In this article, we theorize and develop a posthumanist and new materialist approach to sustainab... more In this article, we theorize and develop a posthumanist and new materialist approach to sustainable development policy. We trace a humanist and anthropocentric emphasis in policy discussions of 'sustainable' development that reaches back almost 50 years, and still underpins recent United Nations (UN) statements. This UN approach has tied policies to counter environmental challenges such as anthropogenic climate change firmly to sustaining and extending future human prosperity. By contrast, we chart a path beyond humanism and anthropocentrism, to establish a posthumanist environmentalism. This acknowledges human matter as an integral (rather than opposed) element within an all-encompassing 'environment'. Posthumanism simultaneously rejects the homogeneity implied by terms such as 'humanity' or 'human species', as based on a stereotypical 'human' that turns out to be white, male and from the global North. Instead, 'posthumans' are heterogeneous, gaining a diverse range of context-specific capacities with other matter. Some of these capacities (such as empathy, altruism, conceptual thinking and modelling futures) are highly unusual andparadoxicallymay be key to addressing the current crises of environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change.
'Frailty' is increasingly used as a clinical term to refer and respond to a particular bodily pre... more 'Frailty' is increasingly used as a clinical term to refer and respond to a particular bodily presentation, with numerous scores and measures to support its clinical determination. While these tools are typically quantitative in nature and based primarily on physical capacity, qualitative research has revealed that frailty is also associated with a range of social, economic and environmental factors. Here, we progress the understanding of frailty in older people via a new materialist synthesis of recent qualitative studies of frailty and ageing. We replace a conception of frailty as a bodily attribute with a relational understanding of a 'frailty assemblage'. Within this more-than-human assemblage, materialities establish the ongoing 'becoming' of the frail body. What clinicians refer to as 'frailty' is one becoming among many, produced during the daily activities and interactions of older people. Acknowledging the complexity of these more-than-human becomings is essential to make sense of frailty, and how to support and enhance the lives of frail older people.
This article offers a critical assessment of the challenges for policy-and practice-oriented soci... more This article offers a critical assessment of the challenges for policy-and practice-oriented social research of 'diffractive methodology' (DM): a post-representational approach to data analysis gaining interest among social researchers. Diffractive analyses read data from empirical research alongside other materials-including researchers' perspectives, memories, experiences, and emotions-to provide novel insights on events. While this analytical approach acknowledges the situatedness of all research data, it raises issues concerning the applicability of findings for policy or practice. In addition, it does not elucidate in what ways and to what extent the diffractions employed during analysis have influenced the findings. To explore these questions, we diffract DM itself, by reading it alongside a DeleuzoGuattarian analysis of research-as-assemblage. This supplies a richer understanding of the entanglements between research and its subject-matter, and suggests how diffractive analysis may be used in conjunction with other methods in practiceand policy-oriented research.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2021
With growing social science interest in new materialist and posthuman ontologies, it is timely to... more With growing social science interest in new materialist and posthuman ontologies, it is timely to explore how these may translate practically into social research methodologies. This task is complicated by differing interpretations of how new materialist precepts should shape research. This
The substantial literature on interactions between places/spaces and well-being/health often diff... more The substantial literature on interactions between places/spaces and well-being/health often differentiate between physical and social aspects of geographical location. This paper sidesteps this dualism, instead considering places as sociomaterial assemblages of human and non-human materialities. It uses this posthuman and 'new materialist' perspective to explore how place-assemblages affect human capacities, in terms of both health and social dis/advantage. Based on secondary analysis of interview data on human/place interactions, it analyses the physical, sociocultural, psychological and emotional effects of place-assemblages, assessing how these produce opportunities for, and constraints upon human bodies. It than assesses how these emergent capacities affect both social dis/advantage and well-being. This analysis of how place-assemblages contribute positively or negatively to health and dis/advantage offers possibilities for further research and for social and public health policy.
The materialist thread within health sociology has observed a clear gradient linking inequalities... more The materialist thread within health sociology has observed a clear gradient linking inequalities in health with measures of social class and poverty. More recently, Bourdieu's approach to social class complemented the ‘economic capital’ of Marxist analysis with ‘symbolic’ capitals such as ‘social’ and ‘cultural’. However, efforts to assess how symbolic capital interacts with health disparities reveal complex or contradictory effects. In this paper, we re‐materialise the study of health and social position via a new materialist focus on the interactions between humans and non‐human matter (NHM). We analyse empirical data to disclose the range of human/NHM interactions in daily life, and how these affect people's health status. These interactions establish physical, psychological and social opportunities and constraints on what human bodies can do, contributing to relative advantages and disadvantages. We argue for a revised materialist understanding of sociomaterial position as constituted by a ‘thousand tiny dis/advantages’, and suggest that health and wellbeing are inextricably linked to dis/advantage.
This article sets out a more-than-human framework within which to explore the contribution of non... more This article sets out a more-than-human framework within which to explore the contribution of non-human matter to social inequality. Applying an approach based in Deleuzian ethology, we extend three invitations: to address the multiplicity and fluidity of dis/advantage, to explore its production in everyday interactions, and to acknowledge non-human as well as human matter in the emergence of dis/advantage. The article examines how the interactions between human and non-human matter produce and reproduce context-specific bodily capacities and incapacities, and consequently 'a thousand tiny dis/advantages'. These dis/advantages may accumulate to produce substantive inequalities and social divisions. An illustrative re-reading of Paul Willis's 1970s study of the cultural reproduction of social inequality Learning to Labour reveals the complex ways in which daily encounters between human and non-human matter produce both transient and lasting dis/advantage. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this more-than-human perspective for the sociological study of inequality.
Climate change policy is a contested field, with rival perspectives underpinning radically differ... more Climate change policy is a contested field, with rival perspectives underpinning radically different policy propositions: from encouraging the market to innovate technical solutions to climate change through to the replacement of a market economy with an eco-socialist model. These differing policy options draw upon a variety of economic concepts and approaches, with significant consequent divergences in their policy recommendations. In this paper, we consider policy as assembled from a wide range of sociomaterial components-some human, others non-human. Using a 'new materialist' toolkit, we explore four contemporary climate change policies to unpack these policy-assemblages, and assess the different uses made of economics in each assemblage. We conclude that none of these contemporary policies is adequate to address climate change. Yet despite the incommensurability between how these disparate policies use economic concepts and theories, we suggest a materialist synthesis based on a comprehensive climate change policy-assemblage.
National and international policy-makers have addressed threats to environmental sustainability f... more National and international policy-makers have addressed threats to environmental sustainability from climate change and other environmental degradation for over 30 years. However, it is questionable whether current policies are socially, politically, economically and scientifically capable of adequately resolving these threats to the planet and living organisms. In this paper we theorise and develop the concept of a 'policy assemblage' from within a new materialist ontology, to interrogate critically four policy perspectives on climate change: 'liberal environmentalism'; the United Nations policy statements on sustainable development; 'green capitalism' (also known as 'climate capitalism') and finally 'no-growth economics'. A materialist analysis of interactions between climate change and policies enables us to establish what each policy can do, what it ignores or omits, and consequently its adequacy to address environmental sustainability in the face of climate change. None, we conclude, is adequate or appropriate to address climate change successfully. We then use this conceptual tool to establish a 'posthuman' policy on climate change. Humans, from this perspective, are part of the environment, not separate from or in opposition to it, but possess unique capacities that we suggest are now necessary to address climate change. This ontology supplies the starting point from which to establish sociologically a scientifically, socially, and politically adequate posthuman climate change policy. We offer suggestions for the constituent elements of such a policy.
Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 2012
Aim: To pilot the delivery of shiatsu in primary care and investigate the non-clinical impact on ... more Aim: To pilot the delivery of shiatsu in primary care and investigate the non-clinical impact on the general practice, its patients and staff. Design: Ten patients, referred by four GPs, were each offered six shiatsu treatments with a qualified practitioner. Setting: An inner-city general practice in Sheffield, England. Methods: 36 semi-structured interviews, evaluated with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and practitioner research including a reflective journal. Findings: GPs welcomed having more options of care, especially for patients with complex, chronic symptoms, and patients appreciated the increased time and holistic, patient-centred approach during shiatsu consultations. Participants claimed the clinic increased equality of access to complementary medicine, improved perceptions of the general practice, reduced consultation and prescription rates, enhanced GP-patient relationships and the working practices of the GPs and shiatsu practitioner. Conclusion: The study successfully integrated a shiatsu clinic into a general practice and offers a model for future research on complementary medicine in primary care.
Despite the current environmental crises of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degrad... more Despite the current environmental crises of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation afflicting the world, dualisms of culture/nature, human/non-human and animate/inanimate sustain a perspective on ‘the environment’ in which the human and the cultural are privileged over the natural world and other species. Policies on ‘sustainable development’ are likewise predicated upon efforts to assure future human prosperity. Our objective in this paper is to establish an alternative, post-anthropocentric perspective on environmental sustainability. Drawing on feminist materialist scholarship supplies an ontology to critique humanist approaches, and establishes the foundation for a posthuman sociology of environment, in which (post)humans are an integral but not privileged element. We consider the implications of this perspective for both sustainability policy and ‘climate justice’. A posthuman ontology leads to the conclusion – perhaps surprisingly, given the anthropogenic roots of current climate change – that some unusual human capacities are now essential to assure environmental potential.
To cite: Fox, N.J. and Klein, E. (2019) The micropolitics of behavioural interventions: a new mat... more To cite: Fox, N.J. and Klein, E. (2019) The micropolitics of behavioural interventions: a new materialist analysis. Biosocieties. https://doi. Abstract Behavioural approaches are increasingly used in both the global North and South as means to effect government policy. These interventions aim to encourage preferred behaviours by subtly shaping choices, applying incentives or employing punitive measures. Recent digital technology developments extend the reach of these behavioural approaches. While these approaches have been criticised from political science perspectives, in this paper we apply an innovative mode of analysis of behavioural policy approaches founded in a 'new materialist' ontology of affects, assemblages and capacities. This perspective enables us to explore their 'micropolitical' impact-on those who are their subjects, but also upon the wider sociocultural contexts within which they have been implemented. We examine two different behavioural interventions: the use of vouchers to incentivise new mothers to breastfeed their infants (a practice associated with improved health outcomes in both childhood and later life), and uses of debit card technologies in Australia to limit welfare recipients' spending on alcohol, drugs and gambling. In each case, we employ a materialist methodology to analyse precisely what these interventions do, and what (in)capacities they produce in their targeted groups. From these we draw out a more generalised critique of behavioural approaches to policy implementation.
This paper suggests that citizenship should be seen not as a status to be acquired, lost or refus... more This paper suggests that citizenship should be seen not as a status to be acquired, lost or refused by an individual. Rather it is an emergent and relational capacity produced and reproduced in everyday material interactions, across a spectrum of activities from work to lifestyle practices. We examine one example of such a material interaction: the engagements that young people have with sexualities education. To aid this endeavour, we apply a new materialist, relational framework that addresses the micropolitical interactions between humans and non-human materialities. Using data from two studies of sexualities education, we assess how the capacities produced during sexualities education interactions-such as a capacity to express specific sexual desires or to manage fertility proactively-contribute inter alia to young people's 'becoming-citizen'. Informed by this analysis, we argue that sociology may usefully apply a bottom-up model of citizenship as becoming, constituted materially from diverse engagements.
This special issue explores the interactions between environment, health and society, and reflect... more This special issue explores the interactions between environment, health and society, and reflects the journal's interdisciplinary focus-with articles that address a wide range of social scientific concerns and approaches. It is well established that natural environments affect human health and wellbeing. Discussions of this relationship have often, however, been overly deterministic, focusing upon environment-related social determinants of health such as the neighbourhood, transport and so forth (Spaargen and Mol, 1992). This determinism is at odds with developments that have led to the emergence of new understandings of the environment, informed by disciplines including anthropology, geography, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and environmental sciences. In these perspectives, the environment is more than a resource, it is a dynamic geographic space, invested with cultural and social meaning, and a sense of identity (Hunziker et al., 2007). The conceptual and methodological needs of this new account of the environment within the social sciences constitutes an important development requiring a much needed and necessary expansion attentive to the interactions between society, the environment, and the social dimensions of health. This issue of the journal variously addresses this re-definition of the environment, and its social impacts on health, through the different theories, case studies and perspectives of its contributors. In recent years, the interactions between the natural environment and human health have become the focus for social analyses within a burgeoning body of academic research addressing a wide range of institutional and personal practices, health discourses, and forms of medical or health expertise. They are also the subject of national and international policy initiatives, for example around environmental protection and public health, sustainable development, and co-benefits of health or environment initiatives. This ferment of activity has, however, frequently perpetuated the view that health can be studied as a true object, and that closer scrutiny in a wider range of environmental contexts can uncover its functional and structural antecedents for the benefits of improving health as an outcome. Key research findings in this respect have shown, for example, the links between proximity to blue or green space and positive mental and physical health outcomes (Wheeler et al., 2012; Maas et al. 2006). Addressing the complex and intertwined way in which different environments are socially shaped or experienced provides an opportunity to think again about how
Though mainstream sociological theory has been founded within dualisms such as structure/agency, ... more Though mainstream sociological theory has been founded within dualisms such as structure/agency, nature/culture, and mind/matter, a thread within sociology dating back to Spencer and Tarde (Karakayali, 2015) favoured a monist ontology that cut across such dualistic categories. This thread has been reinvigorated by recent developments in social theory, including the new materialisms, posthumanism and affect theories. Here we assess what a monist or 'flat' ontology means for sociological understanding of key concepts such as structures and systems, power and resistance. We examine two monistic sociologies: Bruno Latour's 'sociology of associations' and DeLanda's ontology of assemblages.
Sociology has focused predominantly upon 'collective memories' and their impact on social continu... more Sociology has focused predominantly upon 'collective memories' and their impact on social continuity and change, while relegating individual memories to the status of an empirical data resource for research on experiences and identity construction or maintenance. This paper suggests, however, that sociology has overlooked the part individual memories play in social production. It applies a post-anthropocentric, new materialist ontology, in which bodies, things, social formations, ideas, beliefs and memories can all possess capacities to materially affect and be affected. To explore the part that personal memory can play in producing the present and hence the future, data from in-depth interviews in a study of adults' food decision-making and practices are reported. Personal memories deriving from earlier events affect current food practices, and these contribute to the materiality of people's consumption of food stuffs. The paper concludes by reflecting on the wider importance of personal memory for sociological inquiry and memory studies.
International Journal of Social Research Methodolgy, Jul 5, 2017
We assess the potential for mixing social research methods, based upon a materialist and micropol... more We assess the potential for mixing social research methods, based upon a materialist and micropolitical analysis of the research-assemblage and of what individual research techniques and methods do in practice. Applying a DeleuzoGuattarian toolkit of assemblages, affects and capacities, we document what happens when research methods and techniques interact with the events they wish to study. Micropolitically, many of these techniques and methods have unintended effects of specifying and aggregating events, with the consequently that the knowledge produced by social inquiry is invested with these specifications and aggregations. We argue that rather than abandoning these social research tools, we may use the micropolitical analysis to assess precisely how each method affects knowledge production, and engineer the research designs we use accordingly. This forms the justification for mixing methods that are highly aggregative or specifying with those that are less so, effectively rehabilitating methods that have often been rejected by social researchers, including surveys and experiments.
We explore 'sexualisation' from a new materialist position, as an assemblage of bodies, things, i... more We explore 'sexualisation' from a new materialist position, as an assemblage of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions. Interview data on 22 young people's sexual activities reflect a range of relations and 'affects' contributing to the sexualisation of young people, including peers, social events, alcohol, media, popular culture and pornography. While a 'sexualisation-assemblage' may produce any and all capacities in bodies, it is typically blocked and restricted into narrow and circumscribed capacities. Limited and unimaginative practices portrayed in sexualised media and pornography narrow definitions of sexuality, and may reproduce and reinforce misogyny, sexual objectification and circumscribed sexualities. We argue for sexualities education for both children and adults that can 're-sexualise' all our bodies.
Portrayals of young people as either victims or perpetrators of errant, aberrant or even dangerou... more Portrayals of young people as either victims or perpetrators of errant, aberrant or even dangerous attitudes, desires or behaviours may be criticised for obscuring the relations of power within which young bodies are socially and physically located. However, notions of 'resistance' to power within these critiques remain under-theorised. In this theoretical paper we take a new materialist approach to explore the affectivity of young bodies, and the flows and intensities that produce and reproduce power and resistance, and what young bodies can do, feel and desire. To illustrate young bodies' resistances, we offer the example of the transgressive pro-ana movement that resists both biomedical and social definitions of anorexia. We conclude there is a need to focus upon 'resisting' as an affective movement of becoming, rather than upon 'resistance' as an agentic act, with consequences both for young bodies, theory, research and activism.
Personal health technologies (PHTs) are near-body devices or applications designed for use by a s... more Personal health technologies (PHTs) are near-body devices or applications designed for use by a single individual, principally outside healthcare facilities. They enable users to monitor physiological processes or body activity, are frequently communication-enabled, and sometimes also intervene therapeutically. This paper explores a range of PHTs, from blood pressure or blood glucose monitors purchased in pharmacies, fitness monitors such as FitBit and Nike+ Fuelband, through to drug pumps and implantable medical devices. It applies a new materialist analysis, first reverse engineering a range of PHTs to explore their micropolitics, and then forward-engineering PHTs to meet, variously, public health, corporate, patient and resisting-citizen agendas. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of PHTs, and the possibilities of designing devices and apps that might foster a subversive micropolitics and encourage collective and resisting ‘citizen-health’.
In this article, we theorize and develop a posthumanist and new materialist approach to sustainab... more In this article, we theorize and develop a posthumanist and new materialist approach to sustainable development policy. We trace a humanist and anthropocentric emphasis in policy discussions of 'sustainable' development that reaches back almost 50 years, and still underpins recent United Nations (UN) statements. This UN approach has tied policies to counter environmental challenges such as anthropogenic climate change firmly to sustaining and extending future human prosperity. By contrast, we chart a path beyond humanism and anthropocentrism, to establish a posthumanist environmentalism. This acknowledges human matter as an integral (rather than opposed) element within an all-encompassing 'environment'. Posthumanism simultaneously rejects the homogeneity implied by terms such as 'humanity' or 'human species', as based on a stereotypical 'human' that turns out to be white, male and from the global North. Instead, 'posthumans' are heterogeneous, gaining a diverse range of context-specific capacities with other matter. Some of these capacities (such as empathy, altruism, conceptual thinking and modelling futures) are highly unusual andparadoxicallymay be key to addressing the current crises of environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change.
'Frailty' is increasingly used as a clinical term to refer and respond to a particular bodily pre... more 'Frailty' is increasingly used as a clinical term to refer and respond to a particular bodily presentation, with numerous scores and measures to support its clinical determination. While these tools are typically quantitative in nature and based primarily on physical capacity, qualitative research has revealed that frailty is also associated with a range of social, economic and environmental factors. Here, we progress the understanding of frailty in older people via a new materialist synthesis of recent qualitative studies of frailty and ageing. We replace a conception of frailty as a bodily attribute with a relational understanding of a 'frailty assemblage'. Within this more-than-human assemblage, materialities establish the ongoing 'becoming' of the frail body. What clinicians refer to as 'frailty' is one becoming among many, produced during the daily activities and interactions of older people. Acknowledging the complexity of these more-than-human becomings is essential to make sense of frailty, and how to support and enhance the lives of frail older people.
This article offers a critical assessment of the challenges for policy-and practice-oriented soci... more This article offers a critical assessment of the challenges for policy-and practice-oriented social research of 'diffractive methodology' (DM): a post-representational approach to data analysis gaining interest among social researchers. Diffractive analyses read data from empirical research alongside other materials-including researchers' perspectives, memories, experiences, and emotions-to provide novel insights on events. While this analytical approach acknowledges the situatedness of all research data, it raises issues concerning the applicability of findings for policy or practice. In addition, it does not elucidate in what ways and to what extent the diffractions employed during analysis have influenced the findings. To explore these questions, we diffract DM itself, by reading it alongside a DeleuzoGuattarian analysis of research-as-assemblage. This supplies a richer understanding of the entanglements between research and its subject-matter, and suggests how diffractive analysis may be used in conjunction with other methods in practiceand policy-oriented research.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2021
With growing social science interest in new materialist and posthuman ontologies, it is timely to... more With growing social science interest in new materialist and posthuman ontologies, it is timely to explore how these may translate practically into social research methodologies. This task is complicated by differing interpretations of how new materialist precepts should shape research. This
The substantial literature on interactions between places/spaces and well-being/health often diff... more The substantial literature on interactions between places/spaces and well-being/health often differentiate between physical and social aspects of geographical location. This paper sidesteps this dualism, instead considering places as sociomaterial assemblages of human and non-human materialities. It uses this posthuman and 'new materialist' perspective to explore how place-assemblages affect human capacities, in terms of both health and social dis/advantage. Based on secondary analysis of interview data on human/place interactions, it analyses the physical, sociocultural, psychological and emotional effects of place-assemblages, assessing how these produce opportunities for, and constraints upon human bodies. It than assesses how these emergent capacities affect both social dis/advantage and well-being. This analysis of how place-assemblages contribute positively or negatively to health and dis/advantage offers possibilities for further research and for social and public health policy.
The materialist thread within health sociology has observed a clear gradient linking inequalities... more The materialist thread within health sociology has observed a clear gradient linking inequalities in health with measures of social class and poverty. More recently, Bourdieu's approach to social class complemented the ‘economic capital’ of Marxist analysis with ‘symbolic’ capitals such as ‘social’ and ‘cultural’. However, efforts to assess how symbolic capital interacts with health disparities reveal complex or contradictory effects. In this paper, we re‐materialise the study of health and social position via a new materialist focus on the interactions between humans and non‐human matter (NHM). We analyse empirical data to disclose the range of human/NHM interactions in daily life, and how these affect people's health status. These interactions establish physical, psychological and social opportunities and constraints on what human bodies can do, contributing to relative advantages and disadvantages. We argue for a revised materialist understanding of sociomaterial position as constituted by a ‘thousand tiny dis/advantages’, and suggest that health and wellbeing are inextricably linked to dis/advantage.
This article sets out a more-than-human framework within which to explore the contribution of non... more This article sets out a more-than-human framework within which to explore the contribution of non-human matter to social inequality. Applying an approach based in Deleuzian ethology, we extend three invitations: to address the multiplicity and fluidity of dis/advantage, to explore its production in everyday interactions, and to acknowledge non-human as well as human matter in the emergence of dis/advantage. The article examines how the interactions between human and non-human matter produce and reproduce context-specific bodily capacities and incapacities, and consequently 'a thousand tiny dis/advantages'. These dis/advantages may accumulate to produce substantive inequalities and social divisions. An illustrative re-reading of Paul Willis's 1970s study of the cultural reproduction of social inequality Learning to Labour reveals the complex ways in which daily encounters between human and non-human matter produce both transient and lasting dis/advantage. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this more-than-human perspective for the sociological study of inequality.
Climate change policy is a contested field, with rival perspectives underpinning radically differ... more Climate change policy is a contested field, with rival perspectives underpinning radically different policy propositions: from encouraging the market to innovate technical solutions to climate change through to the replacement of a market economy with an eco-socialist model. These differing policy options draw upon a variety of economic concepts and approaches, with significant consequent divergences in their policy recommendations. In this paper, we consider policy as assembled from a wide range of sociomaterial components-some human, others non-human. Using a 'new materialist' toolkit, we explore four contemporary climate change policies to unpack these policy-assemblages, and assess the different uses made of economics in each assemblage. We conclude that none of these contemporary policies is adequate to address climate change. Yet despite the incommensurability between how these disparate policies use economic concepts and theories, we suggest a materialist synthesis based on a comprehensive climate change policy-assemblage.
National and international policy-makers have addressed threats to environmental sustainability f... more National and international policy-makers have addressed threats to environmental sustainability from climate change and other environmental degradation for over 30 years. However, it is questionable whether current policies are socially, politically, economically and scientifically capable of adequately resolving these threats to the planet and living organisms. In this paper we theorise and develop the concept of a 'policy assemblage' from within a new materialist ontology, to interrogate critically four policy perspectives on climate change: 'liberal environmentalism'; the United Nations policy statements on sustainable development; 'green capitalism' (also known as 'climate capitalism') and finally 'no-growth economics'. A materialist analysis of interactions between climate change and policies enables us to establish what each policy can do, what it ignores or omits, and consequently its adequacy to address environmental sustainability in the face of climate change. None, we conclude, is adequate or appropriate to address climate change successfully. We then use this conceptual tool to establish a 'posthuman' policy on climate change. Humans, from this perspective, are part of the environment, not separate from or in opposition to it, but possess unique capacities that we suggest are now necessary to address climate change. This ontology supplies the starting point from which to establish sociologically a scientifically, socially, and politically adequate posthuman climate change policy. We offer suggestions for the constituent elements of such a policy.
Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 2012
Aim: To pilot the delivery of shiatsu in primary care and investigate the non-clinical impact on ... more Aim: To pilot the delivery of shiatsu in primary care and investigate the non-clinical impact on the general practice, its patients and staff. Design: Ten patients, referred by four GPs, were each offered six shiatsu treatments with a qualified practitioner. Setting: An inner-city general practice in Sheffield, England. Methods: 36 semi-structured interviews, evaluated with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and practitioner research including a reflective journal. Findings: GPs welcomed having more options of care, especially for patients with complex, chronic symptoms, and patients appreciated the increased time and holistic, patient-centred approach during shiatsu consultations. Participants claimed the clinic increased equality of access to complementary medicine, improved perceptions of the general practice, reduced consultation and prescription rates, enhanced GP-patient relationships and the working practices of the GPs and shiatsu practitioner. Conclusion: The study successfully integrated a shiatsu clinic into a general practice and offers a model for future research on complementary medicine in primary care.
Despite the current environmental crises of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degrad... more Despite the current environmental crises of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation afflicting the world, dualisms of culture/nature, human/non-human and animate/inanimate sustain a perspective on ‘the environment’ in which the human and the cultural are privileged over the natural world and other species. Policies on ‘sustainable development’ are likewise predicated upon efforts to assure future human prosperity. Our objective in this paper is to establish an alternative, post-anthropocentric perspective on environmental sustainability. Drawing on feminist materialist scholarship supplies an ontology to critique humanist approaches, and establishes the foundation for a posthuman sociology of environment, in which (post)humans are an integral but not privileged element. We consider the implications of this perspective for both sustainability policy and ‘climate justice’. A posthuman ontology leads to the conclusion – perhaps surprisingly, given the anthropogenic roots of current climate change – that some unusual human capacities are now essential to assure environmental potential.
To cite: Fox, N.J. and Klein, E. (2019) The micropolitics of behavioural interventions: a new mat... more To cite: Fox, N.J. and Klein, E. (2019) The micropolitics of behavioural interventions: a new materialist analysis. Biosocieties. https://doi. Abstract Behavioural approaches are increasingly used in both the global North and South as means to effect government policy. These interventions aim to encourage preferred behaviours by subtly shaping choices, applying incentives or employing punitive measures. Recent digital technology developments extend the reach of these behavioural approaches. While these approaches have been criticised from political science perspectives, in this paper we apply an innovative mode of analysis of behavioural policy approaches founded in a 'new materialist' ontology of affects, assemblages and capacities. This perspective enables us to explore their 'micropolitical' impact-on those who are their subjects, but also upon the wider sociocultural contexts within which they have been implemented. We examine two different behavioural interventions: the use of vouchers to incentivise new mothers to breastfeed their infants (a practice associated with improved health outcomes in both childhood and later life), and uses of debit card technologies in Australia to limit welfare recipients' spending on alcohol, drugs and gambling. In each case, we employ a materialist methodology to analyse precisely what these interventions do, and what (in)capacities they produce in their targeted groups. From these we draw out a more generalised critique of behavioural approaches to policy implementation.
This paper suggests that citizenship should be seen not as a status to be acquired, lost or refus... more This paper suggests that citizenship should be seen not as a status to be acquired, lost or refused by an individual. Rather it is an emergent and relational capacity produced and reproduced in everyday material interactions, across a spectrum of activities from work to lifestyle practices. We examine one example of such a material interaction: the engagements that young people have with sexualities education. To aid this endeavour, we apply a new materialist, relational framework that addresses the micropolitical interactions between humans and non-human materialities. Using data from two studies of sexualities education, we assess how the capacities produced during sexualities education interactions-such as a capacity to express specific sexual desires or to manage fertility proactively-contribute inter alia to young people's 'becoming-citizen'. Informed by this analysis, we argue that sociology may usefully apply a bottom-up model of citizenship as becoming, constituted materially from diverse engagements.
This special issue explores the interactions between environment, health and society, and reflect... more This special issue explores the interactions between environment, health and society, and reflects the journal's interdisciplinary focus-with articles that address a wide range of social scientific concerns and approaches. It is well established that natural environments affect human health and wellbeing. Discussions of this relationship have often, however, been overly deterministic, focusing upon environment-related social determinants of health such as the neighbourhood, transport and so forth (Spaargen and Mol, 1992). This determinism is at odds with developments that have led to the emergence of new understandings of the environment, informed by disciplines including anthropology, geography, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and environmental sciences. In these perspectives, the environment is more than a resource, it is a dynamic geographic space, invested with cultural and social meaning, and a sense of identity (Hunziker et al., 2007). The conceptual and methodological needs of this new account of the environment within the social sciences constitutes an important development requiring a much needed and necessary expansion attentive to the interactions between society, the environment, and the social dimensions of health. This issue of the journal variously addresses this re-definition of the environment, and its social impacts on health, through the different theories, case studies and perspectives of its contributors. In recent years, the interactions between the natural environment and human health have become the focus for social analyses within a burgeoning body of academic research addressing a wide range of institutional and personal practices, health discourses, and forms of medical or health expertise. They are also the subject of national and international policy initiatives, for example around environmental protection and public health, sustainable development, and co-benefits of health or environment initiatives. This ferment of activity has, however, frequently perpetuated the view that health can be studied as a true object, and that closer scrutiny in a wider range of environmental contexts can uncover its functional and structural antecedents for the benefits of improving health as an outcome. Key research findings in this respect have shown, for example, the links between proximity to blue or green space and positive mental and physical health outcomes (Wheeler et al., 2012; Maas et al. 2006). Addressing the complex and intertwined way in which different environments are socially shaped or experienced provides an opportunity to think again about how
Though mainstream sociological theory has been founded within dualisms such as structure/agency, ... more Though mainstream sociological theory has been founded within dualisms such as structure/agency, nature/culture, and mind/matter, a thread within sociology dating back to Spencer and Tarde (Karakayali, 2015) favoured a monist ontology that cut across such dualistic categories. This thread has been reinvigorated by recent developments in social theory, including the new materialisms, posthumanism and affect theories. Here we assess what a monist or 'flat' ontology means for sociological understanding of key concepts such as structures and systems, power and resistance. We examine two monistic sociologies: Bruno Latour's 'sociology of associations' and DeLanda's ontology of assemblages.
Sociology has focused predominantly upon 'collective memories' and their impact on social continu... more Sociology has focused predominantly upon 'collective memories' and their impact on social continuity and change, while relegating individual memories to the status of an empirical data resource for research on experiences and identity construction or maintenance. This paper suggests, however, that sociology has overlooked the part individual memories play in social production. It applies a post-anthropocentric, new materialist ontology, in which bodies, things, social formations, ideas, beliefs and memories can all possess capacities to materially affect and be affected. To explore the part that personal memory can play in producing the present and hence the future, data from in-depth interviews in a study of adults' food decision-making and practices are reported. Personal memories deriving from earlier events affect current food practices, and these contribute to the materiality of people's consumption of food stuffs. The paper concludes by reflecting on the wider importance of personal memory for sociological inquiry and memory studies.
International Journal of Social Research Methodolgy, Jul 5, 2017
We assess the potential for mixing social research methods, based upon a materialist and micropol... more We assess the potential for mixing social research methods, based upon a materialist and micropolitical analysis of the research-assemblage and of what individual research techniques and methods do in practice. Applying a DeleuzoGuattarian toolkit of assemblages, affects and capacities, we document what happens when research methods and techniques interact with the events they wish to study. Micropolitically, many of these techniques and methods have unintended effects of specifying and aggregating events, with the consequently that the knowledge produced by social inquiry is invested with these specifications and aggregations. We argue that rather than abandoning these social research tools, we may use the micropolitical analysis to assess precisely how each method affects knowledge production, and engineer the research designs we use accordingly. This forms the justification for mixing methods that are highly aggregative or specifying with those that are less so, effectively rehabilitating methods that have often been rejected by social researchers, including surveys and experiments.
We explore 'sexualisation' from a new materialist position, as an assemblage of bodies, things, i... more We explore 'sexualisation' from a new materialist position, as an assemblage of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions. Interview data on 22 young people's sexual activities reflect a range of relations and 'affects' contributing to the sexualisation of young people, including peers, social events, alcohol, media, popular culture and pornography. While a 'sexualisation-assemblage' may produce any and all capacities in bodies, it is typically blocked and restricted into narrow and circumscribed capacities. Limited and unimaginative practices portrayed in sexualised media and pornography narrow definitions of sexuality, and may reproduce and reinforce misogyny, sexual objectification and circumscribed sexualities. We argue for sexualities education for both children and adults that can 're-sexualise' all our bodies.
Portrayals of young people as either victims or perpetrators of errant, aberrant or even dangerou... more Portrayals of young people as either victims or perpetrators of errant, aberrant or even dangerous attitudes, desires or behaviours may be criticised for obscuring the relations of power within which young bodies are socially and physically located. However, notions of 'resistance' to power within these critiques remain under-theorised. In this theoretical paper we take a new materialist approach to explore the affectivity of young bodies, and the flows and intensities that produce and reproduce power and resistance, and what young bodies can do, feel and desire. To illustrate young bodies' resistances, we offer the example of the transgressive pro-ana movement that resists both biomedical and social definitions of anorexia. We conclude there is a need to focus upon 'resisting' as an affective movement of becoming, rather than upon 'resistance' as an agentic act, with consequences both for young bodies, theory, research and activism.
Personal health technologies (PHTs) are near-body devices or applications designed for use by a s... more Personal health technologies (PHTs) are near-body devices or applications designed for use by a single individual, principally outside healthcare facilities. They enable users to monitor physiological processes or body activity, are frequently communication-enabled, and sometimes also intervene therapeutically. This paper explores a range of PHTs, from blood pressure or blood glucose monitors purchased in pharmacies, fitness monitors such as FitBit and Nike+ Fuelband, through to drug pumps and implantable medical devices. It applies a new materialist analysis, first reverse engineering a range of PHTs to explore their micropolitics, and then forward-engineering PHTs to meet, variously, public health, corporate, patient and resisting-citizen agendas. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of PHTs, and the possibilities of designing devices and apps that might foster a subversive micropolitics and encourage collective and resisting ‘citizen-health’.
The first book of its kind, Sociology and the New Materialism explores the many and varied applic... more The first book of its kind, Sociology and the New Materialism explores the many and varied applications of “new materialism,” a key emerging trend in 21st century thought, to the practice of doing sociology.
Offering a clear exposition of new materialist theory and using sociological examples throughout to enable the reader to develop a materialist sociological understanding, the book: * Outlines the fundamental precepts of new materialism * Explores how materialism provides new perspectives on the range of sociological topic areas * Explains how materialist approaches can be used to research sociological issues and also to engage with social issues.
Sociology and the New Materialism is a clear and authoritative one-stop guide for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural studies, social policy and related disciplines.
The medical and social sciences offer us many ways of understanding the human body and what it ca... more The medical and social sciences offer us many ways of understanding the human body and what it can do. From biology and psychology to sociology and philosophy, a range of disciplines supply us with a rich yet challenging picture. On the one hand, our bodies are fashioned from genes, cells and organs; on the other, they are the foundation for our identities, our interactions and lived experiences from childhood to old age.
This book provides an accessible and informative account of the importance of the body for the caring professions. It offers a clear description of the latest theoretical perspectives, weaving the natural and social body into one. The book focuses on specific aspects such as health and illness, ageing, gender and sexuality, consumption, care, and medical technology.
The text is specifically tailored towards the needs of health and social care students, with case studies directly relating to concrete problems encountered by professionals in the field. The Body is an invaluable textbook for students of the caring professions and will bring to life the issues they face, both in their studies and in their future work with patients, clients and consumers.
In this chapter we apply a new materialist ontology to issues of citizenship. We argue that inste... more In this chapter we apply a new materialist ontology to issues of citizenship. We argue that instead of considering citizenship as a status to be acquired, lost or refused by an individual, it is an emergent and relational capacity. This capacity is produced and reproduced in everyday material interactions, across a spectrum of activities from work to lifestyle practices. To illustrate this shift, we examine one example of such a material interaction: the engagements that young people have with sexualities education. Using data from two studies of sexualities education, we assess how the capacities produced during sexualities education interactions-such as a capacity to express specific sexual desires or to manage fertility proactively-contribute to the 'becoming-citizen' of young people. We conclude by suggesting how this bottom-up, posthuman model of citizenship as becoming can assist social work theory and practice: by rethinking agency, and acknowledging the differential access to resources and opportunities experienced by those of different genders, ethnicities, sexualities, classes and nationalities.
To cite: Alldred, P. and Fox, N.J. (2019) Sexualities education and sexual citizenship. A materia... more To cite: Alldred, P. and Fox, N.J. (2019) Sexualities education and sexual citizenship. A materialist approach. In: Aggleton, P., Cover, R., Leahy, D., Marshall, D. and Rasmussen, M.L. (eds.) Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 118-133. Abstract Teachers, school nurses and youth workers approach sexualities education differently, with young people being framed respectively as 'innocent', pre-sexual beings at risk of corruption by sexual knowledge or practice; as rational decision makers with legitimate sexual health needs or concerns; or as sexual citizens whose empowerment might be supported by individual and social/community level interventions. This chapter places these differing models of sexualities education within a relational approach to sexual citizenship, tracing the sexuality-education assemblages that emerge in the intra-actions between young people and these professionals, and the capacities (sexual and otherwise) they produce in bodies.
Scambler, G. (ed.) Sociology Applied to Health and Medicine 7th Edition, pp. 263-276. London: Palgrave., 2018
The aim of this chapter is to describe alternatives to a strictly biological understanding of bod... more The aim of this chapter is to describe alternatives to a strictly biological understanding of bodies and embodiment, and how these approaches help to understand the parts bodies play in health, illness and health care. We will begin by exploring how sociology has understood a ‘social body’, before turning to recent work that argues that a distinction between biological and social bodies is artificial. Indeed rather than trying to define a body as biological, social or both we should change the question, and ask ‘what can a body do?’
Fox, N.J. and Alldred, P. (in press) New materialism. In: Atkinson, P.A., Delamont, S., Hardy, M.A. and Williams, M. (eds.) SAGE Research Methods Foundations. London: Sage.
New materialism is a term ascribed to a range of contemporary perspectives in the arts, humanitie... more New materialism is a term ascribed to a range of contemporary perspectives in the arts, humanities and social sciences that have in common a theoretical and practical ‘turn to matter’. This turn emphasizes the materiality of the world and everything – social and natural – within it, and differentiates new materialisms from a post-structuralist focus upon texts, ‘systems of thought’ and ‘discourses’, focusing upon social production rather than social construction
Kamp, A. and McSharry, M. (eds.) Re/Assembling the Pregnant and Parenting Teenager, pp. 219-242. Oxford: Peter Lang. ISBN: 9781787075146, 2018
In this chapter Alldred and Fox explore teenage pregnancy, sexualities education and sexual citiz... more In this chapter Alldred and Fox explore teenage pregnancy, sexualities education and sexual citizenship using a new materialist toolkit of assemblages, affects and micropolitics. They use data from two studies to study the impact of different sexualities-education assemblages (constituted around teachers, school nurses and youth workers) upon the sexual and non-sexual capacities produced in young people. These capacities-for instance, a capacity to assert rights to express specific sexual desires or a capacity to manage fertility proactively-contribute inter alia to young people's (sexual) 'citizen-ing'. Alldred and Fox conclude by assessing the wider implications of these assemblages for sexual citizenship-in the context of the continuing emphasis upon educational approaches to address issues of non-normative sexualities including teenage pregnancy and parenting, and the opportunities for an alternative nomadic citizenship of becoming and lines of flight.
King, A., Santos, A.C. and Crowhurst, I. (eds.) Sexualities Research: Critical Interjections, Diverse Methodologies and Practical Applications. London: Routledge., 2017
This chapter explores what is gained (and lost) in a sociology of sexuality that employs a materi... more This chapter explores what is gained (and lost) in a sociology of sexuality that employs a materialist and posthuman perspective. It establishes a Deleuze-inspired language of sexuality using the concepts of 'assemblage', 'affect', 'productive desire' and 'territorialisation'. Sexuality is relocated away from bodies and individuals, on to the affective flow within the sexuality-assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions that produce sexual capacities in bodies and collectivities. The chapter rethinks conceptions such as sexual desire, sexual response, sexual preferences, sexual codes of conduct, sexual identity, and sexuality itself. The chapter develops and illustrates both this ontology and its translation into a methodology for social inquiry using two disparate datasets to explore the sexuality of young men: a series of interviews with higher education students and two focus groups with white working-class teens.
The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education, Nov 14, 2016
In this chapter we establish a language and landscape for a new materialist practice of research ... more In this chapter we establish a language and landscape for a new materialist practice of research in sexuality education that both shifts the location of sexuality away from bodies and individuals toward an understanding of the materiality of sexuality-assemblages, and re-thinks social inquiry in terms of the micropolitics of the research-assemblage. In the first section, we develop the materialist approach to sexuality and – by extension – sexuality education. From this perspective, sexuality is not an attribute of a body, but an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies. Aggregating forces in sexuality assemblages establish limits on what a sexual body can do; sexuality is consequently both infinitely variable and typically highly restricted. We explore this materialist analysis of sexuality education through critical examination of the ways in which the delivery of a sexuality education curriculum typically individualises and psychologises children and young people in terms of their ‘needs’, marginalising discussion of LGBTQ sexualities in the process. The second part extends the materialist perspective on assemblages to consider social inquiry. From this perspective, research is not at root an enterprise undertaken by human actors, but a machine-like assemblage of things, people, ideas, social collectivities and institutions. We conceptualise research as the hybridising of two assemblages: an ‘event-assemblage’ (for instance, some sexuality education practice) and a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising researcher, methods, audience and contexts. The outcome is a third assemblage with its own affective flow, and it is this hybrid assemblage that produces ‘knowledge’. Using examples from our research, we critically assess the implications for social inquiry in sexuality education in terms of both methodology and the status of ‘knowledge’ produced by social inquiry, and how new materialist ontology provides an alternative to the realist and constructionist epistemologies that have influenced sexuality education scholarship.
Learning Bodies: The Body in Youth and Childhood Studies, Mar 1, 2016
Political, social policy and biomedical discourses have all too often portrayed young bodies as e... more Political, social policy and biomedical discourses have all too often portrayed young bodies as either victims or perpetrators of errant, aberrant or even dangerous attitudes, desires or behaviours. Such perspectives obscure the relations of power within which young bodies are socially and physically located. While sociology has explored the power nexus that surrounds young bodies' development, education, sexuality and other aspects, the character of 'resistance' to power requires further elucidation. In this chapter we take a new materialist approach to explore the affectivity of young bodies, and the flows and intensities that produce and reproduce power and resistance concerning embodiment, subjectivities, and what young bodies can do, feel and desire. To explicate young bodies' resistances, we look at two case studies that explore, respectively, diet and sexuality. In the first of these studies, we consider the transgressive pro-ana movement that resists both biomedical and social definitions of anorexia; in the second, we investigate how young bodies' sexuality provides a means to resist institutional power. These case studies suggest a need to focus upon 'resisting' as an affective movement rather than on 'resistance' as an agentic bodily attribute, with consequences both for young bodies and for sociological research.
Pre-peer review manuscript of a book chapter for the Handbook of Critical Psychology (2015), Apr 2015
This chapter describes and critiques lesbian and gay psychology as an important but limited move ... more This chapter describes and critiques lesbian and gay psychology as an important but limited move to remedy psychology’s complicity with oppressive heteronormative and homophobic cultures, and sets out an alternative critical psychology of sexualities. We begin with a brief overview of 100 years of mainstream psychology’s varied engagements with sexuality, and how this has led to the emergence of LGBTQ psychology (Clarke and Braun, 2009). We will
consider why lesbian and gay psychology is constrained by its psychological underpinnings, and show how critical psychology has challenged the individualisation of sexualities, the location of sexuality within the body, and the side-lining within mainstream psychology of explorations of social processes and power in the production of sexualities. We set out the main elements of a critical psychology of sexualities, and conclude by assessing how critical
psychologists may engage with the struggles of LGBT people.
Post-structuralism is an ontological and epistemological position that emerged in the latter part... more Post-structuralism is an ontological and epistemological position that emerged in the latter part of the 20 th century within the humanities and social sciences. It reflects a move beyond structuralist ontologies of the social world, including Marxism, structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis, in which core social, cultural or psychological structures are considered to constrain strongly the possibilities of human action. Post-structuralism retains structuralist concerns with power relations, but emphasises the role of knowledge and textual processes in achieving and sustaining relations of power.
There is, of course, no such thing --in any essential sense --as 'the field'. The 'field' is cons... more There is, of course, no such thing --in any essential sense --as 'the field'. The 'field' is constructed out of the practices of certain human beings who designate themselves as social researchers, define others as subjects and (with luck) persuade a further group to fund the former to inspect, categorise, analyse and interpret the latter. Fieldwork is both the sum of these processes and a performance characterised by a particular, self-conscious set of behaviours, including stoicism in the face of one's own discomfort or others' procrastination and a willingness to accept the bizarre or outrageous as commonplace and morally neutral .
To cite: Fox, N.J. (1997) The promise of postmodernism for the sociology of health and medicine. ... more To cite: Fox, N.J. (1997) The promise of postmodernism for the sociology of health and medicine. In G. Scambler and P. Higgs (eds.) Modernity, Medicine and Health. London: Routledge, Promises are gifts. And when promises come to fruition (which all promises do, or they are not promises but empty words) it is doubly sweet because --despite the waiting and the anticipation --we have known all alone, we have trusted and been certain, that they would be fulfilled. The trip to the zoo, the first night of married passion, the Promised Land of the Israelites, feel so good when finally happening, because they were presaged in the promise. Moses would not have been so willing to wander for years in the desert (and die before he arrived) were the Promised Land to have been the Land that Could Be Yours One Day or the Land I Might Give You if You're Good.
Fox, N.J. (2000) ‘The ethics and politics of caring'. In S. Williams, J. Gabe and M. Calnan (eds.) Theorising Medicine, Health and Society. London: Routledge. pp.107-24., 2000
What does it mean to care? And what is the significance of being a care-giver or a recipient of c... more What does it mean to care? And what is the significance of being a care-giver or a recipient of care? Within the social sciences, 'care' is paradoxical. On one hand, it is based in intimate and human relations which value giving, love and concern. On the other, it is a set of practices --and theories about those practices --which are codified by the 'caring professions' as an occupation and the basis for disciplinary power and authority (Gardner 1992). As Thomas (1993: 649) also points out, care entails both the emotional 'caring about someone' and the more instrumental 'caring for a person'. 'Care' is a growth area for discourse at the present time, and careers in care professions and in research and academic life are being forged from the disciplinary work of care theorists: the fabrication of what I have called elsewhere (Fox 1995a) the vigil of care. These discourses on care are about power, intricately associated with 'knowledge', as it impinges on its subjects: those who are the recipients of this care-as-discipline. Postmodern social theory has made significant contributions to our understanding of the relationship between such power and knowledge, and hence to explorations of the micro-politics of social control --in hospitals, schools, psychiatry and psychology. However, many of these authors have had as their focus not only the theorising of disciplinary control, but also the possibility of resistance to such control. While approaching the question from different angles, such disparate postmodern writers as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and the French post-structuralist feminists such as Cixous and Kristeva have recognised the centrality of language in the fabrication of reality, and a commitment to difference and diversity in postmodern theory as opening up a perspective on resistance to power. And most recently --under the general banner of postmodernism --this interest in difference has
The emergence of digital health and illness technologies (Lupton, 2014), and the digitisation of capitalist economic production (Roche, 2012) reflect the increasing cyborgisation of organic matter within current economic and social relations. However, sociology has tended to displace from attention the non-human materialities that contribute to social production, privileging the human body and its agency over the agentic capacities of both physical things (including technologies) and ‘information’. The latter comprises not only ‘data’, but also ideas, memories, conceptual frameworks, systems of thought and social codes, all of which can have material effects and contribute to production. Such a post-anthropocentric sociology of production and the digital may be helpfully informed theoretically by the ‘turn to matter’ in new materialist theories and methodologies (Coole and Frost, 2010; Fox and Alldred, 2016). In this paper I will explore such a new materialist and posthuman approach to ‘digital health’ and digital capitalism’, by micropolitical investigation of what digital technologies actually do, within the contexts of contemporary social relations. This enables new insights into the impacts of the digital upon social production. However, it also opens up ways for digital technologies to be used to promote radical and transgressive possibilities, by re-engineering the interactions between technologies and other materialities. I conclude by discussing how the digital might thus be co-opted to establish ‘citizen health’ – a collective, bottom-up model of health and care that rejects both the marketisation of health and the paternalism of the welfare state.
Over the past 40 years, epistemological debates within sociology between realists and constructio... more Over the past 40 years, epistemological debates within sociology between realists and constructionists have affected how social identities (for instance, as woman, LGBT, British) have been understood, with a social constructionist model generally favoured over essentialised identities. This has contrasted with activist perspectives, for instance around gender, disability and race, in which an essentialist approach (actual or ‘strategic’) may supply a basis for identity-politics. Renewed sociological interest in the body does not unfortunately resolve this divide, instead recasting the debate in terms of arguments about the body’s apparently dual character as biological (essential) and/or cultural (constructed). So for example, the physicality of the body has been used to substantiate gender binarism or to define distinct sexualities, while post-structuralists have pointed to the body as a site for the cultural play of both power and resistance. In this paper we apply a relational, new materialist perspective to issues of power, resistance and embodiment, to address this divide between essentialist and constructionist models. Advocates of the new materialism such as Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda are post-anthropocentric, posthuman and monistic in their ontologies, cutting across key sociological dualisms such as human/non-human, nature/culture, and agency/structure (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010). Bodies are not stable entities with pre-existing attributes, but relational – with capacities emerging from their relations to other bodies or things within a specific event. Consequently, concern shifts from what a relation (a body, a thing or a space) is, to what it can do in a particular context. Meanwhile a monistic ontology sweeps away notions of structures, systems or stratifications, and treats both power and resistance as micropolitical fluxes within events rather than as possessions of bodies, classes, genders or other collectivities. We use this micropolitical perspective on power and resistance to re-think citizenship, embodiment and activism.
Personal health technologies (PHTs) are proliferating, from monitors of blood pressure or blood g... more Personal health technologies (PHTs) are proliferating, from monitors of blood pressure or blood glucose, through the FitBit and I-Watch, to implantable devices. While these technologies have been hailed by biomedical sources as enabling more personalised health care, they have been criticised sociologically for adding a further element of medicalisation of life, or for turning people into health consumers to be exploited by digital businesses such as Google or Apple. In this paper I take a different perspective from both of these assessments. I will examine a range of PHTs from the perspective of (new) materialist theory, looking at the assemblages of person – technology – biomedicine – health professional – neo-liberalism. This analytical approach enables PHTs to be reverse engineered, in order to explore their micropolitics. I then assess what PHTs do, from the differing perspectives of biomedicine, consumers, patients, and business, and reveal the differing politics inherent in these. On the basis of this analysis, I suggest a radical new approach to PHTs, suggesting that they may be re-engineered to challenge both biomedicine and neo-liberalism, and to contribute to the development of democratic data and citizen health.
This paper establishes an understanding of the sexuality-assemblage, informed by new materialist ... more This paper establishes an understanding of the sexuality-assemblage, informed by new materialist theory. Sexuality is not an attribute of a body, but an impersonal, nomadic flux of multiple desires and materialities, involving a mix of human and non-human relations; a vital, rhizomatic jouissance which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies, collectivities and social formations.
While intensities and fluxes within the sexuality-assemblage have the capacity to produce unknown and unpredictable manifestations of sexuality, aggregating and ‘territorialising’ forces typically establish strict limits on what a sexual body can do. Human sexuality is consequently both infinitely variable and typically highly restricted, for instance into genitality, limited and exclusive sexual identities, and culture- and gender-specific norms and expectations of sexual conduct.
This is not, however, a ‘repressive’ model of sexuality (Foucault, 1981), in which a once-free body submits to the forces of culture. Though this materialist understanding recognises both the inevitability and ineluctability of sexuality’s bodily territorialisation by the panoply of natural and cultural materialities, the sexuality-assemblage also contains within it the potential that can at any moment de-territorialise and dis-aggregate sexuality, and set a body off on a sexual line of flight.
To illustrate the forces that aggregate and territorialise sexualities, we explore data concerning the ‘sexualisation’ of bodies. This reveals the processes which sexualities are constrained, and establishes a basis for us to consider the possibilities for sexualities that extend far beyond conventional notions of ‘the sexual’.
Personal medical devices (PMDs) are proliferating, from monitors of blood pressure or blood gluco... more Personal medical devices (PMDs) are proliferating, from monitors of blood pressure or blood glucose, through the FitBit and I-Watch, to implantable medical devices. While these devices have been hailed by biomedical sources as enabling more personalised health care, they have been criticised sociologically for adding a further element of medicalisation of life, or for turning people into health consumers to be exploited by digital businesses such as Google or Apple. In this paper I take a different perspective from both of these assessments. I will examine a range of PMDs from the perspective of (new) materialist theory, looking at the assemblages of person – technology – biomedicine – health professional – neo-liberalism. This analytical approach enables PMDs to be reverse engineered, in order to explore their micropolitics. I then assess what PMDs do, from the differing perspectives of biomedicine, consumers, patients, and business, and reveal the differing politics inherent in these. On the basis of this analysis, I suggest a radical new approach to PMDs, suggesting that they are re-engineered as ‘personal health devices’, to challenge both biomedicine and neo-liberalism, and to contribute to the development of ‘citizen health’.
The interactions between the natural environment and human health have become increasingly the fo... more The interactions between the natural environment and human health have become increasingly the focus of social analyses and scrutiny. This wide-ranging research area thus presents an important agenda for social analysis across the multi-disciplinary areas of environment and human health. This event aims to share perspectives on current research and theory on this topic.
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Papers by Nick J Fox
Offering a clear exposition of new materialist theory and using sociological examples throughout to enable the reader to develop a materialist sociological understanding, the book:
* Outlines the fundamental precepts of new materialism
* Explores how materialism provides new perspectives on the range of sociological topic areas
* Explains how materialist approaches can be used to research sociological issues and also to engage with social issues.
Sociology and the New Materialism is a clear and authoritative one-stop guide for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural studies, social policy and related disciplines.
This book provides an accessible and informative account of the importance of the body for the caring professions. It offers a clear description of the latest theoretical perspectives, weaving the natural and social body into one. The book focuses on specific aspects such as health and illness, ageing, gender and sexuality, consumption, care, and medical technology.
The text is specifically tailored towards the needs of health and social care students, with case studies directly relating to concrete problems encountered by professionals in the field. The Body is an invaluable textbook for students of the caring professions and will bring to life the issues they face, both in their studies and in their future work with patients, clients and consumers.
a ‘social body’, before turning to recent work that argues that a distinction between biological and social bodies is artificial. Indeed rather than trying to define a body as biological, social or both we should change the question, and ask ‘what can a body do?’
In the first section, we develop the materialist approach to sexuality and – by extension – sexuality education. From this perspective, sexuality is not an attribute of a body, but an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies. Aggregating forces in sexuality assemblages establish limits on what a sexual body can do; sexuality is consequently both infinitely variable and typically highly restricted. We explore this materialist analysis of sexuality education through critical examination of the ways in which the delivery of a sexuality education curriculum typically individualises and psychologises children and young people in terms of their ‘needs’, marginalising discussion of LGBTQ sexualities in the process.
The second part extends the materialist perspective on assemblages to consider social inquiry. From this perspective, research is not at root an enterprise undertaken by human actors, but a machine-like assemblage of things, people, ideas, social collectivities and institutions. We conceptualise research as the hybridising of two assemblages: an ‘event-assemblage’ (for instance, some sexuality education practice) and a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising researcher, methods, audience and contexts. The outcome is a third assemblage with its own affective flow, and it is this hybrid assemblage that produces ‘knowledge’. Using examples from our research, we critically assess the implications for social inquiry in sexuality education in terms of both methodology and the status of ‘knowledge’ produced by social inquiry, and how new materialist ontology provides an alternative to the realist and constructionist epistemologies that have influenced sexuality education scholarship.
consider why lesbian and gay psychology is constrained by its psychological underpinnings, and show how critical psychology has challenged the individualisation of sexualities, the location of sexuality within the body, and the side-lining within mainstream psychology of explorations of social processes and power in the production of sexualities. We set out the main elements of a critical psychology of sexualities, and conclude by assessing how critical
psychologists may engage with the struggles of LGBT people.
The emergence of digital health and illness technologies (Lupton, 2014), and the digitisation of capitalist economic production (Roche, 2012) reflect the increasing cyborgisation of organic matter within current economic and social relations. However, sociology has tended to displace from attention the non-human materialities that contribute to social production, privileging the human body and its agency over the agentic capacities of both physical things (including technologies) and ‘information’. The latter comprises not only ‘data’, but also ideas, memories, conceptual frameworks, systems of thought and social codes, all of which can have material effects and contribute to production. Such a post-anthropocentric sociology of production and the digital may be helpfully informed theoretically by the ‘turn to matter’ in new materialist theories and methodologies (Coole and Frost, 2010; Fox and Alldred, 2016).
In this paper I will explore such a new materialist and posthuman approach to ‘digital health’ and digital capitalism’, by micropolitical investigation of what digital technologies actually do, within the contexts of contemporary social relations. This enables new insights into the impacts of the digital upon social production. However, it also opens up ways for digital technologies to be used to promote radical and transgressive possibilities, by re-engineering the interactions between technologies and other materialities. I conclude by discussing how the digital might thus be co-opted to establish ‘citizen health’ – a collective, bottom-up model of health and care that rejects both the marketisation of health and the paternalism of the welfare state.
In this paper we apply a relational, new materialist perspective to issues of power, resistance and embodiment, to address this divide between essentialist and constructionist models. Advocates of the new materialism such as Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda are post-anthropocentric, posthuman and monistic in their ontologies, cutting across key sociological dualisms such as human/non-human, nature/culture, and agency/structure (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010). Bodies are not stable entities with pre-existing attributes, but relational – with capacities emerging from their relations to other bodies or things within a specific event. Consequently, concern shifts from what a relation (a body, a thing or a space) is, to what it can do in a particular context. Meanwhile a monistic ontology sweeps away notions of structures, systems or stratifications, and treats both power and resistance as micropolitical fluxes within events rather than as possessions of bodies, classes, genders or other collectivities. We use this micropolitical perspective on power and resistance to re-think citizenship, embodiment and activism.
While intensities and fluxes within the sexuality-assemblage have the capacity to produce unknown and unpredictable manifestations of sexuality, aggregating and ‘territorialising’ forces typically establish strict limits on what a sexual body can do. Human sexuality is consequently both infinitely variable and typically highly restricted, for instance into genitality, limited and exclusive sexual identities, and culture- and gender-specific norms and expectations of sexual conduct.
This is not, however, a ‘repressive’ model of sexuality (Foucault, 1981), in which a once-free body submits to the forces of culture. Though this materialist understanding recognises both the inevitability and ineluctability of sexuality’s bodily territorialisation by the panoply of natural and cultural materialities, the sexuality-assemblage also contains within it the potential that can at any moment de-territorialise and dis-aggregate sexuality, and set a body off on a sexual line of flight.
To illustrate the forces that aggregate and territorialise sexualities, we explore data concerning the ‘sexualisation’ of bodies. This reveals the processes which sexualities are constrained, and establishes a basis for us to consider the possibilities for sexualities that extend far beyond conventional notions of ‘the sexual’.
This event aims to share perspectives on current research and theory on this topic.