The Materiality of Cylinder Seals

The meaning of materiality: reconsidering the materiality of Gramscian IR

Gramsican approaches in International Relations (IR) have sought to outline the relationship between ideas and material forces in the construction of world order. Scholars working within this broad school have sought to emphasise that ideas are material forces, and must be considered as concrete historical structures (Cox, 1987) central to the establishment of particular historical and hegemoni...

The materiality of indeterminacy

I would like to thank the contributors and HAU for this symposium. It is a great privilege to receive such insightful and challenging comments, which have expanded and clarified my thinking on a range of fronts. I'll begin with the comment of Stephen Lyon and David Henig because they raise fundamental methodological questions. I am very pleased that they see my book as having significance for d...

The Materiality of What

A singularly influential sense of `material worlds' has been developed by actor-network theories of science and technology, which trace out the kind of social action that emerges from encounters between `humans' and `non-humans'. What happens when this approach to materiality takes on the question of law? One answer is suggested by Bruno Latour's recent ethnography of law making in France's Con...

The Materiality of Microelectronics

This study advocates for ‘materials-centered’ accounts in the history of technology, and presents such an analysis for the early history of microelectronics. Innovations in semiconductor crystal production were central to the emergence of solid state electronics and the dynamics of the early semiconductor industry. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Bell Telephone Laboratories developed nov...

Discourse and the Materiality of Its Artifacts