Sociomaterial Practices Research Articles

The power of materiality: Local orders, interaction and global governance

The article examines the power of materiality in the context of refugee camps, demonstrating how local orders and global governance are intricately interwoven within the material domain. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Burmese refugee camps in Thailand to illustrate how sociomateriality can establish spaces of exclusion and associated memberships through their practical implementation, but at the same time permit flexible forms of local manifestations. These aspects represent the tangible realities that people, both ordinary camp residents and local authorities, navigate and achieve in their local public camp life. By means of detailed observation of three distinct camp situations—namely, interactions of membership, checkpoint practices, and the temporary suspension of public camp life—the article argues that mundane sociomaterial practices can both produce and undermine the political intentions of architects to realize materialities of exclusion. Nevertheless, despite their partial and incomplete nature and the capacity of people to circumvent them, the materiality of exclusion is maintained and persists. By elucidating these dynamics, the article contributes to the existing literature that emphasizes the importance of understanding camp governance through the lens of sociomateriality.

Computer vision in situ

Background: This article shows a visually impaired person (VIP) trying to locate products while shopping using the commercially available computer vision device Orcam. Method: Based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis and perspectives on materiality and agency from a post-praxiological position, the study shows, through detailed analysis of transcribed video excerpts, the observable sense-making practices related to this technology. Results: The study shows the VIP and researcher-participants exploring what the device can and cannot do, and how the local body–object–environment relations need to be organized to make the device scan. The study shows the value of applying a post-praxiological approach to understanding socio-material practices. It also introduces the ‘video-based contextual inquiry’ method as a form of researcher engagement in producing the situation and the data collection. Discussion/conclusion: The article provides two novel contributions: (1) to the field of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis research, with a critical reflection on semi-experimental data collection and the role of the researcher, the materials, and the distribution of agency; and (2) to the field of impairment and disability studies, with insights on locally organized body–object–environment relations and the design of artifacts for computer vision recognition technology.

Beyond discourse: The role of mundane sociomaterial practices in fluid organizing tension response

ABSTRACT Grounded in a paradox perspective, this article investigates the tensions of fluid informal organizing and, using a practice theory lens, explains how micro-level communicative practices deal with those tensions. Through interview and observational data, the study illustrates how tensions of integration/separation, inclusion/exclusion, and autonomy/control intersect with organizational efforts to maintain a public recreation space and are dealt with via social, material, and performative practices of worth signaling, consensus by validation, and social/material nudging. Findings add to theory on organizing tensions by moving beyond discursive and strategic responses to tension, which often focus on altering the meaning of tensions or rely upon conventional organizing elements, to emphasize how materiality and mundane practices are consequential for theory building on tension response.

Finding an (Ecological) Niche in the Postdigital Taskscape: The Role of Strong Literacy and Poor Pedagogy in Primary School Pupils’ Online Literacy Practices

This paper uses a postdigital, postphenomenological lens to examine what happened when an online platform, a wiki, was used to support writing practices in an inner London Key Stage 2 classroom. It understands a postdigital approach to education as one which takes account of the imbrication of technology in our everyday life without valorising it or making hyperbolic claims about what it can do. Avoiding utopian or dystopian accounts, it unpicks what happened when students were allowed to compose multimodal texts beyond the classroom on topics that interested them. Using a postphenomenological approach, it looks at the materiality of the technology in praxis in the different spaces where it was used. It uses as a heuristic Ingold’s concept of the taskscape, recently developed by various scholars as a site not of romantic bucolic human activity but as somewhere where sociomaterial practices are contested as we wrestle for resources within our immediate environment. As students travel between these different taskscapes of home, school and the wiki, it examines how they enact the affordances around them in their transformation from apprentices to more skilled practitioners of literacy. It follows their trajectories-of-becoming when they move between these taskscapes, growing into knowledge as they weave lines of literacy across online and offline spaces. It argues that reviving Gibson’s notion of the ‘ecological niche’ allows us to understand why some find the paths between these spaces easier to tread than others.

Reconceptualizing Simulations: Epistemic Objects and Epistemic Practices in Professional Education

This study explores how and why simulation training facilitates professional learning by investigating how simulators and simulations are used and conceptualized in two professional domains, nursing and maritime navigation, and offer a reconceptualization. Our aim is to move beyond past theorizing of simulators and simulations that has mainly centered on representational issues like validity, fidelity, and authenticity. Instead, we approach simulators as epistemic objects and simulations as epistemic practices. These concepts offer a lens to examine the situated and sociomaterial practices that make simulators into simulations and simulations into entry points to the epistemic culture of a profession. As a result, we pinpoint three central mechanisms for transforming the simulation experience into an event that facilitates the enrollment of students into their future profession. The first mechanism involves the instructional practice of “filling in” aspects of the work context that might be missing in the simulator. The second mechanism, sometimes labeled the “as-if” mode of simulations, manifests through the participants’ ongoing commitment to treat the simulation as-if it was a real professional encounter. The third relates to how simulation-based learning activities afford a crucial pedagogical orientation towards defining what constitutes exemplary professional practice in specific training situations.

The Moral Economies of Reflexive Migration Studies

Abstract Reflexive Migration Studies has emerged as a subfield of Migration Studies. Drawing on moral economy perspectives, we explore how the entanglement of, and tensions between, moral and economic rationalities shape the development of a field of knowledge production in which we ourselves partake. Clearly, Reflexive Migration Studies has not emerged in a vacuum but through socio-material practices and in a specific scientific context and community. Using the case of the Migration Studies landscape in Germany, we suggest that a moral economies perspective allows us to examine the production of knowledge infrastructures, scholarly identities, and research outputs that are key in creating a new academic field. By scrutinizing these infrastructures, identities, and outputs, we point to tensions between some of the morally charged claims and the material conditions and labour contexts of doing Reflexive Migration Studies. With our contribution, we want to raise questions regarding the direction that we, as scholars participating in the field, are taking. We see the risk that the critique brought forward in Reflexive Migration Studies falters in light of prevailing economies of scientific knowledge production and academic labour.

Reconfiguring Community of Practice as Socio-Material Practices for Making Differences With/in the World: A Creative-Relational Inquiry

Reconfiguring Community of Practice as Socio-Material Practices for Making Differences With/in the World: A Creative-Relational Inquiry

Stories with the terrain, stories with the ice: Storytelling as a socio-material practice

This article argues for the importance of understanding storytelling as a socio-material practice growing from engagements with the environment and its constituents. Based on an ethnography of guided tours on Svalbard, the article reveals how storytelling arises from encounters and engagements with particular constituents of the environment, such as terrain or ice, as well as from bodily experiences such as walking, feeling, touching, looking or (not) hearing. The practice of storytelling then shifts looking at and receiving information about something to seeing and knowing it through embodied experience – a shift that is, however, limited by incommensurable temporalities of diverse constituents of the environment. Storytelling as a practice thus contains not only verbal information about miners or (glacier) ice but also arises from and shapes the ways of being with (constituents of) the environment, knowing them and seeing them. Consequentially, relations between the tour group and the terrain, ice or weather elements that are emerging, are all a configurative part of the socio-material practice of storytelling.

How a Child Learns to ‘Talk’ to a Smart Speaker: On the Emergence of Enlanguaged Practices

Abstract In this paper, I am concerned with the socio-material practice of engaging with voice-enabled machines. Far from ‘talking’ to a smart speaker, a user must master the skill of composing a command while routinely engaging with the machine. While the practice relies on practical understanding and intelligibility, attention must be paid to the trans-situational aspects that enable the situated enactment of socio-material practices. By conceptualizing engagement with the smart speaker as an enlanguaged practice, I trace the ability to engage in a seemingly individualistic practice to a person‘s history of engagement in and with the world. Specifically, I consider how a pre-literate child relies on instances of recursive bodily coordination with her caregiver to learn how to engage with a smart speaker. Informed by the languaging perspective which treats language as multiscalar bodily verbal activity, I trace enlanguaging to the intricate interplay of dialogicality, temporality, and embodiment.

Semantic Web Practices: Infrastructural Politics and the Future of the Web

Semantic Web Practices: Infrastructural Politics and the Future of the Web

In pursuit of thermal comfort: An exploration of smart heating in everyday life

Smart Home Heating Technologies (SHHT) have been designed to improve demand flexibility and energy conservation. SHHT rely on rational theories of energy use postulating that people will use less energy when the energy cost is higher. The inclusion of AI within SHHT is poised to optimise energy use in the future as the introduction of lower carbon energy sources place new demands on the grid. When SHHT is introduced in the home, however, they become situated in temporal heating practices that are shaped by an interplay of materiality, meanings, and competencies. We report findings from a mixed methods field study involving eleven households utilising an AI-enabled SHHT probe ‘Squid’. Taking a temporal focus throughout, our study contributes a new lens as to why households may not fully engage with SHHT's rational design, given that energy conversation is already embedded in their ongoing socio-material practices with heating. Focusing on the AI-human relation, we articulate the necessity for human agency where heating is involved, whilst also advancing an understanding of the new forms of hidden labour that households incur before they can engage with the AI. Crucially, our research informs the ongoing HCI concern over how humans understand AI, raising the question of who is responsible to assess the appropriateness of AI when the effects of human-AI performance remain opaque. Our findings contribute a new theoretical perspective into the intricate relationship between individuals and AI in the home and raise several new design implications for SHHT.

Toward a practice-theoretical view of the situated nature of attention.

In this paper, we examine how a practice-theoretical perspective may complement and expand the central tenet of the attention-based view (ABV) that attention is contextually situated. We put forward three main arguments. First, the components that make a practice possible and that locate it in history and context (practice architecture) also prefigure a situated horizon of relevance and possibilities (pragmatic field of attention). Attention thus often befalls organizational members outside the realm of discursive consciousness as a consequence of being engaged in socio-material practices. Second, attention is situated at the crossroads of multiple practices, each with its practice architecture and local pragmatic field of attention. Organizational attention implies tensions, conflict, and contradictions and emerges from the interaction and negotiation of multiple individual and group pragmatic fields of attention. Finally, attention is situated in the temporal dynamics of sustaining and turning attention. This allows us to distinguish between inattention, dysfunctional distraction, and potentially productive attention turning. We argue that by focusing on the ordinary and routinized nature of attention, a theoretical practice view complements and enriches the ABV by offering a less voluntarist and top-down view and proposing a richer view of situatedness. A practice-theoretical approach also distributes attention among a broader set of elements, offering resources to theorize how these elements are connected. The approach also establishes a link between paying attention and caring, thus bringing emotions back into the study of organizational attention. In turn, the ABV helps the practice-theoretical perspective to recognize the central role of attention in organizational matters and the importance of engaging in full with the organizational unit of analysis when dealing with attention-related issues.

Yalla Nutbikh “Let's cook”: Negotiating emotions of belonging through food in heritage language classrooms

AbstractResearch on emotions and second language learning has recently expanded to heritage language education contexts. Influenced by a long tradition in psycholinguistics and second language acquisition, research on heritage language emotions has mainly focused on the statistical effects of emotions on language development rather than examining emotions that relate to social and interpersonal relations. This article responds to these research needs through a critical ethnographic exploration of how emotions of belonging are negotiated through the production and consumption of food at an Arabic heritage language school in the United States. Drawing on data from observations, interviews, and field notes collected during a 2‐year period, I argue that the production and consumption of Arabic food during cooking events and classes at the school afford students opportunities to negotiate emotions of belonging toward Arab culture as an embodied and nonessentialist practice, toward diverse religions and nationalities in the heritage school community, and toward the local majority community in the United States. This analysis foregrounds the affordances of occasions in which language learning and emotions are situated within the sociomaterial practices of heritage culture and highlights the need to establish interinstitutional connections with community schools to support the socioemotional well‐being and educational equity of immigrant and racialized youth.

Differentiated grassroots: Navigating sustainability transitions in conservative political contexts

Uneven subnational energy policy and regulatory geographies in the United States are a widely recognised reality, resulting from the absence of a concerted federal effort towards climate change and sustainable energy development. Against this backdrop, the rise of citizen-led energy transitions or Grassroots Energy Communities (GECs) in liberal and conservative states signals an opportunity for fostering a common ground for climate action, only to be undermined by questions concerning their touted countervailing potential against the mainstream energy system. With particular reference to conservative political contexts, this article presents a comparative case study of Grassroots Energy Communities arising amidst uneven socio-spatial circumstances. By interrogating lived experiences and situated socio-material practices, the article offers interesting theoretical, practical and policy insights. By explicating the materiality of technical devices, purposively rendered meaningful in context and politicised towards particular political and economic ends, the study shows how socio-material processes not only help forge strategic alliances between potentially antagonistic stakeholders but also lead to the obfuscation of power differentials. From a policy perspective, this study shows how conservative ideology – despite hyper-nationalist invocations – subjects local citizen-led efforts to the vicissitudes of global capital by selectively justifying state support to facilitate its circulation.

숨쉴만한 삶을 위한 집 만들기와 기술

Home has long functioned in our daily lives as a material, social, and imaginary space for a breathable life. This article seeks to consider the relationship between technologies and making home for a breathable life. For this purpose, this article consists of three parts. First, it looks at the complex meaning of home adopted in the field of humanities and sociologies in Europe. In this process, it defines home as a place in which physical places and social experiences are constantly interacting and assembled. Additionally, it defines the home-making process as a sociomaterial practice constructed across private and public spaces. Next, it moves to examine how the process of creating a home is closely linked to the power relationship between majority and minority where class, gender, race, and disability intersect. These power relations, in particular, determine the ability to feel comfortable in public spaces and act as a key element in constituting the sense of home and homelessness. Next, it discusses the dominant discourse on technology presented as a solution to homelessness of the minorities and how it is combined with the homemaking process by them. Lastly, as an alternative, it suggests adopting ‘matters of care’, which feminist technology researchers have presented as a way of technology research to contribute to building a breathable life.

On the constitutional relevance of non‑discursive enlanguaged doings to sociomaterial practices

Abstract In expanding on the ‘dynamics first, symbols afterwards’ principle (Cowley 2009) of Distributed Language research, I propose that embodied linguistic competencies comprise the prerequisite for human agents to engage in sociomaterial practices. I make the case that human practical activity is fundamentally ‘enlanguaged’ and that linguistic skills are not only trans-practical in the sense of enabling agents to engage in diverse activities across practices but also that they constitute the basis for adult skill acquisition (see Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986) more generally. Specifically, I explore language-relative skills as the enablers of more diverse activities than what is prescribed to them by Saussurean linguistic tradition i.e., the denotative relations intrinsic to linguistic signs as well the rule-governed combinations of such signs into meaningful sentences.

Theorizing ‘The Gap’ Twenty Years Later: Global Development, Design, and Speculative Ethics in Edtech Research

AbstractDrawing from Feminist Science and Technology Studies, this paper explores how we might revisit and recuperate past academic research projects, theories, and relationships to design futures that matter for social good. As context, I begin by outlining a decade of research in Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), which linked the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to innovations in telecommunications and computing. I then introduce the ‘theory of design-reality gaps’ that was proposed by Heeks to study ’wicked problems’ in this domain (2002). I revisit two strands of research that I carried out in relation to the ‘design-reality gap’. The first involved an ethnographic study of a participatory mobile phone based learning intervention for Kenyan health workers. I argued that instead of a singular ‘gap’ explained by geographic, sociocultural, or economic ‘divides’, there was a messy entanglement, constituted by sociomaterial practices that enacted a multiplicity (Mol in The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Duke University Press, 2002) of desired futures. In the second strand, I attempted to care for the practices that were abandoned by the learning intervention when one kind of justice was prioritized over others. This explored how the research could be more ‘speculative’ and how this ‘speculative commitment’ could generate new ethical questions and logics for living with technology (Puig de la Bellacasa in Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106, 2011 and Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017). I argue that approaching the design-reality ‘gap’ as a multiplicity instead of a void can support Tuck’s call for educational interventions that turn away from damage oriented theories of change to ones based on desire – approaching difference not as a lack, but as an ever-growing assemblage (2009). Tinkering with the original Heeks model, I conclude that in the postdigital era, the design-reality gap is now better-understood as a fluid space of multiplicities, and what is arguably most pressing is to study the differences in competing objectives and values, rather than disparities in information and technology.

The constitutive entanglement between open office spacing and grouping: The production of sociomaterial control

This article explores the emergence of sociomaterial practices and control dynamics of open office spacing by emphasising the constitutive entanglement between open office spacing and grouping. With a Baradian approach to and agential realist ontology of sociomateriality, the article aims to gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of working together by rethinking the conventional notions of and relations between groups and space. An ethnographic field study uncovers how sociomaterial grouping practices emerge and intraact through the constitutive entanglement between open office spacing and grouping. Insights from this study show how these grouping practices are reconfigured in three different yet intraactive ways: as cultural, hierarchising and belonging practices. Further, the observations reveal how grouping practices produce control in new ways in the form of sociomaterial control through the visibility, transparency and materiality of open spacing, which carry implications for the design and collaborative organising of open offices, including privacy, embodied experiences, informal hierarchy, power relations and feelings of belonging, particularly for newcomers.

(Un)sustainable everyday practices sociomateriality shaping sustainability in an urban district

Urban areas are often seen as central sites for sustainability transformations, and in many parts of the world, cities are striving to be recognised for their sustainability initiatives. An example of a new urban district with a sustainability profile is Rosendal, in Uppsala, Sweden. Based on semi-structured interviews supported by participant-generated photographs, I let the everyday practices residents of this district associate with sustainability be the starting point for studying the different ways in which they understand and enact (un)sustainability. My analysis builds upon a practice theoretical framework, viewing practice as mundane, routinised behaviour shaped by ‘materials’, ‘competences’ and ‘meanings’. By focussing on a set of practices brought forth by the interview participants, namely, growing vegetables, showering and cycling, I pay specific attention to the different roles of materials and how these are co-constitutive of the sociomaterial practices of which they form part. Based on the analysis, I contend that the sociomaterial urban assemblage enables and restricts what comes to count as sustainable, as well as which (un)sustainable practices are performed in everyday life. Further, the ability to think of alternative ways of enacting sustainability in everyday life is both enabled and restricted by present practices due to the situated nature of imagination. If urban districts are to play a central role in sustainability transformations, I argue that living environments should be planned in ways so that new ideas and practices for enacting sustainability may emerge.

The Weariness of Hoping: Synchronizing Affect While Awaiting Organ Transplantation for Cystic Fibrosis in Germany

ABSTRACT We describe the challenges in synchronizing affect during the lengthy lead-up to organ transplantation. Our analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Eastern Germany among medical staff caring for patients with cystic fibrosis, a progressive, genetic illness. Patient and practitioners must together endure an uncertain wait for a donor organ, while simultaneously living and working toward living as well as possible. The organizing affective principle in this setting is hoping, which is a socio-material practice that must be continuously and interactively re-produced. Too little or too much hoping must be managed by adjusting affective intensities. A failure to strike this balance can lead to what we designate as the weariness of hoping.