scholarly journals The Arts and New Materialism: A Call to Stewardship through Mercy, Grace, and Hope

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Nicholas Leonard
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Materialist Theory

During highly polarized times, issues are quickly addressed in ways that emphasize divisions. To support the healing of our polarized culture through art, new materialist theory as presented by Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti will be entangled with art and artmaking according to Dennis Atkinson and Makoto Fujimura to argue for art as an act of environmental and cultural stewardship, creating new possibilities and differences in the virtual that are merciful, graceful, and hopeful. To form this argument, first a summary of new materialism and ethics through Agential Realism and Affirmative Ethics is addressed. Next, a cartography including scientific and theological perspectives is presented for a diffractive reading regarding the concepts of mercy, grace, and hope to develop a new materialist understanding through a philosophy of immanence to counter the circular perpetuation of violence. These concepts are then individually addressed through the proposed new materialist framework to further break from material-discursive dualistic thought. This approach is then explored through various artworks to investigate the co-constructing material-discursive nature of art to create new relations and possibilities in the world. Finally, an in-depth study of the artworks Becoming Us by Megan Constance Altieri and Teeter-Totter Wall by Ronald Rael are addressed to detail how a new materialist approach to art that focuses on the concepts of mercy, grace, and hope can position art as an act of stewardship.

Quantum Creativity: Afracting New Materialism in the Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110666
Author(s):  
jan jagodzinski
Keyword(s):  
Creative Destruction ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Quantum Level ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Karen Barad

This essay engages the vicissitudes of new materialism at the quantum level, attempting to differentiate what I take to be fundamental differences in the theoretical positions of vitalist theories as developed by Karen Barad and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene. I treat matter at the quantum level to differentiate conceptions of apparatus and assemblage. It is argued that one should not treat them under the same signifiers. There is the question of creativity that runs through the essay which also raises questions concerning an “affirmative” Deleuze, the dominant position when it comes to the arts, humanities, and pedagogy. Against these particular developments, anorganic life as in|different comes to fore where issues of creative destruction must be faced.

scholarly journals Videography as Refrain

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-137
Author(s):  
Theresa Giorza
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Public Park ◽  
Video Footage ◽  
Video Clips ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
The World ◽  
Karen Barad

A public park adjacent to an inner-city preschool invites children and their teacher into new encounters with the world, literacy and themselves. The park and preschool are situated in the inner-city of Johannesburg, South Africa. In this article, the researcher performs as mutated-modest-witness of events that unfold in lively materialdiscursive encounters between children, grass, friendship, a pen, cement table, sand, sticks, the alphabet and daylight. The agential realism of Karen Barad and the nomadic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari offer ways of re-imagining ‘the child in the park’. Diffracting with repeated viewings of video clips the researcher finds that forward and reverse movement and stops in different moments throughout repeated viewings of the same video footage produces different and new ‘stories’ about the events and the children involved. Conceptions of ‘child’ as literacy learner and of researcher-as-writer mutate through this diffraction which instantiates a non-representational videography practice.

Narrative Inquiry and New Materialism: Stories as (Not Necessarily Benign) Agents

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (10) ◽  
pp. 1151-1162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Lee Rosiek ◽  
Jimmy Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

Agential realism—the idea that it makes sense to view the world as being composed of various forms of protean nonhuman agency—has been a topic of discussion for many social science scholars in recent years. This increase of interest in agent ontologies can be attributed to the new feminist materialist movement in the philosophy of science literature. However, agent ontologies also are found in Indigenous studies literature and in Peircean pragmatism. These latter sources are also a part of the current methodological conversation about nonhuman agency. This article explores the connections between agential realist philosophy and social science research that employs narrative forms of analysis and representation. The goal is to assist narrative researchers in avoiding oversimplification by tracing out different strands in these literatures and mapping out points of connection and disconnection in detail. Intersections that hold the promise of complementary development are highlighted.

scholarly journals ‘seeing’ with/in the world: becoming-little

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 01-23
Author(s):  
Theresa Magdalen Giorza ◽  
Karin Murris
Keyword(s):  
Dominant Role ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Tree Sapling

Critical posthumanism is an invitation to think differently about knowledge and educational relationality between humans and the more-than-human. This philosophical and political shift in subjectivity builds on, and is entangled with, poststructuralism and phenomenology. In this paper we read diffractively through one another the theories of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and feminist posthumanists Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. We explore the implications of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ for early childhood education. With its emphasis on a moving away from the dominant role of human vision (knowing and seeing) in educational research we show how videoing and photographing works as an apparatus in an analysis of data from an inner-city school in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are struck by children’s seeing with the ‘eyes of their skin’ (Pallasmaa) and ‘seeing’ with/in the world (posthumanism), as their obvious distress is felt when a small tree sapling has been mowed down in a nearby park. We analyse the event with the help of a variation on Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming-child’: ‘becoming-little’, and Anna Tsing’s ‘the arts of noticing’. ‘Becoming-little’ as a methodology disrupts the adult/child binary that positions ‘little’, younger humans as inferior to their ‘bigger’ fully human counterparts. We exemplify ‘becoming-little’ through 4 and 5 year-olds’ learning with the little tree and adopt Barad’s temporal diffraction to ‘see’ what is in/visible in the park: the extractive, exploitative, colonising mining practices of White settlers. These are still part of the land on which the park was created but are in/visible beneath the ‘skin’ of the earth.

The Quantum Dance and the World's ‘Extraordinary Liveliness’: Refiguring Corporeal Ethics in Karen Barad's Agential Realism

Somatechnics ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peta Hinton
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
Experimental Apparatus ◽  
The World ◽  
Quantum Universe ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
The Universe

In her 2007 monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad introduces her reader to a world of movement and flux, where bodies ceaselessly participate in their own material configuration, where bodily integrity and identity is entangled in the dynamic materialisation of its social and political significance, and where processes of understanding and meaning making are bound up in ‘an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility’ (2007: 149). Through her reading of Niels Bohr's ‘philosophy-physics’, Barad introduces us to a quantum universe that poses some counterintuitive challenges to the modernist worldview which understands matter to be determinate and measurable, or that may quietly preserve something of matter's evidence against culture's symbolic dexterity. In advancing her agential realist account, Baradmoves beyond anthropocentric constraints to conceive of the world in its ‘extraordinary liveliness’ (2007: 91), an enlarged and productive scene of agency engaged in an ongoing performance of its own intelligibility, articulating itself differently. With the suggestion that agency is extended beyond the framework that assigns it to the intentions and accountability of the human subject, Barad offers a powerful rethinking of the politics and ethics of identity in her claim that the ethical call is ‘embodied in the very worlding of the world’ (2007: 160). In this paper I undertake a close reading of Barad's argument to consider its implications for how we might conceive a corporeal ethics that accounts for the production of inequalities and exclusions within the very becoming of the world, and becoming embodied. In the process, I argue that through asomatechnical unfolding of matter, the experimental apparatus, and concept, Barad prompts some challenging considerations for feminist approaches to what ‘the ethical’ constitutes or should achieve.

Enactments of a new materialist ethnography: methodological framework and research processes

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelia Schadler
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Analytical Research ◽  
Data Collections ◽  
Epistemological Framework

Materialist process ontologies, often subsumed under the term new materialism, such as the Deleuzian materialism of Rosi Braidotti, the agential realism of Karen Barad or the posthumanism of Donna Haraway, are becoming increasingly recognized in qualitative research. In this article I argue and illustrate that these theories allow for a reconfiguration of analytical research tools without using the representationalist epistemological framework these tools are often embedded in. Karen Barad’s concept of ‘exteriority within’ is of particular help for this task. I illustrate the research practices of two research projects, which included multiple methods of data collections (interviews, observations, re-enactments), a process of analysis I call referencing and a writing technique I call rebuilding worlds.

Entanglements of matter and meaning: The importance of the philosophy of Karen Barad for environmental education

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shae L. Brown ◽  
Lisa Siegel ◽  
Simone M. Blom
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
Australian Association ◽  
Powerful Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Environmental Educators ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Knowledge Communication

AbstractThe rich and innovative ideas of quantum physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad have much to offer environmental educators in terms of practical theories for teaching and learning. This article shares insights gained from a facilitated conversation at the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) Conference Research Symposium, and offers an introduction to Barad’s theories for environmental educators. At this time of challenging planetary imperatives, environmental education is increasingly called upon to contribute to students’ understanding of connectedness, and Barad’s theory of agential realism provides a way to think about, articulate and engage with connectedness as inherent within the world rather than something we need to create. By considering entanglement as a fundamental state, we understand that separateness is not the original state of being. This shift in perspective supports a subtle yet powerful approach to knowledge, communication and collaboration, understanding difference as integral within the world’s entangled becoming. The convened conversation sought to explore Barad’s thinking by defining and discussing the concepts of agential realism, intra-action, material-discursivity, phenomena and diffraction. Barad’s ideas were used to collectively explore what it means to be intraconnected and entangled in today’s world, and specifically how these concepts and experiences relate to our work and lives as environmental educators and researchers.

scholarly journals Begæret efter stoflighed. Materialitet, begrænsninger og begær i “Madame Bovary”

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (77) ◽  
Author(s):  
Signe Leth Gammelgaard
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Materialist Theory ◽  
Capitalist Ideology

Signe Leth Gammelgaard: “Desiring Matter: Materiality, Constraints and Desire in Madame Bovary”This article analyses similarities between Flaubert’s stylistics in Madame Bovary and the theories of new materialism, in particular the work of Karen Barad. Drawing upon earlier readings of the novel by Schor, Danius, Starobinski and Rancière this reading centers on the motif of boundaries and their dissolvement and it argues that the novel highlights a feeling of disappointment or frustration with a world that does not always move according to human will. The article goes on to examine how Emma’s money plot conjoins with the theory of active materiality, and to speculate on the relation between capitalist ideology and new materialist theory. Finally, two critiques of new materialism are discussed, stressing the importance of the notion of boundaries.

Book Review

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-389
Author(s):  
Eduardo Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
City Image ◽  
European Capital Of Culture ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
The City ◽  
The Olympic Games

Evinç Doğan (2016). Image of Istanbul, Impact of ECoC 2010 on The City Image. London: Transnational Press London. [222 pp, RRP: £18.75, ISBN: 978-1-910781-22-7]The idea of discovering or creating a form of uniqueness to differentiate a place from others is clearly attractive. In this regard, and in line with Ashworth (2009), three urban planning instruments are widely used throughout the world as a means of boosting a city’s image: (i) personality association - where places associate themselves with a named individual from history, literature, the arts, politics, entertainment, sport or even mythology; (ii) the visual qualities of buildings and urban design, which include flagship building, signature urban design and even signature districts and (iii) event hallmarking - where places organize events, usually cultural (e.g., European Capital of Culture, henceforth referred to as ECoC) or sporting (e.g., the Olympic Games), in order to obtain worldwide recognition. 

Uncountable Matter

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-41
Author(s):  
Jacques Lezra
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Human Hand ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal

Humanism returns for the New Materialism in ‘nonhuman’ form as matter. New ‘matter’ and new materialism thus fashion the world to human advantage in the gesture of abjecting us. They commit us to the humanism of masochists. They offer an animistic and paradisiacal realm of immediate transactions, human to human, human to and with nonhuman, face to face, world without end. The impulse is tactically and strategically useful. But ‘matter’ will not help us if we fashion it so that it bears in its concept the signature of a human hand in its making. Can we do otherwise? Only by conceiving matter as what absolutizes what is not-one: matter from which no discipline will normally, normatively, produce an object or take its concept; on which heroical abjection will founder; matter non-human in ways the human animal can neither designate, nor ever count.

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