Media and materiality: extending the boundaries of object research

Abstract

Articles included in this volume focus on the social role of “things” to examine the relationships between material and media artefacts, the construction of social identities, and the production and use of culture. As a collection, the articles reiterate a shift in contemporary object-based research which sees the study of things as an expanded discourse in which the thing itself is neither tethered to its material properties or a sole narrative. Faced with the challenge of contemplating the object as a virtual moving target, contributors have produced a collection of articles that extend “the object” beyond any singular or delimited site of investigation. In many cases the “artefact” explored is both media and material, and where this is the case, contributors argue that expressions of cultural production can be effectively analysed in relation to other empirical cultural dynamics as well as social and historical structures. Each contributor employs a case-study approach that raises “questions of precedent and futurity, of canons of contextualization” in order to challenge disciplinary norms and boundaries. The resulting volume seeks, in the final instance, to make a contribution to the ongoing processes of formation and reflection that characterise interdisciplinary culture studies.