An intensified concern with “thingness” and materiality has emerged in the past decade as an explicitly interdisciplinary endeavor involving anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, literary critics, and philosophers among others. The new material culture studies that has resulted inverts the longstanding study of how people make things by asking also how “things make people”, how objects mediate social relationships—ultimately how inanimate objects can be read as having a form of agency of their own.

Applications:
Internet and technology studies
Media Studies
Art objects, artifacts, and performance art
Art history
Literature, language
Museum studies
Architecture
Environmental studies, environmental engineering
Public policy
Sex and gender
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An intensified concern with “thingness” and materiality has emerged in the past decade as an explicitly interdisciplinary endeavor involving anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, literary critics, and philosophers among others. The new material culture studies that has resulted inverts the longstanding study of how people make things by asking also how “things make people”, how objects mediate social relationships—ultimately how inanimate objects can be read as having a form of... (read more)