Back to the Matter of Education

This chapter argues that the family of new materialisms in social theory paves the way for renewed attention to the matter of education and promises a critical repertoire for rethinking the sociological imagination. Materialism in sociological investigation dates back to Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and other classical thinkers. Over the last century, however, this attention to materialism was gradually overtaken by a focus on values, ideas, experiences, etc. supported by phenomenological and interactionist traditions, and problematised by feminist and post-colonial sociologies. By underlining the relevance of social structures, old materialism arguably missed attending to the power relations between genders, races, etc. and the combination of these aspects in the processes of domination. With the demise of old materialism, a post-structuralist and linguistic turn became dominant in the sociological imagination. Recently, new materialisms have emerged again in social science and the humanities to counter the textualisation of social life and draw attention, now in different ways, to materialities and matter in the making of society. Sociomaterial studies of education have a relatively short history. They have mainly emerged in the last two decades through interferences between science and technology studies (STS) and the studies of education. Initially, the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), After ANT, and later feminist ANT and also other sensibilities were imported, supporting a renovation of social science vocabularies. This area of research is currently being enriched with additional theoretical resources from critical materialistic thinkers, like Latour, Deleuze & Guattari, Barad and Braidotti, and it promises to launch new research agendas in education. This chapter will argue that sociomaterial studies of education share some common characteristics such as post-Anthropocentrism, monist ontology, and performativity that generate useful resources to enrich the repertoire of criticism and renew the sociological imagination.