Ethical & Political Materialities

December 8, 2017

The analytical questions and intellectual debates sparked by new materialist scholarship continue to energize the field of anthropology, both rallying and dividing the discipline. Descriptively, new materialist work has articulated an ontological flattening between humans and non-humans (Latour 2005), de-centering the human and bringing into view the objects, forces, and nonhuman processes that shape our world and our actions. Jane Bennett (2010) and others (Frost and Coole 2010; Connolly 2011; Appadurai 2015) have sought to push these analytical boundaries further, using the insights from new materialist scholars to engage the ethical and political challenges faced by peoples across the globe. In doing so, scholars have turned our attention to the materialist dimensions of a host of social issues, from ecological crisis and contamination (Bennett 2010), to the materiality of race (Saldanha 2015) and gender (Wilson 2015), to the built environment and the uneven distribution of electricity and water (Gupta 2015; Harvey and Knox 2015). This conference invites graduate work building on these intellectual pathways, seeking to provide the space for scholars to showcase the application of materialist thinking in a variety of field sites and within the context of both old and new anthropological terrains. What can materialism help to reveal in the context of traditional anthropological themes of religion, kinship, embodiment, and legal order? How can we better understand emergent global processes of migration, integration, and new forms of boundary making (the literal wall) with materiality in mind (Jansen 2013; De Leon 2015)? In the spirit of the productive potential of polemic, we also invite work that pushes against materialist thinking, demonstrating its limitations and questioning its intellectual efficacy in critiques of capitalism (Kipnis 2015), the wake of unresolved crises of representation (Fowles 2016), and the ever-present danger of ideological reification (Pels 2008). By bringing the many burgeoning dimensions of new materialist scholarship together we hope to draw connections and elicit provocations that will refine materialist thinking and open new pathways for anthropological exploration. We are delighted that Severin Fowles will serve as the keynote speaker for this event, his work and critical perspective setting the tone for what is sure to be a productive and engaging conference.