On the educational mode of existence: Latour, meta‐ethnography and the social institution of education

Abstract

This article constitutes an argument for both the use and expansion of the philosophical anthropology of Bruno Latour, as established in his recent work An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME). Drawing on ethnographies of education as a methodology for empirical inquiry and specifically on meta-ethnography as a methodology for establishing objectivized knowledge concerning education in a manner that is commensurate to the underpinning epistemological and ontological principles of AIME, this article explicates and then applies the theoretical components of AIME to the field of education research and proposes that education be added to Latour’s schema as an additional mode of existence.