New
Materialism

The rising popularity of the new materialisms in critical cultural, environmental, and scientific studies has generated novel problems for research practice and methodology. The ‘transversality’ of new materialisms (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012) unsettles the ‘proper’ objects of study along with their familiar disciplinary apparatuses. This calls for new spaces and forms of inquiry for which the methods and methodologies are not (yet) available or clearly defined, or which move beyond their canonical frames of reference to open up for uncertainty in the way that thinking can proceed. It engenders research that connects conventionally disparate fields or methods, calling for new, hybrid, or inventive methodologies that are suited to the matters of investigation. The performative, implicated, relational ontologies proposed in new materialist theorizing are what drive these methodological agitations as they suggest that analysis starts from a different set of conditions that profoundly disorient the humanist coordinates underpinning social-, natural-, and technoscientific inquiry while calling for a renewed understanding of concept and practice. With the nature of evidence contested rather than assumed, the logos of method is revealed and destabilized by new materialist frameworks. This manifests particular methodological – which are also ethico-political – challenges (Fox and Alldred, 2015: 401), as methodology itself becomes reworked.

This volume seeks to engage with the methodological challenges and implications thrown up by new materialisms through the following questions:

• What is methodology from a new materialist framework?
• What methodologies emerge through research that engages with the new materialisms?
• What questions about method and methodology emerge in these research practices?
• What modes of engagement might we regard as being specifically new materialist?

We invite researchers and practitioners working with new materialisms to submit proposals on these or related questions in any of the following three categories:

1. Original essays, position pieces, short contributions etc. (see below for further detail)
2. Proposals for sub-sections that concentrate on particular questions, practices, debates, etc.
3. Expressions of interest for editorial input and/or reviewing

You may submit a proposal in more than one category (1, 2 or 3). Please specify the category in your submission. All proposals should include a working title, author name(s), primary email contact, a short bio and an abstract of 300 to 500 words. Proposals for sub-sections should include a designated editor and rationale for the suggested focus of the section. Any potential contributing authors should be included in the sub-section proposal, and each author is to submit a separate abstract. In addressing what it is about new materialism that makes a difference for methodology, you should specify the notion or definition of new materialism/s that you are working with.

The deadline for submitting proposals is extended to 15 November 2017 with decisions communicated to authors by end of November/early December. Full manuscripts will be expected by the end of April 2018. These will undergo a blind peer review process and be published in open access format. Your proposal/s should be sent to the editors: Peta Hinton (peta.hinton@ici-berlin.org); Natasha Mauthner (n.mauthner@abdn.ac.uk); Josef Barla (josef.barla@univie.ac.at); Claude Draude (claude.draude@uni-kassel.de). Please include the ‘CFP Methodologies’ and your name in the subject line. For a more extended Call for Papers for this volume or any queries feel free to contact the editors.

This volume is an initiative of Working Group 2 ‘New Materialisms on the Crossroads of the Natural and Human Sciences’ within the COST Action IS1307 ‘New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter”.

CFP PDF here