Catherine Ayres, Phd Candidate

School of Sociology, ANU,

Larry Saha Room, Haydon-Allen Building # 2175

Materialism is being reinvigorated. Again. Through the works of theorists such as Jane Bennett and Diana Coole, ‘new materialism’ attempts to foreground and examine the material transformations that are not reducible to facets of a specifically human subject. This recent reworking of a materialist perspective is in response to perceived shortcomings of traditional cultural analyses that have dominated the social sciences in recent decades. These cultural analyses commonly conceptualise the material world as a backdrop to human activity, or as a passive canvas awaiting conscious interpretation. Conversely, new materialism takes matter as a lively and active participant in social life, problematises core hierarchical binaries such as human/nonhuman, living/nonliving, and idealism/materialism, and expands the remit of what constitutes ‘social life’. Questioning these binaries renders humans as part of a flatter ontology than we might normally think. In this paper, I consider how core social concerns of responsibility and sustainability might be transformed when we pay attention to the forces and capacities of materialities.