ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights that authority does not simply stem from horizontal or vertical sources spoken by human agents—instead, the material world, including objects, tools, landscapes, and documents, play important roles in authority relations. When we reframe authority as authoring, we emphasize that authority does not exist in a single actor but in relationships among actors that are spoken into existence. This chapter examines how the material world “accumulates” in bids for authority as human agents speak and attempt to author the collaborative trajectory. The chapter uses vignettes that focus specifically on how the material is called into these authority bids and exerts agency in these bids. The chapter ends with a discussion of how translation allows us to look specifically at the communication that aligns various actors in authoring attempts by inserting these actors into a shared narrative.
