ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the concept of materiality has been taken up in critical resource geography and cognate disciplines, focusing on the last 15 years. The first part reexamines a set of arguments for materiality made by the authors in an article published in 2006 and which, as work on materiality subsequently proliferated within critical resource geography, became a primary reference for the field. Second, it analyzes the growing reach of this article over time and takes stock of how materiality is currently used by resource geographers. The second part of the chapter explores how materiality has morphed and articulated several different traditions of thought, and identifies four distinctive (and divergent) motivations for the use of this concept. The third part of the chapter explores how critical engagements with materiality have shaped the subdiscipline of critical resource geography in significant ways, although its application is far from universal. Some of the most productive engagements with materiality are now at their intersections with work on posthumanism, postcolonialism, and geophilosophy.
