New Materialisms

'Fashion matters' proposes a new-materialist framework to look at global fashion. A new-materialist approach helps to highlight fashion's materiality and understand the hybrid mix of both local and global matters in fashion. An analysis of the material details of the-often ironic-use of cultural heritage in contemporary Dutch fashion (e.g. Viktor&Rolf, Klavers van Engelen, The People of the Labyrinths, Oilily, Scotch & Soda) reveals how Dutch fashion designers tap into local clothing styles and crafts. Such examples are part of a growing preoccupation with local roots in times of globalisa-tion. The current interest of Western countries in their own local, national roots cannot be separated from a fascination for 'cultural otherness' and for 'other' local traditions. Fashion designers and firms establish a look that is both local and global at the same time; or: 'glocal.' The 'material turn' enables an understanding of 'glocal' fashion as both a material reuse of local crafts and as an immaterial phenomenon of globalized identities.

In this paper, I discuss how dance can operate as a method in the collaborative performance ethnography to explore the sensory and emo- tional dimensions of the embodiment of young womanhood. Drawing on one dance workshop where we explored material objects symbolic of womanhood, particularly introducing Nitika and her intuitive dance with gendered objects and her bodily ways of knowing and learning about gender, I illustrate how dance enabled exploration of young women’s identity intertwined with objects and their gendered meanings. I argue that creative embodied methods such as dance create space for working with the plurality of fleeting sensory and emotional information, not because it is more important than any other information, but because it is an alternative way of knowing about oneself, others and the world.

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

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

La investigación en el campo de las técnicas y materiales en el arte contemporáneo requiere la aplicación de nuevas metodologías transdisciplinares que permitan obtener una perspectiva renovada sobre los contenidos que entraña la amplia experimentación artística desarrollada en esta dirección durante el siglo  XX. El cambio de paradigma de la física y el progreso tecnológico han dado lugar a un caudal de nuevas narrativas posibles en las que se ha visto alterado profundamente el sentido tradicional de nociones como las de
materia
o
memoria
en el arte. La presencia material del agua en el arte de la segunda mitad del siglo  XX como objeto de estudio, nos permite proponer una metodología que revisa dichos conceptos a través del análisis de los planos imaginativo y técnico-operativo, así como afrontar los problemas que plantea a nivel teórico una estética de lo fluido.

Referencia completa:
MOÑIVAS, Esther. “Narrativas fluidas. El agua como presencia material en las artes plásticas contemporáneas” en: Dept. Història de l'Art i CEHA-Comité Español de Historiadores del Arte (coords.). CEHA, XVII Congrés Nacional d´História de l´art. Art i Memóri. [Actas]. Granada: Editorial Atrio, 2012, pp. 249-263.

Print version of PhD Thesis.

This practice-based project investigates modalities of performing eco-aesthetic assemblages across the modern nature―culture divide. Assemblages are here understood as non-hierarchical associations between bodies that are different amongst themselves. I argue that eco-aesthetic practices that work towards naturalcultural assemblages contribute to the wider field of ecological thought and cultural understanding of the nonhuman environment or nature.

The research uses a transversal practico-theoretical approach that, following posthumanist and neomaterialist elaborations of ontology and epistemology, creates a ‘material-discursive entanglement’ (Barad, 2007) of bodies and concepts. In this posthuman continuum of practice, I argue that eco-aesthetics is an ethico-political disposition of fostering relations of accountability and responsibility with the bodies implicated in performance, especially the nonhumans understood to be minorities in the current politico-economic organisation.

The research is situated within the landscape of modern biopolitics, which is understood as a set of conceptual and material strategies of appropriation of life through the ‘logic of colonisation’ (Plumwood, 1993). Situated naturalcultural performances enact a different modality of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007) with the world, by creating and maintaining fields in which life is seen as a force of generative difference.

The dissertation is divided in three parts which correspond to three entangled modes of performing research. The first part is a critical ontology which individuates operative modalities of modern boundary-making techniques. This part also outlines an alternative landscape of art and philosophy which go beyond binary thinking. The second part, through a posthumanist reconfiguration of the concept of assemblage from Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, and apparatus, in the work of Michel Foucault and Karen Barad, shapes an analytics for locating possibilities of material-discursive reconfiguration of the existing power relations. The third part follows the narrative of my artistic projects that sought to create naturalcultural performances with plants, trees, molecules of carbon-dioxide, sheep, and earth. This material-discursive entanglement of critique, analytics and performance as artistic practice together shapes a posthuman ecological praxis that is oriented towards naturalcultural justice.

AVAILABLE ONLINE:
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In this paper we interrogate the practices of imagining in human-computer interaction (HCI), particularly in scenario building (SBE) and persona construction. We discuss the philosophical premises of HCI imaginings in rationalism, cognitivism and phenomenology, and we propose (feminist) new materialist philosophy as an enriching perspective that helps generate a holistic, relational perspective of users, imaginaries and technologies. In the end we explore the method of figurations as a potential tool for HCI design.

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.

This article is about movement, documenting a researcher's reading, seeing, and feeling with the flaring movements of a young child's clenched fists as he punches the air in an early years' classroom. Drawing on postqualitative inquiry and feminist new materialisms, the article aims to engage with a series of images to think otherwise about the fists, aiming to nudge the researcher's gaze to attend to the unfolding affective forces of movement's encounters and compositions that touch the structure of subjectivity. The first part of the article addresses the importance of returning to early years' events to slow them down and open up spaces for not knowing so quickly what seems to unfold in/to the classroom. As an ongoing provocation of thought, I am interested in resisting the accelerated temporality of education by returning these images over and over, hovering over the surfaces of histories and politics to interrupt associative chains of thinking-feeling. The article then moves into the problems posed by the fists, stirring the sediments and deposits that are rapidly set in motion as the fists flare. Recognizing the affects of congealed language that genders and racializes my sense-making apparatus, the article mixes in stock notions of the child, reducing him to a body in pugilistic rebellion. The article finally turns to consider movement as another way of becoming oriented within one's environment. The moving fist-assemblage becomes a potent thread that gathers and disperses meaning and bodies, politics and history, form and movement, and being natural and ideological, material and semiotic.

Ethnographic video requires the makers to grapple with the idea of 'constituting a compositional present' (Stewart 2007), rather than a static notion of truth or representation. This audio/video performance project sits at the intersection of affect theory, feminist and performance studies, and extends these discourses into new materialist considerations of the posthuman and more-than-human. The piece takes up Bennett's (2010) challenge to any distinction between dull and vibrant lifeforms through the project's attention to the ways in which both 'nature' and person-made objects play an agentic role in the everyday of living and travelling. Video and audio-informed research can be, in our view, themselves enactments of new materialist mappings of research spaces and practices, suggesting new paths for methodological and conceptual becoming. In this 'micro-making' (that is, a making practice built up out of brief video clips, flash performances and the brevity of poetry), the three co-authors enact notions of entanglement (Barad 2007; Ingold 2010) as a "meshwork of interwoven lines of growth and movement" (Ingold 2010: 3) by bodily engagement with machines and machine-bodies that propel us forward and intervene in everyday practices and performances.

Avec HOMO INC. OPORATED, Sam Bourcier poursuit la réflexion menée dans la trilogie des Queer Zones. Mariage, procréation, travail, patrie, les bons homos ont basculé dans la sphère de la reproduction et de la production. Que reste-t-il du sujet politique LGBT lorsqu'il est défini par le droit et le management de la diversité? Pas grand chose. Raison pour laquelle les queers et les transféministes se mobilisent pour un agenda de redistribution économique et de justice sociale plus large que la simple demande d'égalité et d'intégration.  HOMO INC. OPORATED propose une critique radicale de l'homonationalisme et des politiques de l'égalité des droits. C'est aussi une boîte à outils pour lutter contre le néolibéralisme, avec une réflexion et de nouveaux moyens d'action sur les politiques du savoir à l'université, le genre comme travail, la grève du genre sans oublier le gender fucking!

Climate-changed California is the contemporary staging ground
for the long-standing collision and entanglement of the Indigenous and
Euro-American fire regimes explored in this essay. Specifically, I
consider how baskets handwoven by Native women from two distinct,
flame-sculpted regions index the shifting political ecology of fire in
California. My account concentrates on Chumash territory on the
southern coast, where Spaniards first prohibited Indigenous fire-setting
in 1793, and concludes in Yurok territory in the northern Klamath River
Basin, where cultural burning and weaving are undergoing an
entwined revitalization. Woven vessels are the foundation of
customary Indigenous cultures in California, notably women’s landcare
practices that entail the application of fire. Robin Wall Kimmerer
and Frank Kanawha Lake assert that across North America, “the ethic
of reciprocal responsibility underlies the indigenous use of fire, an
adaptive symbiosis in which humans and nonhumans both benefit
from burning.” People and plants are seen as coequals, codependents,
and even cocreators, woven together by pragmatic and spiritual
threads. Baskets embody this multifaceted, mutually constitutive
relationship. Woven from roots, stems, feathers, and shells,
they assemble more-than-human collectives. Together, they catalog the radical transformations of colonialism on the habitat and habitus of Native Californians—a process that I argue is driven by conflicting fire imaginaries that differentially define relationships between humans and land.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, feminist social and economic critiques of capitalism have enjoyed a surge of international interest among scholars and the general public. Concurrently, scholars have turned to feminist consideration of society's relationship to matter, because matter is at the base of economic relations in terms of natural resources, human interaction with those resources, and embodied labor-all of which involve gender relations. Global exploitation and appropriation of natural resources, a cornerstone of capitalist development, continues in the twenty-first century: for example, the mining of resources such as gold, iron ore, rare earth elements, or biomass; the continuing spread of genetic engineering in agriculture; massive enhancements in industrial agriculture; and new forms of the marketization of nature (e.g., the trading of pollution permits). Thus, even in the age of information technologies, human economies still depend on the raw matter delivered by nature. This chapter connects the ''old'' materialist feminism and ''new'' material feminisms to sketch a queer approach to feminist economic theory. Even if the two approaches at first seem contradictory, together the two illuminate paths by which one can think and live alternatives to capitalism. The chapter begins by explaining both approaches of feminist-materialist analysis and outlining central considerations in the debate around ''materiality,'' focusing on the core elements of the feminist-materialist analysis of capitalism: labor, bodies, and matter. Next, the chapter sketches the foundations of the feminist critique of capitalism, drawing on various theoretical references. What unites the approaches is the focus on the cheapening of women's labor in capitalism to the ''reproduction'' of human labor power and social cohesion. This is what the analytic term social reproduction refers to. The chapter then turns to ecofeminism, which sees social reproduction as the exploitation of women's and nature's ''re/productivity'' (Bauhardt 2013) as a means of safeguarding economic male domination. For the ''new'' material feminisms, the material environment of both living and nonliving matter is central to analyzing societal power relations. The chapter thus evaluates whether material feminisms can breathe new life into the ecofeminist critique of capitalist-patriarchal domination. The subsequent discussion of queer ecologies reminds readers to avoid legitimizing a two-gendered order of social reproduction as ''natural.'' The chapter then explores alternative concepts critical of capitalism, asking to what extent they include the feminist critique of capitalist power and domination. The chapter ends with basic considerations for further development of queer-feminist alternatives to capitalism.

‘Rare Earth’ challenges the rhetoric of immateriality associated with a post-internet cultural condition, exploring how emergent (artistic) myths, identities and cosmologies issue from advanced applications of material scientific knowledge. It is the lead essay in the edited volume of the same name, featuring seventeen essays by artists, curators and  scholars, published to accompany the eponymous exhibition at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna). The collection bridges the domains of Science Studies, Media Studies, Philosophy and Curatorial Theory while exploring the technologies and attendant cultural and ecological conditions associated with the exploitation of Rare Earth elements. Other contributors include Iain Ball, Erick Beltrán, Jane Bennett, Benjamin H. Bratton, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Erik Davis, John Durham Peters & Paul Feigelfeld, Mircea Eliade, Boris Groys, Marguerite Humeau, Timothy Morton & Emilija Skarnulyte, Boris Ondreička, The Otolith Group, Jussi Parikka, Matteo Pasquinelli, Nadim Samman, Charles Stankievech.

On the book: Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode. Because obsolescence depends upon the supersession and disappearance of what is old and outmoded, this volume sheds light on what usually remains unseen or overlooked. Calling attention to the fact that obsolescence can structure everything from the self to the skyscraper, Cultures of Obsolescence asks readers to rethink existing relationships between the old and the new. Moreover, the essays in this volume argue for the paradoxical ways in which subjects and their concepts of the human, of newness, and of the future are constituted by a relationship to the obsolete.

This paper discusses the processual ontological transitions of the curatorial after Paul O’Neill’s “curatorial turn”. Studying the curatorial from its discursive conception to a new materialist approach, it explores what can change when the curatorial is considered both a discourse and a practice, with no hierarchical distinctions or separations between them. To envisage the curatorial as a materia-ldiscursive practice is to admit that matter and meaning emerge together and one does not exist in the same way in the absence of the other. In this epistemology, the question changes from what the curatorial is to what the curatorial does, considering it as a mode of production of different kinds of knowledges.

The book examines frugality as an ideal and an ‘art de vivre’ which implies a low level of material consumption and a simple lifestyle, to open the mind for spiritual goods as inner freedom, social peace and justice or the quest for God or ‘ultimate reality’. By rational choice we can develop a more frugal and sufficient way of life, but material temptations can always overwrite our ecological, social and ethical considerations. But the spiritual case for frugality is strong enough. Spiritually based frugal practices may lead to rational outcomes such as reducing ecological destruction, social disintegration and the exploitation of future generations

The article takes a material ecocritical view on contemporary Estonian literature—Andrus Kivirähk’s The Man Who Spoke Snakish. The canonical novel, which focuses on the forest life being replaced with village life as well as the extinction of snakish, or, snake language, has importantly been classified as “the first Estonian eco-novel” (Hasselblatt 1262). In this light, I discuss the ways that nature emerges in new materialist terms as a subject, tangled with culture, challenging normative understandings of humanity. Particularly interesting is the fluid border of nature and culture, which suggests their reciprocal becoming. First, naturalcultural hybridity becomes manifest in the blurring of voices. Snakes emerge as the ancient brothers of humans, speaking with the last forest dwellers, while the protagonist speaks snakish and resembles a snake. The hybridity is further represented through the grandfather, human apes, and the protagonist’s sister. Above all, a hybrid “natureculture” is portrayed through Meeme, who resembles human “turf” and dissolves in nature, foregrounding the trans-corporeal naturalcultural entanglement. As Meeme becomes the earth, the novel suggests the intra-active becoming of the natural and the cultural, confirming the new materialist idea that there is no solid ground on which to stand but a dynamic world, where nature and culture finally still retreat into their own worlds.

What happens when symbolic and biological meet up? How can mental
and material resonate? What is the transition from synaptic to cultural
and vice versa? Or rather, what does it mean for us—plastic beings—
to arrive at a point where we try to understand the history of the plastics?

Catherine Malabou, interviewed by Kristupas Sabolius, tells about the latest development of her philosophy of plasticity.

Materialism and questions revolving around the role of material instances in social processes are currently experiencing a remarkable revival in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Besides the New Materialism of authors such as Jane Bennett and the agential realism of Karen Barad, the heterogeneous transdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has played an important part in this development.

But what does ‘materiality’ refer to in the different strands of STS? And maybe more importantly: Do these approaches really constitute a (new) non-reductionist materialism, and if so, what is so new about it?

The paper will mainly be concerned with Latour’s actor-network theory and approaches in its vicinity – such as John Law’s material semiotics. Probably best known for their methodological suspension of such dichotomies as human/non-human, subject/object, material/immaterial, and the inclusion of non-human actors in the descriptions of processes of technological innovation, discovery, and knowledge production, they have gained considerable influence in STS over the past decades.

The aim of this talk is to present some shared notions of materiality and their ontological underpinnings in the field of Science and Technology Studies and provide a materialist critique of contemporary research in this field. While a certain focus on processes of materialisation and the notion of relational materialism might qualify STS approaches as what Etienne Balibar calls a ‘materialism without matter’, the accusation that they posit matter (or materiality) against materialism should not be dismissed prematurely. I propose a return to some older (dialectical, historical) materialisms to evaluate the critical potential of current STS scholarship.

Serenella Iovino "We need to make some connections between literature and the sun, between teaching literature and the health of the biosphere" (Rueckert 1996(Rueckert [1978: 109). With these words, coming as an outburst of discontent for the absence of bios from literary criticism, William Rueckert was adding a crucial signpost in the direction of the ecological humanities. It was the end of the 1970s, and until then the planet's bio-geo-chemical cycles, nonhuman beings, elements, the earth and the sun, had noticeably been the "stone guests" of literary studies. Almost consistently, they were treated as subjects but bereft of subjectivity-symbolically present but absent as concrete entities, material actors. Still, Rueckert's point was, the world in which we teach and study literature, the world in which literature is made, is the same world in which humans, along with innumerable other species and beings, live. What physically affects this world, affects all the activities happening in it, including our intellectual and cultural productions. Even more, all these cultural productions do not spring out from the void, but emerge in the process of our evolution as living things. And so, like the simplest one-cell organisms, this expression of life that we call "literature" ultimately depends on the energy provided by the sun; like them, it is intrinsically at home in the biosphere.

During the 19th century, sublime depictions of North American mounds captivated Euro-American colonists and Romantic travelers. Settlers frequently embedded farms and homesteads into the material fabric of these Indigenous ruins across the American Bottom region and surrounding uplands, uncovering traces of antiquity in the process. Focusing on the Emerald mound site and broader mound discourses, I examine how material intimacies underlying this 19th-century phenomenon periodically corrupted Romantic sensibilities. Specifically, I highlight aspects of archival and spatial data that capture fleeting moments when mound intercourse generated uncanny affects and queer temporalities. I argue that in moments when uncanny affects haunted colonial homes, Indigenous histories queered the tense of settler colonialism.

La conciencia extrema ‒casi hasta lo intolerable‒ de los distintos planos de la significación fue la roca de Sísifo de Alejandra Pizarnik. Su condena a trabajos forzados puliendo las palabras como piedras preciosas. Construida sobre la intangible frontera que separa el lenguaje textual del lenguaje visual, su obra evidencia una concepción marcadamente plástica de la escritura.

In den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten ist in den Geistes-und Sozialwissenschaften eine bemerkenswerte Neuorientierung und Akzentverschiebung zu beobachten: Dinge, Artefakte und Objekte werden zunehmend thematisiert und neu konzeptualisiert. 2 Theoretische Perspektiven und empirische Studien, die sich verschiedenen Aspekten und Formen von "Materialität" widmen, treten tendenziell an die Stelle von bzw. ergänzen Forschungsarbeiten, die auf soziale Konstruktionen, kulturelle Praktiken oder diskursive Prozesse fokussieren. Innerhalb dieser allgemeinen theoretischen Konjunktur haben in den vergangenen Jahren die sogenannten Neuen Materialismen besonders große Resonanz erfahren. 3 Gemeinsam ist ihnen die Überzeugung, dass der "linguistic turn" oder primär semiotisch verfahrende Ansätze unzureichend sind, um das komplexe und dynamische Zusammenspiel von Bedeutungsprozessen und materiellen Anordnungen zu erfassen. Dabei ist allerdings zu beachten, dass die Neuen Materialismen keinen homogenen Denkstil oder eine in sich kohärente Denkschule darstellen. Es handelt sich eher um einen 1 Dieser Beitrag greift auf bereits veröffentlichtes Material zurück, vgl. Thomas Lemke, "‚Die Regierung der Dinge'.

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years.

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

Blue Sky Body: Thresholds for Embodied Research is the follow-up to Ben Spatz's 2015 book What a Body Can Do, charting a course through more than twenty years of embodied, artistic, and scholarly research.

Emerging from the confluence of theory and practice, this book combines full-length critical essays with a kaleidoscopic selection of fragments from journal entries, performance texts, and other unpublished materials to offer a series of entry points organized by seven keywords: city, song, movement, theater, sex, document, politics. Brimming with thoughtful and sometimes provocative takes on embodiment, technology, decoloniality, the university, and the politics of knowledge, the work shared here models the integration of artistic and embodied research with critical thought, opening new avenues for transformative action and experimentation.

Invaluable to scholars and practitioners working through and beyond performance, Blue Sky Body is both an unconventional introduction to embodied research and a methodological intervention at the edges of contemporary theory.

https://www.routledge.com/Blue-Sky-Body-Thresholds-for-Embodied-Research/Spatz/p/book/9781138608559

This thesis provides a theoretical basis for applying complexity theory to classroom learning.
Existing accounts of complexity in social systems fail to adequately situate human understanding within those systems.  Human understanding and action is embedded within the complex systems that we inhabit.  As such, we cannot achieve a full and accurate representation of those systems.  This challenges epistemological positions which characterise learning as a simple mechanistic process, those which see it as approaching a view of the world ‘as it is’ and also positions which see learning as a purely social activity.
This thesis develops a materialist position which characterises understandings as emergent from, but not reducible to, the material world.  The roles of embodied neural networks as well as our linguistic and symbolic systems are considered in order to develop this materialist position.  Context and history are shown to be important within complex systems and allow novel understandings to emerge.  Furthermore, shared understandings are seen as emergent from processes of response, replication and manipulation of patterns of behaviour and patterns of association.  Thus the complexity of learning is accounted for within a coherent ontological and epistemological framework.
The implications of this materialist position for considering classroom learning are expounded.  Firstly, our models and descriptions of classrooms are reconciled with the view of our understandings as sophisticated yet incomplete models within complex social systems.  Models are characterised as themselves material entities which emerge within social systems and may go on to influence behaviour.  Secondly, contemporary accounts of learning as the conceptual representation of the world are challenged.

One-act play of John Millington Synge (1871-1909) Riders to the Sea (1904) is about the life in the Aran Islands, power of nature and death. While the life endowed with the sea determines the fate of Irish islanders, their dependence on the water surrounding the Aran Islands brings death, too. The sea both provides life and causes death in the play. However, agency of the sea is not just bound to this dualistic nature in Synge's work. The vision of the mother Maurya about the deaths of her two sons, Michael and Bartley, upon the sea evidences that agentic power of the water is not only affiliated with its ontological presence, but also its epistemological capacity which is about the narrative ability of matter. This paper sets out to scrutinise agency of the sea in Synge's Riders to the Sea in terms of material ecocriticism and new materialisms.

Speculative realism critiques the transcendental turn in philosophy, a turn that it sees manifested in Kant.  But Hegel, in contrast, theorizes a return to reality through the contradictions of the transcendental rather than by attempting to bypass it.  In this way, Hegel provides an alternative version of speculative realism.

This article seeks to offer a critical assessment of the conception of ethics underlying the growing constellation of 'new materialist' social theories. It argues that such theories offer little if any purchase in understanding the contemporary transformations of relations between mind and body or human and non-human natures. Taking as exemplary the work of Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, this article asserts that a continuity between ethics and ontology is central to recent theories of 'materiality'. These theories assert the primacy of matter by calling upon a spiritual or ascetic self-transformation so that one might be 'attuned to' or 'register' materiality and, conversely, portray critique as hubristic, conceited, or resentful, blinded by its anthropocentrism. It is argued that framing the grounds for ontological speculation in these ethical terms licences the omission of analysis of social forces mediating thought's access to the world and so grants the theorist leave to sidestep any questions over the conditions of thought. In particular, the essay points to ongoing processes of the so-called primitive accumulation as constituting the relationship between mind and body, human and non-human natures.

Benjamin on Fashion reconstructs and redefines Walter Benjamin's complex, fragmentary and yet influential fashion theory that he developed in the Arcades Project (1927-1940) and beyond, while situating it within the environment from which it emerged - 1930s Parisian couture.

In this insightful new book, Philipp Ekardt brings Benjamin into
discussion with a number of important, but frequently overlooked sources. Amongst many others, these include the German fashion critic Helen Grund, who introduced him to the contemporary fashion scene; Georg Simmel's fashion sociology; Henri Focillon's morphological art history; designs by Elsa Schiaparelli and Madeleine Vionnet; films by L'Herbier and others starring Mae West; and the photography of George Hoyningen-Huene and Man Ray.

In doing so, Ekardt demonstrates how fashion and silhouettes became grounded in sex; how an ideal of the elegant animation of matter was pitted against the concept of an obdurate fashion form; and how Benjamin's idea of 'fashion's tiger's leap into the past' paralleled the return of 1930s couture to the depths of (fashion) history. He also demonstrates that Benjamin recognized in fashion a chronotechnics, allowing him to model temporality. The use of such relevant sources makes this crucial for understanding Benjamin both as a thinker and a cultural theorist..