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'Local food' plays a critical role in tourism destinations by attracting tourists and enhancing their experiences, thus indicating the need for researchers to examine how destinations can establish local food. Research has focused on the social and cultural construction of local food, but there have been limited inquiries into how the materiality of food is intertwined with human practices in the process. This perspective has hindered new insights into the becoming of local food in tourism destinations. This study conceptualises local food as an effect of an actor-network and investigates the dynamic and relational process of the becoming of local food in a tourism destination. In particular, this research selected Chaozhou beef food as a case and collected data through 49 on-site semi-structured interviews, in-situ observations and secondary data. The results reveal that the becoming of Chaozhou's local food is due to the entanglement of both human actors, including tourists, artisans in slaughterhouses and staff in restaurants, and non-human actors such as the media, chain restaurants specialising in beef, tourism attractions and the beef itself. Further, the results reveal that the materiality of beef, namely the features of biochemical change and the morphological structure of beef, shapes the slaughterhouses' and restaurants' production and the tourists' consumption of beef. Thus, the agency of material should be considered in the construction and sustainability of local food in tourism destinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IMPACT: Public sector accounting needs a pluralistic perspective for fostering a broader public value and interactions with citizens and other stakeholders. In this article, the authors suggest that integrated reporting (IR) is a useful accounting practice for promoting a pluralistic perspective into public sector accounting to nurture public value and accountability—even though there are still lessons to learn. Public sector organizations need to stimulate engagement with stakeholders making disclosures more relevant; develop a more holistic appreciation for value creation focusing on efficacy and outcomes for society; and promote integrated thinking across internal stakeholders to avoid a superficial adoption of IR. This article explores the potential for integrating reporting (IR) to foster public value and accountability through its pluralistic approach. Evidence from the IR framework, the relevant public sector accounting literature, and the experience of one local government which recently embraced IR confirm that such accounting practice can help promote public value and accountability through its integrated thinking and stakeholder engagement. Yet, while this is a promising avenue, there are still several limitations and obstacles to be dealt with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen institutionalized procedures for youth representation in global climate governance, and significant visibility for youth climate activists. Despite these improvements, young representatives continue to bear witness about tokenized forms of participation and a lack of influence. This article seeks to address this ambiguous development by focusing on the materiality of youth representation in United Nations climate conferences. Through interviews and participant observations at COP26 and COP27, as well as COY16 and COY17, we analyse the bureaucratic and socio-economic barriers to representation, the knowledge resources and competitiveness of the routes to representation, and the spatial ordering and subversive tactics on site at the summits. We show that these materialities shape youth’s discursive strategies, thus helping to explain who gets to be a representative and what forms of subjectivities, agendas, claims, and strategies that become possible in the global climate governance regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus led to the division of the island between the Turkish-occupied north and the Greek-Cypriot Republic in the south. For approximately 30 years, the Greek and Turkish-Cypriot communities on the island were prohibited from 'crossing' to the other side. However, the relaxation of movement restrictions in 2003 provided an opportunity for many displaced persons from both communities to visit their former homes and villages once more. This paper explores the ways in which Greek-Cypriot refugee women experienced these return visits. It draws on oral history interviews to investigate how the physical return and re-experience of the refugee house has been significant to them and their understanding of home. The paper argues that the tension between the remembered and encountered home led to an inability to re-establish meaningful connections in terms of the refugee house, giving rise to a home-unmaking that questioned their association with it. The paper contributes to the existing literature regarding the ways in which home comes under question or is unmade, revealing how return and homecoming can damage previously associated meanings of home and have effects on how a dwelling is understood and experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on ITAS, a Croatian metalworking company with a turbulent past characterized by various property arrangements and varying degrees of success in the market for machine tools, I sketch out a shop-floor history of the ways in which the materiality of production continues to matter in contemporary capitalism. Control over machines allowed ITAS workers to negotiate their precarious position in the market. I show how collective and individual decisions of workers as economic agents contribute to shaping the geographical unevenness of capitalism. Industrial machines can serve as an ethnographic object that connects analytical scales, allowing scholars to provide a relational and historically situated understanding of how workers are incorporated into political economic systems as well as the degree to which they can influence those systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first investigates why the main strands in conventional subcultural and post-subcultural research have neglected the collective and material aspects of subcultural practice. It then investigates more recent attempts to include collectivity and materiality in the analysis and seeks to further develop such perspectives. In this way the paper seeks to demonstrate the need for a new embedded perspective on the material and collective dimensions of subcultural practice. In the first part of the paper, I embark on a critical reading of the traditional 'schools' of subcultural and post-subcultural theory. I seek to show that they all suffer from a blind spot in regard to collective and material embeddedness. In the second part, I analyse a number of 'thick' empirical accounts of subcultural collectivity, creativity and interchange with material and musical objects. I attempt to develop these descriptions further and seek to show how they may benefit from having more attention paid to collective and material embeddedness, as well as to the interchange between these two dimensions in subcultural practice. I hope to thus demonstrate how the embedded perspective may contribute to analyses of subcultural creativity and lived subcultural experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ObjectiveMethodResultsConclusionThis study reviews the status of materials in curriculum and reform, as reflected in a network case study of curriculum in one kindergarten classroom in the United States. This paper focuses on the events leading up to and building upon one inquiry unit that became a focal point in promoting progressive curriculum reform at the school.Methods from Actor Network Theory are employed to attend to a wide cast of human and nonhuman actors, trace their mobilities, and map them into curricular networks. Data, collected over 9 months of one school year, included field notes, audio recordings of conversations, and images of classroom objects and arrangements.Three material assemblages—a closet, a bulletin board, and a curriculum timeline—are viewed as agents assisting in stabilizing the inquiry unit and sustaining further student-centred inquiries amidst competing curricular reforms and policies. Findings demonstrate how teachers may mobilize such assemblages to accomplish multiple objectives, as is necessary when navigating tensions from multiple parties or reform mandates.This study contributes to scholarship conceptualizing the status of curriculum materials, with particular attention to their functionality at the nexus of both the micro-interactions of curriculum enactment and the macro-politics of educational reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security assistance – foreign actors training and equipping security forces in another country – has proliferated in the Mediterranean over the last decades. Now, more than a decade on from the Arab Uprisings, security assistance cannot be considered merely a tool to obtain strategic objectives, but is in itself a site of competition, collusion and potential collision. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, we develop a framework deploying reordering as a lens through which comparative and interdisciplinary explorations can develop comprehensive and critical views of the evolution of security assistance in the Mediterranean. We propose a theoretical framework centred on international practice and socio-material network theory, which brings different types of providers and recipients, as well as the discourse-material structures underpinning them, into a common frame. The framework conceptualizes security assistance as operating at vertical (between provider and recipient), and horizontal (between vertical blocks) levels. It can purposefully be analysed across three dimensions – knowledge, materiality and networks. In so doing, we may be able to observe how, despite the absence of formal institutions, norms or governing mechanisms, security assistance constitutes an international practice and contributes to the ordering, and continuous reordering, of the Mediterranean as a governable geospatial field of intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the Faculty of Law, University of Turku (Finland), law students have the possibility to attend a set of three interconnected courses: Posthuman and postmodern challenges to law; Challenging the legal truth; Law and the urban. While keeping a common critical engagement with law, each course invites students to explore the tensions and criticalities arising between law and a specific "matter": the first course delves into law and human bodies; the second into law and non-human bodies; the third into law and space. With three different yet complementary approaches, these courses aim to cultivate a normative knowledge that is critical, experiential and embodied, situated, interdisciplinary, and extends beyond legal texts. Ultimately, they venture into efforts to reconnect law with the materiality of everyday life, bodies and spaces. This article is based on the authors' own interconnected teaching experiences, where they experimented with alternative ways of thinking and practising law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an update on key developments in research related visual literacy, children's reading and children's literature. Beginning with an overview of the field, we chart several distinctive 'turns' or research trajectories: the aesthetic, the intercultural or empathic, and the ethical. We then consider how questions of power, authenticity and representation are visible in three important areas of the field: research with marginalised groups; research that focuses on mediation within the visual reading process; advances in the types of visual texts being used in research. Key emergent ideas include the challenges of adult mediators' expectations on children's visual reading, the potential of texts' material affordances, and new directions in open, more inclusive opportunities to respond to, and with, visual texts. We conclude with a hopeful look forward at emerging directions in policy and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractAlthough algorithms are imbued with a sense of objectivity and reliability, numerous high-profile incidents have demonstrated their fallibility. In response, many have called for algorithmic governance that mitigates their potential harms. Further, these incidents have inspired studies that consider algorithms as part of wider sociotechnical systems. In this article, we build on such work and focus on how the specific forms of algorithms may facilitate or constrain the ways in which they become embedded within these systems. More specifically, we suggest that (a) algorithms should be understood as models, with (b) divergent forms, and (c) associated representational qualities. We showcase this approach in three critical case studies of algorithmic models used in government: the SAFFIER II model that underpins the Netherlands government’s spending, the Ofqual DCP A-Level grading algorithm that was used (and later abandoned) in lieu of actual secondary school exams in the United Kingdom, and the Risk Classification Model used by the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration to identify social benefit fraud. With the three case studies, we show how the divergent forms of algorithms have implications for their responsiveness and ultimately their solidification in – or dissolution from – socio-technical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a more holistic approach to gender in crafts and grounds it in the (post)socialist context. It focuses on traditional crafts, also known as 'folk art', and investigates the shifts in signification that are accomplished by female craftswomen over almost a century of the clay toy production located in Kargopol, a small historical town in a Northern region of Central Russia. The analysis relies on Peirce's pragmatist theory of signification and Keane's notion of semiotic ideology. It reveals the inner controversies of 'tradition' as a type of semiotic ideology and explores four shifts in signification related to the female dimension of the folk art: 1) the emergence of the iconic craftswoman, 2) the materialization of female work ethics and appropriation of symbols, 3) the transformation of craftswomen's bodies from indexes to icons, 4) challenging semiotic ideology through modelling of a modern female character. The paper demonstrates how the feminine constituent of the folk art has been gradually reshaped over time through those shifts, without major disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this themed issue of Paedagogica Historica, editors Pieter Verstraete, Maria Romeiras, and Carlos Manique aim to merge the flourishing fields of disability history and the history of education. Despite past initiatives like the 2005 special issue on disability and education and the 34th ISCHE conference in 2012, these fields have largely remained separate. This issue presents three articles that intersect these domains, capitalising on recent historiographical evolutions. Both fields share activist origins, with the history of education emerging in the 19th century and disability history in the late 20th century. Recent trends in disability history, such as non-Western perspectives and renewed interest in institutional histories, align with the new cultural history of education. The included articles exemplify this synergy by exploring the architecture of French deaf institutions, tactile reading systems in East Asia, and the Perkins Institute for the Blind. This collection underscores the potential of integrating these research fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on understanding the use of space at Aşıklı Höyük in central Turkey through the geochemical analyses of five overlying floors of a quadrangular mudbrick building dating to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period. The research allows us to follow the process on a micro-scale, from the design and construction of the structure to its abandonment. We aim to perceive the role of plastered floors to gain insights into the producers and users of the building and those who kept it alive and maintained it. We will treat floors as one of the main actors of these spaces and zero in on entangled relationships by addressing a range of other aspects in the building. The analyses enable the identification of use patterns. Based on our results, we attempt to provide suggestions about the location of the roof hatches and hence the main access of the inhabitants to the external world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have increasingly focused on the intersectional analysis of tourism and geopolitics, the material and affective dimensions underlying the geopolitical implications of tourism remain underexplored. This paper analyses the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders (MH-VNM-JI) in Nanjing, China, focusing on how it sustains and intensifies geopolitical narrations of militarism, fascism, and massacres inflicted by Japanese invaders during WWII through the creation of an affective environment while enacting dark tourism experiences. Drawing on the recent debates on the geopolitics of tourism, affective geopolitics, and the materiality of geopolitics, this paper delineates how the MH-VNM-JI significantly shapes popular geopolitical relations between China and Japan by engineering visitors' affective experiences and, by extension, geopolitical subjectivities. The MH-VNM-JI serves not only as a static tourism infrastructure that transmits fixed and dogmatic geopolitical knowledge through its exhibits but also as a dynamic space that actively preserves and transforms Sino-Japanese geopolitical knowledge through the structuring of tourists' embodied and affective experiences. In this vein, this study also contributes to the broader research agenda of exploring the connections between museums, tourism, and geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in a paradox perspective, this article investigates the tensions of fluid informal organizing and, using a practice theory lens, explains how micro-level communicative practices deal with those tensions. Through interview and observational data, the study illustrates how tensions of integration/separation, inclusion/exclusion, and autonomy/control intersect with organizational efforts to maintain a public recreation space and are dealt with via social, material, and performative practices of worth signaling, consensus by validation, and social/material nudging. Findings add to theory on organizing tensions by moving beyond discursive and strategic responses to tension, which often focus on altering the meaning of tensions or rely upon conventional organizing elements, to emphasize how materiality and mundane practices are consequential for theory building on tension response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay will explore some of the ambiguous interactions between imaginary spaces and material reality as articulated by Barbie, considering the implications for its understanding of womanhood. First outlining a series of oppositions between fantasy and reality, Barbie and “real women” in the film, I will then highlight the ways in which this binary framework is ultimately undermined. With reference to both media theory and trans theories of embodiment, I will argue that the film resists oppositions between imagination and reality in ways that are generative and progressive, yet which simultaneously serve to enhance the film’s marketability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the devotional practices presented by The Book of Margery Kempe in connection to late-medieval English image debates. While scholarly consensus holds that Kempe displays an uncritical approach to the popular devotional practices of her time and a strong attachment to effigies, I argue that she espoused a much more nuanced view, deeply influenced by the anxieties raised in the clash between the Church and the iconoclastic Lollards. This article offers a case study of Kempe's approach by analysing a scene in which her desire to experience a miracle of image animation is denied. This is a highly unusual outcome within The Book's literary genre, which can be explained as an active engagement with the issues raised in the image debates. I conclude that the scene should be read as offering guidance on the idolatrous potential of devotional images and how to properly engage with such artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Posthumanist orientations have underlined the need to foster non-hierarchical relations with other-than-human beings to adequately attend to planetary crises and help life to survive and flourish. Since a posthumanist critique towards natural sciences has mostly leaned on questioning the premise of human subjects making sense of objectified nature, little effort has been made to explore if and how scientific research and posthumanist approaches might intersect and co-exist without abandoning their respective aims. In this paper, we analyse a case of ecological citizen science inquiry on urban rats to explore theoretical and practical opportunities for environmental education that arise from bridging the posthumanist call for attentiveness towards multispecies worlds with ecological research endeavor. We reconceptualize ecological inquiry as sharing atmospheres with other animals as well as through its material aspects to articulate conceptual tools to disrupt the subject-object division of knowledge creation between humans and other animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quarried stone has a multitude of uses in the built environment. Often old, abandoned quarries near cities have become enveloped by urban expansion. This paper investigates what becomes of disused quarries, specifically in Cape Town, South Africa. The study is scaffolded by the theoretical underpinnings of urban materiality which, in turn, draws from assemblage theory. It is posited that the urban materialities of quarries, as one-time sites of material extraction, do not cease with closure. The infill, rehabilitation and repurposing of quarries for other uses result in continued contributions of quarries to the urbanscape, in addition to being historical sites of meaning and memory. The location of 77 quarries in Cape Town were mapped using data from various sources. Seventy-one quarries are in a post-extractive state. Thirty-five per cent of disused quarries have not been rehabilitated or altered by human activity after closure. However, they are sites of non-human use. Sixty-five per cent of the post-extractive quarries are sites for housing, commercial and educational activities; for recreational activities; have been infilled; or they store water for agricultural purposes. The reuse of quarries speaks to the creation of new urban materialities and assemblages by humans and non-humans which are worthy of further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This afterword discusses common questions and emerging themes from a special issue titled Fluid Dispossession. It focuses on the implications of water movements for economic processes and the redistribution of costs and benefits. The article elaborates how the discussed ethnographies illustrate the situatedness of material flows that channel specific benefits to some groups of people and particular costs to others. It then highlights how wet ethnographies destabilise common economic terms including the commons, frontier, gleaning and real estate. Finally, it discusses the hydrosociality of material flows that are entangled with various political, economic and cultural projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper reexamines the meanings and values of Lin Tianmiao’s (born 1961) The Proliferation of Thread Winding (1995) through an analysis of its materialities. Lin’s Thread Winding has received much attention in feminist discourse, which tends to draw attention to the symbolic manifestations embedded in the act of winding, and in textiles and domestic objects—techniques and materials often associated with “women’s work” within certain Western feminist critiques of women’s art. This paper moves beyond the gendered lens of interpreting Lin’s art, which has built on symbolic and metaphorical readings of the underlying visual representations, and instead turn to investigate how her work can be understood from the perspective of its discursive materialities, through which the art objects produce material signs (phenomenological effects) that indicate its previous process of art making. Drawing upon new materialist theories and the notion of affect, this paper understands the materialities of Lin’s work as dynamic phenomena, emerging from ongoing intertwining relationships between human and nonhuman agencies. It examines how Lin’s work constitutes a series of inquisitive investigations into multiple processes of making, and how affective qualities and critical knowledge can materialize in and through this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mediterranean red coral has long been believed to be imbued with sacred, spiritual and healing power and was given to children across Europe in the form of an amulet, teether or medicine. In early modern England, portraits of children from affluent families and medical receipts provide snapshots of coral usage, a moment in time, which do not adequately reveal the spiritual, therapeutic and affective significance of this material within the context of unique family circumstances and a multitude of perceived threats to children’s health. Focusing on five case studies, this article delves into the lived experience of families who deemed coral objects an essential childhood accessory in the period from 1590 to 1775. Julian Herrick, a goldsmith’s widow, Sir John Oglander, a knight caught up in the civil war, Dr Garencières, a doctor confronting dangerous infection, Lady Blackett, a devoted grandmama, and Ann Lord, a woman facing destitution, all placed value on coral for their young children. This study draws on a diverse range of material and documentary evidence from the seventeenth and eighteenth century to unpack the significance of red coral for parents within a changing religious, political and medical landscape. Building on scholarship within material culture studies and the history of emotions, this study also situates children’s coral objects within emotional relationships and seeks to uncover the implicit meanings such objects held which could not be written or articulated due to illiteracy, controversy or persecution. By combining a micro-historical approach with a broader thematic analysis, the case studies presented indicate that coral occupies an important place in the history of the early modern family as the embodiment of the anxieties of parents and grandparents, a means to soothe and protect young children and a material expression of hope, love and faith, particularly during periods of crisis and separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the idea of architecture, theatre and cultural democracy as relational concepts, and considers the theatre building as a cultural artefact which both manifests and embodies power relations. We use the case study of Liverpool's PurpleDoor to explore this idea. We consider theatre buildings as cultural artefacts to focus attention on the impact of material or physical factors and the power of cultural institutions to orient specific forms of behaviour and activity around themselves. In seeing architectural design as an embodiment of politics, philosophy and cultural policy, the article considers both the practical and theoretical dimensions of the future of a theatre architecture concerned with cultural democracy. The interconnection between political ideas of theatre's contemporary social role and the material construction of the building – the performative nature of the performance space – become vital in recognising and re-prioritising values designed to address the intersectional nature of power systems afflicting the cultural sector and enabling citizen usage of cultural space. The article situates PurpleDoor in an historical lineage which articulates the aspiration to become both a site for critical inquiry and a contemporary manifestation of cultural democracy for 21st century British theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University College London Special Collections holds the Small Press Collections consisting of the Little Magazines, Alternative Presses, and Poetry Store of poetry pamphlets, artist's books, and other text bearing print objects. This essay outlines the history and growth of the collections, founded by Geoffrey Soar in 1964, and starts by exploring the networks essential to the development of a large collection of international, independently published literary and visual art material. I draw on fifteen years' experience as Collection Manager to examine the challenges of acquiring, cataloguing, and managing non-mainstream, self-published, ephemeral material in an institutional context and facilitating access for researchers. It considers selected comparable collections in the UK and the US and the difficulties in aligning institutional holdings and practices. The notions of materiality and obsolescence in the context of library collections are considered in relation to mimeographed and other format little magazines and small press publications. It concludes with examples of object-based learning scenarios that reactivate the material in a teaching and research context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invented market traditions are practices and memories of the past created by corporations and sustained through consumption. Invented market traditions show how organisations have the potential to reorganise collective memories of the past, creating new mnemonic narratives rather than drawing on existing ones. Materiality provides long-term stability to these narratives. This paper focuses on the institution of Italian breakfast, based on milk, coffee, and convenience bakery products such as biscuits, invented by the brand Mulino Bianco. Biscuits exemplify how commodities imbued with nostalgic meanings can mobilise these invented memories and fold them into social practices. The recurring consumption of biscuits at breakfast, which was marketed as a rediscovery of Italian heritage, created those very nostalgic memories that consumers wanted to remember. Invented market traditions show the social repercussions of organisations' rhetorical work and expose how context plays a role in understanding their success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article explores how the construction of a guli, the spirits' shrine and the central ritual space par excellence in the Afro-Amerindian religion of Dugu, reveals a material-spiritual dialectic between the spirits of the dead and spirit mediums. I argue that the anthropomorphizing of the guli occurs not only through intense, repetitive ritual activity but also through the potent association of embodiment and uncomfortable psychosomatic experiences. Contrary to simply attributing humanity to the guli for representation of the divine, my ethnography shows that the shrine also transforms into a material extension of the practitioner, creating a triadic configuration of materials, bodies, and spirits. In this manner, the Garifuna shrine gives rise to two ontological possibilities of animation: being ritually "ensouled" with human substances and invisible forces and becoming animated when it manifests in the medium's body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the materiality of lighting influenced the development of ancient rabbinic teachings that would later become the foundations of Jewish law. Drawing on ideas and frameworks from scholarship on material religion, I bring together archaeological finds, experimental archaeology, and references to objects in classical rabbinic literature to argue that the ways that lighting was used provided the earliest rabbis with tools and fodder for developing new expressions of piety that could be performed in one's household. How lamps, oils, and wicks were used in Roman-era Palestine (second-third century CE) played an influential role in the development of rabbinic Judaism. I show this through rabbinic prescriptions on lighting lamps on Friday evening to mark the onset of the Sabbath, as the different wicks and oils created opportunities for one to choose to perform the custom in rabbinically-prescribed ways. I next demonstrate how the rabbis drew on common lighting practices to reinterpret biblical laws on the now-destroyed Jerusalem Temple cult into expressions of piety that can be performed in households throughout Roman Palestine. In this way, the materiality of light contributed towards the ancient rabbis' role in transforming Judaism in the post-Temple age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution explores rumours of dubious activities at coastal sites in Madagascar, investigating occult formations through their underlying infrastructures. By introducing the concept of 'occult infrastructure', it illuminates the socio-material arrangements enabling the flow of occult forces. Suspicious constructions, marked by technological innovations and symbolic displays of power and social status, embody tangible expressions of occult infrastructures. The contribution contends that the interplay between the enduring nature of these structures and the transient quality of occult rumours creates moments of inversion – a temporary overlap between the occult and the ordinary, resulting in brief revelations before receding into concealed realms. This alignment of temporal, discursive, and material elements within occult phenomena aims not to uncover a hidden scheme but to provide an additional layer of understanding to an ongoing narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructures are ensembles of social and technical components that make practices and relations possible. In this contribution, I develop a notion of 'religious infrastructure' and delineate why I find it to be a generative analytical category. Thinking with religious infrastructure spotlights new sites of empirical inquiry for scholarship on religion, as well as fresh ways of apprehending familiar objects of analysis. It brings into focus how religiously marked arrangements support, depend on, and mutually transform wider landscapes of action and relation. These lines of inquiry point to dynamics that cut across different religious boundaries, and they uncover sometimes surprising entanglements between religiously and secularly marked domains of practice. They also help to foreground the multiple modalities of religious operation that a given arrangement can perform, beyond that of mediating transcendent encounters. Accordingly, religious infrastructure elicits questions about what qualifies as 'infrastructure', but also about what qualifies as 'religion'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection sets out to establish a distinct research agenda around the notion of religious infrastructure, creating an interface between the study of religion and that of infrastructure which enriches both fields. To this end, we bring together eight contributions by a multidisciplinary group of scholars who are conducting empirical research in diverse global contexts. Each of these contributions stages a generative conversation between the concept of religious infrastructure and their empirical findings. Collectively, we explore and further develop the analytical potential of religious infrastructure as a lens and unit of analysis for future research on religion and infrastructure alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the milestone publication of Mapping Desire in 1995, geographies of sexualities have found increasing legitimacy and visibility through, among others, publications, conferences and the successful careers of some scholars in the field. However, the materiality of sex and bodies remains overlooked, this making Jon Binnie's critique (e.g. 1997) of the squeamishness of academic knowledge still timely and relevant. By reflecting on the limitations of current geographies of sexualities scholarship, in this introduction we present the aims, contents and contributions of the themed issue as a whole and the different papers composing it. We conclude by acknowledging that the 'dirty work' of sex research cannot be left to individuals (often occupying marginalized positions) but requires a collective effort from the entire human geography academic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coal in India carries different values and meanings for different actors. Consequently, the politics of this resource is manifested in multiple forms at multiple levels. Whereas the extraction of coal is accomplished by a larger resource politics involving an energy crisis narrative and a need to ensure national resource security, people at the grassroots level – workers, security forces, the displaced, administrators, mine planners, and a wide range of other actors – engage primarily with the micropolitics of coal. In this paper, we draw on new materialities literature in human geography to demonstrate that the everyday micropolitics of coal in the eastern Indian state Jharkhand is more than a subset of national or regional resource politics. In doing so, we analyse four vignettes through a materiality lens based on the land use, weight, pollution, and heat of coal. We use ethnographic methods to untangle everyday and long-term micropolitical trajectories related to coal extraction. We show the fluid and often interchangeable and overlapping roles of actors at the coal face: revolutionary groups striving to become mining contractors, contractors working as politicians to mediate claims, and politicians assuming the role of revolutionaries. Meanwhile coalfield residents make moral claims of indigeneity to gain a share of the resource, or eke out informal, coal-based livelihoods. In this fluid setting, the actors in the micropolitics of coal are influenced by outside forces to varying degrees, and are yet able to reimagine resource politics to their own advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this inquiry was to explore teacher educator identity as a relational ontology. The study is conceptually grounded in new materialism and employed self-study methodology to analyze the ways teacher educator identity was produced and enacted in relation to materiality. Findings suggest the entanglement with the internet and digital connectivity, a dependency upon things, and the consumption of things as elements of teacher educator identity. Recommendations for teaching practice and research are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although historically stigmatized, women's participation in the sex toy industry is significantly linked to their sexual autonomy, and women's use of sex toys for sexual pleasure is prevalent. In this analysis, we consider how these important market practices are built upon practices established outside the erotic market in early life. More specifically, we reveal how women's and AFAB (Assigned-Female-At-Birth) individuals' early-life encounters with household objects prefigure their adult consumption of sex toys. Using the theory of affordances, we demonstrate that the pursuit of sexual pleasure is a perceptual learning process, beginning long before individuals enter the erotic industry as consumers, and continuing throughout their lifecourse with both "erotic" and "non-erotic" objects. This study draws from life history narrative data collected in 2019–2020 from 30 participants, with 26 out of 30 participants identifying as LGBTQIA+. These data permit a "follow-the-body" analytical approach that highlights the ways sexual discovery is perceptual, embodied, improvisational, and cumulative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the environmental crisis gains pace, different strands of posthumanist theorizing have aimed to reshape the ecological conditions of human actions. This article examines ecological justifications in French pragmatic sociology, developed by Boltanski and Thévenot, situating it to discussions about materiality. The approach has proven useful for analyzing various controversies as it provides tools for examining how actors coordinate conflict situations and cope with uncertainty. However, previous studies have also raised questions about the applicability of pragmatic sociology in studying environmental problems. These discussions have revolved around the distinctiveness of 'green' justifications. In this article, we examine organic agriculture as a case of green critique that has brought ecology to the fore. Our analysis focuses on contestations about organic agriculture and the possibilities of novel green justifications to establish a 'green reality test'. By combining conceptual work on justifications and empirical analysis of organic agriculture, the study underlines the key task of critically differentiating a new form of worth as meaningfully different from established forms thereof. In so doing, it also contributes to topical discussions of developing social theoretical frameworks for addressing environmental issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with Judith Butler's concepts of gender performativity and materiality as they develop from Bodies That Matter (1993) to The Force of Nonviolence (2020). The article shows how Butler has moved toward a materialism that is less dependent on language and thus open for animals and other nonhuman creatures to become intelligible as liveable lives. At the same time, however, Butler has not expanded the concept of gender performativity into a correspondingly more-than-human direction, which raises the issue of how to understand gender performativity when nonhumans act as living matters alongside humans. To develop such a full-fledged concept of gender performativity, the article turns to new materialism, in particular the work of Jane Bennett. Combining Butler's concept of gender performativity with Bennett's work on vibrant matter, the article proposes a new concept of 'more-than-human gender performativity,' defined as an assembled enactment of multiple forces that in the very entanglement of human and nonhuman modes of life articulates a multiplicity of gender identities. The article concludes by illustrating the relevance of such a concept by using the recent work of the Danish artist Rasmus Myrup as its point of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper incisively engages with the ways in which African leaders are not assertively demanding restitution of their material artifacts dispossessed in the eras of enslavement and colonization. It questions indigenous people’s struggles for restitution of materialities colonially dispossessed beyond a simplistic view of decentering their hierarchy and ownership. Besides, the paper critically interrogates why Euro-America scholarship generously offers resilience discourse as perhaps the most important conceptual addition to international policy making in the last few decades to Africa, but it ironically does not care to restitute dispossessed material artifacts back to indigenous African peoples. The paper argues that colonial dispossession is about recentering indigenous people as masters and owners of material artifacts via restitution. Using coloniality of dispossession/theft this paper proposes a framework of restitution that aims to address resilient colonial dispossession enacted by the West. It is pointed out that decolonization will be achievable through restitution of indigenous material artifacts. I engage in the topic of restitution of material artifacts, particularly in the context of Asante people of Ghana. The paper contends that restitution of dispossessed material artifacts would empower indigenous peoples in Africa and strategically position them in global geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction considers two developments that have hitherto occupied separate realms of scholarship: the increasing visibility of pious consumption, and the proliferation in Indonesia of Muslim authorities and the associated fragmentation of Muslim publics. We identify three significant themes that connect these developments. First, the borders that separate religion and consumerism have become increasingly porous. Indonesian Muslims' uptake of new technologies and non-religious cultural forms has broadened the range of possibilities for practice and faith, which in turn has facilitated the emergence of new figures of Islamic authority. Second, online platforms for Islamic experience and participation have intensified religious identity politics. Visibility is needed for success in the world of social media, and claimants to authority in online spaces frequently exploit differences in religious and intra-religious segments to achieve this. Third, the concept of the 'middle class' has been useful for understanding the adoption of new technologies and media forms by Muslims, yet we suggest that Islamic consumerism should be decoupled from the concept of the Muslim middle class. We conclude by suggesting that the debate about consumerism would be enhanced by a renewed focus on materiality and its social meanings in Islamic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By default, upcycling as a fashion methodology of deconstructing, re-assembling and removing material elements from existing garments, always produces material waste. This waste, with which one would traditionally disengage and place in the bin, is produced through various upcycling approaches—altering motifs, changing silhouettes or deconstructing forms. This waste can be incredibly micro in scale: dust, fibers, the smallest thread, or damaged bit which is produced from breaking down the structure of a garment. Framed more sensitively, this waste can be classified as process debris. Debris conventionally is not clearly understood as a material to reuse, or to value, or to place - as it is small in scale, fragmented, and allegedly beyond repair. This attitude would usually encourage a disengagement with the material, and it would be de historicized and rendered as waste. In the context of this study, the debris from reforming a historic archive has gained new significance. Analyzing and designing with it invites a larger discussion around notions of care, value and the preservation of certain materials. 'Care', in this case, emerged through my encounter with the material debris itself, and the way that unique encounter instigated a consideration of value and role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical scholarship on making has established the interrelations between makers, materials and space. With this paper I explore how this scholarship can be developed to incorporate time through paying close attention to the time of making. Drawing on Karen Barad's (2003) theorisation of multiple and entangled temporalities and materialities; the time of making is interpreted as a constituent of making rather than a homogenous vessel within which making occurs. Using an autoethnographic study of upcycling used domestic textiles into bags, I assemble the practices of making and distribute these into its constituent parts of heterogenous materials, tools and skills. The time of making is studied through autoethnographic reflections on the iterative interactivity between these constituent parts. My reflections on the time of making develop in two ways. First, I consider how the temporal heterogeneity of making segues the (de)stabilising skills of sewing with moments of hesitation, preparation, undoing, repetition and organisation. Second, I detail how the life histories of materials and makers are remade through making. In particular the case study of upcycling reveals how the potential of materials can be realised through re-orientating the skills and practices of makers towards (re)making the life history of materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue offers a substantial contribution to the field, outlining how materiality and embodiment offer insights into science learning with respect to argumentation, use of diagrams and gestures to understand abstract concepts, the role of materiality in digital learning and the importance of material and embodied interactions in investigations, plurilingual settings and in the positioning and identities of learners of science. This paper responds to the special issue by outlining a distinctive theoretical framework for understanding materiality and embodiment in science education: a conceptualisation of material-dialogic space. Contrasting this framework with the multimodal, social semiotic and narrative ethnographic frames used in the studies in this special issue, this paper argues that by examining materiality as voices within a material-dialogic space, new insights into dialogic learning and 'becoming' in science are possible. In this paper, I discuss the papers in this special issue using the conceptualisation of material-dialogic space, grouped according to three areas of interest in science education: methods of analysing materiality, meaning-making in science through 'doing' and 'thinking' science, and science identities. A means by which material-dialogic space might be examined empirically is proposed, and how this enables an approach to think about thinking and doing science that focuses on the relationality of materials, bodies and language in science meaning-making is explored. The notion of becoming, changing and being changed through participation in a material-dialogic relational space is proposed as an approach to thinking about 'being' in science and science identities. The role of material-dialogic space with respect to spaces of science learning is raised as a key question. This paper highlights the lively open questions in the field of materiality and embodiment in science education, whilst offering the concept of material-dialogic space as an important avenue for studying these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a growing new materialism paradigm and research on multimodality, there is an increasing attention on the role of material objects in science teaching and learning. However, there is currently no available framework, coding scheme, or method of inquiry to specifically analyze the use of material objects in science meaning-making. This paper presents and discusses two analytical frameworks developed to examine teachers' and students' interaction with material objects during classroom discourse. The first analytical framework was theoretically informed by multimodal interaction analysis (MIA), focusing on humans' situated interaction using embodied and disembodied modes located in the material world. The second framework was informed by social semiotics multimodal analysis (SSMA), focusing on material interaction as a semiotic mode with unique affordances for sign-makers to make meaning alongside other semiotic modes (e.g. speech, gesture). Both frameworks are used to analyze two vignettes of classroom discourse generated from video data to illustrate their applications, coding procedures, and interpretative potential. The MIA-informed framework highlighted the dynamic and reciprocal relations between students' experiences and the transformation of materials, while the SSMA-informed framework highlighted the subtle meanings constructed with the unique affordances of the material mode. The affordances and limitations of the two frameworks are discussed, along with their compatibility and complementary relations. This work contributes to the emerging field of materiality in science education research and provides a foundation for future studies on the analysis of material interaction in science meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on Pietz's speculation about the construction of a "history of the fetish' that might be related to, yet stand apart from the fetish as a historical construct, this paper asks if there might be novel yet unmarked contemporary fetish-formations. Taking the later chapters of Pietz's volume, which focuses on capital and techno-political infrastructures, this essay suggests that non-fungible tokens, or "NFTs," might be thought of as failed fetishes, objects that work to occlude the material infrastructure that supports blockchain, yet do not cohere because due to contemporary technology, they lack the sensuous materiality required by Pietz's phenomenologically-shaped understanding of Marxism. Regardless of the correctness of this speculative claim about NFTs, this discussion suggests that Pietz's original, groundbreaking argument on the fetish still has relevance to, and a great deal of creative promise for, analysis in the current day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dans la longue cohorte des objets houellebecquiens, le livre occupe une place tout à fait singulière. Presque aucun roman où il n'apparaisse pas (quasiment tous les personnages principaux chez Houellebecq sont d'assidus lecteurs); et son importance, au fur et à mesure que l'œuvre progresse, semble toujours croissante. Cet article analyse les différentes références à l'objet livre dans l'œuvre de Michel Houellebecq, en faisant l'hypothèse que ses modes d'apparition sont significatifs de la manière dont l'auteur conçoit à la fois la littérature et la relation au lecteur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the place of outlaw literature, particularly the English tradition of Robin Hood narratives, on the outskirts of the literary canon. It considers that the 'flawed' material contexts for much of the literature is linked to a set of anxieties around incompleteness, lack of clear origins, and fragmentariness, and that the material contexts also lead to assumptions around literariness. It takes as case-studies one later-medieval manuscript and a fragment from the same period, both preserving important and unique pieces of Robin Hood literature, and argues for them as typical material survivals from this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the performance of Islamic authority through texts. It combines this with a close investigation of the textuality of these texts—that is, their letterforms as well as shapes of words and sentences—and their material affordances. Given that Muslims understand the Qur'an to be powerful, this article argues that it is the concrete possibilities that textuality provides which feed into Islamic authority. This article takes an ethnographic encounter in Zanzibar Town in which I was repeatedly prompted to visually follow the textual aids of my interlocutor, Hakimu Saleh, in order to gain access to that which is "hidden between the words" as starting point. I investigate how Hakimu Saleh used these occasions to perform his authority as a knowledgeable Islamic healer through "material citations." I then explore the singularity of the Qur'an to examine the textuality of kombe, a practice in which the Qur'an is used as a decidedly textual artifact to be washed off for patients to ingest. In doing so, I show how practices tapping into the power of the materially textual Qur'an feed into other practices with material text, including those that support the performance of authority in an Islamic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stickers are pervasive, if often small and subtle, tools of political activism. Despite their enduring popularity, stickers do not fit into popular models of political action that presume either a spectacle of protest or formal institutions and debate. In this paper, we argue that stickers enable and facilitate public interchange as a process of sociomaterial claims-making. However, in order to recognise how stickers are used to do politics, there is a need to shift from semiotic interpretations of stickers as representational signs in favour of an action-oriented, pragmatist approach that examine stickers in action in people's lives and shared worlds. Connecting with recent calls in geography to reconceptualise political and communicative action as lively, emergent, and materially-mediated, we tour through the sticky, peeling, covered, shared, and scribbled geographies of stickers in everyday, ordinary political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the feat of maintaining life in orbit draws a sharp focus to the relationship between the human body and its environment, the porous and circulatory matter that blurs any boundaries between habitat and habitant. These intimate, engineered spaces evoke a microcosm of urgent planetary concerns surrounding air and water resources, and waste capture, storage, and elimination. This paper explores NASA's management of biological operations and discharge wastes in low gravity environments. Without strong gravitational fields, liquids coalesce at the location they are created, instead of flowing down and away. Such excesses disrupt the orderly engineered environments and minutely monitored bodies of these techno-scientific endeavors. Analyzing astronaut tears, space gynecology, zero-g surgery, and NASA's "Space Poop Challenge" through feminist queer and disability theory, new materialist, and discard studies lenses, this paper seeks to refigure the deeply entangled relationships between fleshy bodies and planetary bodies, biomass and geomass, and prompt new discussions of gravity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making autoethnography outlines a method for combining the practices of making (sewing and crochet) and interpretive writing to capture the relationality of the self and materials. I discuss how I have developed my fascination with making as a conduit for working through the challenges of writing autoethnography and the personal vulnerabilities that this practice can reveal. I detail how experimenting with making autoethnography through the stages of discovery, development and embedding develops a practice to interweave my interpretation of the relationality and materiality of making. Through paying attention to development over time as well as the time spent making, this approach explicitly integrates a temporal framing within autoethnographic methods. I also explore how making expresses the complexity of relationships bound through caring and grief. In embedding this methodology, I consider how attempting to capture the diversity of making though recording time, materials and skills, can take the researcher closer to unpicking the qualities of making and how these are constituted by social identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]