Materialist Methodology Research Articles

Settler-colonialism in the Late Neocolonial Period

This essay discusses settler-colonialism in Palestine and the world system during late neocolonialism. It offers a materialist methodology for interpreting settler-colonial social formations, showing the linkage between settler-colonialism, class, imperialism, and world accumulation. It then considers how race continues to structure local reactions and condition local and international attempts at transformation. It concludes with some reflections on contemporary orientations to Palestine in the periphery, especially within racialized social formations.

Co-Becomings of Companionships

This article explores the ways in which the couple-form and its normativity take part in the everyday life of companionships that are “other than couple” relationships. I develop the concept of affective negotiation to analyze the processes in which the companionships are experienced, practiced, and acknowledged. I study the affective negotiations particularly in relation to naming practices and comparisons and expectations around the relationship categories. The article is based on 20 semi-structured interviews with individuals who have important life companion(s) that they refer to as, for example, friends, flat-mates, animal companions, and ex-partners, or fields of multiple relationships. I analyze the data using feminist materialist methodologies and affect theories. Trough reading the data with the concept of co-becoming, I develop an understanding of companionships as dynamic processes lived and experienced in everyday life through entangled affective negotiations. I argue that the couple-form in the co-becomings of companionships in multiple and often contradictory ways. The normativity of the couple-form emerges through affective tensions that may limit the possibilities of these co-becomings, for example by troubling the processes of “making sense” of the intimacies. The co-becomings are also world-making practices where new ways of relating are created and imagined; they include the potential to move away from the normative power of the couple-form and materialize in unexpected ways.

BinaryTech in motion: The sexgender in the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence

Abstract Sexgender has become politicized by neo-conservative and populist movements in Europe and elsewhere. This article explores how the sexgender binary is foundational to the social and material construction of the non-heterosexual legal subject and unveils binary hierarchies embedded therein. Furthermore, it develops a new materialist methodology called BinaryTech, which exposes the binary formulas of inequality and difference in the Court’s jurisprudence. This new materialist approach, based on Karen Barad’s agential realism, is used to critically examine how differences are produced as stable features of subjects and objects. The human of the Convention being heterosexual is thereby the result, constructed on material-discursive differentiation of non-heterosexuals. The article concludes by describing how new materialist interventions and Nordic feminist perspectives on law can offer valuable insights within the emerging material turn.

Research on Accounting Revenue, Costs and Business Results in Some Countries around the World and Lessons Learned for Vietnamese Businesses

The article is based on the study of influencing factors, accounting models, standards, accounting work in general and characteristics of accounting for revenue, costs and business results in countries around the world gender in particular. From there, lessons learned will be drawn to help information users determine their economic benefits and make decisions appropriate to each subject's unique needs and goals. Correctly determining and providing accurate information about revenue, costs and business results contributes to improving the efficiency and business reputation of the enterprise. The important factor contributing to ensuring safety, enhancing competitiveness as well as the ability to achieve high efficiency when making business decisions to help businesses develop is thanks to good management of revenue and expenses. Costs and business results. By using the method of researching secondary documents, including documents and textbooks on accounting theory of revenue, costs and business results, on the basis of dialectical and materialist methodology. Historically, the article has used a number of different research methods such as: investigation, analysis, and systematization methods; Comprehensive method to research, evaluate and present issues related to accounting for revenue, costs and business results in countries around the world, thereby drawing lessons for businesses Vietnam.

UP TO A POINT, THE DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IS DIALECTICAL IDEALISM, IN HEGEL’S MEANING; BUT THEN IT IS MORE

The paper investigates the common and different features of Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophy, thus not the historical and personal aspects of authors are important but the internal articulation of their philosophical methodologies. These features are both the dialectical approach of the knowledge of the world and, somehow deriving from the dialectical method, the understanding of objectivity. The beauty and limits of the dialectical pattern of Hegel is shown in his treatment of the finites. The analysis is rather andialogue between the dialectical idealism and the dialectical materialism. The conclusion is not a synthesis seen dogmatically - as a final state, apotheosis of philosophy - but as an inherent development of thought, therefore even as its division into the never-completed dialectical materialist methodology and the eternally necessary convergence of philosophical interrogations and science.

Spontaneous Cosmic Becomings: El Paso Spontaneous Shrine and Cosmic Generator Cut Together in Conocimiento

This paper considers Mika Rottenberg’s Cosmic Generator alongside the El Paso spontaneous shrine constructed after the August 3, 2019 mass shooting to examine the material conditions of difference with which we are entangled and construct meaning. This paper utilizes an entangled methodology to explore connections and complexities produced by reading these two works together in order to produce complicated understandings of politics, race, and capitalism. This is done while expanding new materialist methodologies and border studies’ application in art education to include discursive notions of making. This making involves the generative creation of understanding (conocimiento), where unlike works are read or held together in their difference to create new understandings and resist difference as ossified. We are left with a deeper understanding of the border as a space of cosmic possibility juxtaposed against a notion of racism complicated by an economic system, that we are all implicated in.

A Nature’s Way—Our Way Pilot Project Case Assemblage: (Re)Storying Child/Physical Literacy/Land Relationships for Indigenous Preschool-Aged Children’s Wholistic Wellness

Physical literacy (PL) is gaining more attention from educational policy-makers, practitioners, and researchers as a way to improve health and wellness outcomes for children and youth. While the development of PL is important for early years children, there is limited attention in the literature that explores the political, cultural, and social discourses imbued in colonialism that implicate how PL is actualized in Indigenous early childhood education (ECE) contexts. This case assemblage explores how the culturally rooted, interdisciplinary, and community-based PL initiative, Nature's Way-Our Way (NWOW), negotiated movement with three early childhood educators in the pilot project with an early childhood education centre (ECEC) in Saskatchewan, Canada. Through postqualitative approaches to research, this case assemblage adopts new materialist methodologies to show how the natural order of knowing in movement was disrupted through moments of rupture generating stories of PL to encompass radical relationality with land. As land becomes a vital and lively part of PL storying, it can function as an important protective factor for Indigenous preschool-aged children's wholistic wellness.

May daydreams haunt the quilombola territories

This work consists of the subject Culture, Knowledge and Imaginary in Amazonian Education in dialogue with my Master's thesis. And in this article I come to say about the importance of daydreaming about the challenges faced by quilombos in their territories, as well as the schools located within the quilombos, and the conservation of the memories of these people in future generations, thereby bringing educational practices to this rescue. Following this narrative we reached some objectives; what daydreams do we want for our quilombola territories through educational practice? How has the quilombola territory been thought of by the community through the school context? in order to arrive at a possible reason and against the facts, the research was carried out through the Dialectical Materialist methodology with a Decolonial approach. One of the daydreams is through the school in communion with the association of residents of the territory, to legalize these lands with the competent bodies because the process is quite time-consuming, and in addition, the rescue of the quilombola identity and its ancestry, has been taking place gradually .

A New Method to Bridge New Materialism and Emotional Mapping: Spatio-Emotional Experiences in Disaster-Affected Brazilian Favelas

Within the field of emotional mapping, and mapping more broadly, nonhuman things are often understood as mere instruments - they have utility but not agency to shape meaning-making. In this paper we experiment with a new method that aims to challenge the dualism between human and non-human things by bridging new materialism and participatory emotional mapping. We experimented with this “new materialist methodology” during a one-day workshop to explore residents’ spatio-emotional experiences in a disaster-affected favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Reflecting on this one-day workshop, we argue that materials with diverse colors, textures, shapes, densities, weights, and smells are key collaborators in emotional mapping. Materials have agency to invoke and evoke diverse emotions with past, present, and future temporalities, and which fall within and beyond the positive-negative emotion binary. Materials can facilitate conviviality and discussion amongst mapping participants, which enables participants to speak about their emotional-spatial experiences with more nuance and complexity.

The Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism (PSSCM): Particular Characteristics, Main Tendencies, and Its Place in the System of Marxist Studies in Post-Soviet Russia

The author characterizes the main stages in the rise of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism (PSSCM) and highlights its most important features, distinguishing it from other tendencies of Marxist thought in Russia. The latter include the orthodox version of Marxism, the social democratic tendency, and the ‘Russophile’ tendency. In contrast to these trends, the PSSCM is oriented toward elaboration of a dialectical materialist methodology; toward development of creative Soviet and world traditions in the study of social alienation and de-alienation; toward the critical use of Marx and his followers’ achievements with the aim of developing the main elements of the ‘Capital’ of the 21st century; and toward studying the prospects for the future ‘realm of freedom’ (Marx) as the dialectical sublation not only of capitalism, but also of the entire system of relations of social alienation in the context of facing the contemporary global problems. A feature of the article is its extensive bibliography of works by Russian Marxists.

Sociomaterial explorations of attendance practices in ‘schooling without schools’

ABSTRACT Mass school closures and restricted mobility during the Covid-19 pandemic have intensified matters of technology, teaching, and participation in schools. In response to this situation, this paper examines how attendance practices work during school closure and screen-saturated pandemic isolation at a Swedish upper secondary school. The aim is to empirically and theoretically explore school closure attendance by focusing on the sets of strategies and enactments that make school ‘attendable’ when being ‘in the right place at the right time’ becomes ambiguous. A relational materialist methodology is deployed with online interviews with six teachers during the first pandemic wave in 2020. The analysis traces empirical events that enact different school closure attendance devices: the video roll call, attendance performance, and ‘click like’ in the Microsoft Team-feed. The article highlights how attendance monitoring shifts and how attendance acts upon teaching, and vice versa.

Improving the Ability of Predictive Thinking

Improving the ability of predictive thinking is conducive in seeking the future and mastering initiative. In order to improve the ability of predictive thinking, it is necessary to strengthen the spirit of active exploration to give full play to people’s subjective initiative. Scientific methodology is the basis for improving this ability. It is necessary to learn and apply dialectical materialist methodology and to master advanced methods in specific subject areas. A deep and broad knowledge system is the fundamental for the development of predictive thinking, hence a deep professional knowledge system and a broad multifield knowledge reserve must be formed. The development of science and technology provides traction in discovering new forecasting directions, more advanced tools for forecasting research, and philosophical epistemological guidance for forecasting. Therefore, there is a need to pay great attention to the development of science and technology.

The Matter of Mapping Multispecies Entanglements of Mourning—A Manifesto’s Shout, An Orca’s Tour of Grief

Mapping entanglements is work—work of care, maintenance, and mourning. This project utilises a new materialist methodology inherited from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who follow lines of becoming to track compositions which compose worlds. To map (non-linear, temporal, and situated) lines of loss across multispecies landscapes is material work of more-than-human mourning. The New York City-based performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles—alongside scholars such as María Puig de la Bellacasa and Donna J. Haraway—reorient configurations of work and care, which enable these lines to be followed into more-than-human worlds. Mapping lines of mourning into multispecies worlds is material work of the aesthetic-ethical response within shared and troubled landscapes. The key storytellers within the narrative of mourning and joy woven into this paper are the Salish Sea, the Lummi Nation, the Chinook Salmon, and the Southern Resident killer whale; the voices and cries to which this project, in work and care, is dedicated.

Research on the Application of Archives and Historical Materials in the Study of the History of the Republic of China (1912—1949)

The history of the Republic of China is a very important history in the modern history of our country. During this period, great changes took place in China and the Revolution of 1911 abolished monarchy; then the Communist Party of China led the Chinese people in the struggle for national liberation and established the People’s Republic of China. Therefore, studying the history of the Republic of China is an inevitable requirement for historical development. To this end, this article starts with exploring the research connotation and value of the history of the Republic of China, comprehensively collects archival historical data, insists on using the historical materialist methodology to conduct research on the history of the Republic of China, and discriminates historical materials objectively and fairly. Three aspects have been studied and discussed.

Diffractive Co-conspiracy in Queer, Crip Live Art Production

While equality, inclusivity, diversity and accessibility now regularly appear in mainstream discourse, the UK’s Equality Act (2010) paradoxically preceded a year-on-year increase in recorded cases of hate crime and discrimination based on protected characteristics such as (perceived) gender identity, sexuality and disability (Home Office 2019). A hostile environment is manifest through the ongoing cuts to Universal Credit (Schraer 2020) and the trans moral panic (Barker 2017) around the Gender Recognition Act, creating urgent times (Haraway 2016) in need of response-able address. These trends suggest that visibility and “awareness raising” are no panacea for discrimination, a matter requiring urgent critical attention. Using the lens of my research around LGBTQIA+ (queer), disabled-led (crip) live art as disidentificatory praxis (Muñoz 1999) I demonstrate how the emerging feminist new materialist methodology of co-conspiracy (de los Santos-Upton 2017) is already being effectively applied by performance art professionals to revolutionise the industry. This diffractive, response-able methodology and praxis has the potential to expose and resist the structural, institutional, political, environmental and social inequalities that queer, disabled individuals continue to face. My multimodal interdisciplinary analysis provides insight into the precarious alterity of queer, crip live artists in continuingly inaccessible/impenetrable social and artistic settings and the emancipatory political potential of applied diffraction as an action oriented rhizomatic ontology. Dissecting the entangled nature of queerness and disability, of in/visibility and making the personal public as many queer disabled artists do, this paper explores the tensions in producing radically challenging, self-exposing works that also serve as affective and affirmative provocations, poignant acts of resistance and of defiant survival. Unpacking how queer, crip identified live artists reconfigure connections by building and sharing productive tools to disassemble politics and practices of exclusion, this paper posits that diffractive co-conspiracy might be used as a productive methodology to create revolutionary communities of practice able to resist the commodification and commercialisation of live art production and wider social and political marginalisation.

Dialectical materialist methodology for a mind-in-activity approach to work, learning and political economic consciousness

ABSTRACT In this theoretical review article I discuss the relationship of dialectic materialism, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and analyses of work, learning and political economic consciousness. The purpose is to help researchers reflect on how they might be more effective in their analytic work. Specifically, its goal is to help expand the comprehensiveness and recognition of the dynamism of phenomena of work and learning, and to support the claim of political economic consciousness as inherent to them. To do this I introduce and describe the purposes and meaning of dialectical materialist methodology. I then discuss practical procedures (‘intentional dialectics’: Ollman [(1993). Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge] and the ordering of these procedures (‘systematic-categorial dialectics’: Smith [(1993) Dialectical Social Theory and its Critics: From Hegel to Analytical Marxism and Postmodernism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press] in the treatment of empirical research on work and learning. Framing those discussions is a rationale for a robust appreciation of variation, heterogeneity and particularities in dialectical analysis of emergent work and learning dynamics which draws on what Adorno [(1973/2003). Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge] refers to as ‘negative dialectics’. No matter how effectively grasped, however, I maintain that dialectical materialist methodology requires suitable, substantive theory – or rather an intermediate science – such as CHAT in order to realise its full value in analyses of work, learning and political economic consciousness.

Feminising politics: notes on material and temporal feminist modal logics in action

Feminist activism aims to work to change the inequitable structures of the world. But feminists themselves get bound up in actions and intentions that are tied to their large object of critique (the patriarchy, the planet, the media, the canon, etc), and the micropolitics of the subjects constituting and constituted by those objects can be swept up in humanistic rhetorical gestures and words. How can we teach the modalities and the genealogy of feminist actions that offer tools for everyday living and for a community practice, and which also offer some ways to engage with the affective matter of the world from a posthumanist perspective, and thereby work to shift cultural attitudes? In addition to the valuable work done by those that tirelessly figure methods of communicating social inequities, the work of research led feminist informed teaching and governance can not only excavate the histories of social, political, speciesist, and biological inequities, but also offer a critique of these positions by the terms of their epistemological construction, and provide different modalities of practice. This article focuses on the latter, discussing how we might design curriculum and engage a pedagogy of recognition for a feminist modal ethics. How modes of feminist new materialist practice take the questions of affect, and agency, to enable ethical political practices is a pressing concern for many communities concerned with generating a planetary ethics. How new materialist methodology is useful for thinking the vernacular political reality was the topic of an intensive discussion and debate that took place in November 2017 in Barcelona. Taking an example of the concrete work undertaken by Barcelona Councillor Gala Pin in relation to the neighbourhood ofCiutat Vella,the article proposes that we explore and extend the genealogy of a feminist modal logics.

Doing new materialisms: an interview with Maria Tamboukou

Including an interview as part of the special issue responds to one specific question that has to do with the production of scientific knowledge. During the Training School, the context in which the current special issue is framed, we highlighted the importance of creating inter-generational knowledges able to transverse across disciplines and the historicity of matter itself. The interview that we are transcribing in this journal represents this specific moment between Beatriz Revelles-Benavente (co-editor and co-organizer of the Training School together with Ana M. González) and Maria Tamboukou, a recognized scholar on new materialist methodologies.

What should we do with our gut?

ABSTRACT This article explores how breakthrough neuroscientific research regarding the Microbiome-Gut-Brain-Axis (MGBA) resonates with Catherine Malabou’s discussions of a delocalised, decentralised, plastic brain. Inspired by Malabou’s materialist methodology, as well as her confrontation of neuroscientific and psychoanalytic paradigms, the article unpacks the imbrication of symbolic and neuro-microbiological treatments of the gut and its excreta. Interlacing the thought of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein and Malabou alongside current MGBA research and critical studies of science and technology, I reveal how symbolic and microbial transmissions in early childhood development reflect a multimodal and multitemporal formation that challenges the established imaginary associated with functional gut and subject development. Secondly, I consider how MGBA research bears upon questions of difference, examining its further materialisation of Malabou’s otherness in a world without exteriority. Through this discussion I question the significance of this biological paradigm shift, as it disturbs notions of agency and the subject/environment distinction, opening to pressing ethical questions at this moment in human history. Through these varied interrogations and provocations, I provide a preliminary window into the potential of MGBA research to enable new departures for thinking the fragmentary movement of form and time underpinning Malabou’s motor schema of plasticity.

The Ongoing Struggle between Capitalist and Communist Globalization

ABSTRACTThis article is an attempt to trace out the historical development of capitalism and the ongoing struggle between capitalist globalization and an emerging socialist/communist globalization as a dialectical counter-tendency. Based on a dialectical materialist methodology, our approach starts with an historical overview of capitalist accumulation and globalization, explaining also the crisis-prone character of capitalism. Within a framework of capitalist world-ecology, we subsequently examine the increasing significance of ecological conditions and the role played by ecological exhaustion in the exacerbated socio-ecological crisis. At the backdrop of recurrent and deepening crisis, we briefly explore the history of class struggle and revolutionary efforts to supersede capitalism. As argued, the revolutionary failures during the twentieth century do not indicate fatal shortcomings of Marx’s theory or disprove the feasibility of communism, but only reflect the problematic conditions and flawed strategies associated with the relevant endeavors. Finally, the strategy to transcend capitalism is placed within a global context, counter-posing the currently dominant capitalist globalization. As suggested, this global strategy and the common transnational struggle towards communism require novel forms of organization from below, an alliance of working classes with broader social movements, and a direct confrontation of capitalist state power.