The Centre for Material Thinking (CMT) was launched in November 2021 (with an inaugural lecture by Prof Carrie Noland of the University of California, Irvine). Housed in TFTS and co-led by Dr Kim Knowles and Miranda Whall, it brings together several key research strands both within the Department and across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS).
The CMT aims to stimulate interdisciplinary research embedded in questions of materiality, matter and making. It responds particularly to the recent ‘material turn’ in both academic disciplines and artistic practice, which has given rise to new embodied ways of thinking about and relating to the world. From our patterns of consumption and disposal, social rituals and political affiliations, to our techniques of representation and modes of production, human behaviour is determined by a complex web of physical interrelations. The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown into relief many material relations that have previously either been taken for granted or simply ignored, and questions of space and place, communication and education, ecology and environment are now being reassessed from different perspectives.
The CMT is interested in creative responses to these questions, pursuing a range of theoretical and practice-based avenues for exploring how materiality matters in a contemporary context. How do we make meaning from matter and how do material entanglements determine the way we inhabit the world? How can new modes of representation bring about a greater awareness of the earthly problems and ecological crises that we must now negotiate as part of our daily lives? What role can the arts and humanities play in communicating the broader social and political implications of materiality? What new modes of understanding are opened up through creative explorations of materiality and physicality, both human and non-human? Implicit in these questions is the acknowledgement that traditional humanist paradigms are inadequate for our times, and that a deeper understanding of what Jane Bennett calls ‘vibrant matter’ is necessary for establishing more ethical ways of being.
Please visit the Centre’s dedicated website for more information about our research projects, past and upcoming events, and ongoing artist commissions: www.materialthinking.net
Or email: material-thinking@aber.ac.uk if you would like to get in touch.