New Materialism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

How did the philosophy of Henri Bergson look before Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism? This article provides a situated answer to that question by performing a close reading of Susanne K. Langer’s early engagement with Bergson in her monograph Feeling and Form from 1953. Both Bergson and Langer argue against polemical philosophizing. Such polemical modes of doing philosophy distort insight into the thought of the philosophers in question and in philosophical questions per se (such as questions about artistic creation). My reading of Langer’s Bergson is therefore infused with what is nowadays called a new materialist impetus of non-linearity, a non-oppositional philosophizing, and the reading follows the methodology of diffractive reading, a thinking outside fixed and fixating schools of thought. I argue that in spite of Langer’s explicit, i.e., polemical objection to Bergson’s work and to its use by artists, it is a Bergsonism with which Langer’s work is infused.

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- Philosophy of Art, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer

Internationally there has been some interest in how critical pedagogies might be enabled in higher education to support transformative social agendas. Few writers, however, have theorised the ethico-political aspects of this effort from a feminist new materialist perspective. By focusing on the analysis of an inter-institutional collaborative course which was constructed across three disciplines and two differently positioned universities in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper examines the design of the course retrospectively from a feminist new materialist theoretical framing. In so doing, it moves beyond more traditional understandings of critical pedagogy to consider the design and student engagement with the course from the perspective of what we call " response-able pedagogies. " Response-able pedagogies are not simply examples of the type of learning that can take place when power relations, materiality and entanglement are acknowledged; they also constitute ethico-political practices that incorporate a relational ontology into teaching and learning activities. We propose that ethico-political practices such as attentiveness, responsibility, curiosity, and rendering each other capable, constitute reponse-able pedagogies. The paper focuses on the transdisciplinary and interinstitutional course to consider how these ethico-political practices which constitute a response-able pedagogy might (be put to) work and how the students were both enabled and constrained by this design in terms of their responses to such ethico-political practices.

- by Vivienne Bozalek and +1
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- Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Higher Education, Posthumanism, Critical Pedagogy

What Lies Beyond the Darkness investigates how a creative sound and land-based art practice can position humans as an active part of any given ecological system; equal to ‘other’ natural and non-human co-habitants. This practice-based research aims to discover how to frame or heighten natural environments to facilitate a focused mode of listening and perceiving that can encourage audiences to emotionally respond to an environment. This will be achieved through the use of; existing natural environments such as nature reserves, public parks, and national parks; aesthetic interventions including outlined paths, mirrored partitions, sheer partitions, and contemplative signage; written guides; and audience surveying. This research contributes to a community of practice including sound and land artists that consider investigations into and creative work regarding environmental conservation and rehabilitation a major and timely concern.

- by Jess A Pinney
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- Posthumanism, Public Art, Critical Posthumanism, Environmental Art

Outdoor environmental education has long postulated a link between experiences outdoors in ‘natural’ environments and environmental concern. This paper suggests a straightforward relationship is problematic due to its implicit assumption of a nature/culture divide. Critical outdoor education has sought to overcome this dualism by
describing a relational understanding of the world emphasizing ecological systems and highlighting humanity’s ‘connection’ to the environment. This relational approach aims to tackle the ‘crisis of perception’, argued to be the root cause of anthropogenic planetary degradation. We draw from the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari to suggest that relational ontologies, as currently conceived, may reinforce a static conception of the world by emphasizing ‘points of being’ (subject and object). Deleuze and Guattari proffer immanent materiality, where points of being are dispelled by movement and ‘becoming’. We then describe ‘animism’ as a mode of living where the world is understood to be immanent and constantly becoming. The consequences of animism are explored with regards to conceptions of ‘nature’, ‘place’ and ‘outdoor’ learning for sustainability. Creative practices to tackle the ‘crisis of perception’ are suggested as approaches that circumvent static conceptions of the world implied by
points in relations and prevailing conceptions of nature as ‘other’.

- by David A G Clarke and +1
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- Environmental Education, Gilles Deleuze, Outdoor Education, Animism

Published as " When is a Haida Sphinx: Thinking about Law with Things " (2017) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 68:3 391-402.
The ‘law and . . .’ field of legal scholarship verges on consensus about the co-constitution between law and nearly everything else. Co-constitution raises questions about how to differentiate law from other things. The contemporary turn from words towards the material brings fresh perspective on these questions by suggesting that law’s differentiation is fabricated through materiality. This article considers whether and how material techniques that differentiate law might fabricate the difference of a thing not commonly understood by Western law as law. Its focus is an object created in Haida Gwaii in the late nineteenth century and now displayed in the British Museum. It shows that while techniques common to Western law differentiate this thing, competing materialities are also at work. Furthermore, jurisdictional choices are embedded in the fabrication of this thing’s difference. Understanding law as differentiated materially does not escape the social and jurisdictional forces that underpin how the matter of law comes to matter.

- by Genevieve Renard Painter
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- Law, Historical Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, Archives
- by Amanda Lagerkvist
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- Media Studies, New Media, Digital Media, Media, Religion, and Culture

This MSc thesis explores a transmasculine embodiment through bodies, acts, and objects, from a new materialist perspective. The study is situated within the field of transgender studies, and the research question, ‘how can transmasculine embodiment through the materialities of the body and everyday acts and objects be understood through new materialism’, is answered through an autoethnography. Key findings are that a) a trans-becoming emerges through the phenomenon of meeting someone’s eyes, b) through material-discursive practices transmasculine people work with and against the body, and c) onto-epistemologies of race and gender emerge through the interplay of temporal, spatial, and corporeal processes.

- by Max van Midde
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- Transgender Studies, Embodiment, Autoethnography, Transgender

In June 2005, a four-man SEAL team was dropped off by he li cop ter in the mountains of eastern Af ghan i stan with the mission to kill an insurgent commander. They were in the rugged, forested terrain of the Hindu Kush near the border with Pakistan, in an area where they had never been before. Soon afterward, these well-trained, fit Americans felt overwhelmed by their exertion in trying to navigate the physical volume of those mountains. The only SEAL to survive the mission, Markus Luttrell, subsequently wrote in his book Lone Survivor that their training for mountain warfare in California had not prepared them for those mountains, where "the terrain was absolutely horrible." The mountain was "so steep" that in their first few hours it was "a goddamned miracle we didn't fall off and break our necks." 1 Tired and eventually discovered by locals, the SEALs were ambushed by combatants who knew the terrain and controlled the most favorable position in mountain warfare: the higher ground. While the four Americans were being fired upon from above, they fled downhill, repeatedly tripping and falling off amid steep slopes. Luttrell describes one of their falls, "a nearly sheer drop," as follows:

This paper is a speculative experimentation that aims to explore the relationship between desire and thinking. Deviating from the letter, it attempts to understand philosophy as the knowledge of desire, as much as the desire for knowledge. To do so, it starts with the figure of Erôs, as assimilated by Plato with the dialectical method and the nature of philosophical inquiry. It then turns toward French phenomenology, for which the caress is the embodiment of desire-so much so that the horizontal exploration of matter replaces the vertical ascension toward the intelligible. Finally, it focuses on the concept of the erogenous zone, which Deleuze borrows from psychoanalysis but transforms into an ontological category intimately associated with the image of thought. In these terms, philosophy can therefore be regarded as a caress.

- by Jeanne Etelain
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- Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Plato, Phenomenology

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

- by Thomas Nail
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- Critical Theory, Religion, History, Social Movements

New materialism is a term ascribed to a range of contemporary perspectives in the arts, humanities and social sciences that have in common a theoretical and practical ‘turn to matter’. This turn emphasizes the materiality of the world and everything – social and natural – within it, and differentiates new materialisms from a post-structuralist focus upon texts, ‘systems of thought’ and ‘discourses’, focusing upon social production rather than social construction

- by Nick J Fox
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- Sociology, Social Theory, New Materialism, New Materialisms

[Catalogue blurb:] More-than-Human Sociology is a call for a bolder, more creative sociology. In the book, Olli Pyyhtinen argues that to make sociology responsive to life in the 21st century we need a new sociological imagination, one that addresses connectivity, understands the world in which we live as both a human and non-human world, and is sensitive to the multiple scales on which things exist. A fresh and innovative take on the promise of sociology, this book will appeal to scholars and students both within sociology and the social sciences more broadly.

- by Olli Pyyhtinen
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- Sociology, Social Sciences, Posthumanism, New Materialism

This article emerges from our relationship with Theo Combrinck, a colleague, a passionate social and academic activist, a recovering addict and a PhD student, who left our living space during 2014 ‒ a death that was unexpected yet a consequence of an iterative desire to end a troubled/ing life. The intensity of Theo's physical absence retains a vibrant presence and continues to intra-act with us as we consider socially just pedagogies. Theo's work lives on through memories, audio recordings and different forms of texts written by him, all representing his views of socially just pedagogy. Our entanglements with Braidotti's posthuman and Barad's diffractive methodologies shape our understandings of the past and present intra-actions with Theo in time and space. The Bozalek et al. Diffracting socially just pedagogies 202 generative process of our individual and collective becomings through Theo illustrate how the collaborative energy of co-constituted relationships contribute an affective response towards developing socially just pedagogies.

This essay gives a situated introduction to body hacking, an underground surgical process that seeks to transform the body’s architecture, offering an ethnographic account of the affects that drive this corporeal intervention for performance artist Cheto Castellano, and later, for the author. A brief history of recent body modification movements is offered. Through these situated stories of corporeal transformation there is an exploration of Eva Hayward’s concept of transbecoming, exploring the perpetual change of the body in transition, particularly in relation to posthumanistic transformations. The article closes with a speculative cyborg feminist body modification project titled 10,000 Generations Later, which explores how a subdermal archive of silicone implants stored under the author’s skin may assist her in a posthumanist transbecoming after the death of her companions species toy poodle Luk Kahlo, and perhaps even in a distant future. The author argues that this project becomes an apparatus of mestizaje between speculative cyborg feminism and significant otherness.

- by Ciclón L . T . Olivares
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- New Media, Performance Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary Art

As a keystone species the concept 'nature' plays a vital role in shaping our world.

- by Jamie Mcphie and +1
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- Environmental Education, Posthumanism, Poststructuralism, Critical Pedagogy

Blue Legalities is inspired by the emerging blue turn in social sciences and the humanities about oceans and their inhabitants. But as important and compelling as this blue turn has been, it has yet to substantively and creatively take up questions of ocean law and governance. Specifically, increasing concerns around warming temperatures, increased pollution, sea level rise, ocean acidification, bio-harvesting, and deep-sea and sand mining are driving regulatory changes and raising questions about the nature of territory, sovereignty, and long-established claims in international law. The rapid technological and ecological transformations that have taken place over the past few decades are now altering the ways that the seas are governed, suggesting an urgent need for more critical attention to the laws of the seas, in their broadest and most pluralistic articulations. Blue Legalities offers such an intensified analysis, focusing on the ways in which our political frameworks and legal infrastructures have been made, contested, and are currently being remade in the oceans.

Thinking posthumanly – from a post-Enlightenment, critical, new materialist perspective – things, including concepts, become more permeable and topological – they leak and stretch. Freed from limiting notions of agency, things behave. Rivers have established the same legal rights as humans in New Zealand and India, stones have been reported slithering across the desert floor in California, an electrical power grid in the USA has revealed a unique agential dexterity and walls have been spotted walking over mountains in the UK’s Lake District. Thinking with a posthuman partiality, we begin to witness a democracy of objects rather than an anthropocentric dictatorship over inorganic materials. If agency is reworked into an ‘enactment’ as opposed to something that is ‘held’, conceivably humans and other biological organisms are not necessary for agency (or life) to emerge as inorganic material agency erupts from unchoreographed assemblages of spacetimematter(ing). And if cognitive and dermatological boundaries are no longer organ-ised by an Enlightenment prescription, how might pedagogies perform differently and more equitably?
This article draws on the empirical materials from two psychogeographic walks that agitate lithic spaces with a posthuman affection. Part One examples a radical mobile classroom that I undertake regularly with university students where the use of it-narratives exposes the distributed agency of buildings. I explore what a posthuman gaze might do to/for performative pedagogies as my students attempt to interview a building. Part Two offers an example from my previous post-qualitative PhD inquiry which – by manipulating the practices of psychogeography and schizocartography – highlights how a shopping centre assemblage called Liverpool ONE diagnosed itself with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), thus reinforcing the notion of inorganic agential distribution. The pedagogic implications of this posthuman diagnosis are discussed.

- by Jamie Mcphie
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- Philosophy of Agency, Social Sciences, Mental Health, Posthumanism

This paper considers how feminist new materialist thinking may offer a resource for reorienting pedagogy in light of pressing global issues such as climate change and political unrest. The paper applies feminist new materialist thinking to develop a new pedagogical agenda. I argue that pedagogies are always already normative or are engaged in practices that play a role in opening up to various and unusual ways of relating and being in and to the world. Pedagogy is a worlding practice as it facilitates diverse ways of relating, thinking, sensing, acting, and is thus involved in the shaping of a 'collective intelligence'. In this paper, I argue that one fruitful approach to pedagogy may be to focus on entanglements and affects and on finding ways of facilitating a 'sensing' living/being of such entanglements. The paper concludes by introducing affective geology to suggest possible steps towards a transformation of our ways of knowing, sensing, and relating.

- by Malou Juelskjær
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- Feminist Theory, Pedagogy, Feminist studies, Affect

Laura White’s practice focuses on a negotiation with the world of STUFF, i.e. interactions with materials and objects, exploring ideas of value, profile, association, meaning and behaviour of materials, individual and collections of... more

- by tara page
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- New Materialism

Touching impermanence describes the experiential moment in an art encounter when one senses the enchanted reality of one's interconnections wit the sentient matterflow of existence. All matter in existence is constantly vibrating, changing, assembling and evolving into forms and organisms, cycli through decay and disintegration, then reforming again with diversity and difference; this is the impermanence of sentient matter-flow. Humans are j one form of these reciprocal assemblages; we are within and part of sentient matter-flow. We also co-create with sentient matter-flow, changing the cycles on micro and macro levels, just as they change us. On a macro level human actions have impacted and changed the Earth's biosphere, altering polluting sentient matter-flows to the extent that our present time period is becoming known as the Anthropocene, the human age of destruction an disconnection. There are many efforts to readdress our anthropocentric feelings of apathetic disconnection from the Earth; one is found in the arts correlates with my practice-led research. This doctoral study of sensate experiences of materiality and haptic thinking, which provide both maker an audience with direct palpable experience of time, forms a specific understanding of touching impermanence. My art processes involve working with ta materials such as beeswax; tree branches, stumps and bark; paper; ash; rocks; ice; snow; charcoal; light and fungi. Engaging with these materials cocreatively involves a methodology of touch, multisensorily following materialities' sentient matter-flow. Acting with the material, I am present to th material's own sense of time, interactions, agency, histories, layers of interbeing and interconnections with surrounding matter. This requires being op to the mysteriousness of materials, inviting moments of enchantment within art encounters and the realisation of touching impermanence. This thesis investigates my studio practice and works produced, alongside related practices of Australian and international artists, by drawing on the intersection between New Materialism discourses and Buddhist philosophy to address aspects of phenomenology and eco-philosophy in the complexities of these practices and artwork encounters. URI:

- by Kath Fries
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- Buddhist Philosophy, Installation Art, Contemporary Art, Space and Place
- by Zulaikha Ayub
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- Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Anthropology of Science, Political Science

The idea of vitalism is supposed to have been refuted long ago, but today we see a group of thinkers called the New Materialists talking about a ‘vital materialism’ and a ‘vitality intrinsic to materiality’. Is the New Materialism some kind of refreshed version of the old vitalism? What could materialism possibly have in common with a discredited metaphysical idea that is used today principally as a term of abuse? Is there anything of real value left in the idea of vitalism?

- by Richard Sandlant
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- Philosophy, Biology, Consciousness, Panpsychism

This paper explores the intersections within bodily materialism and future textiles by inquiring into embodied practices and materiality in care. By placing the body as a site of research, it centres around concepts of bodily care and the body as an ecosystem, one that is always in flux and considers the fluidity of bodies and bodily fluids, such as urine, discharge, breath and sweat, as fluids with potential to design with. It looks at how bodies are acted upon by outside forces, and explore more-than-human relations as co-creators in co-habiting the space of the body and that around it. To illustrate this, the paper introduces a series of design research artefacts that take a variety of approaches to exploring the materiality of care in the everyday. First, an eTextile toolkit that aims to create bodily awareness through hands-on engagement with textile crafting technology, then a biotextile harvesting toolkit that involves the raw material of the intimate body that explores DIYbio in the context of the home, and lastly a set of wearable living material-based explorations that recognize biomimicry and symbiotic relationships in designing for chronic stress. In embracing notions of bodily materialism, this paper explores the bodily abject i.e. fluids and the more-than-human as crucial to engendering new modes of knowing in intimate and personal care through textile-based materials. The paper engages critically with textile design research and practice by placing material that embraces care as ambivalent at the forefront and thus challenging traditional approaches to health and care and, importantly, the design of future textiles.

- by Teresa Almeida
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- Design, Textiles, Women's Health, Interaction Design

The Amazon Rainforest is an anthropogenic forest in constant management of forest resources modifying the environment in persistent ways . Even though both hybrid and native rubber trees have been tapped industrially, rubber trees have modified the Amazon Rainforest landscape and population at least since the 19th century until now. The Amazon Rubber Boom and consequent rising of belle époque elites[1] at Amazon is due its economy, which considered rubber by that time as "black gold." In addition, the presence of ghost cities [2]at Amazon, such as Fordland and Belterra, reinforce the collapse of its powerful industry, which abandoned entire factories, planned cities, rubber plantations, and people. During World War II, the Brazilian rubber industry rose again for a few years. Afterwards, rubber tappers and activists made possible the creation of National Extractive Reserves all over the country for sustainable activities. Nowadays, in these reserves, rubber tappers thrive from traditional practices (fishing, hunting, gathering, handicraft, and tapping in a minor scale) and yet their local knowledge and discourses still tell stories about rubber and entanglements in between things, techniques, forest, fungi, animals, humans, and non-humans.

- by TIAGO MUNIZ
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- Archaeology, Anthropology, Historical Archaeology, Industrial Heritage

How can (post-)qualitative inquiry do justice in uncertain times? Post-qualitative inquiry, in its embrace of radical uncertainty, held promise for ethical and political responsibility in an entangled, hardly knowable world. Lately, we (authors) are doubtful of that promise. For over a year, through in-person and Zoom conversations, before and during the global pandemic, punctuated by weekly protests of a resurging Black Lives Matter movement, we reckoned with our hopes, doubts, dreams, and disappointments of justice in qualitative and post-qualitative inquiry. We reconstituted our dialogue in this paper around the topics most pressing to us: coming to justice, being wary of idols and ideology, and deciding what matters in post-qualitative inquiry. We came to the uneasy conclusion that, with no one to blame yet everyone responsible, the veneer of justice is peeling away from post-qualitative inquiry; that postqualitative inquiry has, largely against its will, become a stable, divisive, and totalizing methodology; and that post-qualitative inquiry's radical uncertainty has created the enabling conditions of indifference, apathy, and triviality. We urge (post-)qualitative inquirers to keep talking about justice and to balance a desire for post-theory with the responsibility for praxis, action, and decision-making.

- by Jennifer Wolgemuth and +1
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- Social Justice, Qualitative Research, New Materialism, Post-Qualitative Research

O artigo descreve e problematiza acerca da agência material dos atores não-humanos que compõem a plataforma de publicação direta da Amazon. Defende-se o argumento de que os algoritmos desempenham um importante papel nessa complexa rede, agindo não apenas como curadores, mas como uma audiência não humana a ser levada em consideração no ato da escrita dos autores. Por fim, o texto sugere que a agência dessa audiência algorítmica figura como uma pista importante para pensar as novas materialidades envolvidas no processo de produção e representação da informação na indústria do livro digital.

- by Elias Bitencourt
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- Design, Digital Humanities, Actor Network Theory, Actor-Network-Theory

This undergraduate senior honors thesis investigates how imperial sovereignty is reproduced in politically contested regions. Centering on the politically volatile region of ancient Armenia, I use disparate assemblages of imperial Parthian, Roman, and Armenian coins in order to understand how each competing polity established claims to legitimate sovereignty by mobilizing coins as a shared medium of their political and economic systems. I turn to new materialist archaeology to move beyond standard symbolic or metallurgical coinage analysis and towards a more holistic and contextual view of coins and their malleable roles in antiquity in both shaping and being shaped by tenuous imperial claims to sovereignty.

- by Sophia Colello
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- Archaeology, Sovereignty, Ancient Roman Numismatics, Imperialism
- by Jeffrey Weinstock
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- Gothic Literature, Speculative Realism, H.P. Lovecraft, New Materialism

The autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a sensory phenomenon, sometimes referred to as a "brain orgasm," which involves pleasant tingling sensations in a body in reaction to certain stimuli. This article analyzes ASMR within the framework of ideas put forward by the musique concrète that offered new sensibilities of musical expression and promoted attentive listening to matter. At the same time, we treat sonic practices of ASMR as inspired by the concepts developed by New Materialism, especially the notions of physicality and materiality of sound recognized within the ontology of its vibrational force.

- by Joanna Łapińska
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- Music, Contemporary Art, Sonic Art, Vibrations

This is the MS of an extended critical review of Arjen Kleinherenbrink's Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze's Speculative Realism, forthcoming in Deleuze and Guattari Studies (2021). Please cite the published version when it appears.

- by M. Curtis Allen and +1
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- Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ontology, Gilles Deleuze

Might image have replaced substance; illusions substituted for ideas; language overwhelmed experience; text obfuscated world; now ignored the past? Might jargon mask authenticity; conversations censor criticism; affirmationism avoid argumentation; rhetoric swamp reality? Epistemology (and its methodologies) misunderstand ontology? Theory dominate practice? Mind overpower matter? Idealism deflate realism? North colonize South? At a recent academic conference in the South, nine of us grappled for four days with these “old” questions and their presence within the “new” discourse of “post” environmental education research. We struggled for an additional six-month period of email exchange to see and feel these questions in our own research. That slow, rich, and deeper academic exchange, as politics of judiciously engaging a collective form of criticism, culminated in identifying the research problem, and questions, of this specially assembled issue of The Journal of Environmental Education (JEE) about the role and place of allegedly new theory in the global discourse of allegedly post environmental education research. In translating our collective thought processes to a special issue (SI), we anticipate the reflexivity of the field will be critically advanced through engaging a number of emerging debates identified in the Introduction of the SI and in three “sample” articles specially written by Isabel Carvalho, Carlos Steil & Francisco Abraão Gonzaga, Louise Sund & Karen Pashby, and Phillip Payne, and an “in process” Conclusion written by Cae Rodrigues. There remains much work to do. This SI is only a start of reengaging overdue debates about the post.

- by Cae Rodrigues
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- Critical Theory, Epistemology, Environmental Education, Posthumanism

In 2017, for the first time in the history of documenta, curator Adam Szymczyk made the decision to site the quinquennial in two locations: Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. Szymczyk's intention was to "decentralize" documenta's Western European gaze, turning the exhibition into an opportunity to foreground Greco-German relations in the wake of Greece's debt crisis. This essay examines documenta 14 through the overlapping frames of education, ethno-nationalism, and wealth—three real-world currents made visible by not only the works of art chosen, but in the protracted controversy over the exhibition's budget shortfall, which reinscribed some of the very dynamics Szymczyk set out to critique with his curatorial decision to site half of documenta in Athens.

- by Emily Pothast
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- Art History, Education, Narrative, Contemporary Art

Who acts in during international relations? From state theory generally, and the field of International Relations specifically, the readymade answer is: ‘states do’ – so long as we assume states to be the high-modern regime of nation-states that so dominantly sorted-out conceptual possibilities of political agency during the 20th century. An alternative approach to global politics, in contrast, searches for political power beyond the state. Contemporary shifts toward neo-liberal and other transnational regimes are reshaping the political landscape to enable entities beyond the state to gain importance in governance. We are, thus, left with two options: We see states as entities capable of acting on the stage of global politics, or we see states as one of many patterns through which political activity is enacted. This dichotomy neatly parallels how agency has been conceptualized in social theory: Either we swallow the bitter pill of essentializing a high-modern model of human nature to understand how actors establish, maintain, and transform political order, or we join the deconstruction camp and dissect the mechanisms, techniques, and discursive patterns that surround this model of human nature, which will then one day probably be ‘erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.’ We develop this tension in our paper about who or what acts during international relations.

- by Nicholas J Rowland
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- Social Theory, International Relations, Political Theory, Actor Network Theory

As a growing and wide-spanning field of research, teaching, and collaboration, feminist materialisms are taking up increasing space in our pedagogical settings, especially in queer and feminist classrooms. Whether as a theoretical topic, as a methodological strategy for conducting research, or in developing learning tools, feminist materialisms work to foreground the complex forms of relation and accountability that mark processes of inquiry, and to re-imagine the already innovative feminist classroom experience. A strong part of this contribution of feminist materialisms is the turn to the very materialities at play in knowledge production, and as these take into account the intrinsically entangled human and more than human actors that operate in and alongside the classroom, and the bodies, spaces, practices and knowledges co-produced there. This volume of the Teaching With series assembles a collection that works to map European Feminist Materialisms across a diversity of classroo...

- by Pat Treusch
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- Feminist Theory, Methodology, Posthumanism, Critical Pedagogy

The article examines self-portraits taken in 2011 by Indonesian crested black macaque monkey Naruto with wildlife photographer David Slater’s camera. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against Slater to request that the monkey be assigned copyright and that PETA be appointed to administer proceeds from the photos for the benefit of Naruto and crested macaques in the reserve on Sulawesi. With this provocative lawsuit PETA wanted to stimulate discussion about expanding legal rights for non-human animals. These photographs, the discussion concerning them, and the court case shed light on the embodied agency of a non-human animal and human-animal relations in visual culture. In this article, I examine what it means when an animal points a camera at himself and takes a picture. I argue that the knowledge that the picture of the monkey is taken by the monkey himself causes the picture to be seen in a new light and raises questions as to the animal’s status as an object and an Other. Furthermore, it urges a thorough re-examine of the agency, power, and embodied consciousness associated with photography and the practices of self-representation.

- by Tiina Salmia
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- Photography, Posthumanism, Visual Culture, Human-Animal Studies
- by Emiliano Buis
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- Human Rights Law, Material Culture Studies, Human Rights, Property Rights