New
Materialism

The Almanac comprises contributions from members of working groups, and participants in related activities, delineating key terms, more esoteric neologisms, and short provocations. Entries are arranged alphabetically and marked with the date of their submission.

The project is co-edited by Working Group 1 members David Gauthier (University of Amsterdam) and Sam Skinner (Manchester Metropolitan University). Additional development and peer review for some entries has been undertaken by members of Working Group 1. We are grateful to all members of the COST Action and beyond who have participated in and promoted the project to their networks, in particular those who attended a publications meeting at FACT, Liverpool in 2017 and Dorota Golanska who edited a number of early submissions.

Collectively the almanac has become a lively document of research and practice within the COST network and a rich resource with which to engage. It may also productively be read alongside, or diffractively, with other kindred works of lexicality such as The Post Human Glossary (eds. Braidotti and Hlavajova) and Symptoms of the Planetary Condition - A Critical Vocabulary (eds. Bunz, Kaiser and Thiele).

It should be noted that entries in the almanac vary from authoritative introductions to key terms, to much more personal and at times provocative texts. The dating of entries submission is intended to underscore the texts situated and contingent character, whilst also following the convention of almanacs to link information to points in time. Accordingly our approach to editing texts has sought to maintain works original style and voice, alongside more formal suggestions and process.

The almanac is currently on hiatus, following the end of the COST Action, as we review its scope and explore options for its future development. Below we include an ongoing list of actual and possible terms, and the first call-out, for a sense of the project's germinal spirit.

If you'd like to get in touch please contact co-editor: Sam Skinner (mail @ samskinner [dot] net)

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Extract of first call-out 2016:

We want you to contribute to an almanac that takes the temperature of new materialism today and enlivens its future development! The almanac will begin life online – composed of key terms and more experimental neologisms.

Traditionally, almanacs are annual publications that include data such as weather forecasts and times of the rising and setting sun and moon, often mixing prediction with more concrete or topical information. They are meant to be used intensely in everyday life – in our case in the everyday life of the new materialist scholar. When accidentally picked up, they instil curiosity. The format of the almanac invites flipping through, uncovering intra-linkages between data points, and discovering disconnections and blind spots. Almanacs are also temporal, contingent, and relational. Accordingly our endeavour seeks to forge temporary condensations and dynamic constellations of new materialist research, and an emergent epistemological process.

We encourage diffractive readings and poetic writings, and an experimental and co- authored approach. The purpose is to be rigorous, but also play with (in)consistencies. The almanac will reflect on literacies within the COST Action whilst also seeking to engage a broad readership, from novices to seasoned materialists, activists to transdisciplinary researchers. We hope it will function both as a conceptual toolkit for well and lesser known bibliographic trajectories and (co)authors’ own novel concepts and vocabularies.

Authors may write multiple entries and authors may also want to contact persons who have registered to write an entry to discuss co-authoring. We suggest entries be between 100 and 750 words to promote a brevity and potency to both writing and reading of the almanac, and also affirm a certain restlessness and plurality of voices to the encounter.

We will publish the almanac from 2016 to 2018, and beyond this explore development of the project into a print and open-access online publication. This iterative process is intended to promote an open dialogical process and for the project to function nebulously as para or meta texts to the COST Action, publishing outcomes, working group meetings, training schools, and conference discussions as they unfold.

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A list of terms collated throughout the project:

Abstraction, Accountability, Affect, Affirmative Difference, Agency, Agential Cut, Algorithms, Almanac, Angle, Angularity (Clinamen), Anthropocene, Apparatus, Apparatus of Bodily Production, Assemblages, Axiometry, Becoming, Body, Bijective, Capitalist Materialisms, Cipher, Code, Codomain (domain, function, mapping), Complementarity, Concept, Consent, Creative AND (vs. alienating OR), Creative Materiality, Cultural Entanglement, Culture, Cyborg, Diffeomorphism, Diagram, Difference, Diffraction & Reading Diffractively, Diffractive genealogies, Diffractive Pedagogies, Diffractive Creativities , Disease, Document/Documentation, Ecology, Emergence, Entanglement, Environmental Forms, Epistemic Unit, Equipollence, Ethico-onto-epistem-ology, Ethos / Ethics, Factor, Fearful Materialism, Fearful Symmetry, (Feminist) NM Pedagogies, Frailty, Free Variation, Function, Gender, Genealogy, Generalization, Homeomorphism, Image, Imagination, Individuation, Informatics, Information, Injective, Instruments, Integrity, Intensity, Intersectionality, Intra-action, Inverse, Isometry, Isomorphism, Iterativity, Jouissance, Key, Laboratory, Language, Liquid Agency, Literacy & Agential Literacy, Materiality, Material Community, Method/Methodology, Micro-politics, Micro-practice, Model/Modal, Nature, Non-Euclidean Geometries, Number, Numeral, Objectivity, Pain, Performativity, Plants, Poetic Materialisms, Poetics of Mathematics, Posthumanism, Power, Practice, Process, Projection, Quanta, Quantum, Quantum Entanglement, Realism, Re-, Recursion, Relationality, Representation, Signature, Singularity, Soil Fiction, Soilfarers, Society, Space-time-matter, Stickiness, Symbols, Surjective, Technology, Technicity, Techné, Tools, Transaction, Transduction, Transversality, Vegetal Ecologies, Virtual-actual Coupling, Viscosity, Vitalism, Yes and, ...

A spreadsheet of planned entries that may be added to can be accessed here