Sociomaterial Assemblages Research Articles

Presence, absence, and spatial relations: An Interactional Ethnography of physical-virtual field-based learning through a sociomaterial lens

Field-based learning has been central to ecology education in supporting scientific inquiry and connecting learners with nature. However, pandemic-era campus closures have renewed debates regarding the role of virtual and immersive experiences. This Interactional Ethnography (IE) of a university-secondary school initiative in Hong Kong employs a sociomaterial lens to trace field-based learning interactions within and across physical and virtual spaces. Metaphors from social topology guided analysis of an ethnographic archive of classroom and field-based video records, learning artifacts, and interviews. Our analysis surfaces how and in what ways organisms act as agents in providing an essential anchor and recurring motif within and across interactions, contexts and settings in the enacted field-based design. While their ‘absence’ in the classroom and virtual environment constructs a sense of authenticity through the flickering metaphor of fire space, the material and semiotic resources in the field enable fluidity, opening possibilities for multiple, often serendipitous forms of relations, presences and dialogues that support diverse forms of knowledge and learning. By positioning field-based learning as varying sociomaterial assemblages centering on natural materials, we reconsider physical-virtual binaries and propose their designs as entangled human and non-human spatial relations that recognize and elevate the agency of natural materials.

Chinese University Students’ Digital Engagement in Post-COVID

Many scholars internationally conducted research on teaching and learning during the pandemic. Some scholars identified positive changes in student academic performance and student satisfaction while others found negative impacts on students’ mental health. My observation is that Covid-19 and technology (non-human actors) have shaped students’ cognition (way of thinking), behavior (digital practices), and affection (mental health). In fact, in China, digital engagement has become an important part of the lives of university students even in the post-Covid era. This qualitative study aims to investigate two Chinese universities with focus on their students’ digital engagement from a sociomaterial perspective. This research focuses on three questions: 1) What are Chinese university students’ perceptions and practices of their digital study (2022-2023)? 2) What dilemmas or conflicts did they confront when they configured a digitally mediated learning space that constitutes messy assemblages of material and social practices? 3) How did they respond to new challenges (human actors and nonhuman actors)? In order to answer these questions, the study adopts interviews and visual analysis of individual digital learning environment (including imaging and texts). It offers insights on reframing student digital engagement as constantly shifting sociomaterial assemblages from which different forms of agency emerge as effects of connections and activity. These assemblages can be closely read and interpreted from the students’ dynamic study practices, which are not only social but also at times private and unobservable. The study will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the human-material-digital practice and enactments for the Chinese academic community and beyond.

Assessing the dynamic social values of the ‘deep city’: An integrated methodology combining online and offline approaches

This monograph presents findings from original research on urban heritage transformations and advances existing scholarship on three grounds: (1) it offers tested combinations of methods to capture the social values of heritage; (2) it distils the complex, diverse social values generated by urban heritage and revealed by the use of these methods; and (3) it discusses the implications and potential applications of these methods for urban planning. Cities are multi-layered deposits of tangible historic features and intangible meanings, memories, practices and associated values. These dense socio-material assemblages have been conceptualised as the ‘deep city’, a concept that recognises dynamic relationships between past, present and future, whilst simultaneously repositioning heritage at the heart of sustainable transformation. However, methods for understanding people’s relationships with urban heritage are mostly applied piecemeal in urban planning and heritage management. Here, we introduce research involving a suite of social and digital research methods, which can be deployed rapidly in online and offline spaces to examine the social values generated by urban heritage. Three in-depth case studies, in Edinburgh, London, and Florence, reveal how these values are involved in urban place-making. Failure to take them into account in development and regeneration projects can result in fragmentation and/or marginalisation of communities and their place attachments. The research has important implications for urban planning, offering methods and tools for working with communities to create more socially sustainable urban futures.

Controlling the water: citizens’ place–related adaptation to landslides in mid-Norway

In light of an increasing frequency of climate change–related hazards such as landslides, climate adaptation is increasingly on the agenda of Norwegian municipalities. Nevertheless, municipalities face constraints in addressing these challenges, with smaller, remote municipalities being particularly susceptible. They often cover expansive geographical areas with high landslide risk, yet have limited financial resources, expertise, and personnel for climate adaptation. Consequently, the active involvement of citizens in adaptation plays an important role in these remote places. This paper investigates how citizens of three small remote communities deal with landslides, emphasizing the role of people–place relations in shaping adaptive practices. Grounded in assemblage theory, our analysis reveals that most citizens maintained a pragmatic relation to landslides, while only a few expressed concern. Regardless of the degree of concern, all citizens constructed landslides as integral element within their socio-material place assemblages, as part of their lives in the respective places. Furthermore, citizens developed various adaptive practices, including nature observation, reporting to authorities, and implementing practical preventive measures to control water that could trigger landslides. These practices are manifestations of socio-material assemblages that have evolved through citizens’ relations to their specific places. Importantly, irrespective of the level of concern regarding landslides, these practices were carried out as part of everyday life. Through these practices, enabled by experience-based, embodied, and often tacit local knowledge, citizens acted as community guardians. Thus, comprehensive people–place relations emerge as a pivotal factor for a community’s adaptative capacity in the face of climate change-induced hazards.

Teaching with the Virus: Sociomaterial Assemblages and the Production of Schooling During COVID-19

Using new materiality theory, we analyzed teachers’ and administrators’ descriptions of educational practices and everyday life in schools during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, the virus and the Provincial Health Authority were agential parts of classrooms that both restricted pedagogical possibilities, as well as created openings for something new to occur. As educators taught “with the virus,” pedagogy and curriculum unfolded rhizomatically shooting off in different and often unexpected directions. Our research makes visible how teaching is always a co-creative act of participating with the material, affective, and relational landscapes of practice. Keywords: pedagogy; COVID-19; sociomaterial assemblages; new materiality; K–12 schooling En utilisant la théorie de la nouvelle matérialité, nous avons analysé les descriptions faites par les enseignants et les administrateurs des pratiques éducatives et de la vie quotidienne dans les écoles au cours de la première année de la pandémie de COVID-19. Pendant cette période, le virus et l'autorité provinciale de santé ont fait partie intégrante des salles de classe, restreignant les possibilités pédagogiques tout en créant des ouvertures pour l’émergence de quelque chose de nouveau. Alors que les éducateurs enseignaient "avec le virus", la pédagogie et le programme scolaire se sont développés comme des rhizomes en prenant des directions différentes et souvent inattendues. Notre recherche met en évidence le fait que l'enseignement est toujours un acte cocréatif de participation avec les paysages matériels, affectifs et relationnels de la pratique. Mots clés : pédagogie ; COVID-19 ; assemblages sociomatériels ; nouvelle matérialité ; scolarité M-12

Situated socio-material assemblages: assemmethodology in the making

Abstract This article proposes the concept of assemmethodology, which combines assemblage theory and ethnomethodology. Relating to the ongoing studies in sociomateriality, this article advances our understanding of the details of social conduct and the consequentiality of materials. By explicating the role of the situation and its processual becoming, which is inherent in ethnomethodology, and by replacing the unit of analysis from the individual to the assemblage made up of heterogenous elements, this article contributes to communication research that seeks to advance our understanding of the ways in which humans are entangled with the material world. As a perspicuous case for the study of assemmethodology, this article explores situations in which screens are assembled with humans and other materials in social situations. The article uses these examples to highlight the necessity of maintaining a focus on the situated emergence of socio-material orders as a property of the activity.

War, PowerPoint, and hypnotised chickens

This article discusses concepts to explore decision-making processes in a military headquarters. Military planning is commonly perceived as a systematic and structured approach to organising ways and means to achieve military ends. While standardised procedures and decision-making tools are crucial for large military organisations to function efficiently, these devices are not neutral. Routines within the staff organisation carry implicit beliefs shaping the perception of war as a managerial problem with an optimal solution that can be elicited through a process and presented in a bulleted list. By examining organisational outcomes as socio-material assemblages, this article sheds light on how daily routines influence potential solutions and shape what can and cannot be thought. Conventional approaches in organisational studies have either overlooked the role of organisational tools or studied them as a matter of technology adoption. The entanglement of the social and material in organisational life should be observed and described empirically to understand how order is reconstructed after it has broken down.

Mundane technologies of educational policy consultancy: Presentations and interpretive control

This conceptual article examines how consultants use a mundane policy device, the powerpoint presentation, to manage education policy relations between international lenders and education ministries in the global South. The article theorizes presentations as socio-material assemblages that combine consultants, software, visualization conventions, presentation styles, and participant structures in ways that enable consultants to control public interpretations of program evidence. Our analysis is a “constitutive argument” (Pacewicz, 2022) about how to conceptualize presentations. We draw evidence from diverse sources including published accounts by consultants, descriptions of presentations in corporate settings, internet discussions of slide construction, online archives of slides, and data from semi-structured interviews with 12 current or former members of a education ministry in a South Asian country. We argue that consultants use mundane presentation technologies to establish closed interpretive spaces in which they can control interpretation by rendering project information in visually coded forms and structuring interaction through language ideologies and participant structures that ritualize presentation discourse. We close by highlighting implications of these arguments and noting lacunae in our account to be addressed in further research.

How water features: negotiating and reassembling the sociomaterial politics of central Californian groundwater

ABSTRACT This article explores responses to the California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to challenge post-political and governmentality perspectives on environmental management. I chart how SGMA reconfigured sociomaterial orderings in the Central Valley region, enacting a liminal moment for groundwater culture, between a historically entrenched libertarianism and an emergent communitarianism. Local organizations functioned as boundary organizations, re-shaping groundwater assemblages by negotiating boundaries between authority and marginalized communities. I argue that the structures and institutions typically critiqued in post-political and de-political theorising can be more fruitfully conceptualized as part of sociomaterial assemblages within which there lies potential for transformative groundwater politics.

The Entangled Intersection of Children’s and Educators’ Engagement in the Educational Environment of a Preschool

AbstractThe study presented in this article shows some aspects of how children between the ages of three and five and their educators perceive and describe the educational environment in early childhood education in Sweden. The data is generated using pedagogical walk-throughs with the educators and camera tours together with the children. The study is conducted as a case study with three municipalities as cases and shows how materiality, places and relationships appear in the intersection of the educators’ and children’s verbal and visual descriptions of the indoor educational environment. We put diffractive readings to work to follow the entangled inter-connections and the intra-acting agency of the sociomaterial assemblages. These assemblages consist of different types of materiality, spatial conditions, the educators’ verbal descriptions, the children’s photographs and their verbal and bodily actions when using the cameras. The findings suggest that children and educators use, engage in and relate to the educational environment and materiality in both different and similar ways. Moreover, the children transform the educational setting organised by the educators as place changers, while materiality constructs places as placemaking materiality.

Affective atmospheres of gentrification: Wellbeing amid neighbourhood change

The article aims to contribute to the gentrification debate by proposing a conceptual apparatus attuned to the study of how the everyday lived experience of neighbourhood change can have consequences for wellbeing. Accordingly, the concept of affective atmosphere, grounded within the non-representational theory, is proposed to capture nuances’ affective impact within shifting socio-material assemblages of local environments. A literature review was conducted to examine the ways in which the concept of affective atmosphere enhances the understanding of how changes in the socio-material configurations of space affect the wellbeing of local communities. The proposed framework captures the affective strain of gentrification as emerging within the specificities of socio-material constellations of local environments. Moreover, the advantage of the proposed framework was identified in its capacity to link particular manifestations of gentrification-related violence to overarching regularities of affective capitalism. The article urges for increased sensitivity to nuances of neighbourhood change, posing a potential threat to wellbeing even at the early stages of gentrification. Due to the decision to prioritise thoroughness of analysis over scale, the limitation of this article is its restrictive scope of research.

Understanding Children’s Drawings as Sociomaterial Assemblages of Voice during Pandemic Times

During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools transitioned to online learning. Utilizing sociomaterial assemblages and visual methods alongside interviews to prompt children’s voices, we collected drawings from primary students at two Eastern Canadian schools to achieve a multimodal understanding of children’s online learning experiences. Younger children’s drawings reflected the issues with technology and lack of socialization, while older children’s depicted their enjoyment with online learning with the agency afforded by learning from home. We found that pedagogical creativity and innovation were essential to successful online learning. This research demonstrates the efficacy of a sociomaterial perspective on children’s drawings for eliciting children’s agentic voices.

The material politics of slurry: Mobilisations and transformations along the waste–fertiliser continuum

Agriculture is a major source of excess nitrogen inputs into the environment. In Germany's Weser Ems region, the extreme concentration of intensive livestock farming translates recent improvements in nitrogen regulation into a ‘slurry problem’ that makes manure disposal services increasingly vital for the beneficiaries of an agroeconomic production system based on ongoing intensification and externalisation. The paper uses ethnographic research to focus on the material politics of different sociomaterial assemblages of slurry. It shows how manure export and new technologies to materially transform slurry both facilitate a further integration of livestock farming by intermediaries such as nutrient brokers and feedstuff producers. As slurry is mobilised and transformed, the material politics of slurry hinges upon shifting material properties and ontological struggles that position slurry along a continuum between nutritious natural fertiliser and abject organic waste. While slurry export to arable regions is problematically framed as a circular economy approach, the aim to transform slurry instead of transforming the unsustainable agroeconomic structure is embodied in hopes set upon ‘full processing’ of slurry into products akin to mineral fertilisers. The disposal of excess slurry eventually depends on both material and ontological transformations. Emerging protest against central manure processing facilities shows that slurry and its odour make intensive livestock farming a material and ‘sensible’ presence that can be acted upon politically. Embodied reactions and abjections related to this material agency of slurry can potentially bridge everyday practice and structural questions of socioecological wellbeing and justice in a more-than-human world.

More-than-care: People with intellectual disability and emerging vulnerability during pandemic lockdown.

This paper offers more-than-care as a framework for analysing how vulnerability emerges in the lives of people with intellectual disability beyond relations of care. More-than-care detaches vulnerability from the identity category of disability. It provides a framework for conceptualising vulnerability in an unequal, neoliberalising, and ableist world and sheds new light on the ever-evolving constitution of vulnerability and disability. This intervention breaks with conceptions of vulnerability centred on care needs that leave other circumstances that inform vulnerabilities unexamined. Importantly, the framework shifts responsibility for managing vulnerabilities away from carers alone. The more-than-care framework is grounded in socio-material conceptualisations of disability and advances a tripartite framing of vulnerability. First, it grounds studies of vulnerability in histories of spatially uneven investment in infrastructure and resources that shape how care and other practices can assemble to produce, challenge, and manage vulnerability. Second, it recalibrates dominant conceptions of the temporality of vulnerability to ensure sensitivity to the unpredictability of emergent vulnerabilities. Third, in following a socio-material conceptualisation of intellectual disability, more-than-care expands discussions about agency in the context of vulnerability. These concepts are empirically examined through an analysis of how vulnerability emerges in the lives of four self-advocates with intellectual disability during Melbourne's first and second COVID-19 lockdowns. The analysis shows that vulnerability was highly dynamic and unpredictable as it emerged in complex socio-material assemblages that included care arrangements, embodied experiences and agencies, and past instances of neglect and exploitation.

Improvisation and Social Aesthetics

Improvisation and Social Aesthetics

Socio-material assemblages: (De)colonizing literacy curriculum in transnational education

Recent decades have witnessed rapid growth of K-12 transnational education programs, but little is known about how human/nonhuman assemblages impact K-12 transnational literacy curricula and how sociomaterial assemblages affect (de)colonizing literacy practices. This study of English and Mandarin literacy curricula at a Canadian transnational education program in postcolonial Hong Kong was informed by posthumanism and theories on decolonizing curriculum. The study combined ethnographic data collection tools (curriculum documents, interviews, classroom observations) and a diffractive methodology of reading, thinking, and writing with multiple data sources and theories to explore how sociomaterial relations between humans and nonhumans shaped the (de)colonization of literacy curricula. Findings show a generative sociomaterial assemblage in the transnational education program that enabled encounters of local-global curricula, local-global languages, and academic-multimedia literacies. New forms of imperialism and colonialism also joined the assemblage and normalized binaries of L1/L2, local/global, and academic/multimedia literacies, thus constraining students’ meaning making across languages, places, and semiotic resources. The article proposes literacy curriculum and pedagogies that could foster students’ ethical relationship building with humans and nonhumans in globalized schooling contexts.

(Per)forming Assemblages and Institutional Maintenance: The Case of Mastic Growing in Greece

Materials are increasingly considered to play a significant role in institutional work. The degree of their involvement and agency remains, however, disputed. Scholars refer to them as tools that human actors mobilize, as objects that embody the outcomes of institutional work and, lately, as entities that actively contribute to institutional change and maintenance. The first two perspectives have been explored and their ontology appears to be straightforward, but the last stance is underdeveloped and builds on assumptions that need to be empirically tested, such as that human and non-human entities form sociomaterial assemblages and engage in collective performances. Although studies on this stream have referred to such assemblages, they have not fully explored their formation, their collective performances and their contribution to institutional work. This paper delves into 24 rural communities in the Greek island of Chios, where agricultural practices of mastic growing have remained intact for hundreds of years, and unpacks three types of entanglements among humans and non-humans: spatial, temporal and affective. In analyzing these entanglements, it reveals how each of them emerges, brings about collective performances and contributes to institutional maintenance. Implications for the role of materials in institutional work and maintenance are discussed, along with contributions to the broader performativity literature and community studies.

School data walls: sociomaterial assemblages to aid children’s literacy outcomes

ABSTRACT Educators, parents, and policymakers agree on the need to assess children’s learning to inform literacy teaching practices but are often divided about how best to gauge literacy development. In ensuing debates, school data walls have become pedagogically and spatially contested sites. We think of data walls as -scapes and scopic regimes that have sociomaterial force and that coalesce as complex assemblages worth interrogating. On that basis, our aim is to consider two kinds of data wall by drawing from a three year study of literacy teaching practices in government schools in one Australian state and sharing insights with resonance in similar education systems. Analysis shows that the first, more common data wall mapped and privileged quantitative data about, and summative testing results for, children and functioned primarily as an accountability tool. The second data wall added layers of qualitative data and formative assessment and facilitated valuable professional learning and development in support of children’s learning outcomes. Our findings are significant because they reveal how data walls foster integrative approaches to literacy assessment that cut through the debate. Findings also furnish theoretical insights about how data walls are powerful assemblages, enable sound educational outcomes, but require ongoing attention to their sociomaterial effects.

Wellbeing as social care: On assemblages and the ‘commons’

Time spent within either mental health inpatient units or residential substance use treatment services affects subjectivities and social relations in complex ways. This paper draws on recent currents in ‘assemblage thinking’, alongside Lauren Berlant's discussion of ‘the commons’, to explore these disruptions and propose new ways of thinking about the relations of support, wellbeing and care that may emerge within treatment. Care within these spaces can be understood as a sociotechnical assemblage – what Berlant calls a “patterning of social form” – that organises expressions of wellbeing in the promotion of distinctive modes of social wellbeing. These modes respond to infrastructural ‘glitches’ – breakdowns in social forms that typically accompany (if not directly cause) pathways into treatment – generating unique embodied expressions of social care, wellbeing, health and recovery. Drawing on qualitative data collected among individuals leaving mental health and/or substance use treatment settings in either Victoria or New South Wales, we argue that care may be understood by way of a series of social, affective and material techniques for restoring complex socio-material assemblages of care and recovery. This approach moves beyond the individual subject of health and illness to consider the wider repertoires of social, affective and material events, relations and practices that sustain wellbeing as a distinctive mode of social care, what Kim McLeod calls a ‘wellbeing machine’. This machine reimagines social care by way of pooled affective, material and embodied resources, and the ways that bodies draw upon these common resources in the restoration of assemblages of care and support. Revisioning care in this way offers new ways of thinking about the social, affective and material infrastructures needed to sustain wellbeing for individuals leaving treatment.

Influence at Work tied to Materiality in Danish Care Work

Influence at work is known to be an important factor for workers health. Researchers have called for studies on influence at work as a contextualized phenomenon. Based on individual interviews with managers and focus group interviews with employees in three care workplaces, the article shows how the materiality of the work setting ties employees’ influence to perform tasks in both hindering and enabling ways. We show that a work environment where employees’ influence is hindered produces negative experiences in the work environment, while an environment where employees’ influence is enabled produces positive experiences. Additionally, we study how employees influence the material aspects of their workplace.We present a view of influence at work as constituted by materiality and social organization in sociomaterial assemblages. This study reintroduces materiality as a concern in psychosocial work environment research and contributes a sociomaterial view on influence at work and materiality.