New Materialisms – serie

This international collection brings together arts-based researchers to explore how new materialisms have changed creative research practice. Grounded in a framework of affective and conceptual creativity, it makes existing and emerging pathways in research visible to challenge dualistic modes of thought-in-practice.With a focus on the methods employed by individual researchers, the coverage is interdisciplinary, including screen and sound production, dance, literary theory, social media, creative writing and community arts. The collection explores transformations in scholarly practice through methods of 'crimping' which reflect the 4 thematic sections: bending, joining, making waves and holding.

This international collection brings together arts-based researchers to explore how new materialisms have changed creative research practice. Grounded in a framework of affective and conceptual creativity, it makes existing and emerging pathways in research visible to challenge dualistic modes of thought-in-practice.With a focus on the methods employed by individual researchers, the coverage is interdisciplinary, including screen and sound production, dance, literary theory, social media, creative writing and community arts. The collection explores transformations in scholarly practice through methods of ‘crimping’ which reflect the 4 thematic sections: bending, joining, making waves and holding.

This cumulative work brings together a range of research communities to contextualize and archive over a decade of work in new materialist theorising and knowledge-making practice. Combining a reflective genealogical approach along with productive avenues for future research, this volume is an essential collection for the field of new and feminist materialism.The collection uses the new materialist movements in thought of changing, intersecting, practicing and transforming. As methods, these movements have engendered the metaphysical questions that different new and feminist materialist practices engage. The volume follows these four movements for genealogical, interdisciplinary, arts-based and politics-orienting research in four parts, each of which is preceded by an introductory framing-essay. Rosi Braidotti’s preface provides revelatory mappings to bring the book together and curated panels further offer co-authored texts which practise the collective nature of academic thinking advocated by the feminist new materialisms network.

Stacey Moran reevaluates Karen Barad’s legacy, by showing that agential realism cannot be understood apart from the rhetorical and transdisciplinary practices through which it is articulated. Against humanities readings that celebrate Barad’s concepts while neglecting their formal construction, and against dismissals from physics that treat the work as philosophically suggestive but scientifically marginal, she argues that rhetoric is not secondary to Barad’s thought but constitutive of it.Through close readings of style, metaphor, analogy, dramatisation and other textual strategies, Moran reconceives agential realism as a project that reshapes the relations among disciplines rather than simply borrowing across them. In doing so, she repositions Barad within debates in feminist theory, science studies and foundational physics, while also advancing a broader account of transdisciplinarity as an open, iterative and transformative engagement among heterogeneous practices of knowledge.

Maps materiality's importance in the emergent posthuman future of architecture This book gathers 14 architects, designers, performing artists, film makers, media theorists, philosophers, mathematicians and programmers. They all argue that matter in contemporary posthuman times has to be rethought in its rich internal dynamism and its multifaceted context. By transversally crossing disciplinary boundaries, new and profound insights into contemporary thinking and creating architecture emerge. Combining the dynamism of materiality and the capacities of nonhuman machines towards prototyping spatiotemporal designs and constructs leads to alternative conceptions of the human, of ethics, aesthetics and politics in this world yet-to-come.

Critical and Clinical Cartographies rethinks medical and design pedagogies in the context of both the Affective and Digital Turns that are occurring under the umbrella of New Materialism. This collection is framed through Deleuze’s symptomalogical approach which creates the ideal terrain for architecture and medical technologies of care to meet with robotics, alongside the newly emerging ‘materialist landscape’.A number of questions emerge, which are addressed across the collection.What is the impact of the Digital Turn on the contemporary medical and architectural education and/or practice?How does the Posthuman Turn influence the possible convergence of medical and architectural education and/or practice?How has the biopolitical concept of care mutated under the proliferation of digital technology?How could medical research contribute to architectural design and how could design, in turn, contribute to the improvement of health care?

Where are you from? This question often refers to someone's birthplace, childhood home or a place that holds significance. The location that is offered in response to this question is more than a means of orientation; it is a lived place that has complex meanings that identify, are learned and made. Yet, the significance of place to our lives is often overlooked. It is key to understanding who we are and how we are, both individually and collectively. Through embodied and material practice research, underpinned with theories of new materialism, Tara Page enables us to learn and understand how our ways of knowing, making and learning place are entangled with embodied and material pedagogies. She shows how our bodily engagements in and with the material world are intra-actions of the who, with the where. The creative and multi-dimensional approach of this book, with links to photographs-creative practices to be read with the text, brings together the global with the local, practice with theory and demonstrates the complex pedagogy between bodies, places and everyday social relations of power. Page reveals that placemaking is the very experiential fact of our existence but, is also a necessary one.

Helen Palmer examines the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarisation, or making-strange, from a contemporary critical perspective, bringing together new materialist feminisms, experimental linguistic formalism and queer theory. She explores how we might radically restructure this gesture of making-strange to create a dialogue with the affirmations of deviant, errant, alternative and multiple modes of being which have become synonymous with queer theory. Queer theory affirms multiple dimensions of sexuality and gender, while defamiliarisation celebrates shifts in perception. Palmer explores these processes from a number of literary and philosophical angles, concluding with a creative epilogue written in the voices of women throughout history.

Critical and Clinical Cartographies rethinks medical and design pedagogies in the context of both the Affective and Digital Turns that are occurring under the umbrella of New Materialism. This collection is framed through Deleuze’s symptomalogical approach which creates the ideal terrain for architecture and medical technologies of care to meet with robotics, alongside the newly emerging ‘materialist landscape’.A number of questions emerge, which are addressed across the collection.What is the impact of the Digital Turn on the contemporary medical and architectural education and/or practice?How does the Posthuman Turn influence the possible convergence of medical and architectural education and/or practice?How has the biopolitical concept of care mutated under the proliferation of digital technology?How could medical research contribute to architectural design and how could design, in turn, contribute to the improvement of health care?

Navigational tools towards a non-reductionist naturalism where matter is chameleon and agentialNew materialisms argue for a more science-friendly humanities, ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention – climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects – tend to leverage their difference against language and the discursive. Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even eschew, those of epistemology. While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is to re-navigate what constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a rewriting of the Derridean axiom, ‘there is no outside text’ as ‘there is no outside nature.’ What if nature has always been literate, numerate, social? And what happens to ‘the human’ if its exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and ecological implication?

An interdisciplinary encounter between new materialist and object-oriented studies and literary criticism. Through a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, this volume shows how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other in mutually productive ways. Focusing on how the study of literature is an underdeveloped field within 'the material turn', the introduction and each of the eleven chapters examine ways in which new materialist and object-oriented theory opens the study of literature in new ways just as they demonstrate the deep entanglements in literature of human and nonhuman realities. The collection includes an Afterword by Timothy Morton and hands-on analyses and close readings of individual works by such diverse writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Plath, Georges Perec, Ayi Kwei Armah, Jeanette Winterson and Paolo Bacigalupi.