Guiding adults : Researching the ANT - ics of confessing

In this chapter, we begin with a confession. This work is derived from our existing publications over a twenty year period on Foucault’s notion of confession and its enactments within the education of adults (Edwards and Usher 1995, Usher and Edwards 1998, 2004, 2007). In this chapter, we draw selectively upon Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to enhance and extend our use of Foucault’s later work to develop our understanding of the significance of guidance work with adults in education and how we might research that empirically. We suggest that approaches adopted from ANT provide a useful trajectory through which to provide more effectively a theoretical and methodological basis for the empirical study of confessional practices.