scholarly journals The Matter of Things: A Material Turn in Cuban Scholarship

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
María A. Cabrera Arús
Keyword(s):  
Material Turn

Editorial Introduction | Oil and Media, Oil as Media: Mediating Petrocultures Then and Now

MediaTropes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. i-xvi
Author(s):  
Jordan Kinder ◽  
Lucie Stepanik
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Editorial Introduction ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Ecological Relations ◽  
The One

In this introduction to the special issue of MediaTropes on “Oil and Media, Oil as Media,” Jordan B. Kinder and Lucie Stepanik provide an account of the stakes and consequences of approaching oil as media as they situate it within the “material turn” of media studies and the broader project energy humanities. They argue that by critically approaching oil and its infrastructures as media, the contributions that comprise this issue puts forward one way to develop an account of oil that further refines the larger tasks and stakes implicit in the energy humanities. Together, these address the myriad ways in which oil mediates social, cultural, and ecological relations, on the one hand, and the ways in which it is mediated, on the other, while thinking through how such mediations might offer glimpses of a future beyond oil.

Assembling Archaeology

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Cobb ◽  
Karina Croucher
Keyword(s):  
Resource Management ◽  
Undergraduate Student ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Cultural Resource Management ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Resource ◽  
Archaeological Practice ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Perspective

This book provides a radical rethinking of the relationships between teaching, researching, digging, and practicing as an archaeologist in the twenty-first century. The issues addressed here are global and are applicable wherever archaeology is taught, practiced, and researched. In short, this book is applicable to everyone from academia to cultural resource management (CRM), from heritage professional to undergraduate student. At its heart, it addresses the undervaluation of teaching, demonstrating that this affects the fundamentals of contemporary archaeological practice, and is particularly connected to the lack of diversity in disciplinary demographics. It proposes a solution which is grounded in a theoretical rethinking of our teaching, training, and practice. Drawing upon the insights from archaeology’s current material turn, and particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages, this volume turns the discipline of archaeology into the subject of investigation, considering the relationships between teaching, practice, and research. It offers a new perspective which prompts a rethinking of our expectations and values with regard to teaching, training, and doing archaeology, and ultimately argues that we are all constantly becoming archaeologists.

Timbre: Alternative Histories and Possible Futures for the Study of Music

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily I. Dolan ◽  
Alexander Rehding
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Material Turn

Timbre has always been a central element of music and sound, but it is only now emerging as a central dimension in musical thought. Aided by the burgeoning fields of sound studies and critical organology, music studies are taking the “material turn” toward timbre. One of the most urgent tasks of a timbral musicology is to rethink its categories from the ground up and to make space for sound at the foundation of our thinking. This chapter offers an overview of the Handbook, presenting a variety of viewpoints on the multifaceted quality of timbre, covering its histories, philosophies, technologies, and modes of perception. It highlights explorations of timbre that have existed (but were marginalized by our collective timbral deafness) and proposes alternative paths not yet pursued.

After Luther: Visual Culture, Materiality and the Legacy of 1517

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
JENNIFER SPINKS
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Public Activity ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
The Impact

Do historians look at Luther and the Lutheran Reformation differently in the aftermath of the Lutherjahr of 2017, and its frenzy of academic and public activity? As recent publications on Luther demonstrate – notably Lyndal Roper's 2016 biography Martin Luther: renegade and prophet – there is a still a great deal to say about Luther, and how his friendships, passions, prejudices and physical experiences shaped him. But while Luther was the monumental public figure of 2017, some of the most important work coinciding with the anniversary addressed instead Lutheranism as a movement, and the nature of religious identities in Luther's aftermath. It also demonstrated and furthered the impact of the visual and material turn in history and in Reformation studies. Building upon decades of scholarship on Lutheran visual images, recent Reformation scholarship has demonstrated in increasing depth how religious identity can and should be read through both material and visual culture. The three publications examined here – a monograph by Bridget Heal, a website by Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace and Alexandra Walsham, and the exhibition catalogue Luther! 95 treasures – 95 people – contribute to the material, sensory turn in Reformation and early modern scholarship, and in the latter two cases also reveal the impact of this upon public engagement with Reformation histories.

The Disposal of Place: Facing Modernity in the Kitchen-Diner

2012 ◽  
Vol 60 (2_suppl) ◽  
pp. 212-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rolland Munro
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Front Stage

The aim of this paper is to suggest how the material turn in sociology could benefit from a re-theorizing around wider understandings of disposal. The argument is that it is not enough to document how spaces for dwelling are produced and consumed; their building and use also entail a disposal of place that has to account for how the materials that make up a dwelling get arranged and ‘placed’ as moralities. Taking spaces for living and eating as its object of analysis, each section of this paper examines a different aspect of modernity, bringing the kitchen-diner ‘front stage’. Avoiding a ubiquitous conflation of disposal with waste – whereby ‘excess’ is dismissed out of hand as redundant and non-productive to design – the analysis goes on to suggest how modernity advances its orders through our making the ‘belongings’ of collective identity more detachable and by our thinning the ‘stickiness’ of cultural institutions.

Lu Märten: An Introduction to Four Texts

October ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Jenny Nachtigall ◽  
Kerstin Stakemeier
Keyword(s):  
Labor Conditions ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Full Life ◽  
Proletarian Art ◽  
Life Work

Abstract This article presents an introduction to four texts that the German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970) published between 1903 and 1928. It outlines some of the major concepts of and contexts for this unduly neglected thinker. Her writings covered a wide terrain that spanned studies on the labor conditions of female artists, polemics against “proletarian art,” and a monist, rather than dialectical, view on film, art, and what she called the “full life-work of a human.” At the core of her multiple endeavors was the demand for remaking the history of art as a history of form that is more capacious than art's institutionalized Western field. Situating Märten's work in historical debates (e.g., on Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s), the introduction also points to the new legibility that her nonaligned materialism gains with the material turn in the humanities.

The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rekret
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Do So

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations.

The Material Turn, Life and Writing

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Harley
Keyword(s):  
Material Turn

scholarly journals Temptation, Resistance, and Art Objects: On the Lack of Material Theory within Art History before the Material Turn

2019 ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Charolotta Krispinsson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Visual Culture Studies ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Turn

Niccolò di Pietro Gerini's painting “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” (1390-1400) serves as a point of departure for this essay. It depicts Saint Anthony during a lapse of self-control as he attempts to resist an alluring mound of gold. Since the mound is in fact made of genuine gold leaves applied to the painting's surface, it works both as a representation of temptation as well as an object of desire affecting the beholder. The aim of this essay is to explore different approaches to materiality before the material turn within the art history discipline by examining two opposing directions within the writing and practice of art history:  the tradition of connoisseurship; and the critique of the fetish within the theoretical apparatus of new art history and visual culture studies of the 1980s and 90s. As an expression of positivism within art history, it is argued that connoisseurship be considered within the context of its empirical practices dealing with objects. What is commonly described as the connoisseur's “taste” or “love for art” would then be just another way to describe the intimate relationship formed between art historians and the very objects under their scrutiny. More than other humanist disciplines, art history is, with the possible exception of archaeology, an object-based discipline. It is empirically anchored in the unruly, deep sea of objects commonly known as the history of art. Still, there has been a lack of in-depth theoretical reflection on the materiality of artworks in the writings of art historians before the material turn. The question however, is not ifthis is so, but rather, why?In this essay, it is suggested that the art history discipline has been marked by a complicated love-hate relationship with the materiality of which the very objects of study, more often than not, are made of; like Saint Anthony who is both attracted to and repelled by the shapeless mass of gold that Lucifer tempts him with. While connoisseurship represents attraction, resistance to the allure of objects can be traced to the habitual critique of fetishism of the first generations of visual culture studies and new art history. It reflects a negative stance towards objects and the material aspect of artworks, which enhanced a conceived dichotomy between thinking critically and analytically in contrast to managing documents and objects in archives and museum depositories. However, juxtaposing the act of thinking with the practice of manual labour has a long tradition in Western intellectual history. Furthermore, it is argued that art history cannot easily be compared to the history of other disciplines because of the simple fact that artworks are typically quite expensive and unique commodities, and as such, they provoke not just aesthetic but also fetishist responses. Thus, this desire to separate art history as a scientific discipline from the fetishism of the art market has had the paradoxical effect of causing art historians to shy away from developing methodologies and theory about materiality as an act of resistance. 

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