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Mud pants have protected Finnish preschool children from dirt and water for many years. However, children do not like to wear them and educators in preschools feel that mud pants cause hard work. This contradiction made us wonder with mud pants. Drawing on relational–material approaches, we understand mud pants as material agent and ask the following question: How mud pants act as material agent in everyday relations in preschool? Our wondering showed that mud pants act as material agent since they create different actions within non-human and human relations. Children in their mud pants strengthen the discourse of happy, clean and healthy outdoor child. However, mud pants limit children’s bodies and cause discomfort, making it hard for them to perform happy childhoods. We argue that it is necessary to think with mud pants and other material agents in preschool to make the material discourses more visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of transforming natural marine space into proliferative capital holds global significance in modern modes of production. Under China's socialist market economy, the property rights system and resource allocation methods have created a unique approach to the capitalization of marine space. Drawing on concepts related to the capitalization of space and land, this paper develops the idea of the capitalization of marine space. It is a process where the right to use the sea area is transferred by the rights holders through methods such as transfer, lease, or shares and is ultimately put into production as a means of production to realize the creation of capital value and surplus value. Using the mariculture industry on Guanglu Island in Changhai County as a case, this analysis delves into the process and mechanisms of the capitalization of marine space in China, the world's leading mariculture nation, while considering the material agency of marine space. The research results show that: ① The specific realization process of marine space capitalization in the mariculture industry has gone through three stages: from natural marine space to marine space resources, from marine space resources to marine space assets, and the participation of marine space assets in creating value and surplus value. ② The material agency of marine space determines the feasibility of the capitalization of marine space and is also the decisive subject in shaping the specific practice of capitalization. The survival and profit needs of mariculture fishermen and enterprises drive the realization of the capitalization of marine space. China's central and local governments participate in realizing the capitalization of marine space with the relevant institutional policies and norms aimed at economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pet-carrying tourism market has gradually become an important segment of China's tourism source market, but relevant scientific research is lacking. Taking the network travelogue of Mafengwo as the data source and the pet tourists as the research object, the text content analysis and spatial analysis methods are used to explore the characteristics of travelling with pets. The results show that: (1) Tourists carrying with pets prefer the self-driving and RV transportation, as well as the scenic spot of grassland,coastal, ancient town and the accommodation formats of homestay and inn. There is obvious heterogeneity and agglomeration in the spatial distribution of the destinations visited by pet tourists, which generally presents a "core-edge" structure that spreads around the core provincial and municipal destinations to the periphery and mainly forms four core agglomeration density areas such as Yunnan-Guizhou-Sichuan, Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and North China; (2) The pets have the characteristics of material agency, and the material agency of pets is implanted in the daily life of pet-owners, awakens the inner emotional and desires and stimulates the motivational emotions of tourists to form four major material agency related motivations that affect the generation of pet tourism behavior, such as escape and release, companionship and attachment, psychological compensation, and social communication. (3) The new material entity of pets has an ability of assemblage. When this assemblage driven by material agency is embedded from "home" to "tourism" situation, non-human heterogeneous elements form a pet-carrying tourism assembly body with destinations, transportation, accommodation, scenic spots, etc. Therefore, the generation process of the pet-carrying tourism assemblage also explains the causes of the pet-carrying tourism behavior. Through the research on the connotation, behavior characteristics and its causes from a new materialistic perspective, this paper expands the cognition and understanding of tourism spatial system of China's pet tourism market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School environments in Finland are changing from traditional classrooms towards more flexible architectures. This change invites designers and commercial organizations to take part in re-thinking these environments by creating narratives of desirable educational environments. Their comprehensive furniture solutions promise flexible entities, including components that facilitate sharing and joining together. This article describes the school architecture reform from the perspective of one local school. We focus on an element emblematic of the planned relaxed learning environment: sofas, and discuss these using the philosophical concept of assemblage. We propose that arriving in the everyday life of a school the comfortable sofa – the promise of relaxation – also begins to participate in and to produce negotiations of power. Sofa becomes a participant in an assemblage of school: the sofa brings to surface relations that everyday life school assemblages already foster and sustain, making the negotiations of power in the school visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student agency theorising traditionally positions individuals as sovereign and under-theorises the role non-human material elements play in enacting agency. We recognise the role of the material but to honour our research participants and context we adopt an asymmetrical view of the agency of the material non-human in relation to the human in co-shaping agency. We apply this view to students learning in nature, and data from a developmental evaluation of visitor experience of an outdoor learning centre. Student and teacher participants took photographs representing their connection to nature on two occasions. Intrigued by the role the camera, the site and its material elements played in participants' photographs, and photo-elicitation interviews, we conceptualised the relationships at work as joint human/non-human material collaborations. We argue educators' recognition of the material agency of settings can assist them in understanding students' agentic positioning within the political imperative of connecting humans to nature as curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the work of Rita Indiana, addressing both her literary and musical production, focusing on the exploration of material agency and its influence on the shaping of social identity. It centers on the novels La Estrategia de Chocueca (2003) and Papi (2005) along with the song Equeibol (2010) to unravel how characters establish connections with objects that symbolically encapsulate success and the pursuit of economic power. Through exploring the link between material agency and the construction of social identity for the protagonists, the purpose is to inquire into how the influence of symbolic objects on the representation of social and economic dynamics is a central theme in Rita Indiana's work.

This article follows the activities of two initiatives seeking to improve living conditions of migrants in Germany. In their attempts to foster collective livability, both rely on ingenious assemblages of food, people, material objects, and their individual and collective affordances. Central in these assemblages are technological solutions the initiatives have devised to overcome the obstacles newcomers face: One uses food bikes that bypass social, physical, and bureaucratic hurdles, whereas the other employs a shipping container with a built-in kitchen that travels across Germany, leaving behind communities that cook together. We explore how material agencies operate and matter in the pursuance of convivial contexts that favor social inclusion, the latter seen as an ongoing socio-material accomplishment constituted as human and nonhuman actors interact in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of transforming natural marine space into proliferative capital holds global significance in modern modes of production. Under China’s socialist market economy, the property rights system and resource allocation methods have created a unique approach to the capitalization of marine space. Drawing on concepts related to the capitalization of space and land, this paper develops the idea of the capitalization of marine space. It is a process where the right to use the sea area is transferred by the rights holders through methods such as transfer, lease, or shares and is ultimately put into production as a means of production to realize the creation of capital value and surplus value. Using the mariculture industry on Guanglu Island in Changhai County as a case, this analysis delves into the process and mechanisms of the capitalization of marine space in China, the world’s leading mariculture nation, while considering the material agency of marine space. The research results show that: ① The specific realization process of marine space capitalization in the mariculture industry has gone through three stages: from natural marine space to marine space resources, from marine space resources to marine space assets, and the participation of marine space assets in creating value and surplus value. ② The material agency of marine space determines the feasibility of the capitalization of marine space and is also the decisive subject in shaping the specific practice of capitalization. The survival and profit needs of mariculture fishermen and enterprises drive the realization of the capitalization of marine space. China’s central and local governments participate in realizing the capitalization of marine space with the relevant institutional policies and norms aimed at economic development.

This study reconsidered educational materials by analyzing educators' opinions regarding handmade manipulative materials (HMMs) for children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities in Japan. Instead of concurring with the view that educational materials are static and inert products, the author adopted an agential realist perspective and considered them as agencies working and becoming with teachers and children. The author interviewed two retired teachers who had spent more than 30 years in HMM production and analyzed the obtained data using a diffractive methodology. Findings showed that making and remaking HMMs allowed teachers and children to engage with actualizing concepts without language and demonstrated the open-ended nature of learning for teachers and children with HMMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effects of prior intentions and intentions in action during the initial stage of a process of design in search of correlations between these cognitive processes and the quality of the design outcomes. We found that the quality of the outcomes was not influenced by sketching. Nevertheless, most of the participants said that they preferred sketching, and their verbal reports can be seen as indicative of the formation of prior intentions. Therefore, we argue that prior intentions have an important role even within a process of pure material engagement. This has important implications for understanding the active role of human agency and our capacity to form prior intentions with pragmatic effects in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Ethnologica Croatica is the property of Studia Ethnologica Croatica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Confluenze. Rivista di Studi Iberoamericani is the property of Universita di Bologna, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We examine the question of material agency as raised in material engagement theory (MET). Insofar as MET tends to highlight the causal roles played by extra-bodily material flows in human practices, the term “material agency” does not sufficiently distinguish cases in which these flows are part of an agentive engagement from cases in which they are not. We propose an operational criterion to effect such a distinction. We claim this criterion is organizational, i.e., systemic, and not causal. In the enactive account, agency requires three organizational conditions: self-individuation, interactional asymmetry, and normativity. These conditions can have organic, sensorimotor, and sociomaterial realizations. The dance of human productive practices is indeed spread between brains, bodies, and the world, as MET claims, but it is distributed in an organized manner that involves constraints and norms at various scales. We put forward a relational and non-anthropocentric perspective toward an enactive approach to productive practices. We discuss some aspects of agentive ensembles rendered more intelligible by our proposal, including incorporation, soft assembly and non-decomposability, and the grounding of teleology normative processes at multiple scales. In this manner, we seek to continue the dialog between MET and enactive theory, beginning with the view that a situated system must realize certain minimal organizational conditions to be called an agent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue features the work of individual practitioners who explore making through established decorative arts such as fine jewellery in Paris, mosaic glass making in Myanmar and a ceramic installation in the Cathedral of Palma de Majorca, alongside socially engaged groups employing co-production methodologies for designing everyday objects and experiences. Within each article, materials and the immediate and wider environment are considered as partners in the co-crafting process, albeit to varying degrees. The notion of serendipity and the influence of eastern philosophy on embracing imperfection in craft practice underpins some accounts and is questioned in others. As a collection, the articles evidence a palpable shift towards, and need for a more equal relationship and level of agency between the maker and the material, as argued in the Position Paper. This includes consideration of gender equality in particular crafts, where roles are traditionally linked to the properties of the materials and skills involved, as highlighted in the Craft and Industry Report. Social engagement through craft is echoed in the Portrait where stitch and embroidery are practised as forms of participatory expression, supporting human connectivity between cross-cultural and trans-national communities to influence issues of social justice. The affective role and emotive sensations evoked by textiles are also explored in the exhibition review of A Thread, Levitated and Hovering, staged in Hangzhou in 2022 and the first of three book reviews; Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft (2021), the other two discussing The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work (2021) and Industrial Craft in Australia (2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This position paper establishes a way towards a post-anthropocentric understanding of serendipity, or the happy accident, in making processes across art, craft and design. Throwing into question hylomorphic attempts to understand the application of the maker's know-how, which devalues the enabling capabilities of the 'happy accident', this position paper sets a course towards a post-anthropocentric model of making. Exploring the ineffability of materials and other events or circumstances that lie outside of purposeful affordances diffracts the focus from purposeful human agency. Instead, re-understanding the maker's process and knowledge as a transcendent intra-action between flows of material and cognition opens up space for a more subtle and comprehensive investigation into the complexity of human and non-human intra-action, which shapes the maker and the made in a reciprocal process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assimilation of functionally graded (or multi-) materials into architecture is deemed to enable the rethinking of current architectural design practice and bring back material considerations at the heart of the early design process. In response, the paper outlines a functionally graded material (FGM) design workflow that departs from standard early-stage CAD, which is typically performed via computer elements devoid of materiality. It then analyses this workflow from a theoretical perspective, namely through Edwin Hutchins' materially anchored conceptual blending, Lambros Malafouris' Material Engagement Theory (MET) and John Searle's concepts of intentionality. The aim is to demonstrate that due to the superimposition of material considerations that precede and succeed the CAD operation, working with material-less entities during early-stage FGM design is not logically sustainable. Additionally, multi-materiality allows for the questioning of authorship in the design process and leads to a repositioning of agency from the subject to the locus of engagement with digital materials and their affordances.

In this methodological reflection, I illustrate how participant-generated photos take on different roles throughout the research process. The photos discussed form part of a study focusing on ‘sustainable’ everyday practices. I account for how the photos act as windows into meanings of sustainability, as windows into sustainable materialities and as artefacts influencing the research process. The aim is to share insights gained as a result of grappling with photos, in terms of their roles – as well as what the photos portray. By bringing materialities to the fore, the photos made me reconsider the role of material elements within everyday practices, which I have come to understand as dynamic and vibrant. I argue that photos, like material elements in practices, provoke and have effects and can help foreground the often taken for granted mundane materialities entangled with everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Kiruna ‐ A Brand New World (2019) is a documentary film directed by Greta Stocklassa, and produced by the Czech company Analog Vision. It analyses the move of (part of) Kiruna, a north‐Swedish mining city, which is threatened by destruction because of the operations of the state‐owned ore mining company, Luossavaara‐Kiirunavaara (LKAB). The film focusses on the lives of a number of inhabitants, including Timo, a local activist opposing the move, the teenage Sami Maja and Abdalrahman, a teenage refugee from Yemen. Our discursive‐material analysis (see Carpentier, 2017) focusses on how the film represents and intervenes in a discursive‐material struggle over the identity of three actors—the soil, the city and the mine—and their interconnections. The article starts with a theoretical discussion on discourse theory, enriched by new materialist approaches, to develop a theoretical framework that does justice to the discursive‐material entanglement. This framework is then used to identify a hegemonic cluster of discourses that give meaning to nature, consisting of anthropocentrism, dualism and prometheanism, and a counterhegemonic cluster, consisting of ecocentrism, integrationism and survivalism. The analysis shows that the documentary film shows the workings of the hegemonic cluster (centred around the topoi of progress and TINA), but also visualizes the gaps in, and limits of, this hegemonic cluster. Second, the film also gently highlights the discursive‐material conflict by giving voice to those who identify with the counterhegemonic discourses, and by representing the soil as having material agency, resisting its exploitation. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

In view of the growing concerns and innate creative potential of waste, this article reconsiders the ontological status of discarded materials and materiality as active components/agents in the conception, making, and interpretation of art through a new-materialist framework. By denying a pure representational analysis, the study instead brings forth art's complex dynamic material-semiotic character. It offers a re-reading of the artworks of twenty-first century Indian artists by exploring multiple facets of how trash operates conceptually and physically. A nuanced understanding of the co-constitutive, relational role of myriad human and non-human actors is instantiated through case studies. By discussing the re-appropriation of trash under three overlapping categories, where the artists apply trash as metaphor and symbol; relics; and substance/physical matter (for its physical properties like texture, colour, etc), the study acknowledges the material-discursive character of art. Thus, the study offers an extended interpretation of materials and objects in art where meaning and material are mutually constructive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assimilation of functionally graded (or multi-) materials into architecture is deemed to enable the rethinking of current architectural design practice and bring back material considerations at the heart of the early design process. In response, the paper outlines a functionally graded material (FGM) design workflow that departs from standard early-stage CAD, which is typically performed via computer elements devoid of materiality. It then analyses this workflow from a theoretical perspective, namely through Edwin Hutchins' materially anchored conceptual blending, Lambros Malafouris' Material Engagement Theory (MET) and John Searle's concepts of intentionality. The aim is to demonstrate that due to the superimposition of material considerations that precede and succeed the CAD operation, working with material-less entities during early-stage FGM design is not logically sustainable. Additionally, multi-materiality allows for the questioning of authorship in the design process and leads to a repositioning of agency from the subject to the locus of engagement with digital materials and their affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Arqueologia is the property of Revista de Arqueologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Platforms are fulfilling functions previously considered within the jurisdictions of media outlets, such as news distribution, advertising, or editorial judgment. This article proposes strengthening the vocabulary of scholarship on news organizations and platforms by taking material agency seriously. It animates sociomateriality as a suitable conceptual framework to dissect human and nonhuman agency in editorial judgment and presents future research with ontological paths for considering their relationship. When platforms are accused of bias or partisanship, this pinpoints the importance of perceptions of who is in charge of editorial judgment. This article suggests that by utilizing a sociomateriality framework to disentangle the interplay of the human and the algorithmic, editorial judgment surfaces as a seminal similarity between media and platforms. The ancillary concept of commensurability serves as an analytical heuristic to render such comparisons possible. This is illustrated by two exemplifications of the sociomateriality framework: The cases of Facebook Trending Topics, and of Twitter Moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how a close encounter with a woman’s making practice, when viewed through a critical feminist lens, can give space to a broader discus- sion on how female creative labour is viewed and valued. Drawing on a 2018 doc- toral thesis titled ’How women make – exploring female making practice through design anthropology’, the focus here is firstly, on how conceptions of immanence in a making practice have implications for ontological concepts of agency and, secondly, on the re-working of normative identity positions within women’s differ- ent crafting and up-cycling practices. These in turn point to certain conceptions of the feminine in the public realm and how visual and material voice is perceived based on gender. Different opportunities for subversion materialise in the wom- en’s work through the interplay of concepts of beauty, femininity, nature, decay and death. The discussion highlights excerpts of a series of close up vignettes, which combined ethnographic, auto-ethnographic accounts and reflections informed by feminist theory and critique.

Few critics have paid serious attention to the corporeality depicted in the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's climate change poetry, despite the fact that the body has become an increasingly crucial topic in the climate change era. In a situation similar to Heaney's, the Chinese ecopoet Hua Hai has stressed the mutual transformations between different forms of bodies in his works, but there have been few studies on Hua's ideas of the body. These ideas are closely related to Confucianism and Daoism in particular. This article, referencing corporeal theories in the West and the East, is a comparative reading of Heaney's and Hua's ecological poetry against the backdrop of climate change. By representing various bodies, be they human or nonhuman, as interconnected and interdependent in different poetic ways, both poets provide fresh insights into the idea of corporeality, which is important to address in relation to the ongoing climate crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers elements for understanding the agency of artifacts and various types of agency. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Amazon and ethnographic studies, it presents how human agency is defined in relation to the artifacts it produces. This relationship enhances agentive capacities, forming an augmented agency. Such agency emerges when designing artifacts to enhance the capacity to act. Additionally, agents may believe or imagine that an artifact behaves as a living being when they attribute agency to it 'as if'. The fictional effects of this type of agency derive from cognitive processes that support fictional discourse. The study of 'as-if' agency and its relation to augmented agency offers an alternative to recurrent animism, allowing for a new approach to the semiotics of artifacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kiruna ‐ A Brand New World (2019) is a documentary film directed by Greta Stocklassa, and produced by the Czech company Analog Vision. It analyses the move of (part of) Kiruna, a north‐Swedish mining city, which is threatened by destruction because of the operations of the state‐owned ore mining company, Luossavaara‐Kiirunavaara (LKAB). The film focusses on the lives of a number of inhabitants, including Timo, a local activist opposing the move, the teenage Sami Maja and Abdalrahman, a teenage refugee from Yemen.Our discursive‐material analysis (see Carpentier, 2017) focusses on how the film represents and intervenes in a discursive‐material struggle over the identity of three actors—the soil, the city and the mine—and their interconnections.The article starts with a theoretical discussion on discourse theory, enriched by new materialist approaches, to develop a theoretical framework that does justice to the discursive‐material entanglement.This framework is then used to identify a hegemonic cluster of discourses that give meaning to nature, consisting of anthropocentrism, dualism and prometheanism, and a counterhegemonic cluster, consisting of ecocentrism, integrationism and survivalism.The analysis shows that the documentary film shows the workings of the hegemonic cluster (centred around the topoi of progress and TINA), but also visualizes the gaps in, and limits of, this hegemonic cluster. Second, the film also gently highlights the discursive‐material conflict by giving voice to those who identify with the counterhegemonic discourses, and by representing the soil as having material agency, resisting its exploitation. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precision of materialized designs is the conventional goal of digital fabrication in architecture. Recently, however, an alternative concept has emerged which refashions the imprecisions of digital processes into creative opportunities. While the computational design community has embraced this idea, its novelty results in a yet incomplete understanding. Prompted by the challenge of the still missing knowledge, this study explored imprecision in four digital fabrication approaches to establish how it influences the aesthetic attributes of materialized designs. Imprecision occurrences for four different digitally aided materialization processes were characterized. The aesthetic features emerging from these imprecisions were also identified and the possibilities of tampering with them for design exploration purposes were discussed. By considering the aesthetic potentials of deliberate imprecision, the study has sought to challenge the canon of high fidelity in contemporary computational design and to argue for imprecision in computation that shapes a new generation of designs featuring the new aesthetic of computational imperfection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La limitación de los recursos y la extinción masiva provocada por el calentamientoglobal tienen un profundo impacto en nuestra actual forma de entender el mundo.Por ello, la necesidad de un enfoque práctico y teórico sobre una mirada mássostenible y empática hacia las relaciones humanas y no humanas, incluidanuestra relación con la materia, está impulsando la búsqueda de nuevasperspectivas y procedimientos en la investigación y la enseñanza de losprocesos de diseño en las instituciones académicas. Como resultado de un largo compromiso con la cuestión del color en la Cátedra de Artes Visuales en el Departamento de Arquitectura de la RWTH Aachen Universidad/Alemania, elproyecto de investigación en curso “Living Colour” fue concebido en2020 y puesto en práctica como un formato de enseñanza. En “LivingColour” se discute el contexto teórico de los métodos contemporáneos decoloración y la producción sostenible del material y su aplicación. Se examinany reflexionan las cuestiones relativas a las implicaciones culturales, ecológicas y sociales y cómo las características específicas de las fuentesorgánicas afectan a los procesos de diseño. La atención se centra en lascualidades procesales, performativas y transformadoras de los colorantes enrelación con la resistencia a la luz, la temperatura, la humedad y el materialde soporte. Las prácticas y los resultados dan cuenta del impacto de entrelazarla teoría y la práctica interdisciplinarias, tratando a ambas como iguales parala producción de conocimiento en la investigación y la enseñanza.

Considerations of materiality and object-oriented approaches have greatly influenced the development of archaeological theory in recent years. Yet, Palaeolithic archaeology has been slow in incorporating this emerging body of scholarship and exploring its bearing on the human deep past. This paper probes into the potential of materiality theory to clarify the material dynamics of the Plio-Pleistocene and seeks to re-articulate the debate on the evolution of our species with materiality discourses in archaeology and the humanities more broadly. We argue that the signature temporalities and geospatial scales of observation provided by the Palaeolithic record offer unique opportunities to examine the active role of material things, objects, artefacts and technologies in the emergence, stabilisation and transformation of hominin lifeworlds and the accretion of long-term trajectories of material culture change. We map three axes of human–thing relations—ecological, technical and evolutionary—and deploy a range of case studies from the literature to show that a critical re-assessment of material agency not only discloses novel insights and questions, but can also refine what we already know about the human deep past. Our exploration underscores the benefits of de-centring human behaviour and intentionality and demonstrates that materiality lends itself as a productive nexus of exchange and mutual inspiration for diverging schools and research interests in Palaeolithic archaeology. An integrated object-oriented perspective calls attention to the human condition as a product of millennial-scale human–thing co-adaptation, in the course of which hominins, artefacts and technologies continuously influenced and co-created each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a relational model for electroacoustic composition practice. In the model, relationality focuses on perspectives of response-ability of the composer with more-than-human agents, within an entangled sympoietic musical space. Here, the response-practices are built on acts of listening that entail, aural analysis and embodied practice with material objects. Within the scope of this paper, more-than-human agents are narrowed down to only recorded sounds (fixed media sound files] and physical material objects. In investigating such response-able compositional practices, the model follows Post-humanist and New-materialist strands focusing on various concepts proposed by Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. And in doing so, it aims to re-figure some of the conventional discourses about the concepts of poietic agency, and of multivalence within the composition practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their differences, sociologists of architecture agree on one fundamental premise: buildings—and architecture more broadly—play a role in shaping social life. The importance of the "agency" of architecture has been equally highlighted in debates in cultural theory. The authors of the publications under discussion here approached this issue through empirical research. We suggest that, in doing so, they make visible the methodological challenges and potentials that confront sociologists of architecture. We aim to offer a comparative overview of some of the newer publications in the German-speaking sociology of architecture which adapt established methods of qualitative sociology to the field of architecture. We review these works through the lens of how well they empirically address the issue of the ways in which architecture can be shown to have agency in society.

Despite their differences, sociologists of architecture agree on one fundamental premise: buildings--and architecture more broadly--play a role in shaping social life. The importance of the "agency" of architecture has been equally highlighted in debates in cultural theory. The authors of the publications under discussion here approached this issue through empirical research. We suggest that, in doing so, they make visible the methodological challenges and potentials that confront sociologists of architecture. We aim to offer a comparative overview of some of the newer publications in the German-speaking sociology of architecture which adapt established methods of qualitative sociology to the field of architecture. We review these works through the lens of how well they empirically address the issue of the ways in which architecture can be shown to have agency in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social brain hypothesis (SBH) has played a prominent role in interpreting the relationship between human social, cognitive and technological evolution in archaeology and beyond. This article examines how the SBH has been applied to the Palaeolithic material record, and puts forward a critique of the approach. Informed by Material Engagement Theory (MET) and its understanding of material agency, it is argued that the SBH has an inherently cognitivist understanding of mind and matter at its core. This Cartesian basis has not been fully resolved by archaeological attempts to integrate the SBH with relational models of cognition. At the heart of the issue has been a lack of meaningful consideration of the cognitive agency of things and the evolutionary efficacy of material engagement. This article proposes MET as a useful starting point for rethinking future approaches to human social cognitive becoming in a way that appreciates the co-constitution of brains, bodies and worlds. It also suggests how MET may bridge archaeological and 4E approaches to reconsider concepts such as the 'mental template' and Theory of Mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]