Material Turns Research Articles

From Field Walking to Phenomenology: A Review of Recent British Landscape Historiography

AbstractThis review identifies three major traditions in British landscape historiography: material/environmental, cultural, and phenomenological. The continuing vitality, methodological rigour, and popular reach of the material tradition is emphasized, notwithstanding persistent questions about the adequacy of its theoretical foundations. Its close cousin historical ecology has meanwhile developed into a broader environmental history, increasingly sensitive to ideological and institutional influences. The development of the cultural tradition, originating in art historical analysis of the ‘landscape idea’ as a culturally specific ‘way of seeing’, is traced through a rich proliferation of studies connecting landscape with memory, national identity, and governance, and through feminist, postcolonial, and history-from-below perspectives. The pervasive influence of the spatial, mobilities, and material turns is highlighted but phenomenology’s focus on experience perhaps challenges the cultural tradition’s premises more fundamentally. Although historians were slower than anthropologists and archaeologists to adopt phenomenology, medievalists and early modernists have applied it rewardingly to topics such as the settings of elite buildings, peasant landscape perceptions, and collective landscape memories. Few modernists have yet embraced phenomenology but it has great potential here given the abundant life-writing sources available. While scope remains for further convergence between research traditions, British landscape history is therefore in an exciting phase of methodological renewal.

“Reconstructing the Study of Religion”: Entering the Conversation from a Different Corner of the Academic World

Abstract This essay engages Josephson Storm’s project of the reconstruction of the study of religion after the latest linguistic and material turns and what he calls radical skepticism by provincializing his account of the study of religion and the human sciences. Referencing postfoundational reconstructive approaches, I argue that so called poststructural theories have already led to new reconstructive efforts, also in the study of religion, at least in the academic environment I was trained in. Furthermore, the lack of an account of power risks ignoring the role of status differentials that prefigure the ability of humans to engage in the practice of self-discovery which is central to his ethical project of revolutionary happiness.

Cranes, Cultivating a New Knowledge Practice in Late-Chosŏn Korea: Knowledge Transformations Connected by Things

Red-crowned white cranes, large migratory birds symbolizing longevity, fidelity, and independence from power across East Asian cultures, came to live in scholar-official households in late Chosŏn. With the residency of this elegant bird in scholarly households around the mid-eighteenth century, a new knowledge practice that took serious interest in things like cranes emerged. This paper illuminates the roles of these highly cross-cultured things in late-Chosŏn knowledge transformation, echoing material turns in various disciplines. Necessitating knowledge to properly possess and accompany them, cranes led to a new scholarly attachment to things. It opened up an unprecedented intellectual attitude that valued curiosity, taste, and facts concerning things and emphasized usefulness of that newly obtained thing-knowledge. Curiosity, taste, facts, and the usefulness of knowledge obtained new meanings in other parts of the world that experienced similar transitions in knowledge practice by and towards things. While delineating the roles of cranes specifically in late-Chosŏn's transformation through the imprints that they left in scholarly acts and works, this paper proposes a new way to connect knowledge transformations in different parts of the globe, via these newly migrating things, moving away from the narrative that requires an origin and transfers.

Constitutive model of disordered grid interpenetrating structure of flexible microporous metal rubber

In this study, the disordered grid interpenetrating structure (DGIS) of wire turns in flexible microporous metal rubber (FMP-MR) for vibration and noise reduction is investigated, and an effective constitutive model is developed to dynamically capture the nonlinear mechanical behavior of FMP-MR. In this model, a micro spring element with adaptive deformation (MSEAD) model with random spatial distribution is employed, based on the phenomena of irregular overlapping and interlacing of material turns. The spatial distribution of micro springs and the evolution of the contact area morphology in FMP-MR are taken into consideration and introduced as key variables in model development. The concept of combined probability distribution (CPD) of micro spring pairs between wire turns in FMP-MR is proposed to characterize the random combination mode of material turns. Eventually, based on the micro-patterns of wire turns in FMP-MR, a constitutive model including macroscopic parameters, such as shape, density, wire diameter, helix pitch, and wire elastic modulus, and microstructure parameters, such as spatial distribution of wire turns, contact shape, and friction coefficient is developed for the first time. By analyzing and discussing the fitting degree of quasi-static compression experimental results and the model constitutive curves, the validity of the proposed constitutive model is quantitatively confirmed by residual analysis. According to the results, the FMP-MR constitutive model based on DGIS can effectively reflect the nonlinear mechanical behavior and complex micro-contact friction phenomena of the material.

The Martyrs of Córdoba: Debates around a curious case of medieval martyrdom

AbstractHistorians have long been fascinated by the almost 50 Christians who were sentenced to death by the Islamic authorities in mid‐ninth century Córdoba, in most cases for wilfully and publicly blaspheming against the Prophet. Since the single manuscript account describing the lives and actions of the so‐called martyrs of Córdoba was ‘rediscovered’ in the 16th century, interest in this seemingly singular movement has grown, as the Cordoban martyrs became symbols for everything from an undying Spanish, Christian identity under a brutal Islamic occupation to fanatical extremism in a tolerant Muslim society. Research in the last decades—particularly after the literary, spatial and material turns—has nevertheless complicated our understanding of the martyr movement, looking beyond the motivations of the actors to the social and religious context in which they were operating, as well as the cultural and literary currents that shaped the martyrdom accounts. This article traces the historiographical record that has sought to make sense of the Cordoban martyrs, leading us to question the very definition of ‘martyr’, how and why such individuals are formed.

Things and Terms: Relations Between Materiality, Language, and Politics in Post-revolutionary Iran

AbstractDeparting from the canons of the cultural and material turns, this paper emphasizes the shortcomings that each body of work has shown in addressing political transformations. So doing, it argues that shifting relations between materiality and language occasion different kinds of politics. Specifically, the paper offers a new interpretation of one of the most critical epochs in the political history of modern Iran, by illustrating that the confluence of the material and linguistic worlds in the Islamic Republic during the 1980s, brought about a distinct political field in which relations between words and their material referents became fixed at the level of multitudes. This blocked public processes of performativity and resignification of signs in ways that might have threatened the centrality of the revolutionary leader, Imam Khomeini. What developed was a social milieu in which Khomeini never faced the possibility of defeat in politics.

The Embodied Turn: Making and Remaking Dress as an Academic Practice

Fashion is a field fundamentally enmeshed with bodies and materiality. After the global and material turns for history, I contend that we are now experiencing the “embodied turn”: a development that recognizes the processes of doing, making and remaking, and reconstructing as a fruitful methodology with quantifiable, academically valid results. The pioneers of material clothing reconstruction changed dress history and fashion studies. From their lead, new generations of scholars are extending the original approaches, while historical re-enactors using their findings are now an established global community.This article explores how remaking the clothed past can yield unique and useful research insights. How is the embodied methodology of making and wearing reconstructed clothing being done, and in innovative ways? Which directions might this take us; and how do new technologies advance the possibilities of enquiry using reconstruction? My discussion of these questions offers broad-ranging examples of the scholarly search for embodied or experiential dress knowledge to be discovered through re-making the past. I draw on personal experience of re-creating historical clothing, and current doctoral work examining what can be learnt from experimental archaeology to suggest “experimental history” is an equally valid concept. The article also outlines the need for dress and fashion scholars’ more extensive theoretical engagement with methodologies of re-creation.

Apollinaire’s Trench Journalism and the Affective Public Sphere

This essay aims to make a critical contribution to the related fields of modernist studies and First World War studies by engaging with affect theory and print culture. It argues that material documents help us understand how an affective public sphere was created during the First World War. Print materials such as periodicals and small poetry volumes circulated between the front and the home front. They documented everyday experiences and gave expression to the affective circumstances of the war through their content and materiality. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war writings serve as a case in point. The Polish-born French poet contributed to the general, avant-garde, and soldiers’ press, bridging the traditional divide between the front and the home front. He commented on everyday life in his chronicle “La Vie anecdotique” in the Mercure de France, submitted poems to avant-garde journals from the frontline, and was involved with various trench publications. By linking affect theory with Apollinaire’s avant-garde writings, this essay shows how modernists’ responses to the war were not just ironic or romantic, but also affective. It further asks how visceral experiences were generated on and off the page, thus establishing a link between the recent material and affective turns in modernist scholarship.

Grounded Visual Pattern Analysis: Photographs in Organizational Field Studies

Visual methodologies for researching organizational life have grown in popularity over the past decade, with conceptual and methodological foundations now well documented. However, analytical critique has not kept pace, and so in this article we offer grounded visual pattern analysis (GVPA) as a rigorous means of analysis that mines the discursive meanings of individual photographs and the visual patterns apparent across multiple still images. We illustrate GVPA’s value through an ethnographic field study investigating the relationship between workplace environments and identity formation among hair salon workers in the United Kingdom. Specifically, we explain how to combine the strengths of both “dialogical” and “archaeological” approaches to visual research, which have hitherto been seen as distinct endeavors. We argue this is particularly valuable in field studies addressing material turns in organization studies, such as studies of space, strategy-as-practice, embodied cognition, and servicescape aesthetics. The article concludes by putting forward a series of potential directions for the future of visual organizational research based on the bridging of Meyer et al.’s five different methodological approaches.

Revisiting Constructional Defects of Constructivism in IR

Abstract Early Wendtian and Habermasian constructivism in IR displayed a number of traits that were inconsistent with constructivist sociological theory. These included state-centrism and actorhood, a voluntarist and intentionalist conception of agency, the limited focus on the problems of anarchy and cooperation, a partial insistence on causal models, a conception of the problem of order in terms of normative integration, the dissociation of norms and power, and the lack of a theory of socialisation (accounting for the formation of identities and interests). Focusing on Wendt’s seminal Social Theory of International Politics as well as exemplary formulations of Habermasian constructivism, this paper examines to extent which these early constructional defects of mainstream constructivism in IR were fixed or persist in its mature formulations. The conclusion of the paper reflects on broader challenges to (and opportunities for) constructivism deriving from a changing disciplinary and political context. Where early constructivist scholarship largely wrestled with the neo-neo synthesis and the political context of the end of the Cold War, contemporary constructivist scholarship is well advised to engage with the practice (and material) turns and to address postcolonial challenges and the reality of a post-Western world. Keywords : constructivism, agency, anarchy, socialisation, practice theory ----- Bibliography: Jaeger, Hans-Martin: Revisiting Constructional Defects of Constructivism in IR, ERIS, 3-2016, pp. 14-26. https://doi.org/10.3224/eris.v3i3.27339

Material Turns of the Screw: The Collier’s Weekly Serialization of Th

Cet essai examine la toute premiere serialisation du roman de Henry James Le tour d’ecrou (1898) d’un point de vue materialiste et sociologique. Il utilise le contexte du magazine et de la culture litteraire de l’epoque ainsi que l’analyse de certains codes des periodiques pour etudier les points suivants : premierement, que signifiait, au sens large du terme, cette histoire pour un jeune redacteur en chef qui cherchait a reinventer un magazine en difficulte, et en quoi a-t-elle contribue a creer un sens nouveau pour Collier’s ? Deuxiemement, que representait cette histoire, telle qu’elle apparaissait dans Collier’s, pour James a ce stade de sa carriere ? Enfin, comment les lecteurs de Collier’s ont-ils percu cette histoire, si l’on prend en compte leur comprehension de la scene litteraire et periodique de l’epoque, la place que James y occupait, et la facon dont l’histoire etait presentee dans Collier’s ? En examinant ces questions, cet essai participe aux debats academiques en cours concernant la serialisation de Collier’s mais s’interesse egalement a des questions soulevees plus generalement dans le champ des etudes jamesiennes et des etudes de periodiques, ainsi qu’aux polemiques plus amples concernant Le Tour d’ecrou lui-meme. Plus specifiquement, il va a l’encontre des comptes rendus tres simplistes qui accompagnerent a l’epoque la parution de Collier’s et de l’idee tres repandue selon laquelle la publication du magazine sous forme de serie a produit des lectures tres reductrices de l’histoire.

Corporeal: Exploring the Material Dynamics of Embodiment

Corporeal: Exploring the Material Dynamics of Embodiment

Back to the Future? History, Material Culture and New Materialism

The study of history currently witnesses two markedly different material turns. Some historians are using material artefacts as alternatives to textual sources. Others draw on ‘new materialism’, a new tradition in thought that originated in the field of gender studies. Both groups are trying to move beyond the cultural turn, which has dominated the study of history since the 1980s. However, the first group merely extends the programme of the cultural turn into new domains without rejecting its methods or epistemological foundations. The latter group, on the other hand, provides a new cultural theory. This article demonstrates that the ‘new’ in new materialism is not so much an increased engagement with the material world, but rather a new conceptualization of developing theory and reading texts, which cuts through established dichotomies between matter and meaning or culture and the social. In doing so, a new materialist history can solve some of the problems associated with the cultural turn and the turn to material artefacts.

Discourse analysis in German-language human geography: integrating theory and method

In the context of various conceptual turns in German-language human geography over the past decades (e.g., linguistic, cultural, and material turns), which have been adopted largely via writings from English-language human geography, theoretical perspectives in these two academic communities have been converging. However, there are still aspects that are quite distinctive for debates in the German-language context. We argue that, for example, in the case of poststructuralist approaches, a distinct development has taken place, which emphasizes the links between theoretical, methodological, and methods-oriented empirical research, e.g., through the operationalization of linguistic methods. Following Michel Foucault's notion of ‘discourse’, these empirical analyses are often referred to as ‘discourse analyses’. This paper gives an overview of the field of discourse analysis in German-language human geography and discusses possible reasons for the different ways in which discourse theories have been emerged and developed in English-language and German-language geography. We argue that there are three developments which make ‘discourse analyses’ in the German context distinct: (1) the significance of theoretical debates on the role of the subject, (2) the intensive interdisciplinary networks within the wider context of German-language social sciences and linguistics, and (3) closely related to the second point, the strong emphasis on questions of methodical implementation.

Adjusting the cut: fashion, the body and age on the UK high street

ABSTRACTThe article explores the interplay between bodily and cultural ageing in the provision of clothing for older women, examining how design directors of UK clothing retailers act as cultural mediators, shaping the ways in which later years are imagined, experienced and performed at an embodied level. Based on interviews with clothing retailers with a significant involvement with the older market: Marks & Spencer, George at Asda, Jaeger, Viyella and Edinburgh Woollen Mill, it analyses the contexts in which they design, discussing: the potential of the grey market; the association of fashion and youthfulness; and the tensions between lifestyle and age in the formation of the market. It explores the ways in which they adjust the cut, colour and style of clothes to meet the requirements of older bodies and the changing cultural interpretations of these, addressing debates around the interplay of bodily and cultural ageing, and the role of consumption in the constitution of age. Reflecting both the cultural and material turns, it argues for the need to expand the social gerontology imaginary to encompass wider sources shaping the meanings of later years.