How Far Are We from a Hot Bath?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilah Grace Canevaro
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Thing Theory ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Status ◽  
Hot Bath

Chapter 1 places this book against a backdrop of New Materialisms, using the framework of Thing Theory in its various manifestations to unpack seemingly innocuous but in reality surprisingly loaded terms like ‘object’ and ‘agent’, and raising the question of boundaries: to what extent does the Materialist slogan ‘Things are us!’ apply to Homer? It explores the issue of representation and the substantial difference it makes to the status of objects and the location of agency, and tackles the productive tension between this book’s core approaches: Gender Theory and New Materialism. The historical and social ramifications of the book are addressed, and some initial dichotomies and categories begin to be drawn out, with a particular focus on memory.

Introduction: The Proggy Mat

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilah Grace Canevaro
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Relationship

Through an initial anecdote, the Introduction begins by demonstrating that people and things communicate with and through each other. The story offers a way in to issues that will be central to the book, such as authorship and tradition, representation and imagination, communication and the negotiation of agency. From it comes the hypothesis that the relationship between objects and agency is coloured, influenced, even constituted by gender roles. It then offers a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book and concludes with a set of methodological reflections that highlight the importance of a critical approach to the New Materialisms, and the advantages of their combination with Gender Theory.

Introduction

Kick It ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Matt Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Creative Artists

This chapter explains the motivations for researching the social history of the drum kit. It traces the history of drummer jokes and outlines the structure of the chapters to follow. Chapter 1 traces the racist roots of linking drummers to primitive stereotypes and contrasts this against the cleverness of drummers that culminated in the invention of the drum. Chapter 2 shows how drummers in fact contributed to redefining the boundaries between noise and music. Chapter 3 reveals how drummers developed new conventions of literacy while standardizing both the components and performance practice of their instrument. Chapter 4 examines the development of the status of drummers as creative artists. Chapter 5 looks at drumming as a form of musical labour. Chapter 6 considers attempts to replace the drum kit and drummers with new technologies, and how such efforts ultimately underscored the centrality of the drum kit as part of the contemporary soundscape.

scholarly journals Alice’s Garden: Imagining Agency in the Natural World in Clare Boylan’s Black Baby

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
Maureen O’Connor ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Life Span ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Generative Process ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
The Status ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
Interracial Family

The Irish writer Clare Boylan is something of a forgotten figure, despite enjoying significant literary success in her lifetime. Because of her untimely death, little critical work has been done on her fiction. Her blackly comic sensibility responds sensitively to characters situated in culturally specific environments, with particular attention paid to the vexed and contradictory position of women in their relationship to the natural world, and so this essay conducts a reading of her 1988 novel, Black Baby, using the insights of feminist new materialism and critical posthumanism, especially as articulated by Rosi Braidotti. In every genre, contemporary Irish women’s writing finds space in the natural world to explore alternatives to the status quo. Black Baby imagines an interracial family of women (and cats) in the enchanted environment of a miraculously blooming winter garden. By staging Alice’s most transformative moments, including her final moments of semi-consciousness, in a garden, Boylan makes recourse to the idea of an unending, generative process. Nothing really dies when life is no longer an individualised experience, but an impersonal moment of radical inclusion that exceeds the material limits of any one life span.

scholarly journals New Materialism, Technophilia and Emancipation

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordana Jovanović
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Political Emancipation

The aim of this paper is to reflect on psychological, ethical and political implications of new materialisms (Barad, Bennett, Coole, Frost) in the context of expanded and accelerated regimes of measurement as part of a technological governance of the human. As new materialists are committed to both epistemic and political emancipation, I first analyse theoretical, in particular epistemological, foundations of new materialism. The new materialism has achieved liberating epistemic effects in criticizing self-referential discursive and socio-constructionist agendas. It argued instead for a return to material and somatic realities. However, I examine whether its flat ontology, its epistemology of de-differentiation of the human and non-human, even non-living agencies and commitments into a principle of immanence, provide appropriate means to critically assess ethical and political implications of entanglements of humans with the historically- produced technologies and social worlds in general. The next question to be discussed is whether a return (nevertheless a discursive one) to material and somatic realities can in itself protect those very vulnerable realities. As horizontal ontology invokes a horizontal normativity which cannot serve as a foundation for emancipatory projects, it follows that normativity needs other sources beyond the new materialism paradigm. Thus, I argue that such a weak or insecure position of normativity within the new materialisms affects any concept of human subject, regardless of its entanglements, and any project of emancipation. I conclude these critical analyses by claiming that the new materialism’s epistemological and political emancipatory promises cannot be fulfilled by means provided by the new materialism itself.

New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liedeke Plate
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Death Of The Author ◽  
Empirical Approaches

New materialism (and new materialisms) is part of the material turn currently sweeping through the humanities and social sciences and entails a paradigm shift toward a more material(ist) understanding of social and cultural life. From new materialist thinking, new (empirical) approaches, methods, methodologies and objects of study ensue. The new materialisms emerge from feminism, philosophy, and science and technologies studies and critique the foundational binaries of modern thought, especially the nature/culture, object/subject, human/thing dualisms, whose anthropocentric biases are seen to have led to the current ecological and civilizational crisis and the incapacity to think through and adequately engage with them. Proposing to give things their due, new materialisms are interested in “the force of things” and debate “the agency of things.” The post-anthropocentric interest in the vitality of things parallels the non-dualist modes of thinking of indigenous ontologies on which some new materialisms may in fact be based, but whose influence has so far insufficiently been acknowledged. At its most radical, new materialism is posthumanist, part of the nonhuman turn. A number of scholars have sought to bring the insights and concerns of new materialism(s) into the fields of literary theory and criticism, developing “thing” or “stuff” theory and seeking to conceptualize and operationalize a new literary materialism. For this, they draw on insights from a range of disciplines, including material culture studies, book and print culture studies, and comparative textual media studies. Given the importance attached to the linguistic turn as the cultural moment and textual approach in relation to which new materialists agonistically construct the newness of their material(ist) endeavors, the publication context of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Death of the Author”—the multimedia magazine in a box Aspen 5+6—is highlighted as an important site for critiquing a nonmaterial approach.

Sexuality Education and Feminist New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Allen
Keyword(s):  
Education Research ◽  
Sexuality Education ◽  
Unplanned Pregnancy ◽  
Sexual Consent ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Sexually Transmissible Infections ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms ◽  
Feminist New Materialism

School-based sexuality education has existed in various forms since the 1800s. Sexuality education researchers have recently turned to feminist new materialist thought to rethink debates that occupy this field. These debates include whether sexuality education should be taught at school, who should teach it, and what constitutes appropriate content. While these issues have been important historically, some sexuality researchers view them as stifling other possibilities for teaching and generating knowledge in this field. Feminist new materialism emerges from a broader ontological turn within the social sciences and humanities that diverges from social constructionist accounts of the world. This work is associated with scholars such as Barad, Bennett, Haraway, and Braidotti and draws on thinking from Deleuze and Guattari. Employing theoretical tools, such as “intra-action,” “onto-epistemology,” and “agentic matter,” feminist new materialism reconceptualizes the nature of sexuality education research. These concepts highlight the anthropocentric (human-centered) nature of sexuality education research and practice. Feminist new materialisms encourage us to think about what the sexuality curriculum might look like when humans are not at its core, nor bestowed with the power to control themselves and the world. These questions have profound implications for how we teach aspects of sexuality underpinned by these assumptions, such as safer sex and sexual consent. Ultimately, feminist new materialism encourages us to question whether issues such as prevention of sexually transmissible infections and unplanned pregnancy should remain the conventional foci of this subject.

scholarly journals Thinking With New Materialism in Qualitative Case Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 160940692097643
Author(s):  
Åsa Andersson ◽  
Peter Korp ◽  
Anne B. Reinertsen
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Study Design ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Qualitative Case Studies ◽  
Case Study Design ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Event Based

In this article, we discuss challenges and implications of thinking with new materialisms and the Deleuzian philosophy of immanence in qualitative case studies. The aim is to establish a terrain and language of “minor case studies.” Deleuze denies two-world ontologies and the ontologically status of single bodies, emphasizing instead how assemblages of human and non-human bodies together produce the world. In this terrain, cases are not objects of inquiry, but life-giving forces that create movement. This in turn changes the premises for how we can approach and explore cases. Rather than represent, comment and explain what cases are, we illustrate how a case-assemblage creates possibilities for event-based thinking regarding interesting phenomena (cases), and how these cases are twisted, stretched and pulled out of a conventional case study design. We conclude by discussing epistemological consequences of new materialist ontology.

scholarly journals Materials, forensics and feminist geopolitics

2020 ◽  
pp. 030913252090565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Sharp
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Geopolitics ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Materialist Feminist ◽  
Discursive Turn ◽  
The Way

This article seeks to advance the case for feminist geopolitics that recognises the challenges both to the Enlightenment individual and the discursive turn in geography posed by ‘new materialisms’. I will argue that for a distinctively feminist geopolitics a consideration of the way that representational categories align the material around bodies is vital. After a brief discussion of feminist geopolitical approaches, the article moves on to consider accounts of new materialism and assemblage approaches as they are applied to geopolitics, before moving on to consider what a forensic approach might offer to a materialist feminist geopolitics.

The New Materialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency: Making the Case for Respectful Anti-Colonial Engagement

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 331-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Lee Rosiek ◽  
Jimmy Snyder ◽  
Scott L. Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Recent Emergence ◽  
New Materialisms

Both new materialist philosophy of science and Indigenous studies scholarship have developed theories about the agency of non-human things. There has, however, been relatively little articulation between these two literatures in the qualitative social sciences. This essay looks at the possible reasons for this lack of engagement–including the relatively recent emergence of new materialism, pervasive racism within the academy, and foundational differences in the priorities and philosophical assumptions informing these two literatures. Addressing new materialist scholars, the essay inventories the ethical, political, and intellectual reasons social scientists using Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism should also be reading and citing Indigenous studies literature on agent ontologies. It makes the case that the Indigenous studies literature on agent ontologies have strengths in precisely some of the places new materialist social science is facing challenges. Examples are provided and the broader political implications of such work are examined.

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