Written by: T. Elias, Independent Scholar

Abstract: As the world around us becomes increasingly digitized, datafied and commodified, so too does education. Seeking to address these realities, educational researchers are increasingly adopting posthuman perspectives, including sociomaterialism. As a feminist onto-epistemology, sociomaterialism considers both how we shape and are shaped through our ongoing interactions with our social and material worlds. Adopting this perspective brings into question many of the assumptions embedded within traditional methodologies and challenges educational researchers to adopt approaches that address the indirect, messy and interwoven nature of our technological, social and economic realms. This article argues that, as an explicitly posthuman approach to research, situational analysis is well suited to grappling with these sociomaterial complexities. It then presents an exemplar in which situational analysis was used to study open education’s relationships with scale from a sociomaterial perspective. Drawing from this exemplar, it argues that situational analysis offers a methodological “structured flexibility” with the power to open up silences by making the hidden visible, supporting collaborative research and enabling a form of “crystallization” in increasingly sociomaterial ways.

Keywords: situational analysis; educational research; open education; digital education; silence; sociomaterialism; posthumanism