Socio-material Relations Research Articles

From troublesome materials to fluid technologies: making and playing with plastic-bag footballs

The material recalcitrance of plastic bags – evident in their refusal to decompose and their capacity to evade neat disposal – is a widespread source of environmental concern and frustration. Yet throughout the Majority (developing) World, the incessant materiality of plastic affords boys and young men an opportunity to make footballs (soccer balls) out of waste. Made in situ, plastic-bag footballs are uniquely suited to local contexts and landscapes – a resourceful technology assembled from otherwise troublesome materials. Plastic-bag footballs are also fluid: perpetually in-the-making and characterized by diverse states of working order. Insights garnered from discussions with young Tanzanian football-makers and players position plastic-bag footballs against neocolonial discourses of poverty and precarity. Meanwhile attentiveness to the socio-material relations of plastic-bag footballs makes plain that they are not inferior technologies. Plastic-bag footballs invite consideration of how humans live, materially, in the Anthropocene. Plastic bags typify the ecological crises of throwaway consumerism and malignant toxicity. Yet, we ask: could it be that plastic-bag footballs exemplify the material resourcefulness, skill, care for things – and even playfulness – needed to cope with these very crises?

The climate crisis, carbon capital and urbanisation: An urban political ecology of low-carbon restructuring in Mbale

The role of urban regions in action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has become increasingly central to global urban governance over the past 20 years and particularly after new promises and agreements made at COP21. Despite some attention across urban studies, the need to interrogate how new forms of urban carbon governance are transforming infrastructure space remains pressing. This paper examines the low-carbon restructuring of the waste system in Mbale, Uganda, a town struggling to address its socio-ecological futures. The paper asserts that a UPE approach to how urban carbon governance is materialised advances three particular concerns; the governing of urban circulation, carbon capital and socio-material relations. Through examining these, the paper shows how global actors are increasingly involved in low-carbon transformation, use places such as Mbale as spaces of experimentation and dominate the governing of this restructuring. Yet out of such unjust processes new forms of contestation and low-carbon politics may emerge.

Affective Infrastructures and the Political Imagination

This essay explores how contemporary political life is framed through engagements with material forms. Extending work that has demonstrated that politics is best understood not as a discursive or institutional sphere but as the effect of material engagements, the essay asks, just how is it that materials become the grounds for politics? Focusing on the history of a road construction project in the Peruvian Amazon, the essay illustrates how politics becomes realized through engagements that entail the affective force of emergent materialities that break through or rupture a normalized understanding of sociomaterial relations. This rupture cracks open a space for material diagnostics, wherein both familiar and unfamiliar political forms are able to take shape. Thus in material diagnostics are found both the potential for ontological difference and considerable repair work wherein the grounds for a future politics is remade.

Identity matters: Language, practices and the (non)performance of rudeness in a Pupil Referral Unit

Combining linguistic analysis of interactions with tools from the discipline of Science, Technology and Society (STS) I explore the material-semiotic character of practices to understand how ‘rude’ identities were achieved in Manchester’s Secondary Pupil Referral Unit (England).Using ethnographic methods, I identify three distinct subaltern practices, banter, boyin and chatting shit, and show how their entangled linguistic formats and normative assumptions were incommensurable with the interactional formats of British secondary education classroom practices.I show that when these incompatible practices overlapped people might become rude, but they might also emerge as wits, winners, gibberers, liars or gossips, and which identities came to matter was contingent on the socio-material relations in play. I conclude that one way in which harmony was maintained during precarious moments of difference in a lesson, was through skilled staff who, in being able to participate in both classroom and banter/boyin practices, were able to mediate between the two when it mattered by crafting alternative identities.

Gestating times: women's accounts of the temporalities of pregnancies that end in abortion in England.

Tensions between the ‘clock time’ of medicine and the embodied times of its subjects are central to feminist writing concerning Western obstetric practice. In this article, I expand the focus of this literature by addressing the temporal dynamics of another site of reproductive healthcare: abortion provision. Echoing obstetric accounts of birth, time in legal, healthcare and social scientific discourse on abortion is routinely conceptualised as a finite resource contained within the pregnant/foetal body, which can be measured using clocks and calendars. I argue that women's interview accounts of their experiences of ending their pregnancies offer opportunities for critical reflection on this characterisation of pregnancy as linear ‘gestational time’. First, participants in this study re‐position the significance of gestational time by articulating its embodied meaning. Second, they provide alternative accounts of the temporality of pregnancy as a process which emerges through, and is disrupted by, the dynamics of socio‐material relations. The article considers the broader implications of women's accounts of pregnancy times for legal, healthcare and social scientific accounts of ‘later’ abortion.

Rethinking Stability and Change in the Study of Organizational Routines: Difference and Repetition in a Newspaper-Printing Factory

Organizational life consists of an ever-changing world of encounters, experiences, and complex sociomaterial relations. Within this context, standard routines can be seen as a solution to problems of inefficiency within organizations, especially when associated with images of stability, repeatability, and standardization. This can bring a sense of order where there is disorder, and stability in the face of change. However, whereas standard routines may be seen as providing solutions within complex and ever-changing organizational worlds, they can also be viewed as sources of organizational problems. Through an ethnographic examination of two routines within a newspaper-printing factory, our paper seeks to build on and add to contributions within routine dynamics (RD) by highlighting the emergence and coexistence of change and stability and the enactment of standard routines through a performative process of difference and repetition. In particular, our paper examines how organizational stability and change emerge through the dynamic relations underlying the enactment of difference and repetition and how these relations involve various—sometimes hidden—microprocesses that include the simplification and amplification of facts, scripts, and concerns. By drawing together the findings from our ethnographic research, studies within the area of RD, and concepts relating to a Deleuzian and Latourian perspective, our paper therefore contributes to the work on the repetition of routines by further unpacking the generative sociomaterial dynamics, creative forces, and microprocesses that underlie the emergence of stability and change through difference and repetition.

Debriefing practices in interprofessional simulation with students: a sociomaterial perspective

BackgroundThe debriefing phase is an important feature of simulation activities for learning. This study applies a sociomaterial perspective on debriefing in interprofessional simulation with medical and nursing students. Sociomaterial perspectives are increasingly being used in order to understand professional practice and learning in new ways, conceptualising professional practice as being embodied, relational and situated in sociomaterial relations. The aim of the study is to explore how debriefing is carried out as a practice supporting students’ interprofessional learning.MethodsEighteen debriefing sessions following interprofessional full-scale manikin-based simulation with nursing and medical students from two different universities were video-recorded and analysed collaboratively by a team of researchers, applying a structured scheme for constant comparative analysis.ResultsThe findings show how debriefing is intertwined with, and shaped by social and material relationships. Two patterns of enacting debriefing emerged. Debriefing as algorithm was enacted as a protocol-based, closed inquiry approach. Debriefing as laissez-faire was enacted as a loosely structured collegial conversation with an open inquiry approach.ConclusionThe findings indicate that neither an imposed structure of the debriefing, nor the lack of structure assured interprofessional collaboration to emerge as a salient topic for reflection, even though that was an explicit learning objective for the simulation.

Felt quality of sociomaterial relations: Introducing emotions into sociomaterial theorizing

Sociomateriality, in helping to overcome the longstanding dualism between the social and the technical, has become an increasingly popular theoretical perspective in Information Systems (IS) research. However, while recognizing the usefulness of sociomaterial theorizing, we contend that it also inadvertently perpetuates other kinds of dualisms—particularly that of objectivism–subjectivism and cognition–emotion. We argue that sociomateriality's current inability to express what it feels like to be a human agent, and the inadvertent perpetuation of the cognitive–emotional dualism, is problematic in terms of the limited practical insights these perspectives generate. To address this limitation, we propose and illustrate two different approaches for including emotions in sociomaterial theorizing. By proposing two approaches for the inclusion of emotions into applications of sociomateriality in IS research (one founded on critical realism, and the other on agential realism), we provide researchers with the conceptual tools to generate richer practical and theoretical insights.

Dynamic Reconfiguration in Planetary Exploration: A Sociomaterial Ethnography

In taking into account the ways in which material and social realms are constitutively entangled within organizations, it is rhetorically tempting to say that technologies and social structures reconfigure each other. But what does it mean to reconfigure? How does one figure the other and how do we fully embrace a mutually constitutive relationship when examining fluid relations? This paper delves into these questions by exploring how physical, social, material, technological, and organizational arrangements dynamically reconfigure each other in the duration of organizational practice. Using the venue of space exploration, we present three empirical examples from an ethnographic engagement with a NASA mission orbiting an outer planet in the solar system to examine various configurations and sociomaterial relations. In this endeavor, we suggest that theoretical and empirical traction can be gained by focusing attention on the dynamic reconfigurations between social and material realms. In so doing, we call attention to the ways in which current sociomaterial perspectives have difficulty articulating the shifting, figural, asymmetric and dynamic negotiations between people, social structures, information technologies, and representational objects. This paper contributes to current discussions of sociomaterial relations in information systems research by presenting an empirical treatment of entangled and shifting reconfigurations and providing language for engaging with this perspective.

Suburbia under an Energy Transition: A Socio-technical Perspective

This paper assesses the effects on suburbia of an energy transition to less carbon- or petroleum-intensive energy urban forms using a socio-technical theoretical perspective. The paper argues that while suburbia is the predominant form of urbanisation in advanced nations, especially North America and Australia, its socio-technical composition is insufficiently understood by urban scholars. Using a socio-technical theoretical perspective, the paper argues that suburbia should be seen a complex ‘assemblage’ that is configured through socio-material relations of land use, transport technology, energy and money credit. This system is also differentiated by social status and infrastructure access deficits. The paper argues that suburbia faces a number of socio-technical challenges from an energy transition principally due to heavy mobility reliance on motor vehicles. The paper sets out some potential trajectories of transformation for suburbia under an energy transition.

Who Do We Think We (and They) Are? The Audience and the Researcher as Participants in Sociomaterial Practice

The article problematizes the ontological and epistemological separation of the audience researcher from the very audience the researcher wishes to investigate. After all, every researcher co-constitutes the research outcome, and every researcher can potentially be articulated also as audience participant. The text consequently suggests conceptualizing the researcher as well as the researched as participants in and contributors to sociomaterial practice by building on insights from Critical Psychology. Thinking audience research in the light of such an understanding challenges widely accepted divisions between those who do research and those who are being researched, as well as between theoretical and empirical work, between qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Finally it is argued that the researcher's perspective on the sociomaterial relations of concern is necessarily situated and limited. Hence, engaging in audience research as social research calls for investigating other practice participants' perspectives on these relations so as to collaborate on tackling problems of shared concern.

Sociomateriality and boundary objects in information systems development

Information systems (IS) development is a complex organisational activity involving multiple stakeholders who interact with various artefacts in order to facilitate understanding and cooperation across diverse knowledge domains. A considerable body of work has analysed such artefacts as boundary objects, focusing on their interpretive flexibility across communities of practice. Increasing interest in the materiality of organisational practices directs attention to how such objects result from the performance of sociomaterial relations. This paper draws on these two strands of research to complement the analysis of project-related artefacts as boundary objects with a sociomaterial perspective on such objects and the practices within which they are constituted. The contribution of this combined approach is illustrated using the findings of a longitudinal case study of IS development. We trace the production and use of a prototype, the various people and practices with which it was associated, the multiple sociomaterial configurations that constituted it as a boundary object, and the social and material consequences of its use. The utilisation of sociomateriality as a theoretical lens enables us to further our understanding of how project-related artefacts act as boundary objects, and in doing so, constitute IS development as a sociomaterial practice.

Personal photography, digital technologies and the uses of the visual

Photography has been a wildly successful consumer technology. The shift from film to digital has, if anything, increased both photographic activity and enthusiasm on the part of photographers, viewers and subjects. In this article, I address empirically and theoretically the practical doing of ordinary, daily photography as it has moved from film to digital. I describe findings from my own empirical work over several years with a wide range of people engaged in both film and digital photographic technologies, including camera-phones and online image-sharing. Current developments in digital image-related technologies are changing the publicness, temporality and volume of personal photographic images. I describe personal photography as, in effect, multiple, overlapping technologies: of memory; relationships; self-representation; and self expression, all of which are changing in the digital environment. I draw on science and technology studies (STS) for help in understanding photography as an on-going practice of assemblage and performance, and the changes in photographic technologies as an opportunity to see technology-in-the-making – the activities by which people are reproducing sociomaterial relations. In this view, photographs have agency as they ‘take the relay’ across space and time. With digital technology we see shifts in the assemblages of objects, practices and meanings that we call personal photography, some of which may be more welcome than others. In particular, personal photographs may be becoming more public and transitory, less private and durable and more effective as objects of communication than of memory.

The art and craft of train travel

Current theories concerning the social and material construction of time and space have little to say concerning the specific things and people involved. For example, how do times and spaces get made on a train—with passengers, train seats, tables, and views through the window? Through a travelogue of one train journey across England, this paper explores the art and craft of train travel, and the making of a particular time and space. The paper draws together science studies approaches to socio-material relations, and geographical concerns with socio-spatiality, to discuss passengers as spatially distributed persons and property. Reflecting on ethnographic evidence in the form of quotations and photographs woven through the text, it demonstrates how these heterogeneous passengers craft their travel times as an effect of their travel time use; how socio-material interactions with pens, papers, puzzles and electricity pylons make time. Following Michel Serres, it also suggests how passenger time is not a simple flow but a percolation, and how these passenger times coalesce in train carriages to form communities. The paper is itself a journey, in the form of words and images, which begins and ends with the imaginary, social, and material work of making a destination.

Bins, Bulbs, and Shower Timers: On the ‘Techno-Ethics’ of Sustainable Living

Domestic eco-efficient technologies, such as recycling bins and compact florescent light bulbs, are integral to the eco-modernisation project. To date, however, little research has examined their role in the production of ‘sustainable citizens’. In response, this paper explores the productivities of commonplace domestic objects. It draws on qualitative research into a Sydney-based sustainable living programme called ‘GreenHome’, to examine how participants’ environmental ethics became articulated through objects’ use. This forges a form of embodied ‘techno-ethics’ that permeates socio-material relations beyond the immediate. Therefore, this examination of the quotidian deployment of eco-efficient technologies, whilst not denying the problematic nature of technologically-dependant futures, suggests some positive outcomes from individuals’ enrolment in domestic eco-modernisation.

Audience Interpretations of (Former) East Germany’s Representation in the German Media

Although there has been growing concern among analysts of German politics and society over the last 10 years about the persistence of a ‘cultural’,‘social’ or ‘psychological’ divide between (former) east and west Germany, most current research in this field shies away from a thorough investigation of the complex networks of socio-material, historical and spatial relations that contribute to the construction of social identities. Few studies exist on the impact of media representations and on the differential way in which many of the latter portray east and west Germans, while even less attention has been paid to people’s own interpretations and their capacity to negotiate between media representations and other social experiences in the process of identity formation. In this paper I begin to address these issues by focusing on the interlink ages between (former) east and west German interviewees’ understanding of their ‘place’ in the unified nation and the interpretations they construct of representations in the televised media. My aim is to show both the significant role which images play in the formation of marginalized v. centred social positions and identities, and the way in which viewers’ embodiment in complex networks of social relations helps to reiterate as well as to contradict the meanings that they find constructed in media representations. The point of this paper is not to determine whether binary definitions of east and west German identities are ‘true’ or ‘false’, but how effective they are and on what basis they can be contested.