Description
Scitus Academics LLC Sociology and the New Materialism Theory Research Action by Kianoush Bachmann
New materialism has emerged over the past 20 years as an approach
concerned fundamentally with the material workings of power, but focused
firmly upon social production rather than social construction. Applied to
empirical research radically extends traditional materialist analysis beyond
traditional concerns with structural and macro level social phenomena,
addressing issues of how desires, feelings and meanings also contribute to
social production. New Materialism is currently having a profound effect
across disciplines. Rooted in post-marxist thinking, but spreading out on the
flat ontology of networks, objects and bodies, New Materialism is an
interdisciplinary discussion on the properties of matter in terms of agency,
ethical responsibility and immanence. Along with post-humanism, the
Anthropocene, nonrepresentational theories and post-Deleuzian thought,
New Materialism asks us to reconsider the nature of the human and the
non-human, the difference between actual and virtual, the emergence of
politics and law in the face of ubiquitous materiality and, above all, the new
responsibilities that come with it all.
Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action discusses
issues of research design and methods in new materialist social inquiry, an
approach that is attracting increasing interest across the social sciences as
an alternative to either realist or constructionist ontologies. New
materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how
assemblages of the animate and inanimate together produce the world, with
fundamental implications for social inquiry methodology and
methods.Conversely, new materialism takes matter as a lively and active
participant in social life, problematises core hierarchical binaries such as
human/nonhuman, living/nonliving, and idealism/materialism, and
expands the remit of what constitutes ‘social life’. Questioning these
binaries renders humans as part of a flatter ontology than we might
normally think. This Book also considers how core social concerns of
responsibility and sustainability might be transformed when we pay
attention to the forces and capacities of materialities.