As with all other approaches to social theory, in attempting to answer the question of how social orders are created and maintained ANT faces epistemological, ontological and methodological challenges. Some of these will be outlined in turn, in line with ways in which these have been addressed in our ongoing research.
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In fact, it may be ANT's practical applicability that has some led to conclude that "ANT's main shortcoming is its being everything but a theory", a criticism which has been partly attributed to its (allegedly inappropriate) naming [13, 21]. The essence of this criticism is that the approach is too descriptive and failing to come up with any detailed suggestions of how actors should be seen, and their actions analysed and interpreted [21, 26, 54, 55]. It has therefore been proposed that ANT may be best used in a combination with other theoretical approaches, especially in relation to analysis and interpretation [47, 56, 57]. However, a detailed discussion of combining ANT with other theoretical lenses is beyond the scope of this paper and will be explored in due course in a follow-on paper.
Nevertheless, it may be useful to consider the traditional notion of theory to explore this issue further. A theory should be able to explain "how and why" things occur by exploring their relationships [54]. Describing how things occur is straightforward using ANT, but why things occur poses a challenge. Other problems facing ANT are that it is difficult to test with empirical evidence as it is very broad and hence difficult to refute. It can therefore serve to aid explanation, and provide a vocabulary for interpretation [20, 21]. It has, however, limited capability in developing empirically verifiable evidence.
Hence, we have found it helpful to view ANT as a something between a theory and a method, or more precisely as an analytical technique where the researcher follows actors and tries to understand what they do whilst constantly questioning often taken-for-granted characteristics of actors and accepting the flux and changing nature of reality [21, 40]. In so doing, ANT has been said to be "telling tales about how the world cannot stop transforming" [40]. Here, the approach can be useful in helping to frame the research question, guide data collection and theorise about potential explanations [58].
Qualitative research, the main method of data collection in ANT, is generally more suited to theory development than to hypothesis testing, shifting the analytical focus to sense making activities, negotiation, differing actor perspectives and emerging effects. Yet from our own experience drawing on the approach, it is particularly important for researchers not to loose sight of the wider study aims as ANT studies can be prone to getting lost in detail. For example, detailed descriptions of individual work practices and ongoing examination of how different groupings conceptualise the EHR in different ways, without attempting to relate this to other relevant factors and the study questions, may be unhelpful, resulting in a lack of practical suggestions for improvement.
A theory put forward by Dr. Abdulzahra Hello, a professor of hydrology and marine sciences at Basra University, is that people were poisoned by algal blooms in water they consumed.[73] He shared a video he and colleagues filmed on September 26 of a brown colored mass coming from al-Khandak River, a canal in the middle of Basra city that feeds into the Shatt al-Arab in central Basra city, which he thought was an algal bloom. [74] Satellite imagery analyzed by Human Rights Watch shows the colored mass in the water, coming from a small canal in the middle of the city of Basra that feeds into the Shatt al-Arab, from March to November 2018. 2ff7e9595c
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