#ANT

Born out of a French constructivist school of thought in the 1980s, Actor Network Theory (ANT) has been further developed by well-noted sociologists, and namely Bruno Latour (1996), who claimed ANT was ”often misunderstood and hence much abused” (p. 370). One of the most recent (and most helpful) explanations of ANT comes from telecommunications scholar Jo Rhodes (2009), who defined actors and actants as “human or non-human entities… endowed with interests, projects, desires, [etc.]” that respond to and help form networks (p. 4). Therefore, actor-networks are “composed of a series of heterogenous animate and inanimate elements linked to each other over time,” and yet, they can also be thought of as “the way things are, a set of assumptions about how relations are organized and networked” (p. 4). Successful networks function well when all the interests of actors and actants are similarly aligned. For researchers, studying actors within their networks allows us “to map out the set of elements (the network) that influence, shape, or determine an action” (p. 4). Potts’ (2014) research mapped out the relations and interests of actors in disasters to demonstrate how centralized information systems stifle immediate communication, whereas the more decentralized social media systems enable actors to form information and support networks more immediately.