Non-human Material Research Articles

The Interaction/Intra-action of People and Things in Different Spaces in Lawrence’s <i>Lady Chatterley’s Lover</i>

D. H. Lawrence has always been a controversial writer in literary area when it comes to the modernity, for he was active in the transitional era between realism and modernism. But it is almost accepted that he is more of a modernist writer. When talking about the way he demonstrates his sharp resistance against industrial civilization, the resolution he offers to recover the loss of humanity in his novel <i>Lady Chatterley’s Lover</i>, we cannot bypass the perspectives of symbolism, imagery and metaphors which have been widely discussed by the academic field. Different from other contemporary writers, Lawrence emphasizes the depiction of interactions between human beings and non-human materials, and gives an exquisite description on various spaces in this novel. As a result, this paper intends to analyze the characterization and Lawrence’s vision of modernity from the perspective of New Materialism, focusing on the writing of non-human things, especially the interaction/intra-action between people and things in different spaces, in order to prove how the space changes and how the characters’ interactions with things actively influence or even determine the hero and heroine’s choices, and further result in their alienation and emancipation respectively. By employing the theory of Spatial narrative and thing theory, this paper is going to make it be more plausible that D. H. Lawrence is a great modernist and holds a critical view on industrial civilization, and call for more attention and studies on how non-human things influence and mould human beings and how the plot and theme of novel are driven by the interactions between people and things.

Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms

Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms

Entangled Yoga Bodies

In this article, we draw upon the work of leading new materialist Karen Barad to explore the possibilities for knowing women's yoga bodies differently. Engaging insights gathered from an embodied ethnography on contemporary Yoga in dialogue with Barad's concept of entanglement, we contemplate the complexity of a lived experience in a Yoga body. Engaging the voices and movement experiences of 19 committed women yoga practitioners, we explain ‘Yogic union’ as states of absorption facilitating an awareness of an existence that is complex, interconnected and involving both human and non-human materiality. Specifically, we work within and between the embodied experiences of the researcher and her participants, feminist new materialist theory, and creative writing to present Yoga bodies as phenomena that are always entangled.

Assembling things: Warao crafts, trade and tourists

We tend to give less attention to the process of assembling things when analysing their social life or biography. There is a preconception of things being relatively stable, fixed and inert entities. In this paper, I suggest exploring the ordinary life of things, accounting for the interweaving of the human life with nonhuman materials. The mutual becomings of various entities, both humans and nonhumans, create assemblages that emerge from the interaction between their parts. Assembling things works to conceptualize how mutual entanglements create new possible worldings among a contemporary indigenous group in low land Latin-America. Ethnographically I trace the production process of hammocks and other types of items among the Warao of the Orinoco Delta, Venezuela, and how it entangles different ‘others’ like traders, tourists, missionaries and anthropologists and how these encounters affect the process of assembling things. Assembling things draws attention to how heterogenic component parts construe temporary but stable configurations that partake in people's worldmaking efforts. I use ethnography from the Warao and how their crafts, especially hammocks, become differently as they entangle various assemblages. I investigate three fields of assemblages in order to discern how the human/nonhuman entanglements unfold, namely household, market and museum.

Nuclear Soundscapes: Exploring Sound in Radioactive Environments

Just after World War II, mounting evidence marked the dawn of the geological epoch dubbed the Anthropocene. Nuclear explosions deposited radioactive debris in the geological strata, combined with an acceleration in resource extraction, population growth and energy consumption. In this light, this paper aims to explore the affective dimensions of the multiplicities of sounds that are interconnected to nuclear materialities. We argue that mediations of nuclear sounds in these forms of audio instances render nuclear sounds comprehensible and challenge existing representations of nuclear power. This paper will bring into conversation an archive of soundscapes of the nuclear epoch – for example the sound of beeping in a nuclear power plant that produces electricity, the Geiger-Müller counters that civilians used following the Fukushima-Daichii plant explosion, and the music composition by JLiat of the sonic representation of atomic testing on Bikini Atoll in 1946. Engaging with these sounds serves to make sense of the nuclear sublime and offer a possibility of connecting with the “otherness” of nuclear materials. These sonic instances also bind people in collective ecological experiences, whilst making us more attuned to voicing the modalities of a damaged planet. Sound can serve as an articulation of affects that emerge between human and non-human materialities in a damaged planet. These conceptualizations of sound are used to articulate the ways individuals or groups embody their relationships to ecological environments. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the paper aims to explore the mechanics of sound in nuclear infrastructures and devices to challenge common metaphors about nuclear energy. Through the analysis of these soundscapes, we demonstrate that exposing these entanglements between human and nuclear materialities can help us make sense of the sociocultural dimensions of living in a radioactive planet. Article received: April 15, 2021; Article accepted: June 21, 2021; Published online: September 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper

Skin in the Game: Affect, Materiality, and the WNBA Arena

Since its inception in 1997, the Women's Professional Basketball Association (WNBA) has attempted to present itself as a highly professional sport. With the advantage of its relationship with the successful and established men's National Basketball Association (NBA), the WNBA was able to play in the same arenas immediately, and this included all the trappings of American professional sport, including music, lights, a ‘Jumbotron’, and half-time entertainment. However, there are important distinctions between the material environments of men's and women's sport, and this has contributed to WNBA games being perceived as unpopular and uneventful. Much of the research on the WNBA has largely focused on the discourses of heteronormativity and gender that structure the league, however by drawing on a new materialist lens and examining the affective forces that circulate the arena, we are better able to understand the WNBA game as an assemblage that develops through the relationship of various material and discursive elements. This article explores the rhizomatic flows of affect that circulate the arena, creating the professional sport spectacle and the stadium assemblage, while highlighting the affective forces of non-human materials, space, and the built environment. It draws upon my ethnographic research with a WNBA team – pseudonymously called the Ravens – and their experience with various arenas, each of which have different histories, stadiums, facilities, entertainment, and relationships to NBA teams. It examines the way in which an affective response is deliberately designed and generated, as the built environment, production values, the crowd, and players’ bodies work together to create an arena experience that can either be professional and exciting, or lacklustre and limiting, which in turn can either help or hinder the physical capabilities of WNBA players, and which can direct the ‘feel of the game’ itself.

Emergence, multiplicity and connection: rethinking ethical discernment in qualitative research through a rhizo-ethics approach

Numerous qualitative researchers employ the Deleuzoguattarian construct of rhizome in their work. In this paper, we consider the ethical affordances made possible by the rhizome’s theoretical features to propose rhizo-ethics: an approach to ethical discernment in qualitative inquiry which engages with the Deleuzoguattarian construct of rhizome. Across an exploration of Deleuze & Guattari’s writing, educational scholarship, and further qualitative work that employs rhizomatic thought, we examine how engaging with a rhizomatic approach affords researchers the means to reconfigure research ethics hierarchies by decentralizing their position in the research context. Such a perspective generates possibilities to: acknowledge fluctuating power relations, enrich representations, embrace a relational onto-epistemology, and consider the interactions between human and nonhuman matter as ethically significant.

‘Thinking with Kaipara’: A decolonising methodological strategy to illuminate social heterogenous nature–culture relations in place

Decolonising methodologies continue to be critically developed to disrupt the marginalising approaches to knowledge production. By privileging Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, relations with nature are a more-than-human entanglement and a relational pursuit. Ecosystems such as estuaries and rivers are connected through kin-based relationships and treated as (or are) ancestors and family members. Such embodiment connects the body–mind–spirit to maintain relations with the mauri of ancestral beings and Deities. Within this ontology, nature is indistinguishable from culture. Our research responds to the call of how method might proceed to de-centre the human and make bodily and material encounters with the nonhuman matter. ‘Thinking with Kaipara’ is a methodological strategy that is a deliberate attempt to pursue embodied ways of producing knowledge. To work with situated knowledges, place and social difference to address the crisis of representation of such in ecosystem-based management, the problematising of ecosystem degradation and restoration practices. Research data produced is founded on human and nonhuman collaboration, an ethic of care, diverse epistemic nature–culture relations, social/nature/gender justice and equality, which makes for empirical evidence not enjoyed by scientific and technocratic methods utilised to inform and shape ecosystem-based management decisions and policy. Geo-creative practices are used by co-researchers/co-participants to recount their lived experiences and knowledges of ecosystem degradation and restoration. Storytelling, poetics, and painting, sculpting, whaikorero, waiata and writing were practices used. We argue that such geo-creative practices challenge the normative spaces and practices of disciplinary knowledge-making and enable the examination of social heterogeneous nature–culture relations in settler-colonial societies.

Is the Grass Greener in a Post-Pandemic World? (Re)Connecting Humanity with Nature for a Just Recovery

This article assesses the potential for reconnecting human and non- human nature in global post-COVID-19 recovery plans. The article utilises a critical perspective on the neoliberalisation of nature as a framing, as well as the case of sustainability and deforestation in forest risk commodity supply chains, to assess whether sustainable development initiatives and neoliberal environmental governance adequately protect the interests of vulnerable human and non- human nature. It finds that existing approaches to sustainable development in international governance prioritise liberalised global markets and the neoliberalisation of nature through commodification, privatisation and marketisation, thus furthering an unjust human-nature dichotomy by placing humans separate from nature and removing the intrinsic value of non-human materiality. It identifies a synergy between the global campaign to ‘build back better’ after COVID-19, environmental regulation and principles of Wild Law. The article concludes by recommending that a just post- pandemic economic recovery must realign the human experience as a part of the wider whole of the non-human natural world.

Spatiotemporality in the Anthropocene: Deleuzoguattarian Philosophy, Quantum Physics, and the German Netflix Series Dark

Abstract Crises alter our perception of time. For medical personnel faced with treating unprecedented numbers of critically ill patients under conditions of personal threat, COVID-19 has most recently accelerated the subjective perception of time. For millions of others, social isolation has decelerated our lives. For all of us, at least in the short term, the future has become more uncertain. Theoretical physicists tell us, however, that under any conditions, the human perception of the flowing of time is only a result of our blurred, limited, macroscopic vision. As the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli writes, therefore, “[t]o understand ourselves is to reflect on time” (2018: 179). Potentially caused by humans’ failed interactions with wild animals, the contemporary global pandemic, as well as previous outbreaks such as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-related coronavirus) or the bird flu, has led to calls to reevaluate humans’ relationships with nonhuman life, with the natural environment that includes us, in the epoch that may soon be named for our very failure – the Anthropocene. In an era in which our usual, day-to-day certainties and desire for human control have been upended, not only by the current medical crisis but also by the continuing existential threat to terrestrial life that is climate change, a rethinking of the category of the human, a new conceptualization of the entangled (human and nonhuman) material relationships on our planet and beyond, requires reflecting on time. This article engages in such reflection through a conversation with the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Toward More-Than-Human Understandings of Sport and the Environment: A New Materialist Analysis of Everyday Fitness Practices.

Sport and fitness have long been linked with healthy lifestyles, yet most sporting events and consumption practices are highly detrimental to the environment. While academics have examined the harmful effects of sporting mega-events and the production and consumption of sport equipment and clothing, there has been less engagement with the “mundane,” everyday activities of consuming, laundering, and recycling of fitness objects. In this paper, we explore the potential in feminist new materialisms for rethinking the complex relationships between sport, fitness, and the environment. In particular, we explain how our engagement with Karen Barad's theory of agential realism led us to rethink women's habitual fitness practices as connected to environmental degradation. Working with Barad's concept of entanglement, we came to notice new human-clothing-environment relationships, focusing on how athleisure clothing itself is an active, vital force that intra-acts with other non-human (and human) matter within the environment. Adopting a diffractive methodology that included reading interviews with women about their activewear practices, our own experiences, new materialist theory, and environmental literature through each other, we focus on two examples that emerged through this process: laundering and disposal practices. Through these examples, we demonstrate the ways in which new materialisms encouraged us to move toward non-anthropocentric understandings of the sport-environment relationship and toward new ethical practices in our everyday fitness lifestyles.

Politicians, pathogens, and other threats to aid workers: a material semiotic analysis of violence against health care in the Syrian conflict

ABSTRACT This paper analyses humanitarian security in the framework of Donna Haraway’s political material semiotics. It begins by arguing that targeted violence against health care constitutes a trope: a figure of speech that challenges and disrupts the established narrative of humanitarian security. Drawing on 20 in-depth expert interviews, the paper explores a case study of weaponisation of health care in the Syrian conflict (2011-present). It illustrates how different material-semiotic actors – such as politicians, pathogens, and medical infrastructure – condition and shape the security of humanitarian health workers in the opposition-held parts of the country. Taking medical facilities as its key unit of analysis, the paper shows how armed violence is not only directed towards these material-semiotic entities but amplified and transformed as it passes through them. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the formative role that nonhuman materialities play in the protection of aid workers and other civilian entities in armed conflict. The paper's findings also contribute towards an improved understanding of how previously under-appreciated variables impact the delivery of medical aid in complex humanitarian emergencies.

Place, health and dis/advantage: A sociomaterial analysis.

The substantial literature on interactions between places/spaces and well-being/health often differentiate between physical and social aspects of geographical location. This paper sidesteps this dualism, instead considering places as sociomaterial assemblages of human and non-human materialities. It uses this posthuman and 'new materialist' perspective to explore how place-assemblages affect human capacities, in terms of both health and social dis/advantage. Based on secondary analysis of interview data on human/place interactions, it analyses the physical, sociocultural, psychological and emotional effects of place-assemblages, assessing how these produce opportunities for, and constraints upon human bodies. It than assesses how these emergent capacities affect both social dis/advantage and well-being. This analysis of how place-assemblages contribute positively or negatively to health and dis/advantage offers possibilities for further research and for social and public health policy.

Bodies, non-human matter and the micropolitical production of sociomaterial dis/advantage

This article sets out a more-than-human framework within which to explore the contribution of non-human matter to social inequality. Applying an approach based in Deleuzian ethology, we extend three invitations: to address the multiplicity and fluidity of dis/advantage, to explore its production in everyday interactions, and to acknowledge non-human as well as human matter in the emergence of dis/advantage. The article examines how the interactions between human and non-human matter produce and reproduce context-specific bodily capacities and incapacities, and consequently ‘a thousand tiny dis/advantages’. These dis/advantages may accumulate to produce substantive inequalities and social divisions. An illustrative re-reading of Paul Willis’s 1970s study of the cultural reproduction of social inequality Learning to Labour reveals the complex ways in which daily encounters between human and non-human matter produce both transient and lasting dis/advantage. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this more-than-human perspective for the sociological study of inequality.

Non-human matter, health disparities and a thousand tiny dis/advantages.

The materialist thread within health sociology has observed a clear gradient linking inequalities in health with measures of social class and poverty. More recently, Bourdieu's approach to social class complemented the 'economic capital' of Marxist analysis with 'symbolic' capitals such as 'social' and 'cultural'. However, efforts to assess how symbolic capital interacts with health disparities reveal complex or contradictory effects. In this paper, we re-materialise the study of health and social position via a new materialist focus on the interactions between humans and non-human matter (NHM). We analyse empirical data to disclose the range of human/NHM interactions in daily life, and how these affect people's health status. These interactions establish physical, psychological and social opportunities and constraints on what human bodies can do, contributing to relative advantages and disadvantages. We argue for a revised materialist understanding of sociomaterial position as constituted by a 'thousand tiny dis/advantages', and suggest that health and wellbeing are inextricably linked to dis/advantage.

Nonhuman Animals and Decorative Modernism in Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy

With a focus on their depiction of the use of nonhuman animal materials this article examines how Barnes and Loy's modernism specifically negotiates and disrupts the uncertain boundary between natural and cultural meanings in their engagements with fashion and the decorative. The article considers animal fashions and the limits of the human in Djuna Barnes's writing, from early pieces such as ‘Vaudeville’ (1915) and ‘Madame Collects Herself’ (1918) to her late poetry, and in her journalism for New York newspapers, Vanity Fair, Charm and elsewhere. It also explores Mina Loy's engagement with decoration and fashion through her poetry, in her essay on ‘Modern Poetry’ and in her work as a designer and inventor (including her design for a ‘Horse Ear Hat’). The article argues that, through motifs of animal decorations in women's fashion, Barnes and Loy imagine animal-human confluences that deconstruct those dualisms and hierarchies that sustain an exploitative anthropocentric economy and a patriarchal cultural elitism.

HDRS - Hybrid Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy: Non-Erythemal In Vivo Driven SPF and UVA-PF Testing.

In order to define a label SPF of topically applied sunscreens, in vivo test methods like ISO 24444, FDA Guideline, and the Australian Standard are used worldwide. The basis of all these methods is to induce an erythemal skin reaction by UV irradiation to find the level of MEDu and MEDp (Minimal Erythmal Dose unprotected and protected). In vitro methods replacing the human skin by any kind of nonhuman material are still not available. Thus, offering the new hybrid diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (HDRS) technique that can maintain an in vivo level for SPF testing while neglecting the UV-dose-related erythemal skin reaction is a perfect combination to take care of sun protection and any ethical concerns in SPF testing nowadays. HDRS is a combination of in vivo diffuse reflectance spectroscopy measurements on the skin and in vitro transmission measurements of a sunscreen on a roughened polymethylmethacrylate plate. By this technique, the in vivo behavior of the investigated sunscreen on the skin is measured as well as the UVB absorption, which is still nonvisible in the reflectance technique. In order to establish an alternative method for in vivo SPF and UVA-PF testing, a huge number of sunscreens (250 samples) were measured by HDRS and compared with the worldwide accepted standards ISO 24444, ISO 24442, and ISO 24443. The variety of sunscreens measured reflect a wide range of different types of formulations as well as a wide range of SPFs (5-120) to validate this new alternative SPF testing procedure. Far-reaching statistical data analyses show an excellent link between the new nonerythemal-driven HDRS-SPF technique and ISO 24444 results. In the same way, HDRS-UVA-PF results can be correlated with UVA-PF values calculated from ISO 24442 as well as from ISO 24443. The importance of the inclusion of a spectral ratio of photodegradation is shown in the comparison of photostable and photounstable products. Owing to the elimination of any erythemal-relevant UVB and UVA doses, absolutely no skin reaction occurs during the HDRS experiment. Consequently, there is no need to define an MED anymore. For the first time, an alternative way to arriving at SPF and UVA-PF values is shown, without any ethical concerns of SPF testing in vivo and/or any restriction of SPF testing in vitro. Regardless of the type of formulation or the level of protection, an excellent correlation between SPFHDRSand SPF24444as for sunscreen labeling could be found. By this new alternative nonerythemal technique, not only SPF values can be measured but also UVA-PF values can be calculated with a linear correlation to ISO 24442 as well as to ISO 24443 from the same set of data. By this a robust alternative test method of SPF and UVA-PF values is described, taking into account the interaction of sunscreen formulation and skin.

Doctoral Thesis as Entangled Becomings: Moments That Tremble With Potential

This paper attempts to exemplify an emergent doctoral research process that plugs into the political activism of Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming minoritarian” and the transformational potential of Erin Manning’s “minor gesture.” Revisiting and responding to texts and images produced over the course of one month, the author attempts to demonstrate how an attentiveness and openness beyond the bounds of the traditional doctoral thesis can generate shiftings and shimmerings that have the potential to produce tangible impacts and affects. In a process of writing to the human and nonhuman matter she encounters on her everyday walkings and wanderings, the author senses a shift of herself in relation to the world, generating an imperative to act that can not be ignored. As a tentative exploration of a process that resists the constraints of an externally imposed methodology, this paper works to trouble the prescribed linearity of more normative approaches to doctoral research. This is done in the spirit of encouraging and promoting speculative enquiries with a social conscience for, as Brian Massumi argues, even tiny acts and interventions have the potential to make a difference in the world.

Profanating Gastro-Normativity

This article explores the making and tasting of wine through the anonymous processes of nonhuman consumption that participate in the production of its relational ontology (the terroir) and shape its visceral encounter with the human tongue (taste). First, the author defines a notion of consumption that is neither reduced to the human, the subjective, or the phenomenological nor dematerialized into sociocultural or politico-economic anthropic schemes. Second, he explores wine’s terroir as a prism through which to challenge the two main ideologies that frame the contemporary wine world: a normative territoriality premised on spatio-legal frameworks, and a consumer-oriented marketing approach. Third, the author introduces the natural wine movement, an umbrella term loosely gathering different wine makers who share a common reaction against those ideologies. In the constellation of thinking, making, and tasting that constitute the movement, he finds the lineament of a strategic materialism that aims to make visible and is open toward the agency of the nonhuman matter, and which does so by addressing simultaneously wine’s terroir and taste, by means of profanating their taken-for-granted normativity. The article concludes by suggesting that this strategy may hold promising insights for implementing radical food politics in the age of agro-industrial capitalism.

The experiences of cancer patients within the material hospital environment: Three ways that materiality is affective

Improving the patient experience is widely recognised as an important goal in the delivery of high-quality healthcare. This study contributes to this goal with a particular focus on the role of the material hospital environment for patients being treated for cancer. Extending the burgeoning literature utilising materialist theoretical approaches in social science and medicine, we report on qualitative data with 18 participants who had received cancer treatment from one UK hospital. Our analysis offers a typology of ways in which the material hospital environment is affective: through patients' direct intra-actions with nonhuman materiality; through providing shared spaces within which human-human assemblages are actualised; and through being the material component of the practices of treatment. Within each process in this typology, the analysis highlights how the affective feeling states which play a critical role in patient wellbeing are in many ways contingent, fluid and context-sensitive. Amidst ambitions to improve the patient experience, these findings underline the significance of materialities of care and offer a broad explanatory typology with analytic and practical potential for healthcare staff, patient groups, architects and designers.