPFH. The story recounts processes of translation and (de)materialisation. But it also makes room for the “pick-and-mix” approach defended here, introducing institutional factors into the story to counter-balance some of ANT’s flaws.

The Story of La place des femmes dans l ’histoire: Sociology of Translation Version A Story of (Material) Translation Not everyone agrees on the chronology. The project probably started sometime in the early 2000s, not so long after the creation of Mnémosyne. Or was it already in the pipeline as the association was being officially created? Anyways, it was one of the first projects. Sometime in the early 2000s for sure. 2001? 2002? All this was a long time ago and human memory is fallible. Yet human memory is the only way to access these early stages of the enterprise since all it was, in the beginning, was an idea: And so it was one of the projects of the board of the association Mnémosyne with the idea that, first, of course, what was interesting for the association was to promote…because the association is called, as you know, “association for the development of women and gender history;” so “for the development” means that the goals of the association include this whole part about primary and secondary education obviously… And so the idea, little by little, was to produce a textbook ourselves. Because it appeared to us that it was the most straightforward way to go in order to reach this goal. (Sylvie, author and former board member)

What Sylvie describes here is the first stage of the social life of the book, the dematerialised book-as-an-idea stage. Dematerialised because this embryonic book only existed in the minds and conversations of the Mnémosyne board members of the time. There may have been notes taken about the topic at that stage, however, no one knows if it was the case for sure and, if so, where these notes would now be. Therefore, the

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book-as-an-idea stage can only be accessed through their blurry memories. Still, this initial idea should not be understood as the dematerialisedyet-identical version of the book which was eventually published: the translation from the idea-of-a-thing to the actual thing is not linear nor predictable. As mentioned at the end of Chapter 2, the book-as-an-idea was far from resembling the book that was published in 2010. Actually, this book-as-an-idea was not even necessarily a book. Louis-Pascal, author and board member, recalls that very early on: Annie [editor], who was in the group, eventually talked to me … And so at one point she talked to me about making a website with documents which would be about the history of women and gender… So there was that part. The second part was about making a book. And we first settled on the idea to make…at one point in 2001, 2002 there were discussions about modifying high school programmes. So we thought that it could be the opportunity to make a textbook, which would be a seconde textbook, then a première textbook, then a terminale textbook, so in three steps, which would integrate a lot more the participation of women.

So, in Louis-Pascal’s account, there were not one, but at least three bookas-an-idea stages: the first one as a website, the second one as three high school textbooks, and the third stage as a single and comprehensive textbook—the form that LPFH eventually took: “So then we had the idea to switch to a textbook which would be…a sort of textbook for teachers, for teacher trainers or for first-year university students and which would be, if you will…which would include the whole programmes ” (LouisPascal). Arguably, the book-as-an-idea stage could even be traced back prior to these suggestions, back to when the question of doing something for secondary and primary education was first formulated. Françoise is the founder and the first president of Mnémosyne, she remembers the first board meetings: “We would have discussions: ‘what do we do?’ We organised seminars, there is a newsletter, there is a list of members with contacts, and gradually the idea of a necessary transmission to secondary education imposed itself more and more”. Why would this “what do we do” stage qualify as the original book-asan-idea while it is so distant from the actual book? This stage might be far from the eventual materialisation of the manual, it nonetheless constitutes the “initial impetus” (Latour 1986, p. 267) that set things in motion and triggered the following translation processes. Latour (1991) writes (about

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a similar story of translations): “In the beginning, the wish was naked; in the end … it was clothed, or loaded. In the beginning it was unreal; in the end, it had gained some reality” (p. 107). This very early “what do we do” stage is the stage of the “naked” and “unreal” wish. From there on, several other ideal—in the literal sense of the word—projects were formulated until the book-as-an-idea eventually took the (dematerialised) form a book; and therefore “gained some reality”. Françoise recalls how this specific form came into being: … we also had discussions in the beginning whether we would have a student textbook or a teacher textbook and a student textbook would imply one textbook per school level. So it was…it would have meant…can you imagine finding a publisher? Convincing a publisher to do…? School publishers are doing well because they sell millions of copies but here they would not have sold a lot so it was almost impossible. Therefore our idea not to make one manual per level but to make a manual that gathered, while focusing, while integrating women and integrating gender issues, that gathered the main themes of the programmes for all levels, from sixième to terminale and even a bit for primary education. So this is why we have a single textbook that goes from Antiquity to our days.

Confronted with the difficulty of finding a publisher that would agree to produce a series of textbooks, members of the association had to reach a compromise which settled the discussion on the form that the project would take: the (still dematerialised) book-as-an-idea was definitively shaped into a single and comprehensive book as publishers entered the network. This is a notable instance of the fundamentally collective aspect of translation processes: the “initial impetus” does not define the course of the book, the successive actions of the actors of its social life do. However, while all potential publishers would only consider the production of a single and comprehensive book, they did not all share the same idea of the form that this book should take: So we were in touch with a publisher and as far as I remember the first publisher was xxx… It turned out that, by chance, I had managed to get quite some work done on the themes of the Revolution and the [Napoleonian] Empire; the French Revolution and the Empire. And Annie for instance had quite some work done on the Third Republic. So we sort of…reshaped our research work into textbook pages for…according to a model that we had been offered. So you know, it took quite some time, almost a year and

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then we found out that [the publisher] was out of the deal. So then… we turned to other publishers; so there was xxx… So I have the memory of having rewritten my part sort of …according to the models that we were being given… And then, the one that eventually followed us on this was Belin… And well, I also went through several stages…as I told you, of writing…how to turn this into a textbook chapter and then make it into…different forms. So each time it was different constraints which did not make it easier [laughing]. (Louis-Pascal, author and board member)

What is described here is the first materialisation of the book which occurred during its production: from book-as-an-idea to book-as-drafts. Book-as-drafts, plural, because as Louis-Pascal recalls, the authors who got on board very early on had to reshape their work numerous times to suit the different publishers’ requirements. This is evidence of the “continuous transformation of the token” (author’s emphasis; Latour 1986, p. 267) that occurs during a social life of translations. Book-as-drafts, plural, also because at this stage of the production—as it is the case for any edited book—the manual is only materialised into a scattered and unrelated collection of drafts from various authors, spread out across a multitude of computers, hard drives, and hand-written notes. These early material traces of the book correlate Louis-Pascal’s account: authors made their own messy drafts—which is the first materialisation of the book— and the publishing team was then in charge of translating the drafts into the textbook model that they chose—which is another materialisation of the book. As Françoise explains: “We would provide [Belin, the publisher] [digital] documents with the picture for the paragraph, close to the paragraph where it was supposed to appear together with, and then the layout was Belin”. The difference between the sort of translation operated by the publisher—mostly concerned with format and layout—and the one operated by authors—mostly concerned with the content of the texts and documents—confirms the idea that actors enter the network with their own specific set of skills that they incorporate to the “thing”, the future “black box that … translates the various materials that make it up” (Callon and Law 1997, p. 174). If we take authors, for instance, their contribution to the book makes possible the translation process “whereby the knowledge of a specific community is incorporated into an artefact” (Gherardi and Nicolini 2000, p. 336); in this case, the knowledge of the community of historians specialised in gender and women’s history. However, authors

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are not one unified whole. They are a gathering of thirty-three writers, all with their own set of skills, whether it is historical knowledge, writing style, or capacity for synthesis. It is the variety and diversity of these skills that are eventually incorporated into the book: “Since we mobilised very different authors, well each one of them interpreted the guidelines his/her own way so it’s still a rather heteroclite object after all; despite the form which makes the homogeneity” (Sylvie, author and former board member). The book is a “heteroclite object” because it is the product of a social life of translations that involves many actors, and “each of these people may act in many different ways, … adding to it, or appropriating it” (Latour 1986, p. 267). Moreover, the incorporation of the actors’ skills is not without difficulty. Callon (1991) explains that: “A totally convergent network would thus be a kind of Tower of Babel. Everyone would speak their own language, but everyone else would understand them. Each would have specific skills, but everyone else would know how to use them” (p. 148). This Tower-of-Babel scenario is quite an unlikely one though. In our story, the different translations that actors wished to operate were sometimes at odds with each other. The title of the book is a case in point for that matter. One of the editors recalls: So for us the title, we would have liked to have the word “gender” in it because we wanted to promote the word “gender” … But Belin did not want “a history of gender,” or “women and men in History.” Belin said that “women” sold better. The publishers of course, behind them are salesmen, the sales department, and sales departments have a very specific idea of what sells and what doesn’t, what you should or should not write. And so it was “no” for “gender,” ‘no” for “women and men” in the title. (Françoise)

Her position is that of the historian who acknowledges and defends the relevance of the term “gender”. But she is well aware of the fact that the publishing house is peopled with differently skilled actors, as the publisher explains: In 2010/2011 the word “gender” was…it’s likely that…we were afraid that it would be misunderstood, or that it would be understood as too activist while it’s not an activist book at all, it’s really a scientific book. This is why we preferred “une histoire mixte” rather than “gender history.” (Yves, publisher)

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An element of context is required here: at the time, a wave of protests against same-sex marriage was forming, and the French term “genre”— which was far less unequivocally accepted than the English equivalent “gender”—crystallised the discontent of the opponents of the reform who argued that an alleged “théorie du genre” (which denied the biological differences between men and women) was an intellectual manoeuvre to justify a political agenda. Part of the publisher’s expertise was therefore to anticipate that such a politically charged term would harm sales and consequently to reject it; even if the term had academic validity, and even if it meant going against the editors’ will: So we reached a compromise, we agreed on their main title “la place des femmes dans l’histoire” because they wanted to include “women”… So we imposed the subtitle which is “une histoire mixte,” we liked it better, because this [subtitle] they were okay with, and it is also important for us to talk about “une histoire mixte,” which is not exactly the same thing as gender history but still it was important…this aspect. So the title is the product of a compromise [laughing]! (Françoise, editor)

In the much more common cases where the network is not a perfectly orchestrated Tower of Babel, translations induce conflicts, and conflicts require resolution just like the sort of compromises described here by Françoise: “the methodological lesson is this: that objects for instance people and texts … are processes of transformation, compromise or negotiation” (emphasis added; Callon and Law 1997, p. 8). Obviously, if there is another crucial lesson to learn from the actornetwork theory, it is that the translations operated by non-human actors should not be neglected. At this stage of the social life, the iconographic work is particularly telling of the role of non-human actors. Marion, the graphic designer of the book cover, was given a pool of images to choose from to make a cover page that would convey the geographical and historical diversity of the content of the book; not the easiest task: The goal was to mix up everything, as much as possible at least. You cannot show everything with small images but well … Here [pointing at the images as she speaks] the quality is…it is…images are small so it wasn’t an issue but of course you have to…if it is a big format like this one, if it is this face which is that big, indeed the documentation department has to find a high-quality document… It requires to try things out, to try things out a lot. For instance, this is not really interesting but, I needed an image on

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which I could put [the editors’ names], so that it is readable. I chose this one you know…This one I regret, I think that the framing is bad, there is this uninteresting part here. But at the same time under her face I did not want something too complex so…you cannot always…control everything.

Evidently, what Marion cannot control are precisely those elements which are the prerogative of the images themselves—their definition, size, colour, etc. In her effort to make a diverse yet aesthetically satisfying cover, images are also actors to negotiate with. The few episodes mentioned here are but a drop in the ocean of the variety of translations, negotiations, transformations operated by various actors, and which eventually led to another materialisation stage of the social life of LPFH: from book-as-drafts to the final book; final book, but not final stage of its social life. Regardless of the huge amount of translation work that has been put into its materialisation, the actors that entered the later stages of its social life are busy dematerialising and rematerialising the now published book. First, there are the readers of the book, and most importantly the main target readership: primary and secondary education history teachers who want their lessons to be more inclusive of women and gender. This is Linda’s case. Linda is an author, but she also teaches history to seconde students in a public high school in the South of France. In Linda’s classroom today there is one book and a half. There is the book that I brought with me, that Linda is happy to show her students, that goes around the classroom and is looked at, skimmed through, or ignored. And then there are all the pieces of the book. Today’s lesson is about nineteenth-century Irish migrations, the chapter that she wrote. However, she did not bring the book with her in class. Instead, Linda selected a few documents from the book’s case study—a painting of migrants in Cork, another one called The letter from America, and then some—and projected them onto the screen. With these images come a few explanatory sentences—“The agrarian crisis (1845–1900): around 6 million people left, half of them were women”, “Rich families left”,…—as well as Linda’s oral comments. In the classroom, the book rematerialises into these images, these short sentences, these oral comments: this dematerialisation and rematerialisation is the result of the translation of a full book chapter into a one-hour high school lesson. But the book is also elsewhere to be found; it rematerialises once more into the hand-outs that Linda distributed to her students. In these three pages, there are some of the previously mentioned paintings,

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as well as short texts from the case study. One student complains: “There are a lot of hand-outs today ma’am”. “Well, usually we use the [regular] textbook. If there were such documents in the textbook we wouldn’t have to use hand-outs”. What was once a neat and fully coloured case study, printed on high-quality paper from a chapter of LPFH, has now transformed into pieces of black-and-white hand-outs, cut out and glued into messy notebooks, punctuated by hand-written paragraphs. Here as well, the material translation is partly operated by non-human actors, as Cécile, another high school history teacher sarcastically noted. When Cécile’s students remarked that they could not see much from the images in the hand-outs they were also being given in class, she replied “if we could print in colours we would know”, confirming that non-humans (in this case the school printer) play their own part in the rematerialisation—and here the deterioration—of the book. The book does not re-materialise in classrooms only. Let us go back to the Mnémosyne board, not the one that produced the book in the 2000s but the current one. It has now been eight years since LPFH was published and there are discussions about a re-edition of some sort: So the question is how to make this more accessible and more easily usable? … Now we’re more in a stage of…a reflection stage with a lot of issues … what is best in terms of material form: a book…it’s becoming less and less relevant, the book, because what do we do with a book? We make photocopies…A website, a resource page on the Mnémosyne website well… There is a problem of form, there is the problem of programmes, there are people who don’t want to dive back into this as well. Well now there are a lot of problems, a lot of issues to solve. (Cécile, history teacher and board member)

Through teachers’ feedback, the Mnémosyne board is informed of the dematerialisation of the book that the actual teaching practice requires. Consequently, they are considering ways of easing the work of teachers by anticipating this dematerialisation. As Sylvie, another board member, explains: “[The book] could be remade, reshaped … also because you have to take into account the evolutions of the way teachers prepare their lessons”. What Cécile and Sylvie’s accounts augur is yet another round of dematerialisation and rematerialisation of the book; another phase of complex translations which could lead to its digitalisation. The story of the social life of LFPH is a never-ending story of successive (material) translations, confirming Callon’s (1986a) idea that “translation is a process before it is a result” (p. 215).

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Materiality, Translation, and Education This alternative story—in which translation is the engine and materiality the main concern—should already make the case for the theoretical insight that the sociology of translation can provide. Yet an important question remains: what are the implications of translations and materiality for the educational practice? First, it is important to note that the concept of translation and the focus on materiality are not just the product of the over-theorising mind of the sociologist—since such criticism has been formulated against ANT (see Whittle and Spicer 2008). Actually, this version of the story is quite faithful to the concerns of the actors involved. If we consider the advice that “a commitment to understanding and respecting emic meanings … would help to temper the tendency for ANT to be used as a ‘grand narrative’” (ibid., p. 618), then the notion of translation appears just as relevant. Irène, editor and author, describes translation as the starting point of the whole enterprise: “While studies on the history of women and gender were developing in the university, there was absolutely no translation of this in…in the software of both those who made the programmes and those who made textbooks”. To be fair, “translation” and “transmission” are often used indifferently by actors of the social life of the book when the topic is the integration of gender history to primary and secondary education. However, when they specify the sort of work required for this purpose, the nuance in the idea of translation proves useful. Annie, one of the editors, explains in an email to an author what her task consists of: “It is about translating into mixte history (men and women) a sub-theme of the new seconde programme”. And translation is, therefore, what this author did (and explained during our interview): “You had to summarise, that’s it, and put it in a language…quite simple. Because I mostly write research, scientific books, so it required a translation, kind of, for the textbook, so that it’s more… [accessible]” (Linda). Here, translation is an emic term just as it is a theoretical one, which suggests the relevance of this notion for those actors of the educational field who must work within the constraints of a prescribed national curriculum. In an effort to demonstrate the benefits of ANT for the sociology of education, Richard Edwards (2011) studied the enactment of the Scottish public curriculum and came to the conclusion that the model of linear implementation—which is the traditional framework for studying curricula—is less pertinent than a model of translation that focuses on “the multiplicity of curriculum-making practices” (p. 39) which occur all

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along the educational chain. Evidently, the actors involved in the social life of LPFH are well aware that programmes are to be translated, not implemented, and that this translation can, therefore, lean towards the integration of more gender and women to the historical narrative taught in school. They are also well aware that this translation heavily relies on material practices. Françoise explains what triggered their decision to produce a textbook: Because actually what we would always hear in France – there has always been links of course between secondary education and the university – what we would always hear, we also had participated, Mnémosyne, to training sessions, twice, to training sessions for secondary school teachers around the theme of the history of women and what we would often hear was “we don’t have any tool, it is interesting, the students are interested but we don’t have the tools.” So the manual was to be part of a project of transmission and to provide this tool, one of the tools, a tool that secondary education teachers lacked to tackle this dimension of history.

The metaphor of the tool is not anecdotal. Interestingly enough, it was a recurring comparison that many interviewees used. Envisaging the book as a tool is a reformulation of Law’s (1994) idea that “left to their own devices human actions and words do not spread very far at all ” (author’s emphasis; p. 24): in order to export the knowledge on the history of women and gender beyond the walls of academia, actors of the social life of the book are acutely aware of the need for some material support. A shared assumption of materialist sociologists—sociologists of translation included—is that reality is not merely interpersonal interactions, thoughts, and discourses. The food we eat, the house we live in, the clothes we wear, matter just as much. Evidently, this assumption is also shared by the educational actors involved with the textbook. This is the case of Cécile and Véronique, history teachers and Mnémosyne board members. Every year around October, Mnémosyne participates in a history festival—Les Rendez-Vous de l’Histoire de Blois—, and sends members of the association to animate a workshop there. For the second consecutive year, Cécile and Véronique volunteered to go. This year, the theme of the festival is scientific history. So Cécile and Véronique have decided to make the workshop about the inclusion of women and gender to the teaching of scientific history in secondary education. The

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major part of their presentation consisted of showing their audience (mainly history teachers) how it was possible to make opportunistic use of elements of the programmes to introduce gendered notions, in line with the story recounted in Chapter 2. They explained how it was possible to tweak the curriculum guidelines in favour of a gendered/feminised approach. If we combine this strategy with the concept of translation, we can build a first bridge between the two theoretical frameworks mobilised in the present book through the notion of opportunistic translation. An opportunistic translation possesses the characteristics of a translation as theorised by ANT scholars—transformation, displacement, negotiation; however, it emphasises the specificity of human intentionality and is alert of the institutional context in which translations occur. Here for instance, the two history teachers opportunistically translate programmes guidelines (which they are institutionally bound to) into women/gender history. Furthermore, what Cécile and Véronique also did, and took extra care in doing, was the provision of diverse and accessible material for these teachers to actually practice what they preached. No less than seven slides of their presentation were dedicated to the question “Where to find documents?” and among the resources cited, of course, was the book. Cécile and Véronique also insisted that their presentation was in and of itself usable teaching material which they were more than willing to share with anyone interested. And judging from the number of teachers who, armed with their USB sticks, rushed to collect the presentation at the end of the workshop, it seemed that it was precious material indeed. They paid close attention to providing enough material for teachers because they know from experience that motivation and goodwill are not all there is to teaching. As Cécile explains, this time about a different training session that she also animated: But yes [teachers] were interested sure, they were interested. Because it’s interesting to see that it’s possible [to integrate women and gender]. But I think that there is a first obstacle which is “how to do this?” Then, there is the obstacle of, once you moved past the “how to” obstacle and you’ve seen that it’s possible and interesting, there is actually doing it… And so the work that we did, both of us, which was a huge amount of work, was collecting documents; and collecting them from resources that were accessible for teachers; that is to say the textbook [LPFH], the Documentation Photo and school textbooks. We only took these sources, only easy to find sources. That was our challenge.

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What Cécile points to is precisely what some sociologists of education have found pertinent in actor-network theory, the fact that “ANT focuses not on what texts and other objects mean, but on what they do” (author’s emphases; Fenwick and Edwards 2011, p. 3): Because if you work on deportation and you start using case studies or documents about women…if you take Mémoires d’une resistante which tells the story of a working day in a concentration camp well then you include women … I think it’s small…it can be made through small things. If these documents are in school textbooks, easily accessible, well it can happen very fast, very very fast. (Cécile)

Documents are crucial because they make the lesson; documents, and anything that contributes to the palpable day-to-day reality of a classroom. Even though ANT has not impacted the sociology of education with the same striking power that it has impacted other sociological subfields (Edwards 2011, p. 42), some sociologists have discerned in this scholarship elements that are particularly fit for studying education: ANT shows how the entities that we commonly work with in educational research—classrooms, teaching, students, knowledge generation, curriculum, policy, standardized testing, inequities, school reform—are in fact assemblies of myriad things that order and govern educational practices. (Fenwick and Edwards 2011, p. 3)

Sociologists of education who have turned to ANT have taken an interest in these, sometimes mundane, “assemblies of myriad things” that teachers such as Cécile know to be fundamental to any teaching practice. And since these “things”—starting with textbooks—“order and govern educational practices”, they can be levers for change. This is at least the philosophy behind LPFH: This is what…for me this is the real problem, the real issue in the long run; it is how to change…how to change everyday teaching practices without having to think about it, without adding on top of things, without having to make an additional effort: making textbooks which are used and in which there are mixte documents … (Cécile)

Here, a connection can be drawn with the concerns of feminist pedagogues, and this connection ultimately responds to the question which

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opened the present section: what are the implications of translations and materiality for the present case? We have seen in the introduction how feminist pedagogues pointed out that there was no neutral education, that any educational philosophy is grounded in—and conveys—a certain worldview. The contribution of ANT for the study of education (and in spite of actor-network theorists’ rejection of critical sociology) is precisely that “ANT is suggestive of knowledge as a mattering practice – materialising activities that bring forth substance and significance” (authors’ emphasis; Fenwick and Edwards 2014, p. 42). Earlier in the same article, Tara Fenwick and Richard Edwards (2014) develop this idea: An ANT approach simply makes visible the variety and extent of these [sociomaterial] networks, as well as their heterogeneous composition. This visibility can assist higher education participants and stakeholders to negotiate, critique, resist or amplify these network effects – starting with how the network actually work materially to make some knowledge more authoritative or powerful than others, bearing in mind that authority does not guarantee power and vice versa. (p. 41)

Their description of the contribution of ANT is quite representative of the story of LPFH: “education participants” relying on a “sociomaterial network” to make “some knowledge” more accessible. It also introduces a theme that actor-network theorists are undoubtedly hostile to, yet deserves a closer look: that of power imbalances in the network.

Bringing Institutions Back In: Translations in Institutional Contexts Providing a tool to change teaching practices is the idea behind LPFH. We have seen that the material form taken by the tool is the outcome of a complex series of translations that are shaped by the various skills of the actors involved. This section takes the argument one step further and maintains—in disregard of some of ANT’s most basic claims—that these translations are also the product of the institutional context. The introduction of institutional elements in a story of translations is based on a correlative observation: translation processes are shaped by the actors’ skills (human actors at least), and the actors’ skills are shaped by their institutional positions , so translation processes are shaped by institutional factors.

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The form of a single and comprehensive textbook did not impose itself. However, discussions quickly turned to the production of one or several school manuals: And so right away we thought – well, maybe not right away – but let’s say that after several meetings we thought that maybe one of the most…the easiest and also the most entertaining thing to do in a certain way would be to … really play the game of the school institution with the programmes formulations and also to play the game of textbooks as they were made at the time – because it’s always evolving but… – that’s to say having a core text and also documents, case studies with documents and questions, really imitating school textbooks. (Sylvie S, author and former board member)

A shared feeling among most of my informants was certainly the dissatisfaction with school textbooks, with their outdated and overly masculine narrative, with their over-simplifications, with the lack of diversity and inclusiveness of the documents they offer. Rejecting the textbook format altogether could have been the answer to this dissatisfaction. Instead, they “played the game of the school institution” and decided to shape their “tool” according to traditional textbook standards. Eventually, they made what Sylvie calls an “anti-textbook;” a phrase that perfectly embodies the tension between dissatisfaction on the one hand and mimicry on the other. So an “anti-textbook”, yet a textbook nonetheless, since they are the privileged material support in the institutional field of primary and secondary education: And a lot of colleagues [teachers] build their lessons from textbooks, you know that publishers give their textbooks to teachers. So you have textbooks from five or six different publishers and you choose from this [material] to prepare your lesson… And so when you rely on textbooks, since textbooks include very very little women’s history…there is not much [women history in your lesson]. (Sylvie C, another author)

Thus, the Mnémosyne “tool” for the translation of gender and women’s history to primary and secondary education was eventually moulded into the dominant format of the institutional field of primary and secondary education: the textbook format. The choice of the publishing house was even based on the company’s expertise in school textbook production:

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I think it would have been perfectly possible with xxx [a different publishing house] because from a scholarly point of…they publish a lot of things about women and gender, they are quite open to all sorts of editorial experimentations etcetera but…the final aspect of the book, that is following a tradition of school textbooks, wouldn’t have been there. (Sylvie S)

And indeed, the final aspect of the book—and especially the beautiful iconography that editors and authors are so pleased with—is shaped by the publisher’s expertise of the educational field: We publish school textbooks; we have a proper team for the iconographic work which is not the case for general literature publication houses for example because we often make use of… And so this is why, on the one hand we had good iconographers who worked on this and on the other hand…we knew that with this target, teachers who are used to having beautiful iconography in school textbooks…, it had to be attractive, this is why we did not…we did not restrain at all the iconographic research budget. (Yves, publisher)

This is another typical case of the translation of an actor’s skills into a “thing”, as it has previously been described. But evidently, the publisher’s skills are the result of his knowledge of the institutional field for which the book was designed; his skills are fundamentally institutional skills . Both Sylvie and Yves’s accounts suggest that, had the book been targeted at an academic audience, it would have taken a very different—certainly far less colourful—form. As Françoise notes: “it is very beautiful, you can tell that it is from a school publisher who is used to making illustrated books”. In that sense, the material form of the book is tightly linked to the institutional context in which the translations occurred; that is to say the school publishing field. This is an argument that sociologists of translation would certainly disagree with, since—as it was earlier noted—they give no explanatory power to notions such as institutions. Callon (1986a) writes, reflecting on his research on the Saint Brieuc scallops: “We did not use social factors, norms, or particular, institutional or organizational configurations to explain why discussions concerning the scallops or the fishermen took place or were closed” (emphasis added; p. 213). My point is not so much that “institutional configurations” can account for why translations occur, but that they can inform how they occur, the form that they take.

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The argument that materiality is shaped by the institutional context is perhaps most evidently illustrated in the case of those actors who occupy different institutional positions in the network. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Nathalie is one of the few elected officials who decided to take upon themselves the diffusion and distribution of the book. As Regional Counsellor in charge of Women’s Rights, she ordered one book per high school of her region (approximately one hundred books) and summoned high school headmasters to come to the Conseil Regional to pick up their copies. But Nathalie is also a history teacher, her original profession, an occupation that she is profoundly attached to. Her schedule is split between the Conseil Regional and the middle school in which she teaches. Thus, Nathalie puts in practice in the classroom what she advocates as regional counsellor: she uses LPFH to make her lessons more inclusive: Massilia: And so as a teacher, do you read/use [the book] for your classes? Nathalie: Oh yes yes yes. It’s sort of my Bible … M: And so how do you use it? Documents, texts…? N: Yes, I scan the text… I scan it sometimes, in exams I also include it. Last time it was about men/women equality in cinquième so yes, I mentioned it. I can’t remember which documents I used but I used a contemporary document. Quite often I use it together with…a friend offered me a book about Marie Claire’s fiftieth anniversary [a French magazine]. It’s nice as well. Well I juxtapose things, pictures, posters… when you teach about consumption society you have quite some material in the book!

Just as it was the case for Linda, in Nathalie’s classroom the book dematerialises—and here rematerialises with excerpts from a different book—and can only be found in a fragmented form. In the classroom, the translation made by history-teacher-Nathalie is a division of the book: not even a full book, but pieces of it. Just as it was noted in Linda’s case, the fragmentation of the book is the translation of a full textbook chapter into an actual history lesson. At the Conseil Regional however, the translation that regional-counsellor-Nathalie operates is a multiplication of the book: not one, but a hundred books. So the sort of translation that occurs and the material form that it produces is not the outcome of the actor’s skills per se, but the outcome of the actor’s skills according to his or her institutional position, his or her institutional skills . Callon (1986a) argues that

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“enrolment [the operation by which an actor enters a network] does not imply, nor does it exclude, pre-established roles” (p. 205). And indeed, the mere fact of being a history teacher or a local authority does not imply the enrolment of Nathalie in the LPFH network. Nonetheless, I would argue that once enrolment has taken place, the sort of translation that an actor operates is heavily shaped by those “pre-established roles” such as institutional positions. As Dave Elder-Vass (2008) summarises, “the individual sometimes deploys causal powers of the whole organization, and not just those of their own person” (p. 467). This argument resonates with that of the readers of ANT who see an analytical blind spot in ANT’s “assumption that there are no predetermined structures” (Callon and Law 1997, p. 179); for instance M. I. Reed (1995) who laments ANT’s tendency to: “concentrate on how things get done, to the virtual exclusion of the various ways in which institutionalized structures shape and modify the process of social interaction and the socio-material practices through which it is accomplished” (p. 332). In order to understand “how things get done”, there is value in turning to institutional positions or institutional contexts, for their effects on “sociomaterial practices” are very tangible. Moreover, an exploration of the effect of the institutional context on translation processes could be an opportunity to engage with another criticism that has been formulated against ANT—and particularly relevant to the present case: the fact that this scholarship does not consider the power imbalances that endow actors with different translational abilities. As Andrea Whittle and André Spicer (2008) note: “Opting for a flat ontology means that ANT ignores the hierarchical distribution of opportunity. … The power to translate, it seems, is not evenly distributed” (p. 622). This observation proves true in the case of LPFH. In that regard, many interviewees who participated in the production of the book mentioned the crucial role of the publisher: Well the final product is a Belin product. So necessarily it has been partly shaped according to the publisher’s demands. The publisher did not want more than…I don’t know how many pages in total, … it’s the publisher for instance who decided on the layout, the titles, the way things are organised, the fact that there are two columns on each page, it’s not us. (Louis-Pascal, author and board member)

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Anyways, I’ll tell you, the layout, I don’t know if the others told you otherwise, but the layout is the publisher’s responsibility; the titles, subtitles and the layout it’s the publisher, and you cannot go against that. (Geneviève, editor and author)

What Louis-Pascal and Geneviève point to is the limitation of their abilities—as authors and editors—to negotiate compromises regarding the final book: at the end of the day, the publisher is in a position which gives him more powerful translational abilities. One could note that there is some confusion regarding the term “publisher” which sometimes refers to one individual—Yves, who single-handedly made a number choices, and notably the selection of LPFH for publication—and sometimes refers to a collective—the publishing house endowed with an aggregate of skills from various actors. When evaluating the imbalance of translational capabilities, it would not be fair to compare an individual actor (author or editor) with a collective actor (the publishing house). We can however compare the translational abilities of the collective of authors and editors with that of the publishing house; or compare the translational abilities of an individual author/editor with that of the publisher (Yves). In any case, it is the institutional skills of the actor as publisher (individual or collective) which ultimately grant superior translational abilities. These superior capabilities are actually put down on paper in the contract that the editors and the association signed with the publishing house and which states, for instance, that: “The publisher has the prerogative to evaluate if the manuscript received corresponds to the target readership and goal. Otherwise, the editors commit to modifying the text according to what the publisher deems necessary”. The institutional position of the publisher allows him to secure—through the biding power of a formal contract— stronger translational abilities. This is why, eventually, “the final product is a Belin product”, to borrow Louis-Pascal’s words: the publisher’s institutional skills confer him a higher and contractually guaranteed hierarchical position in the translational chain. As it was earlier indicated, the argument that ANT is problematically— even dangerously—blind to structural issues, but also power relations, is one of the major criticisms levelled at this scholarship. So the “ANT and after” literature produced in the early 2000s—after the proliferation of ANT-inspired studies and ANT-critical pieces—has had to address this criticism: “Law (1999) suggests, additionally, that ‘asymmetries’ can be

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created inside the network building process, arguing that the possibility of exerting control reflects the central location one entity might hold in a materially heterogeneous network” (Alcadipani and Hassard 2010, p. 423). The argument that the present study wishes to assert is not that the “central location” in the network provokes asymmetries but, rather, that these asymmetries are the result of disparate institutional positions prior to the network: institutional positions are determinant of whether or not a stakeholder will ultimately hold a “central location” in the network. The introduction of institutional aspects to a story of translations and materiality can illuminate what sociologists of translation (purposely) leave unaccounted for: the origin of the differences and hierarchies between actors’ translational abilities. The incorporation of institutional aspects to the sociology of translation and the distinction of human agency— through, for instance, the concepts of opportunistic translation or institutional skills—have proven to more adequately characterise the present case study. While the sociology of translation approach emphasises the large amount of (material) translational work that the incorporation of gender/women’s history to school curricula requires, this translational work cannot be divorced from the institutional context in which it occurs. More broadly, the conclusions drawn from this case study can open a productive dialogue between institutionalism and ANT, a perspective which will be further examined in the following conclusion.

References Alcadipani, R., & Hassard, J. (2010). Actor-network theory, organizations and critique: Towards a politics of organizing. Organization, 17 (4), 419–435. Callon, M. (1986a). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 196–223). London: Routledge. Callon, M. (1986b). The sociology of an actor-network: The case of the electric vehicle. In M. Callon, J. Law, & A. Rip (Eds.), Mapping the dynamics of science and technology: Sociology of science in the real world (pp. 19–34). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Callon, M. (1991). Techno-economic networks and irreversibility. In J. Law (Ed.), A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination (pp. 132–164). London: Routledge. Callon, M., & Latour, B. (1981). Unscrewing the big Leviathan: How actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so. In K.

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Knorr-Cetina & A. V. Cicourel (Eds.), Advances in social theory and methodology: Toward an integration of micro- and macro-sociologies (pp. 277–303). London: Routledge. Callon, M., & Law, J. (1997). After the individual in society: Lessons on collectivity from science, technology and society. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 22(2), 165–182. Edwards, R. (2011). Translating the prescribed into the enacted curriculum in college and school. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(1), 38–54. Elder-Vass, D. (2008). Searching for realism, structure and agency in actor network theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 59(3), 455–473. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2011). Introduction: Reclaiming and renewing actor-network theory for educational research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(1), 1–14. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2014). Networks of knowledge, matters of learning, and criticality in higher education. Higher Education, 67 (1), 35–50. Gherardi, S., & Nicolini, D. (2000). To transfer is to transform: The circulation of safety knowledge. Organization, 7 (2), 329–348. Latour, B. (1986). The powers of association. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 264–280). London: Routledge. Latour, B. (1991). Technology is society made durable. In J. Law (Ed.), A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination (pp. 103–131). London: Routledge. Latour, B. (1996a). On actor-network theory: A few clarifications plus more than a few complications. Soziale Welt, 47 (4), 369–381. Latour, B. (1996b). Aramis or the Love of Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999). On recalling ANT. In J. Law & J. Hassard (Eds.), Actornetwork theory and after (pp. 15–25). Oxford: Blackwell. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-networktheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. (1994). Organising modernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Law, J. (1999). After ANT: Complexity, naming and topology. In J. Law & J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor-network theory and after (pp. 1–14). Oxford: Blackwell. Mutch, A. (2002). Actors and networks or agents and structures: Towards a realist view of information systems. Organization, 9(3), 477–496. Reed, M. I. (1995). The action/structure debate in organizational analysis. Conference on Structuration Theory and Organizations, Paris. Sayes, E. (2017). Marx and the critique of actor-network theory: Mediation, translation, and explanation. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 18(3), 294– 313. Whittle, A., & Spicer, A. (2008). Is actor network theory critique? Organization Studies, 29(4), 611–629.

CHAPTER 4

Conclusion

Abstract The conclusion is twofold. On the one hand, it argues for the possibility and benefits of doing some theoretical “pick-and-mix” to articulate the sociology of translation with the inhabited institution approach. It also presents the conclusions on the case study through this composite theoretical framework. On the other hand, the chapter discusses the implications of the case study for the prospect of feminist educational change. It explains that the piecemeal approach to educational change that this story embodies is grounded in a tradition of feminist reformist and “under-the-radar” activism. It argues that feminist educational change cannot be substantive if it only relies on individual and opportunistic action, and if it requires a great amount of translational work from educational practitioners, as in the present case study. Keywords Actor-network theory · Institutionalism · Sociomaterial networks · Feminist educational change · Reformist feminism · State feminism

The goal of offering two perspectives on the story of LPFH was to make two distinct arguments: one concerning social theory, the other educational reform and feminist academic activism. Let us consider each in turn.

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Ourabah, The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4358-6_4

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Can the Sociology of Translation Be Institutionalist? A word about the genesis of this theoretical journey is useful in closing the institutionalism/actor-network theory discussion. When this project started, it was never my intention to dive into such theoretical considerations. Originally, the two approaches were only at the back of my mind; I could foresee the relevance of both and I figured that, over the course of fieldwork, one would eclipse the other. This irresoluteness was only possible because, as discussed in Chapter 2, there are methodological affinities between the inhabited institution approach (close to symbolic interactionism) and ANT. Yet the eclipse never happened. Or, more accurately, one set of literature would indeed surpass the other by illuminating certain aspects of the social life, but it would then quickly prove unfit for studying other—equally important—aspects of the case. The research was hitting a dead end. It was trapped in an impasse that had only two mutually exclusive ways out: it could either recount a story of individuals and institutional constraints, or a story of translations and materiality. And whenever I considered one story over the other, the frustration grew even stronger, because not only was the story thereby amputated, but it lost the very elements that could counterbalance the flaws of the chosen theoretical framework. This is the paradox that grounds the theoretical argument developed in this book: institutionalism and the sociology of translation are to a large extent antithetical, however, the strengths of one can make up for the shortfalls of the other. Eventually, it became clear that—apart from theoretical allegiance—there was no legitimate reason to cope with the frustration; and therefore my attempt to explore how institutionalism in fact could be articulated with the sociology of translation. This articulation leads to the main empirical conclusion: the story of LPFH unfolds through a network of individuals who make opportunistic and strategic use of their institutional positions to advance the social life of the book. According to their institutional skills, these individuals engage in translation processes that shape and reshape the materiality of the book all along its social life. To the inability of an institutionalist-only perspective to account for the unpredictability of the outcome and the continuous transformation of the object, ANT offers the concept of translation and the focus on materiality, both of which are crucial to this story, as they specify the sort of work human actors do. To the refusal of the sociology of translation to give prevalence to the agency of human actors, to

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acknowledge their intentionality, and to consider the constraints and benefits of the institutional context, institutionalism responds with attention to opportunistic and strategic action, as well as power imbalances of institutional positions, all of which explain the different translational abilities of various actors. The institutional context can also illuminate the different forms material translations take. The present study thus argues for the possibility to use the insightful contribution of ANT without some of its strongest theoretical assumptions, particularly the principle of generalised symmetry between human and non-human actors, and that of isomorphism which denies explanatory power to structural notions such as institutions. Apart from methodological affinities, what renders possible—at least to a certain extent—the assemblage of these two approaches is that institutions have a more straightforward and tangible empirical reality than other sociological notions that actor-network theorists unequivocally reject. This point is eloquently made by Tom Mills (2018): Apple Inc, the European Central Bank, Eton College, Oxfam, the World Economic Forum, Facebook and the Vatican are all abstractions in that they are not physically bounded objects. But that does not mean they are not real things with distinct properties; and it is difficult to see how one can develop a convincing account of the contemporary world without acknowledging the particular characteristics, as well as the power, of such institutions. This much at least would seem to be compatible with ANT, at least in theory, but the same could not be said of abstract concepts like capitalism, imperialism or patriarchy. (p. 300)

Arguably, if anything, the notions of opportunistic translations and institutional skills developed in this book strengthen the empirical grounding of translation processes since they characterise them. This is an important contribution, considering that ANT scholars have heavily criticised any sociology that “reifies” grand concepts on the grounds that such sociology is oblivious to the actors’ reality and gives explanatory power to mere abstractions. This book argues that it is possible, even valuable, to consider institutional aspects in a translational approach, and that doing so is not necessarily synonymous with abstraction. This study thus concurs with Mills (ibid.) that “there are good reasons to be sceptical about any wholesale adoption of ANT” (p. 291), and instead offers a possible avenue for

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a piecemeal adoption of ANT. One could argue that without the principles of generalised symmetry and isomorphism, we are left with a sort of ANT without substance—and this would not be a completely illegitimate criticism. Yet this book defends a more flexible approach to social theory, one that is suspicious of theoretical obedience, and especially when, as is the case here, the empirical material spills over theoretical frontiers. This book does not, however, aim to make a systematic and coherent synthesis of institutionalism and ANT. Its very structure—with the two parallel stories—is in and of itself evidence of the difficulty to harmoniously combine two scholarly approaches whose fundamental assumptions are so contradictory. But the impossibility of a synthesis should not preclude a productive dialogue. Some scholars have made similar calls for constructively engaging ANT with other theoretical trends. For Geoff Walsham (1997), Anthony Giddens’ concept of structuration—a neologism Giddens coined to emphasise the processual and reciprocal constitution of agency and structure—could be an effective cure to the problems posed by the assumption of isomorphism. As noted in this chapter, actornetwork theorists advocate for breaking the barrier between agency and structure, and moving beyond a dichotomy that can only lead to theoretical deadlocks and never-ending sociological discussions. I have carefully avoided the agency-versus-structure debate in this book, as I very much agree that it would inevitably result in an unfruitful discussion. Yet Walsham sees in the concept of structuration an effective cure to ANT’s inability to analyse structural dimensions. For Giddens (1979), structural elements function as “rules and resources” for action (p. 80), and “power can be related to interaction in a dual sense: as involved institutionally in processes of interaction, and as used to accomplish outcomes in strategic conduct ” (author’s emphasis; p. 88). With this encompassing concept, accounting for rules and resources, institutions, interactions, and strategic action, Giddens’ framework could indeed resonate with the present argument. This is but another possible avenue to develop a constructive critique of ANT and, if anything, confirms that despite the many criticisms levelled at ANT, sociologists are determined to make the most of the innovative contribution that this approach has to offer. Notably, despite the charge that ANT is apolitical—and despite the straightforward rejection of critical sociology by actor-network theorists themselves—the ANT approach does show critical potential. Rafael Alcadipani and John Hassard (2010) note that ANT’s political relevance lies first and foremost in the attention to the enrolment of allies in a

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certain network, and that ANT itself is, in this regard, also a political project (p. 427). This is the sort of political relevance discernible in the case studied here. The success of the LPFH project was heavily dependent on enrolling allies, as is the successful incorporation of gender-sensitive material into educational curricula more generally. Note that “allies” is a broad concept, one that in this case included human allies such as political authorities, textbook publishers and teachers, and non-human allies such as teaching material and official curricula. But success also rested on the specific institutional skills of the allies enrolled, since certain institutional positions (that of Minister of Education to begin with) endow actors with the ability to subsequently enrol an even greater number of allies. This last point leads us to the second conclusive argument: the implication of the story of LPFH for feminist educational change.

Feminist Academic Activism in Education: Long-Haul Efforts, Piecemeal Achievements The case of LPFH is an inspiring story of a network of individuals who made opportunistic and strategic use of the resources at their disposal to alter the disproportionately masculine historical narrative of the national programmes . It is a story of a network that mobilises to make change happen. The actors in the social life of this book have worked, according to their respective means, to infuse elements of feminist pedagogy into the teaching of history in the Education Nationale. They share the goal of gender equality and subscribe to the idea that education—particularly the visibility of women and the inclusion of gendered notions in the teaching of history—is a necessary step towards a more egalitarian order of things. This is the principle behind LPFH: the textbook as academic activism. The story of LPFH is also the story of a targeted and collective effort to bring about educational change other than through the centralised and top-down channel of the programmes , which seem to be hopelessly impermeable to a substantial and systematic integration of women and gender. When the Conseil Supérieur des Programmes (CSP) announced that there would be a programme reform in 2015, Mnémosyne (the association of historians that produced the book) and thirteen other associations and institutions sent recommendations for more gender-inclusive programmes ; they urged, for instance, that programmes be written using both masculine and feminine grammatical categories, and that the fight

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against gendered stereotypes integrate the official guideline in every discipline, “hard” sciences included. These recommendations were completely ignored, or, in the best cases, significantly watered down. This was yet another failed opportunity that the association (and sixteen others) called out in an open letter to the CSP (APHG 2015). The final paragraph of this letter reads: Sure, the opportunity is missed. … But the battle is not lost yet. The school textbooks that will be produced in the wake of the programmes reform will be closely examined as they can still avoid gendered stereotypes with the hierarchies and inequalities that they inevitably generate. Moreover, the pedagogical freedom and professional ethics that remain the prerogative of teachers could also partly counterbalance the dangerous denial of our national institutions. (p. 2)

This conclusion suggests that seeking educational change in the margins of the national curriculum (through textbooks and pedagogical freedom), a strategy that the story of LPFH so acutely illustrates, continues to be an important channel of action for feminist activists in education. Such everyday activism has always been an important component of feminist movements, and arguably even more so since the end of the 1960s/1970s’ women’s movement (see Sowards and Renegar 2006). Feminist activism should not be understood as merely public protests and confrontation, for contemporary feminists use many levers of unconventional activism that include “creating grassroot models of leadership, using strategic humor, building feminist identity, sharing stories, and resisting stereotypes and labels” (ibid., p. 58). When I was in high school, our literature teacher gave us a short assignment on a programme chapter entitled “Styles and forms of argumentation”. We were supposed to use the rhetorical tools studied in class to build a well-argued response to the question: “Should there be quotas for women in political bodies?” The assignment felt overwhelming. At the time, I was starting to grow an interest in anything related to feminism. I would read news articles, do some research online, and start noticing the very mundane but insidious differences in treatment between men and women, at home, at school, on television, on the street. I should have been excited about the assignment, but mostly I was annoyed: it was the final assignment of the year, summer vacation was just around the corner, and we could all feel that the argumentation chapter was that slightly less important chapter of the

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programme, the one that teachers leave for the final weeks of the school year, and only complete if there are a miraculous couple of hours left. No one really wanted to spend the first sunny afternoons of the year behind their desks debating gender quotas. But we did, and received the graded assignments on the very last hour of the very last day of school. No need to say we were on the edge of our seats waiting for the liberating school bell as the teacher explained that the argument against the quotas was not necessarily an argument against gender equality, that it could also defend a less contrived form of equality. I remember thinking it was a good point, as I rushed out of the classroom and quickly emptied my mind of everything I had learned for the past ten months because it was that time of the year. It took years and introspection on my own school career to realise that this short assignment was it. It was the opportunity taken. It was the one moment in an educational career otherwise completely ignorant of gendered matters. It was the sort of unconventional activism that Stacey K. Sowards and Valerie R. Renegar describe. Even more so, it had to be unconventional: it could not speak its name and had to adopt the disguise of an official programme chapter. The teacher had to abide by the principle of a “neutral” education and pretend that she was not trying to sensitise us to feminist issues (which she most certainly was)—so much so that I did not connect the assignment to my embryonic interest in feminism, and merely saw a coincidence in the choice of topic. The story of LPFH exemplifies this under-the-radar sort of activism, grounded in a tradition of feminist reformism, which contemplates the possibility for social change through progressive adjustments and step-bystep action. Feminist educational practitioners are confronted with the difficulty of putting into practice their pedagogical ambitions within the confines of the existing school system. They have little choice but to adopt a pragmatic stance for enacting their emancipatory agenda, which certainly attenuates the radical ambitions of feminist pedagogy. Such compromises are obviously grounds for criticism: incremental reform is a political dead end, too conservative to disrupt the status quo and too reliant on individual action (see Dieleman 2010). In the case of LPFH, this critique is indeed well-founded. The first version of the story of LPFH highlights the individual, therefore isolated and piecemeal impact of the enterprise. The second version emphasises the huge amount of work that is required to put the translation of gender/women’s history into an actual secondary education history class; all the more so as

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this work was mostly unpaid labour (except for the publishing team). Editors and authors wrote and designed LPFH on a volunteer basis. Once it was published, the book sold quite well, so they managed to make a profit; however, they had decided that all proceeds should go to the association. While such decisions valorise the collective and activist endeavour of the project, there is some irony in the fact that this book, which highlights the many historical instances where women have engaged in unpaid (and unacknowledged) labour, is itself the product of unpaid labour. The required work of translation is also a consideration for teachers who need to invest a significant amount of time, work, and energy to reshape the book into usable material that they can adapt to a programme lesson. It is not surprising, then, that it proved so difficult to find opportunities to conduct participant observation in classrooms and observe the book “in action”. This work of (material) translation constitutes a significant barrier to the feminisation of education because, as Cécile, one of the teachers, explained: [The book] is for people who already have an approach through which they wish to integrate women in the programme, and who will go and look for information to integrate it, so they will make an effort to integrate this thing into their lessons. No need to say that it is for very few people.

Although the story of LPFH is a successful example of academic activism and an example of how pedagogical freedom can work towards gender equality in education, its impact remains marginal. The case of LPFH is useful to understand the extent to which teaching materials and teachers’ pedagogical freedom can compensate for the flaws of the official curriculum. In a highly constraining educational system—particularly one as centralised as the French Education Nationale—endeavours like the LPFH book can only produce marginal outcomes, as evidenced by the fragmented material form in which the book eventually reaches the classroom. This situation points to the tension between state feminism and market feminism. State feminism is practiced through “state-based structures at all levels and across all formal government arenas assigned to promote the rights, status, and condition of women or strike down gender-based hierarchies” (McBride and Mazur 2013, p. 2), while market feminism refers to “the ways in which feminist engagements with public policy agendas are increasingly mediated via private sector organisations according to the logic of the market” (Kantola and Squires 2012, p. 383). Particularly in the French Education Nationale, the State holds a preponderant and,

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arguably, legitimate position in shaping the curriculum. In this context, only state feminism can be an effective lever for change. We have seen how little support Mnémosyne received from local authorities when they were promoting the book. It should also be noted that they never received the full subsidy that the Ile-de-France region was supposed to grant them for its production. They only received one-third of the full amount and were denied the rest when the political majority of the Conseil Regional changed. The argument for not granting them the full subsidy was that the region was not supposed to finance a private company (the publishing house), even though the book could not have been produced without the publishing house. Moreover, the decision to make a book in the first place—to turn to market feminism—resulted from the frustration with the inaction of state authorities to change the curriculum. One can see the irony of being denied state feminism (the subsidy) because they relied on market feminism (the publishing house) due to the absence of state feminism (curriculum reform). Johanna Kantola and Judith Squires (2012) further note that the move from state feminism to market feminism “give[s] primacy to those feminist claims that are complicit with a market agenda” (p. 383), for instance, the production of marketable teaching material, with textbooks that would rather have “women” than “gender” in the title because “gender” would negatively affect sales and “women” had a nice ring to it. Yet the market agenda cannot, in and of itself, bring about educational change. In that regard, it is quite telling that soon after the publication of LPFH, the publishing house produced a “regular” history textbook that almost completely disregarded women and gender. Publishers will only offer alternative teaching material once the curriculum itself has substantially changed, once the principles of feminist pedagogy are translated into the content of the lessons taught in school, into teachers’ training, into the formal and informal rules that regulate interactions inside and outside the classroom. Only then will the gendered “hidden curriculum” be exposed and abolished.

References Alcadipani, R., & Hassard, J. (2010). Actor-network theory, organizations and critique: Towards a politics of organizing. Organization, 17 (4), 419–435. APHG. (2015, October 24). Les « nouveaux » programmes scolaires et le genre. Lettre ouverte à M. Michel Lussault. https://www.aphg.fr/Les-nouveauxprogrammes-scolaires-et-le-genre. Accessed 27 December 2019.

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Dieleman, S. (2010). Revisiting Rorty: Contributions to a pragmatist feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 891–908. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kantola, J., & Squires, J. (2012). From state feminism to market feminism? International Political Science Review, 33(4), 382–400. McBride, D. E., & Mazur, A. G. (2013). Women’s policy agencies and state feminism. In G. Waylen, K. Celis, J. Kantola, & S. L. Weldon (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of gender and politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mills, T. (2018). What has become of critique? Reassembling sociology after Latour. The British Journal of Sociology, 69(2), 286–305. Sowards, S. K., & Renegar, V. R. (2006). Reconceptualizing rhetorical activism in contemporary feminist contexts. The Howard Journal of Communications, 17 (1), 57–74. Walsham, G. (1997). Actor-network theory and IS research: Current status and future prospects. In A. Lee, J. Liebenau, & J. DeGross (Eds.), Information systems and qualitative research. London: Chapman and Hall.

Index

A Academic activism, 3, 8, 14, 22, 71, 75, 78 Actor-network theory (ANT), 3, 11–14, 18, 20, 38, 41–51, 56, 59, 61–63, 67–69, 72–75 Appadurai, Arjun. See Social life of things

C Callon, Michel, 12, 42, 43, 45–47, 49, 50, 54–56, 58, 65–67. See also Actor-network theory (ANT); Latour, Bruno; Law, John Case study research, 3, 9, 11, 13 Collective action, 48, 50 Conseil Supérieur des Programmes (CSP), 7, 21, 75, 76 Curriculum, 4, 7–9, 14, 59, 61, 76, 78, 79. See also Programmes

E Educational practice, 9, 13, 42, 59, 62 Education Nationale, 7, 8, 28, 30, 37, 75, 78 Edwards, Richard, 9, 50, 59, 62, 63. See also Fenwick, Tara

F Feminism market, 14, 78, 79 pedagogy, 4–6, 8, 75, 77, 79 reformism, 14, 77 state, 78, 79 Fenwick, Tara, 9, 50, 62, 63. See also Edwards, Richard Fine, Gary Alan, 19, 25, 30–35. See also Institutionalism, Symbolic interactionism

G Gender history. See Herstory

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Ourabah, The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4358-6

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Generalised symmetry, 13, 42, 43, 44, 50, 73, 74. See also Actor-network theory (ANT)

H Hallett, Tim, 18, 19, 20, 27. See also Inhabited institution; Ventresca, Marc J. Herstory, 4

I Individual action, 31, 77 Inhabited institution, 12–14, 19, 27, 34, 72 Institutional context, 3, 7, 12, 13, 18, 20, 23, 30, 36, 45, 61, 65–67, 69, 73 position, 12, 13, 26–28, 35, 45, 46, 63, 66–69, 73, 75 skills, 13, 42, 65, 66, 68, 69, 73 Institutionalism, 3, 12, 13, 17–20, 69, 72–74 new, 18, 19 old, 18–20 Intentionality, 14, 44, 61, 73 Isomorphism, 13, 42, 45, 50, 73, 74. See also Actor-network theory (ANT)

L Latour, Bruno, 12, 42–48, 50, 52, 54, 55. See also Actor-network theory (ANT); Callon, Michel; Law, John Law, John, 12, 20, 42, 45, 47, 50, 54, 56, 60, 67, 68. See also Actor-network theory (ANT); Callon, Michel; Latour, Bruno

M Materialisation, 52, 54, 57 dematerialisation, 13, 42, 51, 57, 58 rematerialisation, 57, 58 Materiality, 13, 14, 38, 41, 59, 63, 66, 69, 72 Mnémosyne, 4, 6–8, 20, 21, 24, 25, 31, 33, 51, 52, 58, 60, 64, 75, 79

N Negotiated order. See Symbolic interactionism Network, 12, 18, 31, 32, 34–36, 47–49, 54, 56, 63, 66, 69, 75 in actor-network theory, 42, 47, 49 social, 31, 34, 38, 44

O Opportunistic, 12, 26, 29, 30, 61, 75 action, 12, 18, 22, 25, 29, 32, 73 translation, 13, 42, 61, 69, 73

P Pedagogical freedom, 7, 29, 30, 76, 78 Programmes , 2, 6–8, 21, 23–25, 28–31, 52, 59–61, 75. See also Curriculum

S Social life of things , 9 Sociology of translation. See Actornetwork theory (ANT) Strategic action, 73, 74 Syllabus. See Curriculum Symbolic interactionism, 12, 72

INDEX

T Translation, 6, 12–14, 41, 42, 47, 49, 50, 52–61, 63–67, 69, 72, 73, 78 Translational abilities, 42, 67–69, 73

V Ventresca, Marc J., 18–20, 27. See also Hallett, Tim; Inhabited institution

U Unpredictability, 12, 37, 50, 72

W Women’s history. See Herstory

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