Introduction

A social group’s socialization is made visible by a distinctive way of acting, which develops rituals representing emotions, common values, and norms for coexistence, all of which contribute to constructing a culture. This makes it possible to refer, for example, to a pre-digital, digital, or gamer culture, and, more recently, a hybrid culture in atopic habitation.

Research itself is also embedded in a culture, which is evident in the understanding of what science is and how to do science in different areas of knowledge. This way of doing science, of researching, has faced new challenges and implications arising mainly from exponential digital technological growth.

The production of knowledge, as well as its almost instantaneous dissemination, produces broad access to ever greater amounts of information in a very short time, providing direct interaction with the researcher or research group responsible for a given discovery and/or innovation, as well as the constitution of research networks. This movement, so characteristic of contemporary scientific inquiry, instigates dialogue among fields, allowing distinct areas of knowledge to overlap and establish new research contexts. Thus we have seen the emergence of biomedicine, biotechnology, food engineering, and informatics in digital education/education, among many others, posing new methodological research challenges.

Lopes and Schlemmer (2017), point out that research in education in the context of digital culture has sought theoretical and methodological references that can support the complexity of knowledge production in this context, provoking dialogue and the problematization of the very theoretical and epistemological field that sustains it, in addition to the simple problematization related to the use of specific digital technologies (DT) and their effects on education. In this sense, theorists such as Pierre Lévy, Manuel Castells, Bruno Latour, Michel Maffesoli, Massimo Di Felice, Lúcia Santaella, and André Lemos, among others, problematize the sociocultural dimension of digital technological development, allowing us to broaden the focus of research into the contexts of emerging digital culture and, according to Schlemmer (2018), hybrid culture in atopic habitation, as well as to understand how this phenomenon relates to the field of education. It is therefore a matter of researching the broader meanings that these cultures produce in the field of teaching and learning, that is, the broader field of education.

With this context in mind, the following is a presentation of the research we have conducted as part of the Research Group in Digital Education, which highlights some of the concerns, strategies, and theoretical and methodological approaches that we have adopted in our research in the field of education in digital culture, and more recently in the hybrid culture in atopic habitation, which has enabled us to engage in broader and deeper dialogue. The objective is to consider the cartographic method of intervention research so as to highlight the research process, showing how we gradually adopted digital culture research methods before arriving at the cartographic method of intervention research and the cartography of controversies, which are discussed at length in this article.

From Digital Culture to Hybrid Culture in Atopic Habitation: Challenges for Qualitative Research in Education

In the field of research on education and digital culture in Brazil, Schlemmer, Lopes, and Molina (2012) outline some epistemological and methodological challenges on experiments in providing guidance by master’s and doctoral students in education. These challenges involve the construction of research objects and problems in the field of education and digital culture in DT contexts, including virtual learning environments, digital social media, and 3D digital virtual worlds. The authors propose rethinking the term virtual as a demarcation of an epistemological and methodological frontier in the ethnographic research of education and digital culture. They argue that the term digital would be more appropriate in distinguishing this border. They also suggest that the term netnography would be the most appropriate in a theoretical-methodological ethnographic research design in education and digital culture.

With this perspective, Lopes, Schlemmer, and Molina (2014b) present some approaches to developing research and new procedures involving the use of applications (apps) and mobile devices (netbooks, tablets, and smartphones) in ethnographic research based on the project “Escola aumentada: Cartografia digital e mobilidade para a aprendizagem e a cidadania.” For the authors, the development of mobile technologies, geolocation (GPS and locative media), and distributed online databases (cloud computing) created new possibilities for the production of records and interactions in ethnographic research. While the diversity of digital records (text, photo, audio, and video) coupled with indexing and tagging mechanisms (tags, hashtags, geotags, etc.) opens up new possibilities for research, it also requires participants to understand the relevant syntax and new technological procedures for the production, recording, and sharing of information. Some programs and applications for desktop and mobile devices such as NVivo and Evernote, among others, can facilitate this process, contributing to the planning and organization of such production. The authors also refer to participatory research methodologies capable of involving researchers and subjects in the production and analysis of data. The current technological context, they note, can consolidate a new scenario in the field of research in which scholars and subjects act as co-producers of knowledge. In this sense, cartography mediated by digital devices emerges as a rich methodological possibility, involving social actors in the context of local problems. This engagement is a necessary condition for the production of meaning through the shared and mediated use of DT in the process of knowledge construction. This scenario can reconfigure both the research itself and the contract between researchers and subjects, since action and participation become instances of authorship from which all sides speak and produce.

Expanding their experimentation along with the discussion over the cartographic method, Lopes, Schlemmer, and Molina (2014a) carried out an early attempt to map actions linked to a digital inclusion program—Província de São Pedro (PSP)—to distribute netbooks and tablets to teachers and students, initially prioritizing schools in cities participating in the Territories of Peace Program (Programa Territórios de Paz, PTP) to address the following research problem: What is the reasoning for linking an educational program of digital inclusion to a public safety program? The objective of the research was to understand the ties between such programs. Thus, the authors present digital cartography as a methodological proposition for online research and indicate the digital map of culture in Rio Grande do Sul (RS) and digital cartography as technological possibilities to promote greater connectivity between such programs.

Schlemmer and Lopes (2016) and Schlemmer (2016a) also analyze the potential of the method to inspire new practices in line with the need to understand the phenomenon of learning in all its complexity—social, political, cognitive, affective, and technological—precisely because of its interventionist nature. In this context, the authors present a theoretical, methodological, and technological experiment developed in higher education and inspired by the cartographic method as a way of monitoring and evaluating learning in gamified processes and games from an interventionist perspective developed in a hybrid, multimodal, pervasive, and ubiquitous context.

Lopes and Schlemmer (2017) problematize the ethical, epistemological, and methodological aspects related to the field of education in digital culture, reflecting on how ethics can dialogue with the choices scholars make when conducting research. The authors present the paths adopted in two surveys conducted between 2010 and 2015 with a state public school in the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre participating in government programs for digital inclusion. Founded on the intervention research cartographic method, they present some of the results of discussions with teachers and students, based on the experience of producing and publishing information on the Internet. They problematize the ethical dilemma of research intervention based on the idea of technological appropriation, as a process that is established from the changes of practices that take place in contexts of analogical school culture and digital culture. They discuss and propose, based on the results of the research, overcoming the ethical dilemma of children and young students participating in surveys involving the publication of online content and the fears regarding media exposure—namely, the production and access to inappropriate content—and inattention in the classroom.

This research demonstrates that the cartographic method has been relevant, especially when the research tries to understand phenomena related to learning in the digital culture or, more recently, in the hybrid culture in an atopic habitation. Associated with this perspective, in the digital technological context are systems of data mining and learning analytics that make it possible to more effectively follow the tracks left by the subjects in the different spaces in which they interact.

Hybrid, in this context, refers to the mix between different elements resulting in a new element composed of the previous ones. For Latour (1994), the hybrid consists of multiple matrices, mixtures of nature and culture, which is therefore contrary to the separation between culture/nature, human/non human, among other things.

By atopic habitation, Di Felice (2009) refers to a relationship, a form of communication, characterized by the network interactions between different human and non human collectives, digital and territorial technologies. Atopic habitation “is thus the transient and fluid hybridization of bodies, technologies and landscapes, and as the advent of a new typology of ecosystem, neither organic, nor inorganic, nor static, nor delimitable, but informative and immaterial” (p. 291).

Thus, according to Schlemmer (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017), the hybrid is understood to be a mixture of space (geographic and digital), presence (physical and digital), technologies (analogue and digital), and culture (pre-digital and digital). It is in this context that the term multimodal is used, which includes the different imbricated educational modalities: the presential-physical modality and online modality and, while online, being able to combine elements of electronic learning, mobile learning, pervasive learning, ubiquitous learning, immersive learning, gamification learning, and game-based learning.

When scholars refer to hybridism in atopic habitation, in multimodality, pervasiveness, and ubiquity, they mean actions and interactions between human actors (HA) and non-human actors (NHA), in geographic and digital spaces, in interactions of different cultures (digital and pre-digital), constituting inseparable networks linking interconnected natures, techniques, and cultures. This suggests that a new understanding of culture and society may be emerging, one that embraces coexistence, co-engendering, mutual respect, solidarity, and the recognition of the other as a legitimate interlocutor. Thus, it is worth seeking to understand what these changes might mean in the area of education and, by extension, for research in education.

It is in this context that two contemporary methodological approaches are presented and discussed within the scope of qualitative research in education, linked to specific theoretical orientations.

The Cartographic Method of Research Intervention in Relation to Cognition Sciences

The cartographic method of intervention research is based on the cartographic method proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1995). This method has been developed in Brazil by Kastrup (2007, 2008), Passos, Kastrup, and Escóssia (2009), and Passos, Kastrup, and Tedesco (2014) as a means of interventionist research.

According to Passos et al. (2009), this approach originated from concerns about research methodology, which requires more open and, at the same time, inventive procedures. Thus, the theme of cartography emerged as a methodological issue in the face of impasses in cognition research, developed by the research group Cognição e Subjetividades.¹ The method began taking shape when the members of the research group questioned the assumption that knowledge means representing or recognizing reality by configuring the importance of the binomial cognition/creation and calling for a more detailed investigation process into the temporal dimension of knowledge production processes. Thus, the authors defined the concept of cognition as creative, autopoietic (Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, 2001), or enactive (Francisco Varela, 1988).

Maturana and Rezepka (2000) suggest that the way people attribute meaning and learn has a distinctly human quality, since people are autonomous and autopoietic, in congruence with the environment in which they are inserted. This congruence can cause disturbances in the structure of human beings, promoting learning processes insofar as the structure self-produces to compensate for the disturbance. Thus, for Maturana (1993a, 1993b), learning is the act of transforming within a particular environment of recurrent interactions, and happens as the behavior of an organism varies during its ontogenesis in a manner congruent with the variations of the environment (Maturana, 1998). Therefore, when I refer to a medium or a hybrid, it means that the congruence of the subject with this environment causes disruptions in the structure of this subject, which allows him or her to attribute meanings that originate from the action and interaction in that space, thus promoting learning processes as the structure reproduces itself to compensate for the disturbance, and in so doing, compounds its ontogeny.

The process of cognition consists of creating a range of behaviors through conduct within a field of interactions. Knowledge, from this perspective, is not simply representation, but implies a permanent interpretation of action. For Varela (1990), interpretation and knowledge are emergent (in the sense of emerging) results of action or acting in the world. Thus, greater capacity for cognition consists, to a large extent, of asking the pertinent questions that arise at every moment of our life. These are not predefined but rather enactive: they emerge from action in the world, the relevant aspect being what our common sense deems appropriate within a given context. Thus, knower and what is known, subject and object, determine each other and arise simultaneously. The enactive orientation proposes an intermediate way of transcending both extremes: subject and object define each other and are correlative.

The central point of cognition for Maturana and Varela (1997) is its ability to elicit meaning: knowledge is not predetermined or established a priori, but implicit in regular processes of cognitive activities themselves. In this way, cognition is not the representation of a world that exists independently, but rather the “production” of a world through the process of living, the “continuous coincidence of our being, our doing and our knowing” (p. 20).

According to Passos (2015), “to know is to enter a structural coupling with the environment, to interact” (p. 85). However, the understanding of interaction changes in this perspective because it no longer assumes the preexistence of the two terms (organism and environment, subject and object) that interact. To interact in this perspective means to construct oneself and the environment, being, therefore, the “act of knowing reality, an act of affirmation of self, self-surrendering, of autopoiesis. By redefining the cognitive act, its representational sense disappears” (p. 86). In this way, transgression lies in imbuing knowledge with pragmatic value that makes it a performative act, in which to know is to do and vice versa. This delegitimizes the understanding of knowledge through transparency or indifference of the cognitive act: “The whole act of knowing is a form of engagement in the world, of commitment to the world that constitutes itself in this act” (p. 86).

An important element that marks the difference between the enactive approach and any form of biological constructivism or neo-Kantianism is the emphasis on codetermination. In this context, the understanding that conduct is potentially unpredictable marks a departure from the theoretical approach of Maturana and Varela, from other behaviorist and Piagetian approaches.

In this perspective, according to Passos et al. (2009), subject and object—the poles of cognoscence—are outcomes of cognitive activity rather than conditions. By broadening the concept of cognition and understanding it as linked to creation, the production of knowledge pragmatically and reciprocally shapes the self and the cognitive domain such that cognitive practice engenders subjectivity, overcoming an understanding of dependence of a cognitive subject and a given world, understood as invariant fundamentals. Understanding of cognition as an act of creation brings with it “the problem of the ethical commitment of the cognitive act to the created reality. Production of knowledge, production of subjectivity” (p. 13). The methodological problem is set as follows: “How to study the plane of reality production? What method allows us to follow these processes?” (p. 13). Instead of rules to be applied in the method, the authors offer clues to guide the researcher, since it is not always possible to predetermine every methodological procedure: “The clues that guide the cartographer are like references that contribute to maintaining an attitude of openness to what is happening and of calibrating the course of the research—the meta-hodos of research” (p. 13).

Initially, eight points were proposed to guide the practice of the cartographic method. These were not laid out in hierarchical order but as a rhizome (based on Deleuze & Guattari, 1995), referring to each other and forming a set of connections and references to order, develop, and collectivize the cartographer’s experience.

According to Passos et al. (2009), cartography is an intervention research method (point 1) that aims to track the process, through clues, guiding the course of the research, without establishing a linear path to an end. In this way, it considers the effects of the research process on the research object, the researcher, and the results, and does not simply represent an object: “Cartography seeks to ensure the accuracy of the method without giving up the unpredictability of the process of knowledge production, which is a positive requirement of the ad hoc investigation process” (Kastrup, 2007, p. 19). What sets it apart from other approaches is the focus on the process and not the end result. With the aim of tracking the process (point 3), clues may arise, which might help to describe, discuss, and, above all, to collect the experience of the cartographer.

In this sense, the cartographer needs to keep in mind that the action of researching his object in motion constitutes a practice in which his path establishes links with the participants inserted into the context of what is being investigated. This composition of agency between heterogeneous actors is expressed by Barros and Kastrup (2009), drawing from Caiafa (2007). For these authors, agency implies a relationship of cooperation, a kind of sympathy, which, in addition to a simple feeling of esteem, refers to a composition of bodies implying mutual affection that enable the ethnographer to effectively “enter into relationship with the heterogeneous ones that surround it, to act with them, to write with them” (Barros & Kastrup, 2009, p. 57).

According to Passos et al. (2009), cartography as a methodological orientation needs to be articulated using three ideas that make up a plan of action or a research plan: transversality, implication, and the dissolution of the observer’s point of view (point 6). In traditional third- and first-person methodologies, there is always the imposition of a point of view capable of representing or signifying the object at hand. There must be an observer, which implies the “subject–object separation or duality, as well as the imposition of an interpretative reference frame separate from experience” (Passos & Eirado, 2009, p. 121). These authors discuss the work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (2003), who point out that third-person methodology does not work when studying cognition or the mind, because there is a circularity between knowledge and the known world that is fundamental but often overlooked. This is more evident in studies of cognition because it is not possible to separate the structure that is known from the experience of knowing. This understanding of cognitive experience as its own creation, that is, of both the known object and the subject it knows, which occurs in circular motion, is called “enactive action or approach, modulating the notion of autopoiesis formulated by Maturana and Varela in the 1970s” (Passos & Eirado, 2009, p. 121).

For Passos and Eirado (2009), the biology of knowledge, autopoiesis, accepts the challenge of thinking without a foundation, since third-person methodology needs to be complemented by first-person methodology. Woven together, these make it possible to penetrate the circularity that arises in the experience of acquiring knowledge. The cartographer has to avoid merely seeking solutions and testing hypotheses, for “he does not take the self as an object, but the self-emergence processes as the destabilization of the points of view that collapse the experience in the (‘internal’) self” (p. 123). He must inhabit the experience without being bound by any point of view, his main task being to dissolve the observer’s point of view without neglecting observation. Enaction assumes that all experience emerges from experimentation, since it does not refer to what is already a given but rather the emergence of change. Data does not exist a priori, waiting to be gathered, instead, it is constituted in the experience itself. In this way, it is up to the cartographer to accompany this emergence of himself and the world in the experience, and for this it is imperative to be immersed and never immune to the process.

Kastrup and Barros (2009) argue that the method is not a research model developed through clues, strategies, and procedures. The procedures are embodied in apparatuses (dispositif) that perform important and distinct functions in the operation of cartography.² Grounded in Deleuze’s work, they understand apparatuses as “machines that make it possible to see and speak,” composed of lines of visibility, enunciation, force, and subjectification. These apparatuses are aligned with the process of creation, and the work of the researcher-cartographer is to unravel these lines and monitor their effects. The purpose of the apparatus involves three movement functions (point 4): reference (more or less regular apparatus, in which repetition and variation are articulated); explicitation (research territory to be explored, explicitation of the lines that participate in the ongoing production process, inseparable dimensions, research and intervention); and transformation production (“transformation of the relations between the elements/lines/affective, cognitive, institutional, micro and macropolitical vectors, activating movements and sustaining processes of production” [Kastrup & Barros, 2009, p. 80]). Cartography can produce and transform the reality to be analyzed. In this way, mapping implies intervention.

The cartographer, the person using the cartographic method, does so through “cartographic attention.” Cartographic attention (point 2), according to Kastrup (2007, p. 15), is based on Freud’s concept of “free-floating attention” and Bergson’s concept of “attentive recognition.” It is concentrated and open with four varieties (movements): tracing, touch, landing, and attentive recognition. The cartographer’s work begins with tracing, which involves scanning/sweeping the field, an overview with open and unfocused attention. It is a broader look at something that touches it, beyond the search for information. Touch triggers the selection process, the first meaning, the first analysis performed on the selection process. It is characterized by a quick sense of focus on attention, when something touches, it draws attention, causing it to become alert, but that does not yet define what the cartographer will focus on. The movement that refers to a defined point of attention and focus is the landing, which is to stop, zoom in, choose/define, and indicate that the selected element needs to be inspected more closely for analysis. That is, “the landing gesture indicates that the perception, whether it is visual, auditory or otherwise, makes a stop and the field closes in a kind of zoom. A new territory is formed, the field of observation is reconfigured” (Kastrup, 2009, p. 43). The fourth and final movement is of Bergson’s attentive recognition, characterized by an investigative attitude about the landing, to which the cartographer’s attention is drawn. It represents analysis itself.

The cartographer’s objective is to map a territory that he/she did not previously inhabit (point 7), to understand the planes of power (point 5)—a moving plane of the reality of things at work in it—and to produce knowledge over the course of research, which involves attention and, with it, the very creation of the field of observation (Escóssia & Tedesco, 2009).

Because it is a form of intervention research, the analysis occurs in the process, in the movement of cartography, which makes it possible to carry out the intervention while the process is taking place. Thus, Escóssia and Tedesco (2009) point to the double direction of the nature of cartography: as a knowledge process that is not restricted to describing or classifying the formal contours of the objects of the world, but in tracing the movement itself that animates them, and as a practice of intervention, where access to the plane of power implies inhabiting it, so that the acts of the cartographer, also a collective of forces, participate and intervene in the changes and in the transformations that occur.

This inhabiting of an existential territory is significantly different from the “application of a theory or the execution of a prescriptive methodological planning, since it implies receiving and being welcomed in the difference that is expressed between the terms of the relation: subject and object, researcher and researched, I and the world” (Alvarez & Passos, 2009, p. 148). In cartography, one does not “separate theory and practice, spaces of reflection and action. To know, to act and to inhabit a territory are no longer experiences distant from each other” (p. 149).

As far as the cartographic method of research intervention is concerned, where the data are produced Passos and Barros (2009) emphasize the question of narrativity, that is, it is always narratives that we deal with, being that sometimes the research participants also are cartographers. What each one says, what the situation says implies taking a position in a certain narrativity politics (point 8).³ This narrative position (ethos of research) is embedded in other policies that are at stake, such as research policies, subjectivity, or cognitive policies. So all production of knowledge comes from an implicitly political position. According to the authors, narrativity politics refers to the position we take in facing the world and ourselves. In this way, “the knowledge we express about ourselves and the world is not only a theoretical problem, but a policy-related problem” (Passos & Barros, 2009, p. 151).

According to Passos and Barros (2009), narrativity politics involves two methods and two ways of speaking—extensivism and intensivism—and also two narrative procedures: redundancy (“organizing what in this case is abundance, generating a circulation of meaning that reinforces the clarity of the case, its unity and identity” [p. 158]) and disassembly (“extracting from the larger case the agitation of microcases as microstruggles brought into the scene” [p.161]). In this dismantling process, three characteristics stand out: (1) the procedure to narrate the “case” is due to an increase in the coefficient of deterritorialization; (2) “everything is political”; and (3) everything acquires collective value.

Continuing their elaboration of the eight points of the cartographic method, Passos et al. (2014) cite thinkers besides Deleuze, Guattari, Maturana, and Varela, introducing Latour, among others, into the discussion regarding the research experience. According to Passos et al. (2014), the “importance of the research experience points to its inscription on the plane of powers, which constitutes the production plan of both knowledge and known reality” (p. 8). Researchers are immersed in the experience, which distances the cartographic method from other approaches guided by processes such as the “collection,” processing, and analysis of the data, taken as information. In this way, the cartographic method is based on inventive cognition and creative cognition, thus differentiating itself from the idea of the representation of a preexisting world. Therefore, “the cartographic method is not defined by the procedures it adopts, but it is an activity guided by a directive of a nature that is not strictly epistemological, but ethical-aesthetic-political” (p. 9).

Kastrup, Tedesco, and Passos (2015) point out that the cartographic method is compatible and can be used alongside different techniques, strategies, and research approaches, among them interviews, data analysis, and qualitative or quantitative strategies. In this way, the method is fluid, distinct from methodological models guided by the assumptions of representation. However, research that investigates the experience of research itself must make clear the “firm position of the cartographer with regard to the guideline of research: access/production of the plane of powers that responds to the creation/transformation of experience” (p. 9).

Inventive cognition emerges from the biology of knowledge (Maturana and Varela), of enunciative cognition (Varela), and includes elements of Bergson, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. According to Kastrup (2015), thinking stems from stimuli that make you think and does not happen spontaneously, from nothing. The stimuli are, therefore, forces of the present, of a world in movement and accelerated transformation constituting “the unique ground of emergence of thought and novelty” (p. 96). This understanding differs from that held by those who understand cognition from a perspective that Maturana and Varela (2001) call environmentalist (a realistic assumption of a given world), which “does not allow us to think about the invention of the world itself and above all the world in transformation” (p. 96). Thus, Kastrup (2015) seeks to understand the “shifts of cognition in the contemporary,” from the encounter of two intercessors for the psychology of cognition: (a) Maturana and Varela, who promote the idea of the biology of knowledge (autopoiesis), by refusing the model of representation and promoting the understanding of cognition as an invention of oneself and of the world; and (b) Deleuze and Guattari, who focus on the transformations currently taking place in cognition. To this understanding, the author adds that, in order to be able to understand the new ways of knowing and living emerging today, it is necessary to affirm the present as a movement of virtualization of currently constituted cognitive forms. The conditions of cognition have in themselves tension between constituted forms and forces of instability: “Forces of the present, which problematize the old forms, placing cognition on the route of experimentation” (Kastrup, 2015, p. 97).

In this context, Kastrup (2015) refers to DTs, stating that they cannot be understood as mere objects or as solutions to old problems but as a basis “for creating new problems, new relationships with information, in time, with space, with oneself and with others” (p. 97).⁴ Thus, the relation between the constituted forms and the present is not of rupture or of discontinuity, but of coexistence, the conditions of cognition being polytemporal and not invariant or historical. The problem of cognitive functioning is in how the present can provoke “cracks in historical strata, in old mental habits, in established structural couplings and produce novelty,” in addition to understanding it as historically produced. “It is the living gift that coexists with the history of structural couplings. Through this notion, Varela introduces in the studies of cognition the possibility of thinking it into becoming, becoming that makes the history bifurcate” (pp. 98–99).

In the biology of knowledge, with the concept of autopoiesis, Varela resignifies the understanding of learning by, in approaching the problem, placing the actor as the prototypical apprentice. Learning is not, as previous theories proposed, adapting to a given environment, or obtaining knowledge, but experimentation, invention of self and the world. The invention of a work of art is correlated with the production of the artist him or herself. As a novelty comes a theory of action, since for Maturana and Varela the living system is a constantly moving cognitive system in a process of permanent self-production, that is, autopoietic, which can be understood, according to Kastrup (2015), by the formula BE = DO = KNOW.⁵ In this sense, the functioning of the living being is confused with the process of self-creation; according to Varela (1990, p. 99), “doing is ontological.” Understanding cognition as action or practice leads to its permanent modification and not to invariant structures. In addition to the logic of action, cognition refers to flows in conduct (Maturana & Mpodozis, 1992, p. 18).

Paradoxically, according to Kastrup (2015), what ensures the flow of the conduct is precisely the crack, the break, the notion of breakdown, described in Varela (1990) and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (2003), as perturbation, a “problematization” of the structures of the living, ranging from engagements with the world, without it being possible to determine a principle that guides this drift toward the pursuit of a superior equilibrium. Breakdowns are the source of the autonomous and creative side of living cognition and arise as a theoretical-scientific formulation for an understanding of cognition that is not restricted to solving problems but is, first of all, the invention of problems. Thus, Varela (1990) explains the rooting of cognition in the “concrete,” dealing with earlier conceptions that approach cognition from the point of view of logic, general mechanisms, or representation, grouped under the denomination of “abstract” approaches to cognition (p. 102). The breakdown is a cognitive activity that happens in the immediate present and in that concrete actually lives. This “concrete” for Varela (1990) is not a step for something different, but how we arrived and where we are.

In the perspective of reconciling cognition with concrete Varela presents the notion of enaction (actuation), previously explained. For Kastrup (2015), this notion refers first to an embodied cognition distinct from the understanding of cognition as a mental process, for it is “tributary to action, resulting from experiences that are not mentally inscribed, but in the body” (p. 103). It is an action guided by local sensory processes and not by the perception of objects or forms. These sensorimotor attachments are not separate from the lived cognition (biological, psychological, and cultural couplings). Thus, the embodiment of knowledge implies social couplings, including linguistic ones, so that the body, in addition to a biological entity, is able to register and mark itself historically and culturally.

In order to exemplify the concept of enaction, linked to the embodiment of knowledge, Varela et al. (2003) refer to learning a musical instrument, where the musician is taken as a prototype of the learner. In this process of learning, initially the body functions are commanded by the mind, because the process begins with a representation, with symbolic instructions. However, to learn to play an instrument is not to follow rules, and learning truly only happens “when the symbolic relation is transformed into direct coupling of the body with the instrument, eliminating the intermediary of representation” (p. 103). That is, therein is the enaction, actuation, incarnation, or embodiment of knowledge. Thus, for the author, cognition begins to function outside the register of representation, in direct coupling with the matter that the world provides. To learn is not to adapt to the musical instrument, but to act with it. Thus, the notion of acting refers to a collective dimension that appears in the body, at the same time as it indicates the participation of the body in the configuration of the world that is shared by the collective.

This understanding of coupling as agency allows Kastrup (2015) to move forward in a second sense of the notion of acting—cognition as invention of a world—constructed in the interface between Varela’s cognitive studies and Deleuze and Guattari’s subjectivity production, from whom it takes the concept of agency as “direct communication, without mediation of representation” (p. 104). Communication without subordination, hierarchy, or determinism does not operate by causality, but by reciprocal implication between movements, processes, or heterogeneous flows, by double capture. According to the authors still referring to the learning of a musical instrument, agency refers to the production of a complex apprentice–instrument unit, which produces a process of reciprocal differentiation. The mechanical relationship occurs between previous elements (having the same elements and the same relationships, we will have the same product behavior repeated in the same way) whereas machinic agency, on the other hand, connects flows or processes and creates forms.

Kastrup (2015) uses again the example of learning a musical instrument to demonstrate that if we understand flute learning, for example, as a machinic agency, “learning is eliminating distances, because one learns between mouth and flute, learns in the middle, on the surface of its coupling, outside the field of representation” (p. 104). That is to say, in this adaptation with the medium, “the blowing motion is able to interact with the arrangement of the instrument and at the same time generate the sound and the apprentice” (p. 105). Thus, coupling should be thought of as a machinic agency or a product of learning, a creative activity always focused on becoming and not a mechanical representation or repetition. This understanding puts an end to the supposed determinism of the object or the environment. The best learner is the one who permanently creates a relationship with the instrument, incessantly reinventing himself as a musician.

The best student, for Kastrup (2015), is not the one who approaches the world through crystallized habits, but who can always remain in the process of learning, which can also be understood as permanent unlearning. That is, learn is to experience incessantly in order to evade the control of representation, preventing crystallized habits from forming, that is, be alert to continuous variations and rapid resonances, implying, at the same time, a certain lack of attention to the practical schemes of recognition.

Bergson (1934) theorizes this relation between certain attention and correlative inattention. For this author, there is a pragmatic, utilitarian life that assures learning while solving problems, but there is also an additional attention, which is attention to duration, which ensures learning as the invention of problems.

In this context, it is fundamental to consider that the contemporary world has provoked the emergence of new forms of subjectivity, mainly by the ceaseless and almost omnipresent presence of all kinds of DT, which has accelerated processes of transformation and innovation in the ways of living and engaging, which are more and more open and in flux. In this whirlwind of uncertainty, subjectivity is called upon to reconfigure itself and must learn to deal with breakdowns, with the disturbances that present themselves. On the other hand, this same reality, coupled with the online approach to the most diverse cultures, according to Kastrup (2015), reveals the precariousness of any supposed foundation that can be provided by the world (p. 108), that is, if we are affected on all sides by disturbances of all nature, solutions are not assured. Therefore, if we want to create new ways of knowing and living, we must invent a world, for learning to live in a world without fundamentals is to invent it by living, remembering that invention of self cannot be achieved without the invention of a related world.

If interpretation and knowledge are emergent results (in the sense of emerging) of action in the world or acting, when spaces are hybrid, multimodal, pervasive, and ubiquitous, and dwelling is atopical, what are the relevant issues that emerge concerning the action and performance of the subjects in these spaces? How do meanings emerge? What world do we produce and invent?

The Cartographic Method as a Means of Identifying and Mapping Controversies and Actor–Network Theory

Recently, actor–network theory (ANT), developed by Latour, Law, and Callon, also recognized subject–object codetermination by emphasizing the participation of non-humans—objects and quasi-objects—in social relations, thus presenting itself as an alternative to the binaries of modernity by eschewing a compartmentalized view of reality.⁶

In this perspective, ANT (Latour, 2012) provides a new understanding of what is social, presenting the idea that humans establish a social network not only to interact with other people, but with non human elements as well. According to the author, the social is not simply made up of people, but also machines, animals, texts, money, architecture, laboratories, institutions, among other elements. By the principle of connectivity, everything is linked in a network, with multiple inputs, which is always in continuous movement and open to new elements. For the author, social refers to the network of HA and NHA, where the actor is any person, thing, (quasi-)object, or institution that produces agency, that is, something with the ability to produce effects on the network (although indirectly), of being actant. The understanding of agency, therefore, is related to the human and non human actors (actants), similarly, who participate in the actions and provoke transformations in the network, in movement. Thus, in ANT, or sociology of associations, the non human is no longer considered only as an artifact, whose meaning is attributed by the human, but as having agency, because it participates in actions in everyday situations and causes transformations. Non human actors also shape events in the creation of meanings, acting in the reflective and symbolic sphere.

In this context, network is understood from the perspective of a rhizome (based on Deleuze & Guattari, 1995), that is, seen as something alive, changeable—as flows, circulations, alliances, and movements of a series of animate and inanimate elements—and not as fixed to a set of actors. It refers to transformations, translations, displacements, therefore, quite distinct from the traditional understanding of a network as a form or structure. The network is the associative movement that forms the social, being rather an instrument of analysis or its object. The actor–network binomial perspective proposes that the actor never acts alone. In acting, it is influenced (constituted) by the networks in which it has connections and, at the same time, it can represent these networks, as well as influence them. In this way, it is never quite clear who is acting. The actor is, at the same time, the builder and receiver of the networks.

For Latour (2012), the social has no predefined locus, but is understood as provisional, performative, as processes of aggregations, associations, and reassociations between HA and NHA. In order to understand the social, which, therefore, is not what explains but rather what needs to be explained, the author recommends that the actors be followed in their associations and reassociations (cartography). I understand, therefore, that nowadays these associations and reassociations are increasingly constituted in nomadic movements, in an atopic habitation that takes place in hybrid, multimodal, pervasive, and ubiquitous spaces.⁷

With regard to science, Latour (2016) says that every idea only proceeds from multiple deviations and compositions. It is the attribution of science to understand this process and not only the result. For this, it is necessary to retrace the entire chain of deviations and compositions, and what matters in this process is what emerges and forms in the course of the process of composition and deviations of courses of action. Linked to this question, Latour (2016) in the second letter of Cogitamus, raises the problem of method: How is it possible to analyze deviations and compositions if, in general, they are invisible?

In this context, the concept of proof becomes the protagonist, because, according to the author, it is at the moment of proof that the blunting of deviations and compositions is revealed. This evidence, although there are other forms of evidence, materializes in the panel: everything works well, until it stops working. This is more pedagogical form of expression of proof. The computer, initially understood as a technical object, is now presented as a sociotechnical project: “From simple, my computer has become multiple; of unified, has become disunited; it immediately became mediate; of fast, it became slow” (Latour, 2016, p. 47). The network, or part of it, with the different elements that together kept it working, now fails, becoming visible. It is at this moment that it is necessary to analyze the links, the relationships, the networks that integrate it.

This perspective, presented by Latour (2016), although linked to the method he calls “cartography of controversies,” could also be linked to the cartographic method of intervention research, proposed by Kastrup (2007, 2008), Passos et al. (2009), and Passos, Kastrup, and Tedesco (2014).

While Latour (2016) refers to pane and understood as a proof, bringing sociotechnical network analysis (HA and ANH) to the context; we could think from the point of view of the subject’s cognition (HA) as a cognitive imbalance (Piaget) or as a breakdown (Varela) understood as a proof, later assumed by Kastrup, Tedesco, and Passos (2015) from the perspective of the inventive cognition.

With regard to the interactions that take place in this sociotechnical network, the deviations and compositions are visible by the traces that the different actants produce in the movement of associations, which can be accompanied by “another” sociotechnical network formed by HA (teachers) and NHA (mining and data-based systems and learning analytics), providing elements that allow us to trace the cosmogram and understand the process under construction.

Turning to the question of the pane for Latour (2016)—in the context of a sociotechnical network; cognitive imbalance for Piaget and breakdown for Varela—in the context of cognition; a process of investigation begins, so that the initial indetermination begins to be deciphered, the source of the disturbance is found, and a problem is revealed progressively.⁸ Hypotheses and solutions are tested and verified, until the problem is solved.

In the case of the computer (NHA), in the context of sociotechnical network (formed by HA and NHA), the pane is repaired and put back to use. In the case of cognition, what in the comprehension of Varela (1990) and Kastrup, Tedesco, and Passos (2015) refers to an enactuated, self-engendered process of agency, caused by a breakdown, takes knowledge to a superior equilibrium, not in the perspective of problem-solving but, above all, in the invention of problems. It is not the result, but the process by which the result is achieved. In a way, this is related to the concept of debugging, a result of a metacognitive process (Piaget, 1976, 1978a, 1978b, 1995) that is necessary for computational thinking, which was very present in research related to language programming in the 1980s and 1990s.

From the proof concept, Latour (2016), in his third letter in Cogitamus, goes on to discuss scientific controversies, stating that the statements pass between two poles: radical doubt and unquestionable certainty: “At the beginning of the exercise, the statement floats; in the end, one must find it solidly anchored in a precise landscape . . .” (p. 81). According to the author, this is where the importance of controversies lies.

The term controversy, according to Latour (2016), “designates all possible positions, ranging from absolute doubt . . . to indisputable certainty” (p. 79). The word “controversy” describes a shared uncertainty about aspects of science and/or technology that are not yet stabilized. It occurs when there is a disagreement between the actors, that is, “when actors discover that they cannot ignore each other and controversies end when actors manage to work out the solid commitment to live together” (Venturini, 2010, p. 260). The cartography of controversies consists in mapping the actions of human and non human actors involved in contemporary sociotechnical questions, without, however, assuming an a priori frame or an order to be followed. In this context, according to Latour (2012), the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) achieves a better understanding of the order after the actors explain all the controversies in which they were involved, that is, “We [social scientists] will not try to discipline, to frame you [the actors] in our categories; we will allow them to stick to their own worlds and only then will we ask for their explanation of how they were established” (p. 44). It is not up to the analyst to define and order the social, but rather to the actors present in the context. If the goal is to restore order, it is best to go through the associations, tracing the connections between the controversies themselves. The pursuit of order, rigor, and pattern is by no means abandoned, just repositioned one step further in the form of abstraction, so that actors can unfold their own and various cosmos, no matter how irrational they may seem.

Latour (2012) notes that it is possible to trace stronger relationships and discover more revealing patterns when we find a way to record the links between unstable and mutable frames of reference rather than trying to stabilize one. What makes one expand, relate, compare, and organize is what one has to describe. The important thing is not to stop the flow of controversy, because if the actors do not act, they will leave no clues: “No clue, no information, no description—and therefore no conversation” (p. 217). It is in the flow of controversies that one has to find the “firm ground: on shifting sands. Contrary to what is commonly said, relativism is a way of floating in the data, not plunging into it” (p. 46).

The main idea is to give visibility to the different understandings about situations, movements, representativities, influences, and interests. For this, it is necessary to explore, visualize polemics, the movement of action and motion, that is, where mediation flows (Lemos, 2013). Controversies are those spaces of dialogue, conflict, negotiation, and action, which the actors reveal by leaving traces.

For Latour (2016), mapping a controversy is learning to locate all these movements. This implies following the statements from doubts permeated by intermediate states (rumor, opinion, idea, proposition), pros and cons, until they become the

final result, where clear and well-defined inscriptions are evident. However, with the condition of taking it in its motion, and not frozen in an object. Remembering that nothing is definitive, both techniques and sciences do not exist by the simple force of inertia. To exist is to always be in that front line. What we now understand as a certain statement is only the final stage of a controversy and in no way its beginning.

(Latour, 2016, pp. 80–81)

Latour (2016) states that the two extremes must be considered: fact and opinion, which correspond to two moments in the controversy. Accompanying the controversies is then to describe the ways in which the actors construct and modify the evidence.

Venturini (2012, p. 800) proposes a script to subsidize the creation of cartographies of controversies, which is summarized by Lemos (2013, p. 118): (1) to define the best possible controversy; (2) observe, describe, and maintain that the object is controversial; (3) identify whether the controversy is: cold/hot, present/past, secret/public, difficult to access/accessible, limited/unlimited; (4) apply the lenses to the collection of information (gather statements, opinions, read the specialized literature); (5) identify human and non human actants and sketch the network that connects them; (6) identify cosmogram, ideologies, and worldviews. The cartographer must then identify the representativity, influence, and interest of the actors in the networks.

If there is evidence, Latour (2016) proposes that two conditions are imposed on the analysis: (1) that it comes from the actors, and (2) that it results from joint activity, therefore, not more than a cogito, but a Cogitamus.

In this context, the author refers to the new passage from the infinite world (modern and post-scientific revolution) to the complicated multiverse or pluriverse, term coined by William James. Thus, if there is no radical discontinuity, the meaning of the word revolution changes. Latour (2016), based on Sloterdijk, stresses that it is not a matter of revolution or emancipation, but of explicitness, since “history never breaks with the past, but permanently makes more and more explicit with which we have to learn to live, elements that will be compatible or incompatible with existing ones” (p. 115). Thus, the author inaugurates a new “epistemological policy,” in which the researcher’s function is to describe “the agency of all beings that a particular culture links with practical forms of life” (p. 166). This refers to a movement of associations between the different parties participating in a controversy, which can be represented by what the author calls a cosmogram. In order to retract the different parties, Latour (2016) proposes the description of the associations of convenience, coexistence, opposition, and exclusion between HA and NHA, whose conditions of existence become explicit in the course of the trials submitted by the disputes: “to become sensitive to these lists of associations and logical duels without resorting to the distinction between the rational and the irrational, the modern and the archaic, the systematic and the unsystematic” (Latour, 2016, pp. 116–117).

Mapping the cosmograms means working with the movement, with the agency distribution drawing of mobility, unlike the paradigm, which works with frames (stabilized theoretical framework). When designing a cosmogram, the analyst does not need to resort to structures, systems, or frames, which limit or even render unviable the monitoring of the connections in formation in the sociotechnical networks. He needs to go through the network, follow the actants in their associations, identifying the controversies, their different visions or world versions (multiverses or pluriverses), showing how the whole world (a complicated and complex pluriverse), a cosmos, reveals itself, emerges, and reconfigures itself in the confrontation of ontologies.

It is within the scope of interactions that occur in this sociotechnical network that the different actants (human and non human) produce traces in the movement of associations. These traces, in the scope of education research, can be accompanied by another sociotechnical network formed by HA (teachers-researchers) and NHA (diverse systems, including those based on mining and data and learning analytics) which, when mapped, provide elements that make it possible to draw the cosmogram (diagram of mediations, motion, mobility), a multiverse, and understand the process under construction—the movement of these associations happening. The aim is to map the controversies: “the study of innovations and controversies is one of the first privileged places where objects can be held longer as visible, disseminated and recognized mediators before they become invisible, non-social intermediaries” (Latour, 2012, p. 120).

It is important to consider that for Latour (1994), the logic of thinking of the sciences is vitiated by a need for purification by division, which results in exclusion. According to Melo (2011), this logic, in a way, freezes the possibility of transformation, because it does not consider the continuous mixture, which produces hybrids incessantly and indefinitely. Instead of imposing one part(s) on another, replacing one or the other(s), as the modern project intended, the parts become the contact with heterogeneous versions, through the adjustment of hybrid practices and interests, through which these parties receive from each other the chance of mutual transformation (Despret, 2002). TAR presents the notion of hybrids and generalized symmetry.

It is possible to bring elements of this vision presented by Latour to reflect on the question of culture, since it is not a question of dividing, of classifying, into analogical (pre-digital) culture, digital culture, or cyberculture, or, but to consider the mixture, that is to say, the hybrids that are produced in that mixture, which is resignified and transformed in that coexistence.

Conclusion: Education Qualitative Research in the Hybrid and Multimodal Culture Context in an Atopic Dwelling

Both methods, the cartographic method of intervention research and the cartography of controversies, with their specificities, have proved robust for the development of qualitative research in the field of education, in the context of digital culture and hybrid culture in an atopic dwelling, mainly because they are also related to equally consistent and contemporary theories in terms of human cognition aspects, enabling us to track the traces and clues in the mobility of associations between actants, which are enhanced by different Digital Technologies (DT), including data mining and learning analytics.

These methods have been used in the research developed by the Grupo de Pesquisa Educação Digital (GPe-dU Unisinos/CNPq), in which I am involved at the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS), since 2010. In particular, the cartographic method of intervention research, as well as being appropriate as a research method, has been investigated for its potency with regard to the development of new methodologies and pedagogical practices, due to its interventionist characteristic in accompanying the process (along the course), aligned with the need to understand the phenomenon of learning in its complexity—social, political, cognitive, affective, and technological (Schlemmer, Lopes, & Molina, 2012), in contexts of hybridism, multimodality, pervasiveness, and ubiquity. Its power to accompany learning processes has also been investigated as well as the possibility of it being appropriated by teachers and students in their own learning pathways.

Among the research projects that have used the cartographic method of intervention research are: “Escola aumentada: Cartografias digitais para as aprendizagens e a cidadania,” “Gamificação em Espaços de Convivência Híbridos e Multimodais: Uma experiência no ensino superior,” and “Gamificação em Espaços de Convivência Híbridos e Multimodais: A educação na cultura digital.” Under different approaches and in varying contexts, research explores the perspectives of hybridism, multimodality, pervasiveness, and ubiquity, as well as cartographic attention. It was in the context of these projects that the cartographic method of intervention research began to become the object of study, inspiring studies carried out on the formation and qualification of teachers and students (Lopes & Schlemmer, 2017; Lopes & Valentini, 2012; Schlemmer, 2014, 2015; Schlemmer & Lopes, 2016) in the scope of elementary education, graduation in pedagogy and digital games, post-graduation stricto sensu, and continuing teacher training. Our focus has been to explore some elements related to the hybrid, multimodal, pervasive, and ubiquitous culture and the new regimes of action, participation, and socialization of experience.

In the context of elementary education schools, we have outlined some experiences involving cartography with the support of digital media, geolocation, and digital marking (quick response [QR] codes), to provoke experiences of local mapping of people, objects, and places in the public space. In the undergraduate, and graduate continuing teacher education context, as well as in elementary school, we also designed inventive methodologies and pedagogical interventionist, aggregative, and gammatical practices with a cartographic bent, mainly the cartographer attention through the four movements (tracing, touching, landing and attentive recognition) , linked to elements of gamification, with the support of digital media, geolocation, digital coding (QR codes), and augmented reality, in order to provoke learning experiences in a hybrid, multimodal, pervasive, and ubiquitous context. According to Schlemmer and Lopes (2016), unlike classic cartography (mapping), the idea was to provoke aesthetic and/or informational experiences for the production of meanings about our environment in the case of schools, and on the concepts present in undergraduate and undergraduate academic activities in the case of higher education. The purpose of these experiments is to activate sensibility and cognition as functions of intelligence, as well as registration and sharing as functions of sociability.

Schlemmer (2018) states that inspiration in the cartographic method of intervention research to develop inventive methodologies and interventionist, aggregative, and gamified pedagogical practices comes from the following elements:

In the context of tracks, according to Schlemmer (2018), the proposal is to work with the concept of geographic tracks (local/specific points in the community/city), live tracks (people from local community who hold certain knowledge necessary for the development of the missions), online tracks (specialists that do not belong to the local community, but that can appear in video), as characters in Mixed Reality (MR) or in Augmented Reality (AR) (iotized objects).

In the scope of a cartographer’s attention movements, tracing is characterized by the exploration/scanning of the field—in the case of this research, geographic and online spaces in search of clues (information) to understand the processes; the touch triggers the selection process which consists, in this case from Schlemmer (2016a, 2017), in the selection of geographic clues, online clues, and live clues, to direct the research; and landing refers to stopping, zooming in on lanes, choice/definition, and attentive recognition in the perception of the global context.

The metaphor of the clue, as well as the changing focus of the cartographer’s attention, can also serve as inspiration to understand the composition of tracks, as well as the progression itself in the context of a game or gamified process—gaining achievements—at the same time as achievements can be understood as skills for the own gameplay and sociability.⁹

It is important to point out that as a result of this process the inventive methodology |Gamified Learning Processes (GLP) is created (Schlemmer, 2018).

The Grupo de Pesquisa em Educação Digital (GPe-dU) has also investigated and developed theoretical, methodological, and technological experiences inspired by the cartographic method of research, as methodology for the monitoring and evaluation of learning in games and gamified processes from an interventionist perspective and developed in a hybrid, multimodal, pervasive, and ubiquitous context. According to Schlemmer and Lopes (2016) and Schlemmer (2016a) such contexts are more easily subject to the pulverization of the spaces of participation and registration and, therefore, can hinder the exercise of teaching and of the discourse regarding both pedagogical mediation and the evaluation. Thus, the proposal developed by the authors, inspired by the cartographic method of intervention research as a methodology of monitoring and evaluation, allows accompanying the subjects in their different learning pathways, involving analogue technologies and DT, physical and online face-to-face interactions to develop their own missions and projects that, from the perspective of bring your own device (BYOD), can extend beyond the time set for formal education. The fact that the subject possesses a mobile device and is connected creates conditions of possibility for him or her to remain engaged in the process, regardless of time and space. Thus, the processes of monitoring and evaluation can, at different times, be “situated” and still intertwined. By means of clues, designed and planned to provide the hybridization of analogue and digital spaces, it is possible to establish a multimodal context, which is desirable when talking about immersion, agency, and engagement.

More specifically, with regard to the movements proposed by Kastrup (2007, 2008) and others in the cartographic method, the development of gamification and game experiments allowed us to evaluate the power of the method and the inadequacies we perceive in our own experience of building the game or gamification. The question that seemed to us most challenging was to guarantee the unpredictability and rhizomatic opening of the cartographic method and attention. If we work from a perspective of “use of” rather than inventiveness, the design of phases of a gamified game or process, for example, which was designed by someone to be “applied” in education or simply played by players, cannot always guarantee the rhizomatic opening that underlies the two proposals of methods previously carried out, because it has a limited context and whose control is not complete developed in the field reconfiguration of the students learning. The possible reconfigurations take place in the circular or linear dimension of success itself when completing the missions. In this sense, an a priori objective always seems limited from the point of view of cartography, but not limiting from the point of view of learning. What is learned opens possibilities, but in the dynamics of the game these are not necessarily unpredictable, since it is a condition that games advance in phases.

The clue metaphor to the tracks conception, according to Schlemmer and Lopes (2016), was inspiring for game designers or gamification, but, to become inspirational to gaming, we identified the need for players to leave “traces” which may become clues for other players. An interesting strategy would be to insert notebooks as an object/item that loads and can be left somewhere—as in some online and offline role-playing games—into the dynamics of the game or gamification. Another strategy would be to insert HA and/or bots equipped with AI to record and report events, producing clues for the route of the tracks to grow and insert, at continuously, new challenges based on the reconfiguration of the field of knowledge produced by the players themselves. This perspective of valuing, in the context of game or gamification, ways of recording and sharing personal narratives (dynamic clue production) would be an interesting possibility for both teachers and students to map their learning processes—after all, mapping, from the perspective here presented, is a means to track processes.

In this case, it seems important to consider that it is necessary to invest in game dynamics that strengthen and value the narratives of the players (as in the case of Role Playing Game [RPG] or, better still, to work at the level of inventiveness, in which the entire process of the conception and development of the game or gamification is co-constructed by the learning subjects themselves).

It is important to mention that, in the case of the researches we develop, because they are situated within the scope of enactive and inventive cognition, the creation of the game or process is a result of a co-creation process between and with the learning subjects themselves, where the teacher acts as an interventionist, conducting pedagogical mediation. Thus, everything that composes the game or gamified process—from the pre-concept, concept, and development; what is implied in the definition of mechanics and dynamics; to being able to include tracks and progression—are defined by the subjects themselves who, therefore, extrapolate the perspective of knowledge as representation and learning as problem-solving, working on the level of knowledge as interpretation and learning through the invention of problems, from the notion of the rhizome, which is at the base of the development of both the cartographic method of intervention research, as well as the cartography of the controversies. This approach is qualitatively different from the traditional approaches found in games or gamified processes, where the subjects are only users, players, whose learning is by solving problems and their evolution by linear stages or phases.

Most recently, the projects “The City as a Learning Space: Games and Gamification in the Constitution of Hybrid, Multimodal, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Spaces for the Development of Citizenship,” and “The City as a Learning Space: Education for Citizenship in Hybrid, Multimodal, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Contexts,” also developed on the basis of the cartographic method of intervention research, we have more appropriately called the cartography of controversies, in order to better understand, in addition to what occurs at the micro level (enative and inventive cognition), the associations that occur between HA and NHA, which may be due to convenience, coexistence, opposition, and exclusion. These associations also evidence planes of forces and, therefore, political expression of cognition, in the sense that “knowing involves a position in relation to the world and itself, an attitude, an ethos” (Kastrup, Tedesco, & Passos, 2015, p. 12). These associations can be evidenced in a cosmogram, which makes it possible to draw the distribution of the agency, the diagram of the mediations, in short, the design of the movement, its formation. In this way, the cosmogram works with the empirical and in motion, unlike the paradigm that works with the frame, with the theoretical framework stabilized with the model as structure.

Schlemmer and Lopes (2016) and Schlemmer (2018) emphasize that the proposal does not consist in a transposition of the method or methods, but rather an experimentation with the logic behind them, as well as some of its elements, which are linked to others, in this case, present in games, gamification, and PAGs, allowing us to develop inventive methodologies and pedagogical interventionist, aggregative, and gamified practices in the educational context.

Thus, relating the cartographic method of controversies and, consequently, elements present in the ANT with the cartographic method of intervention research and with the perspective of enactive cognition, in its two senses of action—corporate cognition and inventive cognition—allows us to understand that the process of invention or innovation, both in development and research, advances from multiple breakdowns, deviations, compositions, associations, and reassociations that occur in the empirical movement. In this way, understanding an invention, an innovation, implies tracking the traces and retracing the whole network of deviations and compositions, associations and reassociations that constitute the path.

From this context questions that inspire future investigations arise:

How can Latour’s concept of symmetry or flat ontology, in which HA and NHA are on the same plane (which eliminates the anthropocentric view of cognition), contribute to research in education?

How can the Latour cosmogram contribute to the intervention research cartographic method as a means of understanding the paths made by the different actors, as well as the controversies established in a network?

How can the intervention research cartographic method, comprising cognition as the invention of problems, associated with the cartography of controversies, be part of the methodology to help us understand the place of the human in the context of intelligent cities?

To sum up, “we go, we hear, we learn, we practice, we become competent, we change our minds. Very simple indeed: this is called research. Good research always produces copious new descriptions . . . There is no in-formation, just trans-formation” (Latour, 2012, pp. 212–216).