This article is an investigation of the agency of matter and an exposition of the new materialist methods I have been developing as part of a muti-sited trans-national ethnography that features socially engaged arts practices alongside more traditional ethnographic and qualitative techniques. I think through the agency of matter and consider the temporality of matter as part of its agency, understanding these agents as constitutive features of the research assemblage. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from the United Kingdom, I examine how matter’s space-time can impact processes of making the social. I develop theoretical resources for moving the field forward.
BaradK. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2.
BaradK. (2008). Queer causation and the ethics of mattering. In GiffneyN.HirdM. J. (Eds.), Queering the non/human (1st ed., pp. 311-338). London, England: Routledge. (Original work published 2008)
3.
BishopC. (2006, February). The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents (pp. 24-24). Artforum.
4.
CameronS.CoaffeeJ. (2005). Art, gentrification and regeneration—From artist as pioneer to public arts. European Journal of Housing Policy, 5, 39-58. doi:10.1080/14616710500055687
5.
GruberC. (2017). Back to nature: The votive in Islamic visual and material cultures. Material Religion, 13, 99-101. doi:10.1080/17432200.2017.1272737
6.
Hickey-MoodyA. (2013). Affect as method: Feelings, aesthetics and affective pedagogy. In ColemanR.RingroseJ. (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 79-95). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
7.
WarfieldK. (2016). Making the cut: An agential realist examination of selfies and touch. Social Media + Society, 2(2), 1-10. doi:10.1177/2056305116641706
