The following is a guest blog post from Stefan Böschen, Jochen Gläser, Martin Meister, and Cornelius Schubert, guest editors of Nature and Culture Volume 10, Issue 3.

Our interest in compiling this special issue was sparked by a curious imbalance that prevails in the recent turn to materiality in social research. The current proclamations for (re)considering materiality are mostly levelled at theoretical conceptualizations. Framing materiality as a theoretical challenge is of course necessary, but this debate has little to say about how to deal with materiality in terms of empirical research. We think that considering materiality as a purely theoretical challenge is taking the second step before the first. What might be even worse is that decoupling conceptual treatments of material agency from empirical research makes the “material” of material agency itself disappear behind abstract concepts. It seems that although there is substantial interest in the research on materiality and agency, there also is a marked carelessness, if not helplessness, to how deal with this challenge in empirical research.

Continue reading “Material Agency as a Challenge to Empirical Research?” →