Actor-network theory (ANT) grew out of French-British studies in the sociology of science and technology from the early 1980s onward. Known variably as a material semiotics, the approach claims that all entities in the world get constituted and reconstituted in shifting and hybrid webs of discursive, technical, and natural relations. From semiotics, ANT borrows the notion of actants to make sense of such relational processes and to challenge ingrained habits of sociological analysis.