Analyzing Socio-Ecological Infrastructures as Part of the Interaction Order

• In Event: What's Next for Interaction Analysis of Learning? Aligning Analytical Approaches With Theoretical Turns

Abstract

Informed by our collective training in ethnographic and interaction analysis traditions of research, we are interested in the socioecological, more-than-human, and sociotechnical processes at work in our data that operate beneath our notice but shape conditions for learning. Here we examine what is infrastructural to learning, including lands/waters, human labor, or technical systems. Rather than locating these factors or elements in empirical records, attempting to extract evidence of their member-relevance, we assume that they are relevant to interactions, siding with Star (1999) that “we need new methods to understand this imbrication of infrastructure and human organization” (p. 379). In this paper, we make infrastructures official parts of the interaction order, and ask: in learning ecologies, how can we analyze interactions of/in infrastructures?
We develop an analytic approach to studying the socioecological infrastructures that underlie interactions and learning arrangements. We ask four analytic questions to unearth systems and structures at work in our data: in this learning configuration (1) what parts of infrastructure are we surfacing? (2) what parts are people riding? (3) what parts are we/they interested in sustaining? and (4) what parts are we/they righting? Because so much of what structures learning operates behind the scenes, understanding learning from an infrastructural perspective entails first surfacing less visible aspects in order to interrogate them. As opposed to the ethnomethodological precept upon which IA is premised, that we limit analysis to what is observable or what people say in our data (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), surfacing unseen or unspoken social-material forces is actually required to be able to interrogate them (Clarke, 2014).
Once infrastructural elements are out in the open, it then becomes possible to analyze how people actively negotiate how (and whether) to ride them, or make use of structures in order to carry on with tasks at hand. We are particularly interested in how people may strategically opt to make use of infrastructure in ways that (retro)fit their own endogenous purposes. Infrastructures are by nature heterogeneous, comprised of nested systems and technologies (and heterogeneous definitions of technologies, (e.g. Colleagues and Author, 2013); therefore, there may be some aspects of infrastructures worth holding onto. Accordingly, our third analytic question asks what is being sustained within a learning configuration and considers how power is always implicated in processes of sustaining.
Finally, asking what we must right-- because it is no longer serviceable for learning and maybe never was-- is a means of analyzing how infra/structures could be otherwise and explicitly challenging settler colonial, racist, and heteropatriarchal logics that underwrite infrastructures and reinscribe settled nature-culture relations (Colleague & Author, 2015). Again flouting IA’s adherence to grounding evidentiary claims in what “is there” in the record, we consider what “could be,” with special attention to what LaDuke & Cowen (2020) called “alimentary infrastructures” (p. 245), those that nourish the human and material environment. We see this methodological intervention as necessary for contravening some of the greatest challenges that face us in educational research and for furthering conditions for racial, social, and climate justice.

Authors

• Deborah Silvis, Utah State University

• Tanner Vea, The Pennsylvania State University

• Jasmine Y. Ma, New York University

• Katie Headrick Taylor, University of Washington - Seattle

• Ananda Marin, University of California - Los Angeles