Christopher Pinney, UCL Anthropology The recent events in Paris have focused attention on the complex relationship between different varieties of Islam and the image. Historians will rightly point to a French tradition of anti-clerical satire that reaches back to Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage of 1771, and which providesContinue Reading
Some of you more regular readers may have noticed that we’ve been posting less at material world blog of late. When Danny Miller and I started the blog in 2006 the blog was a way for me to keep my connection to the vibrant material culture group in the AnthropologyContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, UCL Anthropology We are pleased to announce the latest issue of our Occasional Paper Series as well as the relaunch of the site with new and improved design by our newest editor, Matt Hockenberry. Properties and Social Imagination is a book length project that drew on explorations and experimentsContinue Reading
Since the Material World Blog began, the digital media landscape changed dramatically. In social media terms, we have moved from Friendster, MySpace and Orkut to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp, with a range of other digital, mobile and social media becoming embedded within many people’s everyday lives around the world. TheseContinue Reading
Patrick Laviolette (EHI, Tallinn University, hosts of EASA2014) In terms of providing reflections on the material dimensions of place and landscape, here are some links to what I feel have been amongst the more provocative postings on the blog over the years. Many of the authors to the links belowContinue Reading
Since its inception, Material World has treated museums and archives not only as repositories of material culture, but as material culture–that is, material products as well as producers of culture and social memory. As institutions, they are sites of collection and exhibition, acts that have their own material and materializingContinue Reading
Daniel Miller, UCL Krisztina Fehérváry 2013 Politics in Color and Concrete: socialist materialities and the middle class in Hungary. Indiana University Press Léna Pellandini-Simányi 2014 Consumption Norms and Everyday Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan Hungary is a good place to take stock of the current state of material culture studies. Because HungaryContinue Reading
In this post, I link to the very best posts in our archive focused on making, doing and craft. In Fixing, Things, Fixing Ourselves, Lydia Nicholas writes about Suguru, an open source material for extending the life of mass produced (or any other) artifacts. In Plan B for a NuclearContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, UCL In this new series of summer posts, we, the editors look back at the past 8 or so years that Material world Blog has been going and curate a series of “best of” themed post. Here, I link to what I consider to be some of theContinue Reading
Over at the UCL Social Networking Sites and Social Sciences Project, Danny Miller writes about his research at a London hospice where he has been exploring the resonance of new media at the end of life: Alongside my ethnographic research in The Glades I have now been working for over a yearContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, UCL In October last year (2013) I posted a draft of an editorial for the Journal of Material Culture which rehearsed some of the options we (the editorial board led by myself and Susanne Kuchler, with guidance from Danny Miller) have been working through regarding taking the journalContinue Reading