Material engagement

“How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (Bennett 2010, viii).

“Material Engagement Theory’s focus on 'vital materiality' enables us to ponder what makes us all human and at the same time so different” (Malafouris 2013, 248).

“Social change means people behaving, interacting, engaging with the world differently. Social change is, in other words, always perceptual/cognitive/emotional but it always also involves a changed mediated material engagement” (Graham 2019, 73).

“The claim is that things actively participate in human cognitive life or that human thinking is better described as thinging. We think with and through things, not simply about things. In particular, for the material-engagement approach, withness and throughness take precedence over aboutness” (Malafouris 2020, 4).