Materialist Thinking Research Articles

The body in old age: Pernicious medical and materialist thinking

This article looks at the historical construction of knowledge about the elderly body from a medical perspective that is concerned with the materiality of the body and associated losses. It recalls, presents and analyses the paradigm of loss, decline and failure that dominates the way care is provided, and examines the issues associated with this domination. By presenting old age as a social construct produced by language and subject to values relating to a certain performance of the body, the author invites us to shift our perspective and take a finer, more complex and broader view of the body and the experience of being old.

“The 70s Are the New 50s. Nothing Is, However, for Free” – The Affective Biopolitics of Andropause and Testosterone on Danish Websites

ABSTRACT Andropause, the notion that men’s aging is affected by a declining testosterone production, has until recently been a somewhat unknown phenomenon in the Danish context. However, as a growing number of Danish websites are disseminating information about ‘the male climacteric’, a new hormone centered health discourse about the male body is emerging. In this article, we analyze a corpus of 50 Danish websites consisting of both online media articles and websites marketing products for ‘andropausal’ men. We show how men’s health and performances of masculinity in mid- and later life is entangled in biomedical discourses of risk and self-surveillance, as well as (biopolitical) affects centering aging men’s sexual capacities. We base our analysis in new materialist thinking which outlines affect, biopolitics and complexity as entry points to embodied dimensions of masculinity. We argue that the growing attention to andropause promote new norms for aging in which the aging body is designated as unhealthy and the individual is required to remain vital and capable throughout life. Finally, drawing on Steve Garlick, we show how online available testosterone home-testing kits can be read as illustrative of the theory of masculinity as a technology of embodiment which rests upon the control over nature.

The Human Limpet Project: Where Humans and Limpets Meet

The story of limpets, those conical sea-snails frequently found on rocky shorelines may seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but that is not the case. If given careful, prolonged attention, room to express themselves and an engaged receptive audience they reveal a richly entangled human-nonhuman story which unfolds over thousands of years. A process of art-based research, underpinned by new materialist thinking and practice channels this attentiveness, provides physical room, makes space for creative inquiry, corresponds with humans and nonhumans, and generates a willing audience with enchanting, potentially life affirming consequences.

Oświecenie w syntezach dziejów Rzeczypospolitej Józefa Andrzeja Gierowskiego (na tle ujęć Władysława Konopczyńskiego i Celiny Bobińskiej)

The Enlightenment occupied an important place in the oeuvre of Professor Józef Andrzej Gierowski. This piece presents his evolving views on the Enlightenment in three syntheses of the history of early modern Poland and the Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth: two university textbooks first published in 1967 and 1978 respectively, and a book addressed to a wider, non‑academic readership first published in 2001, much of which was presented to Anglophone readers in 1996. J. A. Gierowski’s views are presented against the background of the sardonic references to “the enlightened age” and “enlightened Europe” in the synthesis published by his supervisor, Władysław Konopczyński in 1936, as well as the Marxist‑Leninist scheme of the Enlightenment forced on historiography and the humanities in postwar Poland, especially by Celina Bobińska. J. A. Gierowski’s view of “the ideology of the Enlightenment” gradually shifted from the primacy of rationalist and materialist thinking to the aim of the pursuit of happi-ness within human society. While still emphasising economic and social factors, including the role of the bourgeoisie in the Dutch Republic, England and France, he increasingly distanced himself from the model of the Enlightenment as the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie, forced on him in the early stages of his academic career. After long reflection on the question of the reception and originality of the Enlightenment in the Commonwealth, he came to appreciate the contributions of Royal Prussian burghers, the Catholic clergy and the Polish‑Lithuanian nobility. He also jettisoned the postwar dogma that the beginning of the capitalist order in Poland should be dated to 1764.

A New Historicist Reading of John Dos Passos’ Novel The Big Money: Depiction of Children as a “Second Lost Generation”

This article examines the representation of children as a “second lost generation” in John Dos Passos’ novel The Big Money. It explains that the documentary and narrative sections that Dos Passos integrates into the novel explore how children’s position in the 1930s is caught between parents’ care and indifference. Dos Passos clarifies the impact of the American Dream and materialism upon the structuring of this conflicted position. In the novel’s Newsreels, Dos Passos presents a composite of popular songs and news headlines that present children seeking jobs and also departing from their family houses. Alongside the presentation of this phenomenon which resonates with children’s social situation in 1930s, in the narrative sections Dos Passos portrays Juvenile characters as living in families whose main concern is the making of money. To investigate this representation, the article considers the views of historians about the first “lost generation” (the post-World War I generation). It utilizes the “second lost generation” term to describe the juveniles who struggled during the 1930s age of Depression. The article historicizes the position of children in 1930s America. It refers to literary critics’ views about Dos Passos’ modernist and political inclination. The article concludes that Dos Passos’ The Big Money manifests in a modernist form fragmented historical realities about 1930s America’s materialistic thinking, within which children are seen as a second “lost generation”.

Waiting for inpatient detoxification: A qualitative analysis of patient experiences

BackgroundThere is limited provision of inpatient detoxification relative to other treatments for alcohol and other drug (AOD) use. This means people often need to wait prior to detoxifying. However, waiting for healthcare is generally perceived as negative and stressful. This paper aims to understand patients’ experiences of waiting for inpatient AOD detoxification to ascertain whether and how service-level policies and practices might be improved. MethodsSemi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with 32 people (20 males, 12 females; aged 25–67 years) who were waiting for inpatient detoxification. Data collection was part of a wider evaluation of a policy initiative started in 2021 to increase detoxification service capacity in England, UK. Interviews were professionally transcribed and data on waiting experiences were coded using qualitative software. Analyses were informed by new materialist thinking and undertaken via Iterative Categorisation. ResultsWe found that waiting was constituted through five dimensions: i. duration; ii. support; iii. information; iv. preparations; and v. emotions. These five dimensions were multi-faceted and operated in and through wider interacting social, material, and affective forces (e.g., professional judgements, formal and informal relationships, the availability of beds and funding, bureaucratic procedures, the utility and relevance of information, and participants’ diverse feelings, including desperation for treatment). Not all accounts of waiting were negative. The experience was complex, non-uniform and variable over time. Moreover, it affected how people felt and how they behaved. ConclusionsChanges to service-level policies and practices can potentially minimise the stress of waiting for inpatient AOD detoxification. The negative impact of waiting may be reduced if professionals more consistently engage patients in a wider range of constructive pre-treatment activities, offer regular ‘check-ins’ to mitigate any anxiety, explain changes in wait duration to help with planning and demonstrate fairness, and facilitate contact between those waiting to lessen feelings of isolation.

Environmental Burden in Everyday Lives of Dalits: A Case Study of Sanand, Gujarat

Under Buddhist philosophy, followed by Dalits and other marginalised groups, an organic relationship exists between environment, knowledge and society where natural resources are conceived as equal partners and their identity is enmeshed with these. However, this organic balance between environment, knowledge and society gets disrupted by certain kind of materialistic thinking which not only creates ecological imbalance but also social conflict, exposes people to a whole range of risks like dislocation, loss of livelihood, work burden for women, health issues, loss of culture to destruction of civil rights. Against this backdrop, this paper reflects on sustainable development and analyses environmental degradation caused by the proliferation of chemical and pharmaceutical industry by encapsulating how neoliberalism smartly appropriate caste system and its attendant inequality, resulting in pain and suffering of subaltern masses. Foregrounding the study in the four villages of Sanand Block, Ahmedabad district of Gujarat, this article discusses the politics of environmentalism, spells out ‘environmentalism of the poor’ and narrates the way subaltern communities manage to live with environmental burden.

Potential approaches to establishing harmonious river‐human relationships

AbstractThis paper responds to a call to address the development and building of river‐human relationships in the twenty‐first century. Many literatures have identified the historical instrumental exploitation of natural resources underpinning urbanisation and the economic development leading to wide‐spread degradation of environments including rivers. Clearly such relationships can no longer be considered as appropriate in the twenty‐first century. This paper intends to present a conceptual rethink to address the following question: Are there potential approaches by which humans can develop harmonious coexistent relationships with riverine landscapes and associated ecosystems? In answering this question, this paper draws on ideas from new materialism thinking. New materialism offers useful guidance in understanding human‐river relationships in which river landscapes are not static backgrounds to the performance of the social. River systems and environments are active participants influencing and shaping social performances through multiple and diverse interconnected and complex human‐nonhuman relationships and co‐productive partnerships. It is concluded that new materialist perspectives provide important guidance for developing harmonious river‐human relationships. De‐centring the human as the dominant actor in relations with river landscapes and acknowledging rivers as key actors within river‐human relationships may enhance the building of harmonious coexistent and mutually beneficial relationships in the twenty‐first century. It is further concluded the Nature Futures Framework (NFF) and Human‐River Encounter Sites (HRES) frameworks in their capacity to accommodate new materialist thinking provide an opportunity for further exploration and examination of the possibilities for building harmonious coexistent river‐human relationships.

Enabling Knowledge: The Art of Nurturing Unknown Spaces

This article is both an exploration and a reflection on the process of generating knowledge from an encounter with the unknown. It documents what practising the ‘ethics of the unknown’ (Eeg-Tverbakk 2016) consisted of and what insights it led to in relation to two projects: ‘Childism’ (2015), based on documents from an informant who experienced child abuse, and ‘Embodied’ (2018), a performance lecture presenting both research and lived experience of involuntary childlessness. To reflect the fluidity, multi-directionality and, at points, messiness- of the process of practising the ethics of the unknown, theory and practice are not as rigidly separated in the text as the conventions of academic publication would normally require. The text alternates analysis, the voices of the authors, as well as sound files and images designed to offer experiential glimpses into the performances and the arguments. Theoretically, the concepts outlined are inspired by quite different strands of materialist thinking (object-oriented philosophy and new materialism). The research takes liberties when relating to different philosophical concepts that have proven to be useful in the practice of staging documentary material. We are not proposing a ‘method’ but rather arguing along with Erin Manning for ‘research creation’, where methods have to be invented and developed for each project. As such, this article also places itself within the discussions on post-qualitative, non-representational and performative research.

Speculative Virontology: Malevolent Infrastructure against the Design of Infrastructural Intimacy in Pulse

In this article, speculative virontology refers to a form of thought that revalues the biontological framework present in current queer theoretical and new materialist thinking. Using an archive of horror films, Paul Golding’s Pulse from 1988 in particular, this article points toward malevolent infrastructure – the conceptualization of matter that is performatively terrorizing the closedness of mutually constitutive design of infrastructural intimacy and the immanence of biontology. Both intimacy and immanence depend on production of space and time which exclude forms of life that are not white middle-class cisnormative (re)productive heterosexuality and thus deemed not properly alive and outside of Being. The figure of the Virus upsets these processes of exclusion and divisions, and reorders conceptuality away from immanence and biontology toward what is non-biontological, toward that which is neither Life nor Nonlife.

Negotiating Survival Needs through Ontological In/Visibility: An Exploration of Irregular Migrants’ Lawscapes

This article explores how irregular migrants in/visibilise themselves in socio-spatial contexts in Finland. Drawing upon new materialist thinking, specific strategies of in/visibilisation are interpreted herein as fully part of irregular migrants’ lawscapes, that is, of their ontological movements and the material interplays between laws and spaces, allowing bodies to create their own desired spaces of survival. This article is part of a larger research project using ethnographic methods and a new materialist approach to explore irregular migrants’ everyday lives in Finland. It shows how law is embodied by individuals and, thus, materially influences and affects their movements and emotional activities.

Agentic Things and Traumatized People in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, when seen from the perspective of “thing theory” and other new materialist discourses, challenges the dominant anthropocentric mode of relationship between humans and things. In the novel, ostensibly inanimate things exert their agencies over the survival, less physical than spiritual, of socially oppressed African Americans. Morrison complicates “thing theory” and extremist new materialist thinking by initiating the development of an eclectic new materialism, which foregrounds the vibrancy of quotidian objects while also integrating it into human agency through the co-habitation of space, thus creating a harmonious and balanced network of hybrid agencies that can be both troubling and stabilizing.

Ancient Respected and Modern Absorbed, Chinese Essence and Western Utility—Thoughts of the Integrated Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine

AbstractTraditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western medicine are two medical systems formed in different cultural backgrounds. The differences between them are that TCM focuses on the study of the invisible state while Western medicine focuses more on the study of the visible state of the human body; TCM pays attention to systematicity and integrity, while Western medicine pays attention to local evidence; TCM attaches importance to dialectical thinking, while Western medicine attaches importance to materialistic thinking. For the development of TCM, it is necessary to take the initiative to learn from and absorb all the advanced scientific and technological achievements in the world today. To innovate TCM, it is necessary to need to adhere to (1) the integration of “research on TCM with the thought of TCM ” and “research on TCM based on the thought of Western medicine”; (2) the integration of scientization of TCM and scientization for TCM; (3) the integration of mobilization therapy and allopathic therapy; (4) the integration of treating patients and treating diseases; (5) the integration of preventive treatment and existent disease treatment; (6) the integration of individuality and commonality; and (7) the integration of the macro and the micro.

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance by Laura Doyle

Reviewed by: Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance by Laura Doyle Lidan Lin Laura Doyle. Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance. Duke UP, 2020. ix + 392 pp. The concept of postcoloniality has offered some hope for a more equal world because national independence in former colonies undoubtedly signifies victories of human justice, retribution, and morality. In the wake of European colonialism, scholars have continued to ask challenging questions: How did European colonialism happen? Why is racism still permeating many quarters of life? How can we prevent the existence of colonialism and racism? Inter-imperiality innovatively engages these questions and locates the origin of colonialism and racism in the "denial of interdependence" (35). From this fresh angle, Doyle investigates the complex dialectical relations and power structures among competing empires from the premodern era to the twentieth century. Focusing on interimperial alliance and resistance and weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and global studies, Doyle initiates a new "decolonial" (5) or a "360-degree" (1) approach that analyzes Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. Doyle argues that a multitude of infrastructural programs shaped such alliance and resistance, along with cultural programs that facilitated the co-construction of imperial states, from intercultural influences in Asia and travel writings by premodern Western missionaries, to the later translations of literary and religious works by Western and non-Western writers. Literature, for Doyle, is a vital site that registered the interlocking world history of colonial hegemony and decolonial subversion. While postcolonial studies have primarily focused on the colonizer-colonized relationship in the context of European colonialism, Doyle shifts this focus to the co-construction of contending empires. This shift is necessary, and it signals a significant new direction in postcolonial studies. Yet, Doyle does not consider "postcolonial" (5) and "decolonial" approaches to be incompatible; instead, she deems them "complementary rather than opposed." This dialogic handling of diverging methods is one of her book's strengths. Drawing on the work of feminist critics such as Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, and Nancy Chodorow, Doyle brings a feminist orientation to bear on her analysis and reveals colonial labor as gendered labor. A critical revisit of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectical theory allows Doyle to reaffirm the centrality of the dialectical conditions of being human, conditions devoid of the ontological independence of any kind. While sharing scholars' reservation of Hegel's racist thinking, [End Page 383] Doyle adds her feminist critique of Hegel's male-dominated dialectic by inserting the feminine into the "lord and bondsman" (2) relation on the one hand and by stressing the co-constitution of subjectivity or intersubjectivity implied in Hegel's dialectic on the other. Here, Doyle perceives Hegelian affinities not only in Western thinkers such as pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, Karl Marx, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty but also in Asian philosophy, including the Chinese Daoist philosophy. Rather than dwelling on the polemics involving poststructuralist and materialist thinking in decolonial studies, Doyle appeals to both, another dialogic appropriation of differing modes of thinking. While incorporating Hegel's dialectic in the analysis of interimperial coformations cogently revalidates the continued relevance of dialectical thinking to decolonial studies, a bit more explanation as to how the revised Hegelian dialectic differs from the dialectical thinking that informs the self-other correlation widely discussed in postcolonial studies would have been helpful. Doyle's book contains a substantial theoretical introduction. The stated theoretical grounding and analytical approaches are mostly lucid, readers will easily follow, if they have some background in critical theory and postcolonial studies. The main body includes seven chapters divided into three parts. The texts chosen for analysis include cultural texts, political writings, and literary texts, among others. While some analyses are more substantial than others, which is necessary to serve different purposes, all will be accessible to readers who have some background in literary and cultural studies. In the two chapters in part 1, Doyle first provides a structural frame for examining ideological and infrastructural formations in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas, and shows that they "converged" (28) in their mutual attempts to conquer the "dissent" from the colonized natives. She then stages a...

New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness

New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness

Spatializing material–corporeal entanglements: A new materialist approach to the agential work of costume in the stage adaptation of The Lovely Bones (2018)

This article argues for the value of conceptualizing the agency of costume in performance when it is not worn directly upon the body. I employ a new materialist framework to examine the spatial dynamics of the shifting corporeal–material relations established when costume is set apart from an actor onstage and, unworn, asserts its agency as an independent force distinct from the performer. My investigation is supported by a close analysis of Bryony Lavery’s page-to-stage adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), directed by Melly Still and performed at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton in 2018. Drawing upon the observation of rehearsals and performances encountered as an embedded researcher, my discussion centres on the live practices of theatrical production. Employing Bennett’s new materialist thinking laid out in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) and Bill Brown’s ‘Thing Theory’ (2001, 2015), my discussion of The Lovely Bones shows costume to be an active participant in a ‘distributive agency’ enacted between garment and performer, the contours of which are amplified when the two are set apart. The spatial disentanglement of the material and corporeal, evidenced in the performance of costume in The Lovely Bones, thus provides an opportunity to present a fuller understanding of the material agency of the stage.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPING THE DIALECTICAL THINKING CAPACITY OF STUDENTS AT THE MILITARY SCIENCE ACADEMY IN VIETNAM

Materialistic dialectical thinking is a type of thinking that develops at the highest level of thinking, plays an important role in the process of world perception and human practical activities. In this article, the author focuses on analyzing the importance of developing the dialectical thinking capacity of students at the Military Science Academy in Vietnam in developing the ability to acquire and store Marxism-Leninism scientific knowledge, whose core is the materialistic dialectics, applying worldview, materialistic dialectical methodology in learning, training and scientific research; the capacity to think logically, synthesize existing knowledge, create new knowledge, the capacity to summarize the practice in learning, training and scientific research.
 
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2-Curious: jarring representations of the two-year-old in transformative continuous professional development (CPD)

ABSTRACT This paper explores how new materialist ideas informed a non-linear experimental approach to ‘continuous’ professional development (CPD). Experiences of professional development in the early years are diverse but remain at the heart of continuous improvement practices. In the UK, the roll-out of the ‘disadvantaged two-year-old’ offer increased demand for professional development, at a time when austerity impacted on training budgets. Where opportunities for professional development exist, the focus is typically on ‘best practice’ solutions, which often cling to developmental psychology. This paper focuses on the process of ‘continuous’ professional development inspired by new materialist thinking. It recognises that integral to quality early years’ provision are understandings of how children learn, but that this knowledge is embodied, always in movement and yet deeply situated. Focussing on the first CPD session, the glass jar, this paper assembles happenstance encounters from within and beyond the CPD session to explore how combinations of relational becomings are continuously changing as encounters and experiences spark new thinking and doing in diffusive and irrational ways. This paper emerges only as a resting place; writing becoming part of the movement needed in new materialist practices, vitally informing the transformative potential of CPD that continues to move.

The matter of energy emerges: Bridging the divide between conflicting conceptions of energy resources

After decades of theoretical neglect of material properties and relations, a much welcome material turn within social science energy research has recently raised discussions of materiality to the centre of current debates. So far, the efforts to rematerialize energy has to a large extent drawn on new materialist thinking. Against the substantivalist conception of energy resources as self-standing natural things with inherent properties new materialists have developed relational conceptions that are anti-essentialist and emphasize indeterminacy, contingency, and unruliness. This article critically and constructively discusses new materialism, some of its limitations and problems, and how a critical realist perspective can resolve these. Based on the concept of emergence, a stratified conception of natural resources is developed, which seeks to dialectically sublate conceptions of natural resources as either things-in-themselves with intrinsic properties or relational effects.

Performance and New Materialism: Towards an expanded notion of a non-human agency

This research paper expands on new materialist notions of material agency within the context of practice-based creative research. New materialist thinking provides a recognition of the agency of non-human actors, and enables a focus on the dynamics of human and non-human relationships. A key concept of new materialist theory is a critical perspective on the binary of human and non-human, arguing that all matter resides within a form of incessant flow, in states of constant transformation. These renewed approaches to understanding matter has drawn from developments in science and physics exploring the nature of forces and networks that constitutes matter. In a world that is continuing to become more technologically reliant and scientifically developed, this research paper explores a non-human agency emerging within human and non-human interactions, where human and non-human agents (spaces, materials, forces, etc) have efficacy in the co-construction of practices, events and figurations, drawn from looking at the nature of these relationships that unfolded in the performance works. In this paper I will be discussing two performances that were undertaken Material Interactions[i] and BodyBody Experiments [ii]. Considering these works within a theoretical framework of analysis which draws from New Materialist thinking on non-human agency
 
 [i] Choat, Alyssa. Material Interactions, 2017.
 [ii] Choat, Alyssa. Bodybody Experiments, 2017.