Entanglement in the World’’s Becoming and the Doing of New Materialist Inquiry

Honourable Mention, ICQI 2022 Outstanding Qualitative Book Award

Entanglement in the World’s Becoming and the Doing of New Materialist Inquiry explores new materialist concepts and the ways in which they provoke an opening up of thought about being human, and about being more-than-human. The more-than-human refers, here, to the world that we are of - a world that includes humans, who are emergent and permeable, and all of the animal and earth others they intra-act with. It explores how we affect those others and are affected.

This book engages intimately in encounters of various kinds, some drawn from the author’s everyday life, some from the research projects she has engaged in over several decades, and some from others’ research. It works at the interface of living- and writing-as-inquiry, delving into the rich seam of conceptual possibilities opened up by Deleuze and Guattari, and Barad, and by new materialist inquiry more broadly. It brings not just words to the task, but also art, photopraphs, movement, memories, bodies, sound, touch, things.

It delves into the ways in which the entangled dynamics of social, material and semiotic flows and forces make up the diffractive movements through which life emerges, assembles itself, and endures. New materialist concepts, as they are explored here, offer new and emergent approaches to life itself, and to ways in which we might research our lives as they are intricately enfolded in the life of the earth.

Bronwyn Davies is an independent scholar, with honorary professorships at the universities of Melbourne and Western Sydney. She left academe in protest ten years ago at the growing stranglehold of neoliberalism on academic work. She has written her best work since then and enjoyed several wonderful academic collaborations. See bronwyndavies.com.au for details.