233041 SE The Politics of Socio-Materiality (2025S)

As human beings, we "live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter. We are ourselves composed of matter". Our existence depends "on myriad micro-organisms and diverse higher species, on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions …, on the material artifacts and natural stuff that populate our environment, as well as the socioeconomic structures that produce and reproduce the conditions of our everyday lives. In light of this massive materiality", Diana Cool and Samantha Frost asked in their anthology on New Materialisms published in 2010, "how could we be anything other than materialist? How could we ignore the power of matter and the ways it materializes in our ordinary experiences or fail to acknowledge the primacy of matter in our theories?"
The study of materiality has been a central topic in STS since the founding of the field – from actor-network theory's account of how agency emerges from networks of human and nonhuman actors to Donna Haraway's material-semiotic approach to situated, embodied and localized knowledge. However, the 'material turn' emphasizes that the postmodern prioritization of culture over nature, of discourse over materiality and corporeality, still relies on the human subject and human agency and does not adequately address the question of 'how matter comes to matter' (Barad 2007).
New materialists, thus, highlight the agentive capacities of matter. They analyze the doings of matter, of things, the environment, surroundings, algorithms and infrastructures and how agentive matter takes a stake in co-producing scientific knowledge practices, technological artifacts and human bodies. Creating new concepts and ways to think about how science, technology and society co-emerge in an ongoing process of entangled becoming, new-materialist scholars present their interventions as projects of renewal, even sometimes of radical rupture with epistemic foundations of modern Western thinking. Such renewal promises to better grasp the complex imbrications of the political with/in material conditions and to hold a key for re-envisioning (more-than-) human worlding practices (Allhutter et al. 2020).
In this class, we will explore the vibrancy of matter in different research fields. Based on discussing how new materialisms reshape concepts of agency, discourse, materiality, practices and power, the seminar aims to raise questions on the theory-political interventions of the ontological turn in STS.

Allhutter, D. Bargetz, B., Meißner, H., & Thiele, K. (Eds.) Materiality-Critique-Transformation: Challenging the Political in Feminist New Materialisms. Special Issue of Feminist Theory 21:4.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham & London.
Coole, D. & Frost, S. (Eds.) (2010) New Materialisms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham & London.