Thinking with Objects
Rapid technological development continues to transform how we relate to one another and our shared world. Political, economic and ecological crises destabilise our sociopolitical consensus and established narratives. Does this moment require us to rethink the varied foundations of social inquiry? Have our perspectives been overly human-centred, derived from an exaggerated individualism that obscures our fundamental interdependency? How do we make sense of a world where our human actions are increasingly entangled with material forces, infrastructures and non-human agencies? Does an attention to these entanglements illuminate forms of responsibility that exceed human centred perspectives?
Our sociological inheritance has largely focussed on human interdependencies and positioned human agency as the primary driver of social life. This programme insists in on the mutual entanglement of people and things, and on the agency of objects. Objects are not passive, they do not exist in the background of our social lives, rather they shape and constrain our identities, relationships and structure our societies. Our consumer society relies upon complex global supply chains that entangle us together through objects; digital devices now mediate so much of our communication and interaction; whilst everyday and extraordinary objects have been motors of social change or shaped the horizons through which we see the future. For example, think of the effects of the contraceptive pill on women’s liberation movement and the long shadow the atomic bomb cast across the cold war era.
Thinking with Objects is an invitation to rethink our habits of sociological thinking and to take seriously the role of everyday objects, extraordinary inventions, and unseen material infrastructure in shaping our social lives. Through unfolding the entangled sociality that crystallises in an object, we foreground the flows of matter, energy and labour that produce and sustain social systems. This programme asks us to return anew some of the central problems of sociology, how we theorise agency and structure, power and inequity, innovation and social change. It also prompts us to revise how we as sociologists teach and learn about society. Sociology has long been taught as a ‘chalk and talk’ subject, and our main business of teaching and learning has been textual and discursive analysis. Object-Based Learning opens up new possibilities for sociological education, foregrounding material engagement as a mode of enquiry.
In our present moment of uncertainty , Thinking with Objects invites us to develop new ways of relating to our shared material world and to each other.
Whether the pressing of the key starts a kitchen ice-cream-making contraption, feeds current into an electricity network, or lets loose the Horsemen of Apocalypse, makes no difference … We are technologically all-powerful because of, and thanks to, powerlessness of our imagination – Zygmunt Bauman, ‘A Natural History of Evil’
Written by Dr Tom Campbell