The ANT‐Mobilities Framework: Transectionality and a Post‐Materialist Historical Sociology
Journal of Historical Sociology
Published online on June 12, 2026
Abstract
["Sociology Lens, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThe ANT‐Mobilities framework synthesizes Actor‐Network Theory, the mobilities paradigm, and historical sociology to analyze complex social transformations. This paper develops the framework through empirical engagement with post‐disaster rehabilitation networks following the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, demonstrating how crisis contexts generate theoretical insights unavailable to either ANT or mobilities research alone. Drawing on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork, forty semi‐structured interviews with survivors and caregivers, and policy document analysis, the study reveals how recovery networks emerged through complex interactions of caregivers, technologies, policy and spiritual actors. The latter are traced not as cultural beliefs but as actants producing observable network effects, following Latour's modes of existence framework. From this empirical encounter, transectionality emerges as a concept capturing the partial, contested, and multi‐directional nature of translation processes where network stabilization remains perpetually incomplete. This novel historical sociology advances a post‐humanist critique of anthropocentric materialism while engaging eco‐Marxist scholarship, maintaining rigorous attention to how capitalist extraction, colonial legacies, and neoliberal governance shape network formations across temporal scales. Applied comparatively to COVID‐19 pandemic response, the framework demonstrates portability across crisis contexts. This contribution challenges sociology's persistent materialism while demonstrating that spiritual actors can be traced with methodological rigor through their network effects and mediating roles.\n"]