Non-human Material Research Articles

Disability, digital technologies and the ambivalent allure of posthumanist/transhumanist futures

Technologies, both simple and sophisticated, have always played a major role in the negotiation of a range of disabilities that are assumed to impede the expression of autonomous selfhood. Whether...

Cruel Substances

In the paper, I examine the concept of “cruelty” (kaṭumai) of physical substances in the Tamil siddha alchemical literature, by taking as the starting point an analysis of the selected texts ascribed to Siddhar Yākōpu alias Rāmatēvar (ca. 17th–18th c.), a prominent author of the Tamil siddha alchemical tradition. The alchemical works of Yākōpu repeatedly describe certain alchemical operations, the names of which allude to acts of violence, such as “binding” (kaṭṭutal) and “killing” (kollutal). Such operations, according to the texts, should be mastered and performed by alchemists on various material substances. In the paper, I analyze passages that shed light on the purpose and character of such operations in the alchemical tradition of the Siddhars. I also address the issue of the non-human material agency related to the perspective of material ecocriticism as presented in the Tamil siddha texts.

Rethinking student agency through ‘material agency’ in the context of learning in nature

Student agency theorising traditionally positions individuals as sovereign and under-theorises the role non-human material elements play in enacting agency. We recognise the role of the material but to honour our research participants and context we adopt an asymmetrical view of the agency of the material non-human in relation to the human in co-shaping agency. We apply this view to students learning in nature, and data from a developmental evaluation of visitor experience of an outdoor learning centre. Student and teacher participants took photographs representing their connection to nature on two occasions. Intrigued by the role the camera, the site and its material elements played in participants’ photographs, and photo-elicitation interviews, we conceptualised the relationships at work as joint human/non-human material collaborations. We argue educators’ recognition of the material agency of settings can assist them in understanding students’ agentic positioning within the political imperative of connecting humans to nature as curriculum.

Translanguaging in digital picturebook reading: a sociomaterial perspective

ABSTRACT This ethnographic case study investigates how a young rural Chinese EAL learner engages in a translanguaging process as she reads a digital and multilingual Cinderella picturebook in her home. It documents wide-ranging translanguaging relations dynamically formed among this learner, the researcher as a reading partner, and a myriad of nonhuman materials (modes, languages, tablet, software, time, space, etc.). Accordingly, the current research adopts a sociomaterial approach to examine language and literacy learning environments in terms of social and material dynamics. A sociomaterial perspective on translanguaging expands the researcher’s gaze from looking only at individual actions or social interactions in translanguaging practices to consider how nonhumans also constitute and affect these practices as active agents.

Microbial Theatricality: <i>Selfmade</i>, Celebrity, and Scales of Hunger

In 2013, Christina Agapakis, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology, swabbed celebrities' armpits, belly buttons, and feet for microbial samples to make cheese. The “human-made” cheese resulted in the art exhibition Selfmade, a sensory installation inviting audience members to confront intimate and smelly relationships between humans and microbes, all through fermented edible matter. Artist Olafur Eliasson, food journalist Michael Pollan, and baker and writer Ruby Tandoh all offered their bodies as cultivators for cheese production. The prominent figures, and their companion bacteria, validate and complicate the relations that Selfmade claims to produce. At first glance, the installation invites a sensory entanglement with nonhuman matter. There is, of course, more than meets the eye. Hunger, eating, and even cooking are not exclusive to humans but perhaps intrinsic to planetary life. Human, celebrity, and microbial actors blur across the many mediums materialized in the food performance. As much as Selfmade is a nonhuman performance, it is also because of its very humanness, celebrity, and theatricality that we find an essential entanglement in food and performance studies: a nearly imperceptible (or non-sensible) proximity of human and nonhuman, at the microscopic scale.

Posthumanist new materialist pathways for reimagining music education research: What matters? What can this offer music educators?

ABSTRACT Much of historical and contemporary music education research is influenced by a Cartesian ontology of opposition. This reinforces the classic function of music and music education: the exercise of possession, ownership and control. To confront these ideas, our article reimagines music education research through posthumanism and new materialism. In doing so, the focus shifts to making with nonhuman matter, posthuman bodies and the materialisation of music. Examples of cartographic research are discussed to show how the experience of musical environments is constantly reconfigured by human and nonhuman elements. This abandons the notion that music education takes place only in the mind and explores what a posthumanist approach to materiality can offer instead. As a result, normative academic conventions are disrupted by the recognition of in-the-making embodied musical learning, the intra-action of human and nonhuman sound materialising, and the materiality of the body in its experience of music as a play space, arguing that staying with the trouble of doing something new, or swimming against the tide, matters for music educators.

Meaningful Grunts and Radical “Blehs”

This article studies the radical identity-making potential of noise and nonhuman sound in video games. To do so, this article focuses on the oral production of the rabbid protagonists—mischievous humanoid rabbits easily identifiable by their constant and cacophonic sound making—in the Mario + Rabbids series. The rabbids’ constant shouts, grunts, and cries serve as great examples of the potential of nonhuman noise and sound to not only reproduce identities that escape from human-centric conceptions of being, but, more importantly, to invite players to see all identities—including their own—as polysemic and sometimes contradictory assemblages. This article converses with existing research on the ability of human voice and silence to manage identities in video games, with studies on nonhuman material excess in video games where players control nonhuman characters, and with work on how animal main characters sound in video games. This dialogue brings forth reflections on what being and becoming mean. The cacophonic nature of noise does not necessarily invoke the absence of all meaning, but an opportunity to embrace its many potential meanings and reflect on an equally polysemic world.

Why the turn to matter matters: A response to post-Marxist critiques of new materialism

Theories of new materialism have gained increasing traction in the social and human sciences in recent decades, as thinkers like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett have reinvigorated the philosophical interest in topics such as the agency of nonhuman matter, the relational nature of existence and the limitations of anthropocentric forms of inquiry. However, these theories have faced criticism from post-Marxist critical theorists, who argue that theories of new materialism blunt social and capitalist critique and promote obscurity by flattening the world to a single ontological plane. In this article, I argue that these critiques rely on mischaracterizations of new materialist scholarship and that theories of new materialism can in fact help us re-examine – not reject, as their critics suggest – the role of critique, responsibility and human politics in the context of the Anthropocene and its unfolding ecological crises.

Cartographies of the Able School

Abstract Using a cartographic approach, this article addresses ableism in the Chilean educational system. By analyzing audiovisual production, and specifically, the creation of storyboards, theoretical-methodological tools are provided for mapping desire flows and micro-movements produced in and about the public school toward and against the production of able educational institutions. Thus, the analysis stresses how human and nonhuman materialities mutually affect each other in an educational context. By focusing on the analysis of videos and storyboards, new discursive-material relationships appear in the school, which allow us to recognize and problematize ableist practices, and at the same time, open spaces for new creative approaches to challenge the able school norm.

Hunting for pearls in the shallow water: designing and building spatial immateriality in the aquatic theatre La Perle

This essay discusses the working process behind Franco Dragone’s aquatic theatre La Perle (2017) in Dubai. The aim of the case study is to provide unique insight into the development and implementation of an innovative architecture typology of a theatre building conceived as a ‘living thing’, a spatial system able to adapt and change according to the demands of dramaturgy. Remembering imaginative, but never built, proposals for theatre buildings from the beginning of the twentieth century, and their objectives regarding more flexibility of a performance space, the study explains what it takes to actually realise a ‘fluid’ spatial system. At the same time, it is an attempt to broaden the understanding of scenography by discussing it in relation to its materiality, technical requirements, and the virtual content employed in the La Perle show. Using the lens of posthumanism, the analysis includes discussion on the culture/nature divide in the realm of contemporary spectacle, concentrating on Karen Barad’s notion of non-human matter and its role within an aquatic theatre, adaptable and ever-changing. It explains an approach to treating space as a scenographic body, and the contribution of architectural design proceedings to the conception and production of new kinds of theatres.

Students’ Mathematical Thinking in Movement

AbstractMathematics education research is increasingly focused on how students’ movement interacts with their cognition. Although usually characterized as embodiment research, movement research often theorizes the body in diverse ways. Ingold (Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, 2013) proposes that thinking and knowing emerge from the entwined, dynamic flows of human and non-human materials in a process called making and, following Sheets-Johnstone (The primacy of movement (Vol. 82), 2011), contends that humans think in movement. The study that this paper draws on employs Ingold’s making to study students’ movement during mathematical problem solving. In this paper I also recruit Laban’s movement elements (Laban & Ullmann, 1966/2011) as a framework to describe and analyse how the body moves in space and time and to incorporate the often-forgotten dynamic qualities of movement. This paper investigates the movement of a small group of tertiary students as they engage with a mathematical prompt (a task in Abstract Algebra), using thick description, to answer the questions: (1) How do students think mathematically in movement? (2) How do Laban’s elements help inform research into students’ movement? Through the lens of Laban’s movement elements, my analysis demonstrates that students think mathematically in movement. These findings suggest that mathematics educators may be overlooking valuable instances of students’ mathematical thinking and knowing: the thinking and knowing in movement which may not be available through verbalizations or artefacts. Although thinking in movement does not fit a traditional conceptualization of undergraduate mathematics, which privileges written communication heavily reliant on notation, to understand students’ mathematical cognition more comprehensively, mathematics educators need to reconsider and appreciate students’ mathematical thinking in movement.

The importance of rhythms for maintaining consent in diagnostic encounters to detect cervical cancer.

Diagnostic encounters can be seen as complex socio-material processes. Drawing on the new materialist ideas of Barad, we studied how an innovative technology became part of the intra-actions between different human and non-human materialities in a cervical cancer diagnostic process. While researching the development of a technology intended to improve cervical cancer detection, we carried out a series of observations of diagnostic encounters involving clinicians, patients and the device in a hospital. The intra-actions between the different materialities had rhythmic properties, repeated activities and timings that varied in intensity, for example, movements, exchanged looks, and talk that helped co-produce the diagnosis and maintain consent. Sadly, the device interfered with the rhythms, undermining the clinicians' desire to adopt it, despite it being more accurate at diagnosing ill health than previous assistive technologies. Studying rhythms as part of diagnostic encounters could help with the design and subsequent integration of novel technologies in healthcare, because they encompass relationships created by human and non-human materialities. Importantly, highlighting the role of rhythms contributes another way diagnostic encounters are co-produced between clinicians and patients, and how they can be disrupted, improving the understanding of how consent is maintained or lost.

“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).

Biomothers and Technobodies: Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story as the Technocritical Hybridization of Trans- and Posthumanism

Abstract In Frankissstein: A Love Story, the British writer Jeanette Winterson reclaims the epistemological value of the literary interpretation of existential questions around the posthuman. By retelling Mary Shelley’s gothic classic, Winterson assesses, both ethically and aesthetically, the consequences of artificial intelligence for traditional conceptions of gender, life (re)production, and the commodification of bodily desires, as well as their fusion at the intersection of technology and art. With the methodological support of recent studies on trans-/posthumanism and material/trans-corporeal feminism(s), this article will attempt to show how, by revindicating monstrosity as the legitimization of new forms of life and love, Winterson hybridizes trans- and posthumanist polarities and relativizes the rigidity of the debate around the de- and rematerialization of nature in the face of practices such as mind uploading, the mass production of sex robots, and enhancing biotechnologies, through a technocritical examination of the risks and possibilities of the com-posting of human and nonhuman matter.

Reimagining climate equity to incorporate the non-human

Over time, international environmental law has increasingly accommodated principles of equity and justice. Yet, climate equity remains a contentious, if not exclusionary, concept. This article applies new materialist theory and a posthuman perspective to climate equity. It explores the concept of climate (in)equity as enshrined in existing climate jurisprudence, and attempts to reimagine the concept in order to incorporate the subjectivity and interests of non-human matter into an otherwise enclosed and marketized climate-change legal discourse. The analysis in this article finds that prejudicial approaches to climate equity that prioritize dominant human subjects produce unjust consequences for excluded, vulnerable human populations and for non-human subjects, with these unjust consequences shaping both policy and lived experience. The article suggests that adopting new materialist/posthuman ontological and epistemological pluralism will support the incorporation of human–non-human entanglements in climate equity, and that such a determination must extend to reforming the inequitable enclosures and exclusions driven by the climate equity assemblage.

Wasting CO2and the Clean Development Mechanism: The remarkable success of a climate failure

This paper examines how global climate mitigation policies articulate with urban political–ecological transformations. It focuses on South African waste-to-value projects as case studies, exploring how local processes of urban ecological modernization combine with global climate finance through the now largely defunct Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Whilst it is generally recognized that waste-related CDM projects in South Africa (and elsewhere) have been an unmitigated failure in terms of climate and socio-economic benefits, we demonstrate that landfill-to-gas/energy projects have functioned effectively as geographical–discursive dispositifs through which particular knowledge systems are enrolled, specific ‘solutions’ are projected, and singular imaginaries of what is possible and desirable foregrounded, thereby crowding out alternative possibilities. This not only nurtures the commodification and marketization of non-human matter with an eye towards sustaining capital accumulation but, rather more importantly, successfully installs state-orchestrated private property relations around common resources, thereby deepening the dispossessing socio-ecological relations upon which expanded capitalist reproduction rests. We argue that whilst the formal outcome of the CDM is a failure, its success resides precisely in how it permitted local and global elites to create administrative and regulatory practices that solidify and naturalize a neoliberal market-based framework to approach the climate crisis.

Wellbeing

Wellbeing

What Got You through Lockdown?

What Got You through Lockdown?

Ritual Relationships with Copal Incense

Copal, an aromatic tree resin, has long been harvested and offered as incense in Indigenous communities of Mesoamerica. In contemporary academic contexts copal and other non-human materials and entities are often conceived of through objectifying ontologies. However, metaphysical frameworks grounded in life forces such as teotl (Nahuatl) and ch’ulel (various Mayan languages) offer alternative insights to human relationships with other-than-human worlds. Copal can be traced temporally and spatially, across thousands of miles and millennia. Specifically, we can follow copal from Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica across the northern border of Mexico into contemporary rituals in Denver, Colorado where copal continues to burn in Danza ceremonies. Beyond these ritual spaces, copal also moves in neoliberal and new age contexts as a market commodity and is stored in museum collections as ‘artifact’. Centering Mesoamerican metaphysics offers a counternarrative to these versions of settler-colonial objectification. Ultimately, precolonial and decolonial kinship practices can inform reinterpretations and reimagining of copal in the processes of museum and market appropriation.

Transmuting Trauma and ‘Alchemiz[ing] Inherited Wounds’: iele paloumpis’s disabled, diasporic choreographies of care

In the programme notes for the premiere of In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky at Danspace Project in May 2022, choreographer iele paloumpis asks, ‘What vitality allowed our ancestors to survive generations of trauma, and what wisdoms have been passed down to us?’ Moving with and through grief surrounding various connected histories of violence, paloumpis and collaborators simultaneously find modes of tuning into various connected histories of resilience. This essay explores how paloumpis and collaborators collectively tap into disability and diaspora to transform intergenerational trauma into knowledge, power and more livable forms of relationality. Through overlapping practices of textile weaving, interdisciplinary somatic practices, audio description and sculpture, the piece enacts multisensorial choreographies of care that allow for alchemical grief processes to unfold between human performers themselves, between performers and non-human materials, and between performers and audience members. Approaching choreographic practices as care practices and care practices as choreographic practices, I use the phrase ‘choreographies of care' to refer to disabled, diasporic relationalities in performance. My engagement with these relationalities takes cues from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's conceptions of ‘care webs' (2018), Édouard Glissant's theories of ‘Relation' and ‘opacity' (1997) and Alice Sheppard's discussions of care as an ‘anchor point' of disability culture in performance contexts (2021). A certified end-of-life doula and grief worker, paloumpis carves out room for shared mourning on their own terms through a process of what they call ‘alchemiz[ing] inherited wounds into collective care’ (2022b). In this article, I will attend to some of the ways in which paloumpis and collaborators move through this alchemical transmutation of trauma by weaving across differing but connected experiences of disability, chronic illness and diaspora.