Vad är ny materialism feminism
However, contemporary work is beginning to explore and develop a range of research methods and practices that both put new materialist concepts to work, and reflect on them, reshaping what new materialisms means as an approach, what it does, and what it can do. Feminist new materialisms, we suggest, are at the forefront of these developments; however, as yet, this emerging field of methodological and practice work has not been fully mapped.
This special issue, therefore, draws out and pushes further the implications of new materialist philosophies for feminist research methodologies, methods and practices—and vice versa. In other words, it both considers and expands the making and mattering of feminist new materialisms. The impact of the new materialisms is felt across many disciplines, not least by challenging the very boundaries between them.
Feminist New Materialist Practice: The Mattering of Methods
As various publications, networks, conferences and workshops attest, people, ideas and approaches from many different disciplines and practices are developing the new materialisms, constituting an interdisciplinary and changing assemblage. It is vital to underscore here the feminist grounding of neo-materialism. With the changing of societies on local, national and international scales owing to economic, ecological, political and technological developments and crises, a reorganised academic landscape can be observed to be emerging.
Scholarship strives to be interdisciplinary to grasp and examine the unfolding complexity of ongoing ecological, socio-cultural and politico-economic changes New Materialism: How Matter Comes to Matter. Drawing on its long history of working on the politics of the relationships between nature and culture, feminism has played a crucial role in both establishing and critiquing this interdisciplinary field Ahmed ; Sullivan The materialisation of a concept is simultaneously tricky and breathtakingly simple.
To render concepts materially through practice forces us out of the comfort zone of using pretermined words or phrases, and we can no longer rely on jargon. Each material articulation is created and perceived anew. There is the real potential for novelty and innovation—a new type of reason beyond the logos of abstract philosophical thought.
Many of the pieces in this special issue foreground the sensory in their practice; as an interface between us and the world, sensory perception cannot be ignored in material thinking and practice. What makes this methodological mattering specifically feminist and how is it feminist in more than just one way? First, the energy required to overthrow conventional abstract, ideal reasoning in favour of messy mattering of methods is precisely the energy that is required to break down barriers and borders that prevent us from understanding and affirming difference without prejudice.
It is the energy that allows us to think about the concept of difference differently.
Ny materialistisk feminism
This is significant because it takes us away from thinking difference only as binary separation or as opposed to sameness. It is entirely new and fresh thinking of difference: it affirms rather than negates. The old, negatory type of difference, in Trinh T. Divide and conquer has for centuries been his creed, his formula of success. But a different terrain of consciousness has been explored for some time now, a terrain in which clear cut divisions and dualistic oppositions such as science vs.
As we can see in the traditions of non-dualistic, poststructuralist thinking from which new materialism emerges, difference undergoes a significant overhaul. At the same time as we open out what might be considered as agential within research, we are also mindful of the need to continue to prioritise questions of ethics, reflexivity, embodiment and participation in the research process.
Entanglement indicates how entities are always relational and to how this relationality is fundamental to the constitution of entities. Our focus in this special issue is on how research practice and methods both are entangled and make entanglements, or to put it slightly differently, on how research practices and methods are entanglements of various entities that also make various entangled entities.
Ny kurs i feministiska materialismer
In some ways, our aim in putting together or thinking across practice and method is to see them both as ways of doing. In social sciences, methods are often characterised as the practice of research, or as the practical aspects of research. In arts and humanities, practice is also sometimes seen as a method or as an approach. In both of these meanings, there is an activity through which something is produced.
As such, methods are politicised. Taking up these understandings of method from social sciences through feminist new materialisms enables us to consider how the human is only one part of a research assemblage and how other materials are also active in research, as we discuss below. Reworking the binary between animate and inanimate matter, we focus on a potential plethora of research agencies.
This focus issue of MAI adds a specifically feminist new materialist angle to the growing body of work on art and creative practice as research methods, some of which we draw on here.