The Material Turn

Abstract There is a growing literature in the social sciences addressing the importance of artifacts, natural forces, and material regimes to social practices and systems of power. It looks at how material forces affect the conduct of everyday life, discusses how and when nonhumans have agency, and explores the methodological value of studying materiality for illuminating under‐examined forms of social life—particularly the lives of nonliterate or suppressed groups. It is an emerging trend with multiple sources and faces, but it has roots in Foucault's analysis of political embodiment, work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on object agency, and the growing interest (in part because of climate change) in how the natural world is entangled with social practices.