Material Entanglements Research Articles

Constituting the Body of State: Paper, Parchment, and Political Thought in the Age of the American Revolution

Abstract This essay considers the material and visual cultural dynamics through which the modern state emerged during the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic world. It centres upon the emergent rhetoric of the ‘written constitution’ in Revolutionary North America and the new United States, arguing that this mode of constitution-making represented not the invention that many claimed it to be, but instead a revision of the relationship between document, statecraft and the body in early modern British empire that built upon seventeenth-century English critics of monarchical power. The continuities between the material substrates of empire and nation came to be masked by a rhetoric of disavowal that posited the US constitutional form as both an innovation and a template for the material entanglements of the modern state.

“RadioActive”: an exploration of the critical role of materiality in shaping participatory spaces

ABSTRACT Materiality plays a critical role in determining participatory spaces within social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) interventions focused on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, this role remains under-examined. This article draws inspiration from social practice theory to steer away from dominant individual-centred approaches. We focus on the material dimension of social practices to examine how materiality is involved in enabling or hindering participation, with the Rwandan “Itetero” Radio Listening Club (RLC) as case study. This research draws on one year of ethnographically inspired participant observations that involved attending 12 listening club sessions, 12 group discussions, and semi-structured interviews with 45 RLC participants (2019–2020). We provide insight into how the materiality of the RLC – understood here as infrastructure, architecture, and technology – shaped attendants’ ability to participate. We argue that acknowledging the material entanglements of people and (material) space might allow SBCC project implementers to develop more contextually appropriate and inclusive participatory spaces.

The Material Politics of Graffiti Removal

While anti-graffiti policies have been examined in various places, the concrete conditions of graffiti removal remain largely unexplored. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article considers a generative dimension of graffiti removal techniques and highlights their contribution to the visual ordering of urban reality through two main actions: making differences and making similarities. Anything but automatic and simple, graffiti removal is a complex operation consisting of technical gestures and ontological re-specifications, which are accomplished within the material entanglements of the city’s surfaces. A matter of continuous transformations, graffiti removal participates, like graffiti writing, in the visual becoming of urban ecologies.

Entangling with the landscape: a methodological walking art experiment

This paper presents a walking art experiment called ‘Line Walk’ aimed at attuning to more-than-human landscapes. The researchers wanted to expand the methodological repertoires for engaging with contemporary semi-urban and urban living environments. A second goal was to increase attentiveness to multispecies relationality and thus challenge uncritically normative notions of nature in environmental educational research. The experiment demonstrates how a walking art protocol has the potential to work as a catalyst to expose walking human bodies to the material, affective, and sensory relationalities of the landscapes. Additionally, it can generate encounters with ghostly, atmospheric presences of past histories and hints of more-than-human world-making projects and their temporal scales. We suggest that the value of such an experiment lies in its capacity to take researchers from comfort zones to multispecies and multitemporal contact zones and to help them trace back and out the material entanglements of humans with the planet.

Arguing with objects and bodies: embodied reasoning and material entanglements in science learner interaction

ABSTRACT How do people use objects and gestures to shape scientific argumentation? This paper engages the concept of “entanglement” as a heuristic for considering the potentials and constraints that gestures and materials create for interactants. Drawing on video recorded data from an academic-year-long linguistic ethnography of a high school science classroom in southern Arizona, USA, I examine the entanglement of discourse, bodies, and objects in one act sequence to reveal differences in the situated practices of high school students as opposed to professional scientists. The analysis reveals that objects and gestures allow scientific novices to engage in collaborative sense-making as they transform discourse and are transformed in discourse. At the same time, the flexibility and contingency of objects and gestures can be problematic for novices dealing with ambiguous understandings of natural phenomena, leading to interpretations that may or may not correspond to expert understandings. Reckoning with materiality in science argumentation must account for the limitations of objects and bodies as forms of evidence as well as their potential to afford forms of agency.

“I’m Traversing My Own Death Throes”

This paper offers a queer ecological reading of the 2012 video game Dear Esther , an approach which exists at the intersection of queer theory, queer ecology, and video game scholarship. Queer theory working in concert with ecological thought traces the affinities between human, geological, animal, and atmospheric forces within the game; these affinities compound and trouble categorical distnctions, instantiating a porous “time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment,’” anchoring “complex modes of analysis that travel through entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal” 238). Dear Esther enacts a series of immanent encounters with more-than-human material entanglements, revealing a world “waterlogged” by fluid slippages between body and island, feather and flesh, and bones and stones to offer, ultimately, a contribution to the nascent field of queer video game scholarship that makes a case for video games as a media uniquely capable of disclosing fluid, dynamic, and complex relations between human and nonhuman matter and environment (Pinchbeck and Briscoe).

Material Touch: Diffracted from Wool — Stich Sisters Collective

Material Touch documents a performance lecture by the Stitch Sisters. The session was a sensory material entanglement of art with discussions on sustainability in the warp, weft and stitching of wool that wove and knitted words and being together, attempting to make sense of our future at a time of great urgency. A discussion followed the performance lecture.

Social egg freezing as ambivalent materialities of aging

This commentary explores how the material-nonmaterial transactions around reproduction among women raise paradoxical questions of reproductive autonomy and commercialization of reproduction. Drawing from medical anthropological studies on human reproduction, the technology around social egg freezing has been conceived to proffer ambivalent possibilities of hope, despair, and repair as mature women recalibrate their reproductive identities, especially in pronatalist contexts. Building on the material-discursive critique of the ‘material turn’, I ask if social egg freezing offers an empowering biological reprieve for women who have ‘chosen’ a non-normative (i.e., a departure from heterosexual conjugality) life-course. Subsequently, how does one “do age” when material entanglements (here, reproductive technologies) disrupt the symbolic performance of the life-course? Or, does this reproductive autonomy actualized through social egg freezing align well with the neoliberal prerogatives of “successful aging,” thereby intensifying the specter of the “Third Age”? Overall, through an analysis of (reproductive) technologies, as well as the question of choice and social bodies, I argue how new materialities and anxieties of growing old can undergird the material-cultural link in gerontology.

Ethnomethodological conversation analysis and the study of assemblages.

The material turn has challenged traditional social scientific and humanistic research approaches. Both individual and community are rejected as a starting point for theorizing what is going on in societies and cultures. In fact, all dichotomies are deemed suspect, and the research focus draws heavily on actual practices. The concept heterogeneous assemblage is used in at least two strands of the material turn with slightly different takes on the entangled nature of practices. These are actor-network theory, ANT (cf. STS, e.g., Callon, Latour, Law) and new materialism(s) (cf. process philosophy, e.g., Deleuze, Guattari). Both can be placed under the umbrella term sociomaterialism. In their analysis of concrete phenomena, Deleuzian assemblages tend to focus on embodied sensations (affect) that have rhizomatic threads of connection, whereas ANT's assemblages include how heterogeneous entities (actants) stabilize certain practices. With a revised understanding of how the world works (ontology), the usefulness of traditional research methods (epistemology) to study concrete phenomena has also been questioned. Margaret Wetherell has suggested that affect assemblages can be analyzed as observable social practices, giving an EMCA-based study as an illustrative example. The question is whether both new materialist intensities (cf. certain approaches in psychology) and ANT's connections to other people, places, and practices (e.g., in organization studies) could be analyzed with an EMCA approach. This paper acknowledges the existing possibilities EMCA offers to analyze heterogeneous assemblages as situated interactional and material entanglements and enlarges the repertoire by focusing on 1) how the material specifics can make the EMCA "why that now" analysis connect to larger assemblages than the local accomplishment of action, and 2) how observable orientations to phenomena outside of the situation can be treated as an assemblic activity. It will do this with 1) Goodwin's concept lamination that enlarges the strictly situation-bound contextual configuration analysis to the cultural-historical formations through the use of material tools, and with 2) mentionings that combine Membership Categorization Analysis and Cooren's interest in non-human (material) actors. In other words, the well-known sociomaterial concept material-discursive is translated into two analytical possibilities to study sociomaterial heterogeneous assemblages. An empirical study illustrates the tools in practice.

Slaughterhouse Intimacies

Abstract: This essay traces slaughterhouse intimacies, sites of material entanglement between and among species, gender, race, sexuality, and reproduction. The phrase may seem paradoxical: the slaughterhouse is a line of death and dismemberment; intimacy connotes vital connection, private interiority. Yet the history of industrial animal farming, I argue, traffics between the intimateexchanges of gender, race, and species at the slaughterhouse, an institution that binds species to reproductive control, alters how animals are known, and changes the tempo and scale of violence itself—making the unthinkable possible. Two strands of scholarship recruit animals or species to comprehendviolations of human-based difference. Second-wave feminists often recruitedan analogic comparison between animals and women to outlinethe contours of a sexism that treats women like animals. The burgeoning field of Black animality studies has focused attention on the race-as-species metaphor in the history of scientific racism. Yet little attention has been paid to the material pathways through which industrial farming changed the entanglements of race, species, and gender. By close reading Ruth Ozeki's novel, My Year of Meats (1998), I unpack the material connectionslying beneath metaphorical comparisons and trace the circulation of U.S. meat through global circulation networks that produce and reproduce our notions of gender, race, time, species, sexuality, and reproduction.

Multispecies contact zones: The entangled interior grounds of domestic livestock keeping

This study explores the interiority of traditional domestic livestock keeping, in which humans and animals cohabit and produce interior conditions created by the interdependence between the two. In investigating such a setting of cohabitation, this study appropriates Donna Haraway’s proposition of contact zones as spatial and material entanglements created through encounters between multispecies. This study argues that contact zones reflect a new form of interiority that decenters the human perspective in understanding space. This article explores the interiority of human–animal cohabitation by investigating domestic livestock-keeping practices in seven dwellings across three different areas of Central Java, Indonesia. This study focuses on the interior grounds of these dwellings, expanding the previous multispecies discourse that is often limited to the physical boundaries between humans and animals. The multispecies interior is revealed through narrating the caring encounters that alter the material grounds of these dwellings. This study identifies caring encounters created by the direct and indirect contact between dwellers, animals, and animal materials, as well as the spatial and material entanglements produced by these encounters. It concludes that the interiorization of encounters is influenced by the purposes of human–animal relations and the subsequent acts of encounter that create patterns of interdependencies. Such acts alter the experience, configuration, and flow of the material environment, informing the domestic interior programming of the multispecies dwellings.

Making Informal Sacred Geographies: Spiritual Presence, Sensual Engagement, and Wayside Shrines in Urban India

Inspired by recent debates in material religion, and using the example of the central Indian city of Bhopal, this article characterizes an informal Hindu religious geography that flourishes in the interstices of India’s planned urbanity. The small wayside shrines that dot Indian cities usually arise spontaneously, created by believers who discern divine manifestations and begin to worship these. Traces of ritual activities animate others to follow suit and express their devotion, thus reinforcing the sites’ sacredness. The daily repetition of myriad minor ritual gestures maintains a dynamic religious geography, which in a recursive mode ties together devotees in an anonymous ritual community, whose members share a visual language and are inclined to take seriously the desire of deities to live among humans. With a focus on minor religion, and by concentrating on the social life of a cosmos of informal shrines, the text highlights a less-studied dimension of urban religion. It draws attention to the cumulative effect of lived practices and human–material entanglements, and complements discussions that frequently engage with omnipresent politics of formalization as well as competition of communities for attention and recognition in multireligious spaces.

Marine Entanglements: Tropical Materialism and Hydrographic Imaginary in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

In the epoch of the Anthropocene the environment is predominantly characterised by innumerable entanglements of matter. According to materialist theorist Jane Bennett, matter acts as a ‘distributive agency’ that intertwines itself with a “multiplicity of other material bodies and formations'' across space and time (Khan, 2012, p. 42). Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon (2014) centres around the material entanglement scenario between oil and marine waters off the coast of Nigeria in Africa. Okorafor’s Afrofuturist Science Fiction narrative focuses on oil’s vitality and overwhelming presence in the tropical marinescape and elaborates on the significance of oil as a material determinant that forces us to rethink matter’s affective influence in the marinescapes of the tropics. This article analyses how human extracted matter like oil acts as a vital agentic force that confronts, reconfigures, and modifies the physical compositional properties of marine water. The article employs tropical materialism to study the performative role of matter as a ‘hyperobjective’ register within the constructed eco(aqua)-speculative and hydrographic imaginary of Okorafor’s Sci-Fi narrative.

Material Green Entanglements: Research on Student Teachers’ Aesthetic and Ecocritical Engagement with Picturebooks of Their Own Choice

This article reports on a course module designed to promote an ecocritical and new materialist approach to children’s literature and to support student teachers’ skills regarding sustainability. The course module was offered in autumn 2020 and was completed by 260 students of children’s literature with no previous scholarly knowledge about ecocriticism prior to the course. Building on basic ecocritical theory, posthuman perspectives on humans’ intra-actions with material entities, and the students’ previous experiences with didactic tools for developing sustainability competencies through literature, the course module aimed to critically contribute to the implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in teacher education. The research material consists of fifty-three video assignments by groups consisting of three to four students. The material has been analysed in line with the methodological implications of video content analysis, focusing on three aesthetic and material entanglements – that is, entanglements with picturebooks, with peers, and with the environment.

From interactivity to intra-activity in performing arts for children

This essay will give an introduction to dilemmas and experiences of making interactive theatre for children based on findings from the SceSam Project. This artistic research project bridged artistic practice and theoretical perspectives on interactive dramaturgies in the context of cultural politics, interdisciplinary, and participatory art. Further developments in our critical times of mass extinction and climate change, have turned our interest away from the focus on human interactions towards the intra-actions of more-than-human agents of performing arts for children; space, environments, nature and material entanglements. The Animalium project will serve as example of how this might look like within theatre for the very young.
 Authors quote from the conference presentation: «Theatre connects deeply with how we relate to one another as human beings, both as artists and audiences, how we are able to imagine new human and non-human worlds together, and how entanglements and sympoiesis create a community of differences in the theatre space."

Ways that Diasporic Italy Matters and for Whom

Ways that <i>Diasporic Italy</i> Matters and for Whom

Race and climate change: Towards anti-racist ecologies

Global South scholars have long documented and theorised their communities’ struggles against the ecological degradation, toxic contamination, and climate change–related extreme weather events which result from the overlapping ills of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. Building on that existing work, contributors to this collection extend and deepen understandings of the material entanglements of race and ecology in our contemporary conjuncture. Speaking from various scales and locations, including the Caribbean, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Palestine, the authors reflect on those sites while also collectively recovering and amplifying lineages of thought on ecology from across the South. As the contributions collected here show, the traps set by global structures of race also direct mainstream climate solutions back towards the expropriation, premature death, or prevention of birth of peoples of colour by various means, from militarised conservation to eugenic populationism. Confronting the racial logics of both ecological harm and its supposed solutions is therefore a key task of this collection. As a collective, however, the issue’s contributors also carve out paths to reparation and structural change which form the contours of an anti-racist ecology for our times.

Relational Work and Monetization in the Creator Economy

The digital content creation economy supports a significant number of freelance artists, creatives, and knowledge workers. These content creators earn income from revenue sharing arrangements with the digital platforms that host and distribute the products of their work. In these relationships, the monetization policies and tools afforded from the platform are central to how content creators generate value, yet the role that monetization plays in shaping the content production process is not understood. This paper investigates the role of monetization in digital platform work by focusing on how a platform’s monetization features and policies organize the work of content creation. Findings are based on a qualitative analysis of 30 interviews with content creators who earn a living from monetizing content on Twitch. We argue that platform monetization tools and policies materially enable relational practices with audiences. In these relational practices, creators obscure, reframe, and gamify monetary contributions in social terms. Creators also recognize doing these practices as normative and avoid engaging in practices perceived as non-relational. Based on these findings, we argue that monetization can be understood as a material entanglement of relational work and platform features, and offer some future directions for research.

Remote communities, material entanglements and information and communications technologies as double agents

Digital devices and Information and Communications Technology or ICT play a prominent role in most people’s everyday lives, as the often unconscious, mostly unacknowledged entanglements between people, devices and infrastructure shape contemporary lives and co-determine activities and their outcomes. Communications technologies are particularly agentic for people who live in rural and remote parts of the world because they often lack easy access to goods and services that are ubiquitous in more urbanized areas. At the same time, access to ICTs in these areas is often tenuous because the maintenance of ICT infrastructure is not always economically viable. This paper examines emerging techno-lifeworlds in remote villages in Malaysia and their social, economic and political context through a new materialist lens. I argue that the entanglements with digital technologies and the resulting diffractions can result in increased agency for those involved. At the same time as this new materialist focus emphasizes the agentic role of devices and infrastructure, it allows for thinking through the power relationships that are implicated in the regional techno-politics and the economic and political interests that determine the material access to communications infrastructure.

The urban politicization of fossil fuel infrastructure: Mediatization and resistance in energy landscapes

From 2013 to 2016, two pipeline projects were vigorously contested in the Tiohtià:ke: Montreal area in Quebec, Canada. These disputes are analyzed as instances of the urban politicization of fossil fuel infrastructure. This politicization involves power struggles for authority in energy landscapes, particularly in relation to the material entanglement of energy in the city-region, that is, which parts of the infrastructure and landscapes come to matter. Drawing on work from political ecologists and scholars pressing for a rematerializing of urban studies, we supplement their insights with a conceptualization of struggles for urban authority in the governance of energy, in two parallel processes: one of performing centralized urban authority (notably with the media) and a second messier politics of multiplicities operating in spaces of urban governance and resistance. Struggles for urban authority are co-constructed with the socio-material realities of infrastructure and involve actors who are engaged in everyday practices of regulating, maintaining and protecting landscapes. Yet, in the mediatization of urban energy landscapes, certain voices, notably of Indigenous communities, remain on the margins, resulting in few challenges to settler colonialism and climate-changing extractivism.