Mapping academic practice: a Latourian inquiry into a set of lecture slides

Abstract

How is academic work accomplished within a curriculum that has been established through a digital education infrastructure, and what, exactly, does an academic member of staff do within this digital context? Reflecting on the empirical findings of a three-year ethnography of a distributed medical education curriculum delivered across two university campuses in Canada, this paper demonstrates that the ways in which work that has typically been characterized as academic is enacted within this curriculum, positioned as a socio-technological network, through a heterogeneous network of people and materials. Drawing on the philosophical anthropology of Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, this paper positions the individual academic member of staff as one amongst many network elements within the digital platform across which academic work is generated and circulated. The paper argues that studies of digitally-mediated higher education can equally rest on small and localized instances of practice as well as on cross-boundary or institutional explorations, and offers ways of thinking that are informed by Latour's philosophical anthropology.