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 ac-
count 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

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 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 promo-
tion 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

1 Introduction 1

2 A Story of Individuals and Institutions, Lessons

from Institutionalism 17

3 A Story of Translations and Materiality, Lessons

from Actor-Network Theory 41

4 Conclusion 71

Index 81

vii
 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 develop-
ment of women and gender history and notes that this historiography
has seldom been incorporated into French primary and secondary educa-
tional 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 1

M. Ourabah, The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4358-6_1
2 M. OURABAH

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 well-
attended 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 sex-
ist 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. Par-
ticularly, 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 carica-
tured gendered representations, what emerges from decades of scrutin-
ising 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).
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

This situation is not specific to France. The enduring

under/misrepresentation of women is a shared characteristic of most edu-
cational 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 initia-
tive 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 bene-
fits 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 fur-
ther detail in this introduction.

1 In 2007, the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring report noted “stereotypes per-
sisting in learning materials and, too often, teachers’ expectations of girls and boys differ-
ing” (UNESCO 2006).
4 M. OURABAH

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 move-
ment, the term “herstory” was coined as a not-so-funny pun intended
to offer a historical narrative free of masculine biases. Women’s histori-
ography 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 legiti-
macy with difficulty, as the discipline has often been reduced to its femi-
nist activist roots (Wieviorka 2004).
The emergence and growth of this scholarship is also to be under-
stood through the profile of its practitioners: in various national contexts,
the development of women’s history was only possible because a gener-
ation of female historians had gained access to academia. Yet the histo-
rians who followed in their footsteps realised that to understand long-
lasting 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). Funda-
mentally, 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 gen-
der 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 ped-
agogy as there are versions of feminism. So, while formulating an exhaus-
tive definition of feminist pedagogy is a difficult task, it can nonetheless
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

be noted that feminist pedagogues share two basic assumptions: the need
for feminist emancipation, on the one hand, and the power of educa-
tion 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 con-
sciousness raising, the existence of oppression and the possibility of end-
ing 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 educa-
tional 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 ambi-
tion of feminist pedagogues is significantly broader than merely chang-
ing 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 inter-
sectional perspective.
6 M. OURABAH

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 imper-
fect translation of the French word “mixte”) is a history textbook cen-
tred 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 historiog-
raphy had acquired enough legitimacy within French academia, once this
field was sufficiently elaborated and prolific, and once Mnémosyne histo-
rians 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 edu-
cation 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 gen-
der, 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
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

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, pre-
mière, 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 incor-
poration 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 pedagog-
ical 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 recommenda-
tions formulated by multiple associations (Mnémosyne included) to incor-
porate gender-sensitive material in the school programmes . The resistance
of the CSP to the inclusion of such material and the high level of cen-
tralisation of the French educational system makes it an appropriate site
for studying alternative efforts to bring about educational change in a
constraining institutional context.
8 M. OURABAH

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 con-
sidered in the context of the Education Nationale. The fact that a gender-
sensitive 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 res-
onates 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 transmis-
sion 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 teach-
ing 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 mod-
els. In line with feminist pedagogy and the feminist roots of women’s
history, the historians who produced LPFH conceived it as an act of aca-
demic 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 dis-
cipline 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 his-
tory 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
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

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 ter-
minological 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 prac-
tice, 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-in-
motion that illuminate their human and social context” (author’s empha-
sis; 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 femi-
nisation 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 sto-
ries 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
10 M. OURABAH

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 teach-
ers 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 geo-
graphical 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 min-
utes 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 system-
atic 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 his-
toriographical 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 occa-
sions 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 edi-
tors 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.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

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 juxta-
position of the different perspectives enables the viewer to have a better,
more complete, idea of the situation. The present book offers a theo-
retical 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 theoret-
ical 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 perspec-
tives 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
12 M. OURABAH

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 schol-
arship, 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 interaction-
ism—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 initia-
tives 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 forego-
ing institutionalist version of the story, the reason for this omission and,
consequently, the perspective to adopt next. It argues that the institution-
alist 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 scholar-
ship of Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law to present ANT’s
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

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 acknowl-
edging 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 contradic-
tions 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 materi-
ality 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 materi-
alisation 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 frame-
works, 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
14 M. OURABAH

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, prac-
tical 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 edu-
cation. It also notes the limits of market feminism, showing that pur-
chasable 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.

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 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 empha-
sis 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 oper-
ate, and how the book travels. We begin with some theoretical clarifi-
cations about institutionalism before turning to the story of LPFH, one

© The Author(s) 2020 17

M. Ourabah, The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4358-6_2
18 M. OURABAH

that emphasises individual initiatives and opportunities for action in insti-

tutional 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 actor-
network 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 phe-

nomenological 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 insti-
tutions 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” institu-
tionalism. 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 Mau-
reen A. Scully and W.E. Douglas Creed’s (1997) concept of inhabited
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 19

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 environ-
ment” (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 under-
stand 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)
20 M. OURABAH

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 above-
quoted passage suggests. But it does take inspiration from “research [that]
centers on work activities as a kind of ‘agency’ within institutional con-
texts” (Hallett and Ventresca 2006, p. 215). A major goal of the insti-
tutionalist 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 ethno-
graphic methodology in “an effort to get closer to empirical reality” (Hal-
lett 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 theoreti-
cal 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 inter-
actionism) 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
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 21

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 pro-
fessor 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 inclu-
siveness 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 argu-
ments…you know, both equally stupid… (Irène, editor and author)

Confronted with the impossibility to substantially change the pro-

grammes , 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 narra-
tive taught in schools—and decided to take action, to do something about
22 M. OURABAH

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 representa-
tion 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 text-

book for primary and secondary education: “So there was a whole reflex-
ion 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 finan-
cial 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 Ile-
de-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 pro-
motion [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
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 23

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 insti-
tutional 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 pro-
grammes 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 con-
straint because we had to… if we don’t follow the programmes,
since teachers have the obligation to stick to them … they would-
n’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 guide-
line 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 .
24 M. OURABAH

This was a recurring observation in the production stages of the book

(and an observation which ran against my expectations): in the produc-
tion 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 uncon-
vinced 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
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 25

of the publishing field: no publisher would make the highly risky invest-
ment of producing seven women/gender history textbooks. Thus, it is
not so much that programmes were not constraining, but that the insti-
tutional constraints of the publishing field overtook those of the educa-
tional 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 “occa-

sion”—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 his-
tory 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 text-
book. I talked to two of them: Nathalie who held a mandate in a Conseil
26 M. OURABAH

Regional, and Brigitte, in a Conseil Départemental (in France, depart-

ments 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 presiden-
t’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 depart-
ment, 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 pur-

chase 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 mak-
ing 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 piece-
meal approach to change” (ibid., p. 126), and that “the sources of piece-
meal 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
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 27

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 avail-
able—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 col-
league. I just mentioned it, you know, in a hallway! [laughing]

Such informal encounters—that nonetheless result in concrete institu-

tional 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 simi-
lar views) to the conclusion that “institutions are not inert cultural logics
or representations; they are populated by people whose social interac-
tions suffuse institutions with force and local meaning” (Hallett and Ven-
tresca 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
28 M. OURABAH

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 differenti-
ated 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 inte-
grating 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 physi-
cist] 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 ses-
sions that you give?
F: That’s it, exactly, as soon as I can.

It is mostly through the individual initiatives of actors seizing the oppor-

tunities offered by their institutional positions that gender and women
history spreads to secondary and primary education and, more specif-
ically, that the book LPFH travels. As Alice, author and high school
teacher, confirms, “I often presented the book to other primary and sec-
ondary 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 institu-
tional 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?
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 29

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 mod-
ifying 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 [laugh-
ing] but that was it!

Despite the heavily constraining aspect of the programmes , Cécile eventu-

ally decided—as she gained teaching experience—to limit the schizophre-
nia 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. Equality before the law
B. Restrictive citizenship
C. Rights and duties of the citizens
D. 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 individ-
ual initiatives, opportunities for action, and institutional constraints. The
30 M. OURABAH

principle of pedagogical freedom is, in the context of the French Educa-

tion Nationale, the sort of freedom that Fine (1984) emphasises: “social
actors … have the freedom to operate strategically in organisational envi-
ronments, 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:
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 31

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 observa-

tion that “real constraints direct and channel the actions of individuals”
(Fine 1984, p. 246). In the case of teachers, programmes are real con-
straints 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 mas-
culine 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 mobili-
sation 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.
32 M. OURABAH

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 Mné-
mosyne 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 volun-
teer 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 dead-
lines 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
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 33

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 insti-
tutional 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 publica-
tion of the book, so that he could spread the word to educational inspec-
tors—, 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 rela-
tionship 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
34 M. OURABAH

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 his-
tory – 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 his-
torian, 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 work-
ing towards the same goal. But it’s not the case in all departments
obviously.

The existing relationship between Françoise and these two elected offi-
cials 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 nego-
tiations 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 can-
not 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
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 35

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. How-
ever, 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 lit-
erature—which stresses the achievements that such ties enable—should
36 M. OURABAH

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 work-
ing 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 unac-
counted 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, materi-
alised it into a final product and, ultimately, that the book was made avail-
able for teachers’ use as it was originally designed. This is a very smooth
narrative that does not reflect a recurring element in the stories recol-
lected: 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 begin-
ning, 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
 2 A STORY OF INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS, LESSONS … 37

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 peo-
ple…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 book-

as-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 trav-
els through a network of individuals—otherwise, why would the original
architects of the project be surprised by the final product? There is evi-
dently an important element of unpredictability in this story, and yet, the
38 M. OURABAH

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 net-
work of individuals. Consequently, we now know about the people who
constitute this network and how they operate, but we still know very lit-
tle 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.

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 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 rele-
vance to the present case. Notably, it questions ANT’s principles of gener-
alised 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 insti-
tutional 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 actor-
network theory (ANT), to ask what exactly happens to the book through-
out its social life. With the concept of translation and a focus on mate-
riality, the aim of this chapter is to understand how and why the book

© The Author(s) 2020 41

M. Ourabah, The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4358-6_3
42 M. OURABAH

evolves along its journey, and to clarify the pertinence of this ANT-
inspired 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 ANT-
inspired 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 prin-
ciple of generalised symmetry, the principle of isomorphism, the network
in ANT, and the notion of translation.
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 43

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 non-
human 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 scal-
lops. 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 inves-
tigated 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 nar-
rative approach to the case study itself—which traced the chronological
trajectory of the book—has been largely inspired by the ability of “actor-
network 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).
44 M. OURABAH

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 fur-
ther notes that “social networks will of course be included in the descrip-
tion 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 intention-
ality in this analysis is the result of the study’s methodology: the field-
work 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 intentional-
ity 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: “Peo-
ple 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,
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 45

makes a network of allies and extends his power – doing some “network-
ing” 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 isomor-
phism. The idea that all actors are isomorphic means that there is no essen-
tial 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 macro-
actors are bigger than or superior to micro-actors. … Too often sociolo-
gists 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 actor-

network theorists to escape the agency/structure binary—or that between
the individual and the collective—which they deem unfruitful for socio-
logical 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 distinc-
tion 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
46 M. OURABAH

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 world-
building 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 eighteen-

hour 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 com-
pletely, 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
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 47

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 previ-
ous chapter, it should be noted that the work of actor-network theo-
rists 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 enti-
ties 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 Elec-
tricité de France, the French government, and consumers, but also accu-
mulators, 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 col-
lectives” (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 sociol-
ogist?” Callon and Latour (1981) provide an answer that is grounded in
their relational ontology (and makes room for non-human actors):
48 M. OURABAH

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 associa-
tions 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). Reflect-
ing 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 frame-
work for the study of collective action. The importance of the collective
also derives from the centrality of the network since any sort of action nec-
essarily 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 net-
works 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 enter-
prise 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.
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 49

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 “so-
ciology of translation” already indicates the centrality of the concept, so
central, indeed, that Callon (1986a) writes that “translation is the mech-
anism 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 lan-
guage 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 differ-
ent 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 trans-

lation, 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. Transla-
tion is the movement of a token across a network, just as it is the mod-
ification of the token in the course of this very movement; “to translate
50 M. OURABAH

is to betray” (Latour 1996b, p. 48), but “to translate is [also] to dis-

place” (emphasis added; Callon 1986a, p. 215). The articulation of these
two mechanisms of translation results in the unpredictability of the pro-
cess, as the initial statement is continuously being modified by the net-
work: “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 iden-
tified 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 transforma-
tion. 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 select-
ing 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 tradi-
tions (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”
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 51

(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, introduc-
ing 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 Mné-
mosyne. 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 Mné-
mosyne 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
52 M. OURABAH

book-as-an-idea stage can only be accessed through their blurry memo-

ries. Still, this initial idea should not be understood as the dematerialised-
yet-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 book-
as-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 text-
book—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 ” (Louis-
Pascal). 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-as-
an-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
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 53

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 defini-
tively 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 pro-
duction 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 pub-
lisher 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
54 M. OURABAH

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…d-
ifferent 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 “con-
tinuous transformation of the token” (author’s emphasis; Latour 1986,
p. 267) that occurs during a social life of translations. Book-as-drafts, plu-
ral, 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 para-
graph where it was supposed to appear together with, and then the layout
was Belin”.
The difference between the sort of translation operated by the pub-
lisher—mostly concerned with format and layout—and the one operated
by authors—mostly concerned with the content of the texts and docu-
ments—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
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 55

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, writ-
ing 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 diffi-
culty. Callon (1991) explains that: “A totally convergent network would
thus be a kind of Tower of Babel. Everyone would speak their own lan-
guage, but everyone else would understand them. Each would have spe-
cific 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)
56 M. OURABAH

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 nego-
tiation” (emphasis added; Callon and Law 1997, p. 8).
Obviously, if there is another crucial lesson to learn from the actor-
network 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 his-
torical 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
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 57

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 transla-
tion 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 class-
room 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 agrar-
ian 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 sen-
tences, 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,
58 M. OURABAH

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 trans-
formed 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 stu-
dents 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 pho-
tocopies…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 pro-
cess before it is a result” (p. 215).
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 59

Materiality, Translation, and Education

This alternative story—in which translation is the engine and material-
ity 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 for-
mulated 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 respect-
ing 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 abso-
lutely 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 transla-
tion, 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 sug-
gests 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 Scot-
tish 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
60 M. OURABAH

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 sec-
ondary 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 Mné-
mosyne board members. Every year around October, Mnémosyne partic-
ipates 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
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 61

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 possi-
ble 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 doc-
uments?” 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.
62 M. OURABAH

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 scholar-
ship 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, curricu-
lum, 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 peda-

gogues, and this connection ultimately responds to the question which
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 63

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 – mate-
rialising 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 negoti-
ate, critique, resist or amplify these network effects – starting with how the
network actually work materially to make some knowledge more author-
itative 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 “sociomate-
rial network” to make “some knowledge” more accessible. It also intro-
duces 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 intro-
duction 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.
64 M. OURABAH

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 dissat-

isfaction 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 for-
mat 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 embod-
ies 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:
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 65

I think it would have been perfectly possible with xxx [a different publish-
ing 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 trans-
lation 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 con-
figurations to explain why discussions concerning the scallops or the fish-
ermen 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.
66 M. OURABAH

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 profes-
sion, 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 advo-
cates 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 soci-
ety you have quite some material in the book!

Just as it was the case for Linda, in Nathalie’s classroom the book demate-
rialises—and here rematerialises with excerpts from a different book—and
can only be found in a fragmented form. In the classroom, the transla-
tion 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 frag-
mentation 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 institu-
tional position, his or her institutional skills . Callon (1986a) argues that
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 67

“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 indi-
vidual 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 pre-
determined 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 inter-
action 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 oppor-
tunity. … 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)
68 M. OURABAH

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, sub-
titles 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 abil-

ities—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 capa-
bilities, 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 collec-
tive) 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. Oth-
erwise, 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 institu-
tional 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
 3 A STORY OF TRANSLATIONS AND MATERIALITY, LESSONS … 69

created inside the network building process, arguing that the possibil-
ity 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 insti-
tutional 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 pro-
ductive dialogue between institutionalism and ANT, a perspective which
will be further examined in the following conclusion.

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Callon, M. (1986b). The sociology of an actor-network: The case of the electric
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ence and technology: Sociology of science in the real world (pp. 19–34). London:
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 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 artic-
ulate the sociology of translation with the inhabited institution approach.
It also presents the conclusions on the case study through this com-
posite theoretical framework. On the other hand, the chapter discusses
the implications of the case study for the prospect of feminist educa-
tional 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 educa-
tional 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 educa-
tional reform and feminist academic activism. Let us consider each in turn.

© The Author(s) 2020 71

M. Ourabah, The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4358-6_4
72 M. OURABAH

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 considera-
tions. 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 possi-
ble because, as discussed in Chapter 2, there are methodological affinities
between the inhabited institution approach (close to symbolic interac-
tionism) and ANT. Yet the eclipse never happened. Or, more accurately,
one set of literature would indeed surpass the other by illuminating cer-
tain 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 mutu-
ally 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 theoreti-
cal 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 sociol-
ogy of translation to give prevalence to the agency of human actors, to
 4 CONCLUSION 73

acknowledge their intentionality, and to consider the constraints and ben-

efits of the institutional context, institutionalism responds with attention
to opportunistic and strategic action, as well as power imbalances of insti-
tutional positions, all of which explain the different translational abilities
of various actors. The institutional context can also illuminate the differ-
ent 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 gen-
eralised 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 insti-

tutional 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 sociol-
ogy is oblivious to the actors’ reality and gives explanatory power to mere
abstractions. This book argues that it is possible, even valuable, to con-
sider 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 whole-
sale adoption of ANT” (p. 291), and instead offers a possible avenue for
74 M. OURABAH

a piecemeal adoption of ANT. One could argue that without the princi-
ples 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 harmo-
niously combine two scholarly approaches whose fundamental assump-
tions 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 neolo-
gism Giddens coined to emphasise the processual and reciprocal constitu-
tion of agency and structure—could be an effective cure to the problems
posed by the assumption of isomorphism. As noted in this chapter, actor-
network theorists advocate for breaking the barrier between agency and
structure, and moving beyond a dichotomy that can only lead to theo-
retical deadlocks and never-ending sociological discussions. I have care-
fully 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 strate-
gic conduct ” (author’s emphasis; p. 88). With this encompassing concept,
accounting for rules and resources, institutions, interactions, and strate-
gic 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 criti-
cisms 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 theo-
rists 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
 4 CONCLUSION 75

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 polit-
ical 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 associ-
ation of historians that produced the book) and thirteen other associ-
ations 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
76 M. OURABAH

against gendered stereotypes integrate the official guideline in every disci-

pline, “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 uncon-
ventional 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 assign-
ment, 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
 4 CONCLUSION 77

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 every-
thing 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 dis-
guise 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-by-
step action. Feminist educational practitioners are confronted with the dif-
ficulty of putting into practice their pedagogical ambitions within the con-
fines 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 indi-
vidual action (see Dieleman 2010).
In the case of LPFH, this critique is indeed well-founded. The first ver-
sion 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
78 M. OURABAH

this work was mostly unpaid labour (except for the publishing team). Edi-
tors 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 asso-
ciation. While such decisions valorise the collective and activist endeavour
of the project, there is some irony in the fact that this book, which high-
lights 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 oppor-
tunities to conduct participant observation in classrooms and observe the
book “in action”. This work of (material) translation constitutes a signif-
icant 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 teach-
ers’ pedagogical freedom can compensate for the flaws of the official cur-
riculum. 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 class-
room.
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 hier-
archies” (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,
 4 CONCLUSION 79

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 publish-
ing house), even though the book could not have been produced with-
out 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 fem-
inism “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 fem-
inist 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.

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 Index

A E
Academic activism, 3, 8, 14, 22, 71, Educational practice, 9, 13, 42, 59,
75, 78 62
Actor-network theory (ANT), 3, Education Nationale, 7, 8, 28, 30, 37,
11–14, 18, 20, 38, 41–51, 56, 75, 78
59, 61–63, 67–69, 72–75 Edwards, Richard, 9, 50, 59, 62, 63.
Appadurai, Arjun. See Social life of See also Fenwick, Tara
things

F
Feminism
market, 14, 78, 79
pedagogy, 4–6, 8, 75, 77, 79
C reformism, 14, 77
Callon, Michel, 12, 42, 43, 45–47, state, 78, 79
49, 50, 54–56, 58, 65–67. See Fenwick, Tara, 9, 50, 62, 63. See also
also Actor-network theory (ANT); Edwards, Richard
Latour, Bruno; Law, John Fine, Gary Alan, 19, 25, 30–35. See
Case study research, 3, 9, 11, 13 also Institutionalism, Symbolic
Collective action, 48, 50 interactionism
Conseil Supérieur des Programmes
(CSP), 7, 21, 75, 76
Curriculum, 4, 7–9, 14, 59, 61, 76, G
78, 79. See also Programmes Gender history. See Herstory

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 81

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
82 INDEX
Generalised symmetry, 13, 42, 43, 44,
50, 73, 74. See also Actor-network
theory (ANT)
H Materiality, 13, 14, 38, 41, 59, 63,
Hallett, Tim, 18, 19, 20, 27. See also
Inhabited institution; Ventresca,
Marc J.
Herstory, 4
I Negotiated order. See Symbolic
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
66, 69, 72
Mnémosyne, 4, 6–8, 20, 21, 24, 25,
31, 33, 51, 52, 58, 60, 64, 75,
79
N
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 Actor-
network theory (ANT)
Strategic action, 73, 74
Syllabus. See Curriculum
Symbolic interactionism, 12, 72
 INDEX 83

T V
Translation, 6, 12–14, 41, 42, 47, 49, Ventresca, Marc J., 18–20, 27. See
50, 52–61, 63–67, 69, 72, 73, 78 also Hallett, Tim; Inhabited
Translational abilities, 42, 67–69, 73 institution

U W
Unpredictability, 12, 37, 50, 72 Women’s history. See Herstory