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The modern practice of schooling is and always has been inextricably intertwined with its materials: from Froebel gifts, Montessori object boxes, and Waldorf architecture, to Madeline Hunter's lesson plan format, the Blackboard learning management system, and Smart Technologies' Interactive Whiteboard. The particular technologies teachers use in the classroom appreciably shape and "influence the formation of learning and affect thinking and theorizing about education in general" (Sørensen, 2009, p. 7). Yet the formative significance of materiality to the social project of education has received surprisingly little theoretical attention. Waltz (2006) points out that "this is especially curious given the serious work that has gone into the development and use of things as educational tools" (p. 52). Even educational technology literature has remained relatively immune to the work of science and technology studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) scholars who, for example, observed early that technologies are often unfaithful to their creators and thus produce unanticipated effects beyond the (educational) aims intended. Estrid Sorensen's (2009) The Materiality of Learning: Technology and Knowledge in Educational Practice offers one corrective, methodological step toward addressing this theoretical deficiency, reframing "learning not as social but socio-material" (p. 5). Sørensen's book is a reworking of her 2005 dissertation, which examined the contribution of learning materials in constituting school practices in two Scandinavian grade 4 classrooms. Using an ANT-informed ethnographic approach, she observed teacher-student interactions "performed" with, around, and through a variety of established technologies-blackboard, chalk, notebooks, chairs, a bed-loft, and a bell-as well as several new media technologies-a blog, a conferencing system, and an online virtual environment called Femtedit. Sørensen's intent is to provide a methodological approach to studying the materiality of learning in order to discover "how digital and traditional learning materials influence educational practice in general, and Catherine Adams is an assistant professor in the Department of Secondary Education. Drawing on phenomenology, philosophy of technology, and critical media scholarship, her research investigates changes in teachers' practices, students' learning approaches, and knowledge representation in the wake of digital technology integration.

Actor-Network Theory and Latour's principle of symmetry between human and nonhuman creatures was developed as a methodological 'grip' to encourage analysts to investigate sociomaterial configurations rather than defining them before empirical study. In order to adjust the principle of symmetry to the scale of experience, it is argued that what is co-present must be in focus in empirical research as this is what experience relies on. In discussion with Marxist empirical materialism and with studies from the affective turn, the article analyses experience as presence, based on classroom ethnography. The term is suggested as a contribution to an empirical posthumanist methodology that reaches beyond anthropocentric studies where the human is given a privileged position or is a distant judging observer of the world, to move towards a methodology of human and nonhuman symmetry.

George Marcus (1995) emphasizes that multi-sited ethnography embodies within itself a comparative dimension. For our general understanding of comparison, however, multi-sited ethnography lacks a crucial component: a grounding or tertium comparationis. Th is article proposes a multi-sited comparison which does not take as its point of departure any tertium comparationis but instead identifies this as an outcome. Th e method of comparison was developed amidst a multisited ethnography of "doing regulation," here with reference to computer games and the regulatory purpose of protecting minors from harmful media content.

This article contributes to psychology’s epistemic project by proposing a methodology that foregrounds the relation between research methods and subject matter. Considering method-driven and subject-driven approaches as being opposite poles of a continuum, the science of psychology has historically tended toward emphasising one or the other. Method-driven approaches claim legitimacy through an emphasis on a unifying standardised method, while subject-driven approaches insist on human-centred conceptions of psychology’s subject matter. Both poles are accompanied by one-sided methods-to-matter relations which limit the ways in which phenomena can be known in surprising and unforeseen ways. Phenomenon-driven research conceptualises the engagement with methods and matter as mutually intra-acting. Systematic research assembling points to the practical crafting of research activities through ongoing engagement with how phenomena can be known through intra-action. In our time of particularly unsettled, changing, and complex phenomena, psychology’s epistemic projects need methodologies that aim at ways of knowing that can bring out the unexpected.