Concept Of Assemblage Research Articles

Using Poetic Assemblage to Trouble Stigma Associated With Perinatal Drug Use

The concept of assemblage has a long history in both the arts and social sciences. Assemblage thinking is particularly useful for critical scholars to engage with complex phenomena, such as drug use and stigma. Analytic methods that support assemblage thinking through the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of data-based assemblages are needed. This paper describes a qualitative analytic method, poetic assemblage, that merges the arts and social sciences to support assemblage thinking. I demonstrate its utility by presenting its application to data gathered on the stigma associated with perinatal drug use. Poetic assemblage, a form of poetic inquiry, uses disparate data sources to create temporary constructions that allow the researcher to make and remake connections and relationships across human, nonhuman, and discursive agents. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how this method can be used to support assemblage thinking and mid-level theorizing around complex and dynamic phenomena. The method involves the evolvement of constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed research poems. This process creates a liminal space for the researcher to engage with multiple possibilities and allows for a focus on emergent questions rather than on identifying simple answers. Using a series of studies on how healthcare and social services are provided to pregnant and parenting people who use drugs (PPPWUD), I describe my initial use of poetic inquiry in data analysis and my subsequent recognition of its limitations in supporting assemblage thinking. I then demonstrate both the construction and reconstruction of assemblage poems as well as provide examples of analytic insights on structural stigma that were illuminated from the process. While I demonstrate its application to a specific form of stigma, I am proposing the method's utility for imagining new possibilities, identifying emergent questions, and deepening theorizing for any complex social issue.

Regimes of transcultural assemblage: Erased histories and forgotten boundaries in a festive shopping mall installation

Abstract This article explores relations between transcultural processes and historical boundaries. Drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblage, it examines the selection and organisation of cultural elements in a Japanese-styled Chinese New Year installation at a Hong Kong shopping mall. The article presents three affective regimes produced in this transcultural assemblage: New Year festivity, simulated tourism, and partial historicity. We argue that these regimes are regulated in the processes of erasure (the selective blockage of competing lineages of rituals, traditions, and spaces) and forgetting (the process evoking creative re-organisation of semiotic boundaries between cultural elements selected into the transcultural assemblage). This article suggests two implications. First, transculturality is not only the dialogic transgression and creation of boundaries but also the selection and regulation of cultural elements in an assemblage. Second, historical boundaries are not sidestepped but are regulated by the partial blockage through erasure and re-organisation through forgetting in affective regimes. (Transculturality, assemblage, affective regime, erasure, forgetting, Hong Kong)

The social semiotics of Mambwe clan names and praises

ABSTRACT The study explores the clan names and praises of the Mambwe-speaking people of Northern Zambia from a social semiotics perspective. Specifically drawing on the concept of semiotic assemblages, it considers the names and praises as more than just linguistic resources but as meaning-making collections that contribute to the collective self-representation of the Mambwe people. The assembled expressions reflect their worldviews, sociocultural narratives, and identities. The study shows the interconnectedness of gender roles, bioenvironmental factors, community activities, folklore, ethnicity, and self-asserting narratives within the contexts of clan names and praises. Furthermore, it demonstrates the multi-layered meanings resulting from the emotional forces of the interactions among individuals, living and non-living objects, events and bioenvironmental factors in time-spaces. It concludes that clan names and praises are narratives of expressions that represent the psycho-social and historical paths of the Mambwe people, and they play a crucial role in the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture.

A figurational analysis of Health and/or Physical Education teacher educators’ conceptualisations of policy, and their sociogenesis

ABSTRACT Policy engagement is key to promoting quality physical education yet it has been identified as a ‘grand challenge’ for Health and/or Physical Education (H/PE) internationally. All H/PE professionals, including teacher educators, have a collective responsibility to engage with policy but existing research tells us little about how H/PE teacher educators (H/PETEs) understand and engage with policy. It is important to examine H/PETEs conceptualisations of policy for a few reasons, not least because teacher educators play a crucial role in supporting future generations of teachers who themselves will need to engage with policy as a core feature of their professional lives. Drawing on figurational sociology, and the concept of assemblage, this paper offers insights into the nature and development – or sociogenesis – of teacher educators’ conceptualisations of policy. The data shared in this paper was generated through semi-structured interviews with 12 H/PETE from 7 countries. Inductive-deductive analysis – drawing largely on figurational concepts such as interdependence, power, habitus and sociogenesis – revealed that H/PETEs conceptualised policy as: (i) informing intended action and change; (ii) a way to govern practice; (iii) imposition and possibility. In terms of how these conceptualisations came to be, key features of the H/PETE figuration that were identified as influential include: (i) interdependence with human and non-human elements; (ii) balances of power and (iii) social and individual habitus. It is concluded that capitalising on these elements through professional learning, for example, could support H/PETEs in engaging with policy in productive and meaningful ways. Given that engaging with policy is viewed as a collective responsibility of H/PETEs, and many – if not all – of the H/PETEs felt they needed support in this regard, this should be a key focus for the field.

The semiotic repertoire of dairy cows

Abstract This article moves from the familiar—the human—to the very different in sociolinguistics—the dairy cow. Based on multispecies ethnography, the aim of this article is to advocate the animal turn in sociolinguistics (Cornips 2019). The guiding question is how do non-human animals, that is, dairy cows—mutually and with humans—imbue their intraspecies and interspecies interaction with meaning that makes sense for the two species. The concept of semiotic repertoire is invoked in order to investigate how dairy cows draw on resources to make meaning, and the concept of material-semiotic assemblage is applied in order to account for the different effects generated by the resources that come together at particular moments. The assemblage perspective does not take a ‘cow’ or ‘human’ as discrete and fixed but focuses on the distributed and emergent agency as a relational effect of all elements involved: humans, non-humans, and other. (Intraspecies and interspecies interactions, the semiotic repertoire, assemblage, dairy cows, practices)*

Relaxed and flexible – what (else) happens when sofas enter everyday lives of schools?

ABSTRACT School environments in Finland are changing from traditional classrooms towards more flexible architectures. This change invites designers and commercial organizations to take part in re-thinking these environments by creating narratives of desirable educational environments. Their comprehensive furniture solutions promise flexible entities, including components that facilitate sharing and joining together. This article describes the school architecture reform from the perspective of one local school. We focus on an element emblematic of the planned relaxed learning environment: sofas, and discuss these using the philosophical concept of assemblage. We propose that arriving in the everyday life of a school the comfortable sofa – the promise of relaxation – also begins to participate in and to produce negotiations of power. Sofa becomes a participant in an assemblage of school: the sofa brings to surface relations that everyday life school assemblages already foster and sustain, making the negotiations of power in the school visible.

Teaching strategic management accounting with sustainability

ABSTRACT Current agendas such as decolonising curriculum, incorporating sustainability, and navigating the neoliberal global political-economic order demand a broader perspective on management accounting education in universities than the prevailing techno-economic taxonomy. With a critical social science approach, this paper first explores why current management accounting thought limits the consideration of social and ecological justice issues. It then seeks to broaden management accounting teaching by integrating ecological and social justice concerns into the Strategic Management Accounting (SMA) curriculum. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical concepts of arborescent and rhizomatic assemblages, the paper provides a conceptual framework to contextualise, historicise, politicise, and theorise the techno-managerial particularities of SMA within a broader framework of strategising ecological and social justice. This approach encourages management accounting students to critically engage with professionally accredited techno-managerial elements of SMA while considering their sustainability implications.

Stanley and Acetolysis: Enhanced Method for Pollen Identification and Geolocation of Cocaine Samples

The concept of palynological assemblage, a set of all identifiable pollen grains and spores, is very useful in geolocation determinations in Forensic Studies. To identify plant genera, palynologists must recognize detailed aspects of apertures, ornamentation and layers on the cell wall. Pollen and spores recovered from higher purity cocaine samples represent an alternative to indicate drug source regions. After following the method established by Stanley in 1992, we added the acetolysis procedure in samples seized by the Civil Police of the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2017, in order to enhance morphological traits observation and taxonomical identification of different pollen taxa, allowing reliable environmental and geolocation reconstructions.

Cultures of Artificial Intelligence. AI Assemblages and the Transformations of Everyday Life

Artificial Intelligence is one of the keywords of our time, and AI systems are currently initiating numerous transformations in various areas of everyday life. How can cultural anthropology at the interface with digital anthropology contribute to understanding these transformations and to shaping social and cultural negotiation processes around AI? To answer this question, this article develops the concept of AI assemblages, which aims to illuminate the dynamics of sociotechnical relations between human and more-than-human actors or elements surrounding AI systems. Assemblage thinking allows to reflect upon and describe numerous ‘small’ transformations of everyday life connected to AI without uncritically reproducing grand narratives of sociotechnical change and upheaval. On a more general level, analyzing AI assemblages is a way to study cultures of AI, that is, to study “a whole way of life” (Williams) in which routines, relationships, and cultural orders are increasingly shaped by AI systems. Three examples illustrate this perspective: AI assemblages in memory culture (virtual survivor testimonies in Holocaust remembrance), in popular culture (social media and their algorithms), and in academic culture (generative AI in academic research and teaching).

Attuning to processes of affective sociomaterialisation: exploring subjectivity and identity in outdoor early childhood provision in Scotland, UK

ABSTRACT This paper examines the formation of children’s subjectivities, related to the metaphysical conditions of being and becoming a subject, within outdoor early childhood provision in Scotland. It applies a sociomaterial metaphysical framework to propose an alternative way of understanding how subjectivities come to form in early childhood environments, bringing together Spinozist monism in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage and affect. Methodologically, an ethnographic approach inspired partly by the postqualitative field of scholarship is employed to gather data on children’s subjectivities at Wood Fire, a primarily outdoor early childhood setting. The data produced in this study affords an opportunity to understand the materiality and relationality of primarily outdoor early childhood provision through which subjectivities are in-formed. Thus, they demonstrate a more expanded understanding of how we, humans, are produced as individuals in specific encounters through processes of ‘affective sociomaterialisation’. Practically, this carries implications for how researchers might attune to the child’s sense of self on more expansive terms through processes of affective sociomaterialisation.

Body awareness, activity trackers, and the cognitive unconscious

This paper investigates the role activity trackers play for their users, focusing on the transformative role of wearable technology in shaping our perceptions of our bodies and health. Drawing on autophenomenography, in-depth interviews and online content analysis, it questions the neutrality of tracking data and interpretation, by drawing on Annemarie Mol’s concept of ontonorms and highlighting the built-in normativity of the assemblage that makes it constantly prone to enacting a certain kind of optimal performance. Using Katherine Hayles’ concept of cognitive assemblages, it defines trackers as being specific types of cognizers, entering alongside humans in assemblages in which their role sometimes ends up dethroning the body’s own perceptual systems and changing the way we are aware of our own bodies. Throughout the research, three different types of users are identified and described, for whom the cognitive assemblage takes a different shape: regular users, users with medical issues and power users.

From peacekeeping missions to global peacekeeping assemblages

Abstract How does the experience of peacekeeping shape the countries that contribute troops and the troops themselves, individually and collectively? Most of the peacekeeping literature's focus has traditionally been on field missions, the countries that host them and the challenges of attracting sufficient and appropriately trained troops. We suggest that more emphasis should be put not only on the locations where missions deploy, but also on the individuals, countries and institutions that make up the missions. To analytically capture this more comprehensive understanding of what peacekeeping is—its multiple effects across space—we suggest drawing on the concept of assemblages to make an analytical shift from peacekeeping missions to global peacekeeping assemblages. First, this approach abandons the prior analytical separation of field mission, host country and contributing state/organization as discrete or isolated analytical focus points. Second, it encourages a detailed empirical methodology that focuses on how multiplicities of different actors, knowledges, technologies, norms and values through power struggles and negotiations constitute assemblages in geographically dispersed locations. Third, we suggest treating peacekeeping as flexible social facts, as outcomes of the co-functioning of heterogenous actors with diverse motivations and objectives that cannot be traced back to a single, but rather multiple point(s) of origin(s).

Illusions of textuality: The semiotics of literary memes in contemporary media

AbstractThis article seeks to account for the phenomenon where cultural productions are able to transcend different chronotopes and masquerade in myriad forms while sustaining an illusion of itself as a text. Using the Barthian distinction between work and Text as its framework, the article argues that multimodal semiotics offers a theoretically viable perspective on the global circulation of cultural artifacts by way of the concepts of memes, distribution, resemiotization, and assemblage. The central argument is this: what we call a text in common parlance is in fact a node within a networked assemblage of individually constituted works loosely connected through a substrate recognizability of memes. Operating at the level of this network is the Barthian Text that is always in‐progress and can never really be completed. The article concludes by proposing that with the imminence of Web 5.0 and in light of the ever‐pervasive influence of artificial intelligence in cultural production, it is imperative that we adopt nonlinear thinking to understand the shifting semioscapes in digital space and their impact on contemporary textuality.

Towards a new framework to assess agri-food value chains’ sustainability – The case of chestnut value chain

Food systems rely on natural resources for production causing their depletion. Sustainability assessment can encourage farms and agri-food companies to improve sustainability performances. Sustainability assessment frameworks and tools differ in their purposes, scope, methods of application, and required time for execution; however, most of them do not fit with value chains, or they do not cover all sustainability dimensions. Our objective is to propose a holistic framework to assess sustainability at agri-food value chains level. The proposed framework combines the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems (SAFA) (El Hage, 2012) [1] and The Agri-food Evaluation Framework (TEEB) [2]. It incorporates the concepts of Socio-Ecological Systems, Assemblage, and Social Practices. It integrates system dynamics by emphasising human and natural capital stocks and their users. We explain in detail the methodological steps we followed to construct and to apply this new framework to two case studies in Italy and France. The new framework was applied to real-life case studies and has shown its effectiveness and demonstrates its potential for widespread use in similar scenarios.

Intersections and the becomings of disabled and queer subjectivities in Margarita with a Straw

This article aims to explore the affective capacities of the non-lesbian and lesbian, non-disabled and disabled, moving and fleeting bodies of Laila Kapoor, who suffers from cerebral palsy, in the 2014 Hindi film Margarita with a Straw. The study examines the ontology of Laila’s disabled and sexualized body that is entangled in an assemblage of relations of other human (characters Dhruv, Nima, Jared and Khanum) and non-human (architectural space, wheelchair, laptop, voice aggregator and music) bodies in the film. Drawing on the concept of assemblage, this article examines the affective flows, desire and becomings of disabled and queer bodies within Margarita with a Straw. It demonstrates how the discursive, material, post-human subjectivity of disabled and queer bodies in the film manifests the potential to destabilize the notion of what a body is by continuously negating the social disavowal of bodies through new emergent potentials, capacities and assemblages.

Assembling China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Discourse, Institution, and Materials

Abstract The article uses the concept of assemblage to analyze the becoming, not being, of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), that is, the ways in which different elements were framed and constructed so as to constitute the BRI, often seen as China’s “grand” or “global” strategy. Different from rational and more-than-rational perspectives, the assemblage approach pays attention to the role of materials as well as the contingencies that were associated with the BRI. Thus, the article argues that the global BRI is best conceptualized as an assemblage that emerged through (de)territorializing processes in which various practices, institutions, discourses, and materials came together to form different relations with specific effects, rather than a set of principles simply conceived and imposed by China’s central government. The Chinese governmental institutions and national discourses are critical to its emergence, but so are materials such as the forms of policy papers and infrastructure. Seeing it this way allows us to understand how such a broad and heterogenous strategy as the BRI is held together without ceasing to be heterogenous; in other words, how the BRI emerges, travels, and mutates.

Aesthetic Assemblages: Relational Aesthetics of the Israeli Movement Practice Gaga

This paper presents a study of the aesthetics of the free-form improvisational dance practice Gaga as an example of contemporary neo-spirituality. The study is based on aesthetic data collected in recreational Gaga classes at the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Tel Aviv. The study shows that the aesthetics of practices are relational and depend on a variety of heterogeneous factors; collective and shared aesthetics persist despite individualization. The paper develops assemblage thinking as a theoretical and practical framework for approaching aesthetics. It combines the specific analytical approach of aesthetic analysis with the theoretical concept of assemblage and applies it to an example of neo-spirituality. It evolves the concept of “aesthetic assemblage” to address the challenges of studying practices that focus on movement, body, and experience. It demonstrates that studying aesthetic assemblages of neo-spiritual practices helps to foster an understanding of social and cultural dynamics in the context of religion.

Langue and politics in Hjelmslev and Deleuze & Guattari: prolegomena to the concept of assemblage

Resumo O objetivo principal deste artigo é explicitar a dimensão política da língua e seu papel na montagem do conceito deleuzo-guattariano de agenciamento. Para tanto, é indispensável demonstrar como a criação do conceito de agenciamento depende de componentes forjados com o pensamento de Hjelmslev, o que será feito em dois movimentos: o rastreamento de algumas noções da linguística de Hjelmslev, em seus pontos de consenso e dissenso com Saussure; e a elucidação da operação de incorporação da linguística hjelmsleviana pela filosofia de Deleuze e Guattari, em especial no conceito de agenciamento.

The Sewn-Together Humanities

The purpose of this paper is a straightforward one: to step back from the increasing use of assemblage in recent debates and to attempt to take stock of what assemblage thinking offers to humanities. I relate the answer to this question to the title concept of “sewn-together” humanities, which has a tentative and ad hoc character. The starting point is the analysis of the video installation realized by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, entitled Assemblages, which relies upon the concept of assemblages proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Assuming that research practices and theories combine assemblages of ideas of both abstract and practical nature, I analyse examples of the application of assemblage thinking and action at the levels of a method, methodology, and onto-epistemology, tracing the goals that humanities achieve by means of this approach to research.

The Intersectional Logic of “Bad Religion”

Using an example of German Christian development cooperation, this paper examines strengths and weaknesses of an intersectional analysis in relation to “religion.” I will make a twofold argument. First, I will argue that the rhetoric of “bad religion” present in development cooperation is based on an intersectional logic and reproduces marginalization. Second, I will present that intersectional approaches often conceptualize “religion” in an essentialist way. By doing so, I will explore the common features of “development” and “intersectionality,” referred to here as the intersectional logic of development, describe the role of “religion” within it and demonstrate a dualistic logic of reading positions as hegemonic and non-hegemonic within this intersectional logic of development. Drawing on the concept of assemblage developed by Jasbir Puar (2007), this essay concludes by proposing some programmatic considerations that allow addressing these challenges and further developing intersectional studies as well as the critical study of religion.