Personal health technologies, micropolitics and resistance: A new materialist analysis

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 sexuality-assemblages of young men: a new materialist analysis

This article presents a new materialist exploration of young men and sexuality that shifts the focus away from bodies and individuals, toward the affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions, and the sexual capacities this flow produces. Using data from two empirical studies, we explore the sexuality assemblages of teen boys and young men, and the micropolitics of these assemblages. We find that the sexuality produced in the bodies of young men is highly territorialised and aggregated by various materialities. However, we also reveal how young men resist these conventional sexualities

“We” Are In This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same

The COVID-19 pandemic is a man-made disaster, caused by undue interference in the ecological balance and the lives of multiple species. Paradoxically, the contagion has resulted in increased use of technology and digital mediation, as well as enhanced hopes for vaccines and biomedical solutions. It has thereby intensified humans’ reliance on the very high-tech economy of cognitive capitalism that caused the problems in the first place. This combination of ambivalent elements in relation to the Fourth Industrial revolution and the Sixth Extinction is the trademark of the posthuman condition. This essay explores this condition further, offering both critical and affirmative propositions for moving forward

Epistemic roles of materiality within a collaborative invention project at a secondary school

In this study, we examined maker‐centred learning from an epistemic perspective, highlighting the agentic role of material engagement and artefacts in learning and creativity. The use of physical materials plays a crucial role in maker activities where the socio‐epistemic aspects of knowledge creation entangle with the designing and making of physical artefacts. By taking a case study perspective, we analysed video data from nine design sessions involving a team of students (aged 13 to 14) developing an invention. First, we analysed knowledge that was built during the process. Our analysis revealed how design ideas evolved from preliminary to final stages and, together with the expressed design problems and conversations preceding the ideas, formed an epistemic object pursued by the team. Next, we included non‐human agencies into the analysis to understand the role of materials in the process. Features of materials and human design intentions both constrained and enabled idea improvement and knowledge creation, intermixing meanings and materials. Material making invited the students to not only rely on human rationalisation, but also to think together with the materials.In this study, we examined maker-centred learning from an epistemic perspective, highlighting the agentic role of material engagement and artefacts in learning and creativity. The use of physical materials plays a crucial role in maker activities where the socio-epistemic aspects of knowledge creation entangle with the designing and making of physical artefacts. By taking a case study perspective, we analysed video data from nine design sessions involving a team of students (aged 13 to 14) developing an invention. First, we analysed knowledge that was built during the process. Our analysis revealed how design ideas evolved from preliminary to final stages and, together with the expressed design problems and conversations preceding the ideas, formed an epistemic object pursued by the team. Next, we included non-human agencies into the analysis to understand the role of materials in the process. Features of materials and human design intentions both constrained and enabled idea improvement and knowledge creation, intermixing meanings and materials. Material making invited the students to not only rely on human rationalisation, but also to think together with the materials.Peer reviewe

Britain, Bulgaria and benefits:the political rhetoric of European (dis)integration

This chapter considers the political controversy in Britain over the lifting of restrictions of freedom of movement on European Union (EU) citizens from Bulgaria and Romania in January 2014. The response of the then Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government centred on altering the rules on the payment of welfare benefits to potential new EU immigrants such that they would not be entitled to claim these benefits for 3 months after entry to the United Kingdom. This policy led to a split in the coalition, with the Liberal Democrat leadership claiming that it was a panicked move by the majority Conservative coalition partner, and moreover that it was a blatant attempt to appeal the electorate in an effort to be seen to be doing something to stop the welfare benefit system from being abused by ‘foreigners’. The backdrop to this political fracas centred on the economic contribution of East European immigrants to Britain and the claim and counterclaim over the issues jobs, welfare benefits and services such as English language support in schools. These contentious issues are examined in terms of an analysis of online comments to posted in reaction to a political interview with Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary, who claimed that the Conservatives were attempting to placate public disquiet over immigration as a response to the rising popularity of the United Kingdom Independence Party

Intra-acting with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, or; how the technosphere may come to matter

This paper contends that a robust concept of the technosphere – indeed one that is truly adequate to the Anthropocene – must be approached using a plurality of methods that do not categorize agencies or rely on hierarchical scalar analysis. In this commentary, we draw from feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad’s philosophy of agential realism, and in particular her concept of ‘intra-action’, to identify the technosphere as emergent from entangled practices, sites and infrastructures, and to trace the technosphere from the ‘meso’ scale to subatomic and cosmological realms of force and energy. We demonstrate the value of a critical, intra-active approach to technical assemblages by thinking the technosphere concept with and within a vast experimental apparatus: the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Inside the research-assemblage: new materialism and the micropolitics of social inquiry

This paper explores social inquiry in terms of the ‘research-assemblages’ that produce knowledge from events. We use the precepts of new materialism (and specifically DeleuzoGuattarian assemblage ontology) to develop understanding of what happens when social events are researched. 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. During social inquiry, the affect economies of an event-assemblage and a research-assemblage hybridise, generating a third assemblage with its own affective flow. This model of the research-assemblage reveals a micropolitics of social research that suggests a means to interrogate and effectively reverse-engineer different social research methodologies and methods, to analyse what they do, how they work and their micropolitical effects. It also suggests a means to forward-engineer research methods and designs to manipulate the kinds of knowledge produced when events are researched

Mixed methods, materialism and the micropolitics of the research-assemblage

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