ABSTRACT
There is broad acceptance across the Humanities and Social Sciences that our deliberations on the social need to take place through attention to practice, to object-mediated relations, to non-human agency and to the affective dimensions of human sociality. This Companion focuses on the objects and materials found at centre stage, and asks: what matters about objects?
Objects and Materials explores the field, providing succinct summary accounts of contemporary scholarship, along with a wealth of new research investigating the capacity of objects to shape, unsettle and exceed expectations. Original chapters from over forty international, interdisciplinary contributors address an array of objects and materials to ask what the terms of collaborations with objects and materials are, and to consider how these collaborations become integral to our understandings of the complex, relational dynamics that fashion social worlds.
Objects and Materials will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities, including in sociology, social theory, science and technology studies, history, anthropology, archaeology, gender studies, women’s studies, geography, cultural studies, politics and international relations, and philosophy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|84 pages
Material qualities
chapter 8|11 pages
Decay, temporality and the politics of conservation
part II|80 pages
Affective objects
chapter 14|11 pages
Sarah Kofman's father's pen and Bracha Ettinger's mother's spoon
part III|63 pages
Unsettling objects
part IV|76 pages
Interface objects
chapter 23|12 pages
The environmental teapot and other loaded household objects
chapter 27|10 pages
Money frontiers
part V|86 pages
Becoming object