Material Agency

The chapter focuses on the ways in which Hollywood films have represented the material and emotional dimensions of nuclear risk and on how these representations engage viewers. James Bridges’s The China Syndrome and Mike Nichols’s Silkwood both frame their representation of risk as suspense-driven political thrillers and in both cases the fictional drama is heightened by the films’ relationships to real-world risks and events. While the invisibility of radiation raises representational problems, both films use their viewers’ preexisting risk perceptions to engage them in plotlines that are driven by the anticipation of catastrophes rather than by the catastrophes themselves. By telling melodramatic stories about courageous individuals who struggle to uncover the truth about nuclear risk, argues Weik von Mossner, the films not only illustrate Ulrich Beck’s claim that the determination of risk is a form of ethics; they also demonstrate that emotional processes such as fear are vital components of ethical decision making in the face of unpredictable material agencies and the environmental risks they pose.

The article provides a survey of selected theories and methodologies of new media studies. The author describes their posthumanist potential allowing to think of technologies as agencies. Such a perspective is an attempt at overcoming an impasse the media studies have entered since the polemics between M. McLuhan and R. Williams. In order to consider media human cooperators (and not only tools), one needs to revise the division between culture and nature and reconsider the notion of agency. Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory provides a useful background for non-anthropocentric media studies. It is in the method itself that one can find an inspiration with media entities.

Material agency denotes the possibility that things can act. The defining criterion for such agency has varied between theoretical strands, but generally entails the notion that material objects have an effect on the course of action that is irreducible to direct human intervention. The concept of material agency is part of the "material turn" that puts objects in the picture of the humanities and social sciences as more than simply passive instruments or empty shells for social symbols and meanings. It contributes to a broader challenging of the boundaries between ontological categories such as nature and culture , active and passive, or persons and things, and opens new opportunities for collaboration between scientific and interpretive archaeologies. Relational agency The notion of agency is an enduring legacy of post-processual archaeology. Moving away from New Archaeology's template of people as survival-or profit-seekers, and infused with practice theory, post-processualism's agency denoted people's differential capacity to act, steered by their structural position, but allowing for the spark of contingency and improvisation. Gender , power, class, and so on were therefore no longer qualities that one possessed (as per New Archaeology), but emerged out of the constant, dialectical recomposition of social structure in daily practice and were inherently relational. Post-processualism revolutionized archaeol-ogy's take on human agency, but did not extend this to the object world. An interest in things as symbols (see material symbols) was soon transformed into a broadly textual reading of material culture, emphasizing how things could be ascribed different meanings depending on The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences. Edited by Sandra L. López Varela.

Trans-corporeality is a posthumanist mode of new materialism and material feminism. Trans-corporeality means that all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them. While trans-corporeality as an ontology does not exclude any living creature, it does begin with the human, in order--paradoxically perhaps--to disrupt Western human exceptionalism. The figure/ground relation between the human and the environment dissolves as the outline of the human is traversed by substantial material interchanges. Mapping those interchanges across all species and at all scales is the prelude to trans-corporeal ethics and politics. Trans-corporeality contests the master subject of Western humanist individualism, who imagines himself as transcendent, disembodied, and removed from the world he surveys. The trans-corporeal subject is generated through and entangled with biological, technological, economic, social, political and other systems, processes, and events, at vastly different scales. Trans-corporeality finds itself within capitalism, but resists the allure of shiny objects, considering instead, the effects they have, from manufacture to disposal, while reckoning with the strange agencies that interconnect substance, flesh and place. It does not contemplate discrete objects from a safe distance, but instead, thinks as the very stuff of the ever-emergent world (Alaimo 2016).

In traditional archaeological considerations of Iron Age and Romano-British landscapes, trackways are usually interpreted in largely normative terms, merely as means of getting from one settlement to another, or as purely functional features to assist with the herding of animals. In these somewhat static expositions, the role of trackways as places in themselves, and their long-term importance in constructions of social identity and memory, are often overlooked. So too are the complex relationships between people and animals enacted within trackways, field systems, and the wider landscape.

Recent theoretical ideas concerning relational agency and identity, materiality and movement have much to offer in terms of our archaeological understandings of these features. This paper explores the interpretative potential of such approaches using case studies of Iron Age and Romano-British trackways from Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Integrating theories of identity, embodiment, materiality, relationality and practice highlights the sedentarism of previous explanations, and allows for much more nuanced accounts of highly dynamic, mobile meshworks, where agency resided in complex constraints and affordances between people, animals and the materiality of the lived-in landscape.

Meanwhile/Becoming is a practice-led research project that includes a written thesis and a final exhibition of work investigating methods of creating photographs that do not conform to the Cartesian perspective prevalent in photographs taken with a standard format camera. The research explores the opportunity of examining a visual space other than that offered by the standard single lens reflex camera through manipulation of the pinhole camera.

The photographic series that constitutes Meanwhile/Becoming uses processes that produce what the research describes as a reinterpretation of phenomenology, postphenomenology and posthumanism through photographic practice; where the photographs are expressive of the what and how humans see and the lived experience of the situated perspectives of a specific space. The research question reflects and critiques this position asking, if multiple viewpoints are presented within a single photograph, does the resulting photograph incorporate the human experience of, relation to and presence in, the world? Once expressed within this framework, the research questions if these multiple viewpoints more closely represent the physiology of how humans see.

The concept of the meanwhile is taken as the timespace between events, examining the “meanwhile” through the landscape of the domestic garden. “Becoming” refers to “the movement between events”, an interval between events that allows the processes of creativity and change through differentiation and duration, identified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004) and Henri Bergson (1911).

Together, my practice and thesis interrogate the restricted boundaries of the Cartesian model of constructed visual space through the apparatus of a unique purpose-built multiple pinhole camera. This apparatus mediates between me and the world, enabling me to develop a new method of making photographs that considers space/place and how we respond to it both physically and perceptually.

Literary depictions of magic swords in Old Norse sagas highlight the active role of objects in shaping and renegotiating human personal boundaries, identities, and self-experiences. By focusing on narrative portrayals of these artifacts, as well as the psychosomatic dynamics of saga characters' interactions with said artifacts, this study illuminates ecological entanglements between cognitive and material spaces across the medieval North, stressing cross-cultural variability and diversity inherent in medieval worldviews.

Complex systems like literacy and numeracy emerge through multigenerational interactions of brains, behaviors, and material forms. In such systems, material forms – writing for language and notations for numbers – become increasingly refined to elicit specific behavioral and psychological responses in newly indoctrinated individuals. These material forms, however, differ fundamentally in things like semiotic function: language signifies, while numbers instantiate. This makes writing for language able to represent the meanings and sounds of particular languages, while notations for numbers are semantically meaningful without phonetic specification. This representational distinction is associated with neurofunctional and behavioral differences in what neural activity and behaviors like handwriting contribute to literacy and numeracy. In turn, neurofunctional and behavioral differences place written representations for language and numbers under different pressures that influence the forms they take and how those forms change over time as they are transmitted across languages and cultures.

SynopsisI argue, following Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), that agency is a process distributed across collectives of humans and nonhumans. These collectives can be considered in terms of networks, composed of heterogeneous nodes and links. Yet despite its name, Actor-Network-Theory has paid relatively little attention to the spatial and organisational structures of these human-nonhuman networks and their effects upon network ‘behaviour’ or dynamics. I draw upon some new network concepts in an attempt to fill this gap, and demonstrate my approach using an archaeological case study, one that explores the differential role of artefact, picture and text in actor networks. One reason for choosing such a case study is that archaeological approaches to agency remain anthropocentric, despite the material basis of the discipline, and have not as yet made much systematic use of ANT. Not only can archaeology benefit from ANT in tackling agency (particularly when supplemented with network concepts), ...

The artefactual environment is not just the passive, inert background against which the drama of human and non-human animal life plays out; but rather, the built environment plays an active role in the structure of agency. This is an insight that Lambros Malafouris (2013) has articulated in his framework of Material Engagement Theory (MET). I will discuss the enactive-embodied and dynamic approaches to cognition and action, emphasizing the ways that this approach leads to taking MET seriously by force of its own theoretical commitments. That is, material engagement is a natural development of these models of mind, specified to the particularities of the human historical situation. I will then discuss Theiner and Drain's (2017) critique of HMA, in which they argue that we should replace material agency with materially-scaffolded agency. Scaffolded agency, however, is too weak of a conception of how material culture shapes agency, and is a notion continues to privilege the sense of agency as a mark of what genuinely constitutes agency proper. Drawing on Steward (2016) I propose a definition of material agency that emphasizes the idea that agency is a process, and I suggest that material agency is better captured by the phenomenological experience of flow (Vuorre and Metcalf 2016). This phenomenological understanding of material agency both responds to Theiner & Drain's critique, and emphasizes the importance of investigating material culture phenomenologically.

Dairy milk is an intriguing hybrid substance. A supremely mundane artefact, routinely and unreflexively consumed on an everyday basis by millions of humans, it also embodies and mediates a complex ensemble of human-animal-technological-economic relations. As a mass-produced and mass-marketed modern commodity, milk is the product of a highly systematic and rationalised 'humanimal' encounter, in which the cow often seems reduced to a disciplined unit of production. Yet in its irreducible materiality milk still retains the power to disrupt such rationalised systems, to transgress disciplinary boundaries, and to testify corporeally to the vital existence of the animal, as mediated through the milk itself.

This paper explores these tensions through a focus upon the complex and contradictory mobilities of milk – as a commodity, as a material substance, and as a dimension of bovine corporeality – in the historical and geographical context of the modernising British milk industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It proceeds from the vitalist assumption that the milk is the cow, that the animal is ontologically present in milk, which does not become fully humanised and separated from the cow in the process of milking, but retains an irreducible ‘cowness’. The multiple forms of expression of this vital ‘cowness’ and its tendency to subvert and disorder rationalised schemes of production and marketing are then examined and conceptualised as distinctive bovine mobilities, spaces and flows.

Talk presented to “Writing, a cultural-historical and neuroscientific approach,” University of Bern, 27 October 2021. Writing is presented as a system composed of brains, bodies, and material forms.  The ways in which writing changes over time are highlighted, as these provide us with insight into change in ancient behaviors and brains in the historical development of writing.  How and why numbers differ from other writing are reviewed.  Finally, reading is analyzed as a cognitive system that necessarily involves a material form, the idea that cognition is extended and enactive.

‘Minoans’ have been recognised as pre-Hellenic race or closed ethnic group in Egyptian representations of Aegean figures from Eighteenth Dynasty Theban tombs. Modern construct of ‘Minoans’ thus merged with an ancient Egyptian construct of Aegean foreigners. Previous approaches to Aegean figures in Theban tombs did not pay attention to decorum, context and restricted knowledge. By examining these concepts it is argued in this paper that decorum can transform restricted knowledge into available knowledge for the tomb visitors. The abducted meanings from these images materialized virtual reality different from reality based on the tomb-owner’s restricted knowledge. However, this abducted virtual reality can actually take the form of reality for those who lack specific restricted knowledge. Based on decorum analysis it can be argued that New Kingdom Egyptians perceived Keftiu and its inhabitants as quite close to their cultural concept of ‘north’ and ‘Asia’, observable both in visual and written evidence.

This chapter begins by considering whether or not MCS can be understood within the frameworks of environmental justice, which were explored earlier in this book. The rest ofthe chapter develops the theoretical positions outlined in chapter r, regarding emerging models of materiality and the possibilities for trans-corporeal conceptions of the human, by exploring MCS as it is revealed and portrayed in science, cultural theory autobiography, photography, and film. Multiple chemical sensitivity may well be the quintessential example of what I m calling trans-corporeality, as those who are chemically reactive experience their selves as coextensive with the material world-an ever-emergent world of risky knowledges, mangled practices, and disturbing, potentially deviant material agencies.

This essay argues that modern perceptions of the agency of fat people have been inflected by older ways of thinking about fat and fattening. This claim rests on two basic points. Firstly, the potentially encumbering materiality of fat has long been cited as preventing movement in ways that frustrate agency. Secondly, fat has implications for agency by virtue of the power relationships implied in the act of fattening, which has been repeatedly framed in the West with reference to animal consumption. Discourses of fat and fattening are thus saturated with allegations of failed agency, whether by citing the confining materiality of fat itself or by associating the fattened person with abject animality. After exploring these claims with reference to select examples from classical antiquity, the essay presents surveys how similar ideas mobilized weight-loss discourses from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, by which time most of our current anti-fat thinking had been firmly entrenched.

Shamanism and animism have proven to be useful cross-cultural analytical tools for anthropology, particularly in religious studies. However, both concepts root in reductionist, social evolutionary theory and have been criticized for their vague and homogenizing rubric, an overly romanticized idealism, and the tendency to ‘other’ nonwestern peoples as ahistorical, apolitical, and irrational. The alternative has been a largely secular view of religion, favoring materialist processes of rationalization and “disenchantment.” Like any cross-cultural frame of reference, such terms are only informative when explicitly defined in local contexts using specific case studies. Here, we consider shamanism and animism in terms of ethnographic and archaeological evidence from Mesoamerica. We trace the intellectual history of these concepts and reassess shamanism and animism from a relational or ontological perspective, concluding that these terms are best understood as distinct ways of knowing the...

Taking a psychological and philosophical outlook, we approach making as an embodied and embedded skill via the skilled artisan’s experience of having a corporeal, nonlinguistic dialogue with the material while working with it. We investigate the dynamic relation between maker and material through the lens of pottery as illustrated by wheel throwing, claiming that the experience of dialogue signals an emotional involvement with clay. The examination of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of habit, the skilled intentionality framework, and material engagement theory show that while these theories explain complementary aspects of skilful engagement with the material world, they do not consider the dialogic dimension. By way of explanation, we submit that the artisan’s emotional engagement with the material world is based in openness and recognition and involves dialogue with the material. Drawing on the intimate relationship between movement and emotion, it promotes an open-ended manner of working and permits experiencing with the material, acting into its inherent possibilities. In conclusion, we suggest that dialogue, whether verbal or nonverbal, constitutes a primary means for making sense of the world at large, animate and inanimate.

Human cognition evolution is often assumed to have essentially finished in the Upper Paleolithic, the idea being that what cognition was 40 or 50 thousand years ago is what cognition is now. However, post-Neolithic technologies like writing systems and the emergence of forms like scripts can illustrate how and why our interactions with material forms change our cognition, especially within the past 10,000 years. In this presentation, how scripts-writing that can only be read with acquired changes in behaviors and brains-emerged from small pictures is reviewed and used to illuminate the role of the material form in human cognition. The question raised is how such culturally acquired changes might then inform evolutionary change in brain function and form.

Conventional buildings, partition walls and construction materials are part of networks of long-established practices and unsustainable models of material flow. In this design research project, I investigate methods, mindsets and partnerships for a more sustainable building industry with the support of the company Saint-Gobain, the think tank Sitra and Aalto University. My focus is on the notion of healthy circular economies, the type of economies which support humans and non-humans in the long-term. First, I question how material agency approaches can bring focus to the composition of partition walls and contribute to sustainability transformations. Second, I examine the common and often overlooked construction material plasterboard, a combination of gypsum, paper, additives, infrastructures, politics, natural ecosystems and ethics, and rethink its production, consumption and disposal. Third, I formulate practical recommendations for construction material producers and unfold an alternative future narrative for partition walls.

The study is framed using concepts related to sustainability, circular economy and material agency. I draw from Actor-Network Theory and New Materialism to understand plasterboard as part of hybrid systems of humans and non-humans. Research methods include 37 interviews with key stakeholders involved with the material in Finland and eight observations of prominent locations in the material’s lifecycle (including the production factory, building sites, demolition sites, recycling facilities and a landfill). I document the tidy story of plasterboard from production to end-of-life. I also expose the messy day-to-day building activities and becoming of the material. Building on sustainability challenges related to the extraction, distribution and recycling of the material, I formulate four complementary strategies for construction material manufacturers to facilitate healthy circular economies. Finally, I employ foresight approaches to examine underlying assumptions, worldviews and values systems of plasterboard and unlock narrative shifts towards a more respectful coexistence between humans and ecological non-humans.

Results demonstrate that there is potential for construction materials and their stakeholders to engage with healthy circular economies, beyond mere recycling. Knowledge about healthy circular economy principles, greater collaboration between stakeholders across construction, demolition and waste management sectors, and multi-level design and leadership strategies are key to healthy circular economies. My findings show that reconnecting building practices to construction materials and their past natural ecosystems can open new imaginaries to support sustainability transformations in the building industry. This research offers a rich and holistic insight into the development of practices and narratives associated with healthy circular material flows.

Mine undersøgelser på Genoptræningscenteret i Lyngby
viste et komplekst og problematisk samspil mellem rollator og den eksekutivt svækkede ældre. Jeg har søgt at identificere og analysere kritiske situationer i den observerede brug. En sådan dybere forståelse af rollatorens materialitet håber jeg kan fremme
en bredere tilgang til træning samt til indkøb, tilpasning og ultimativt design af rollatorer.

This exposition presents an explorative project that examines employing material as a reference point for designing and making an artefact. The material's effects on designing and making have been elaborated upon from many angles. This exposition also examines how material affects designing and making processes from the perspective of material agency. This study argues that by observing a material's behaviour from the perspective of agency, one can genuinely understand what the material does, and accordingly can find ways to collaborate with it in the process of designing and making artefacts. The discussion is articulated through a designer's project in felting by employing a practice-led research approach that examined the decision-making processes through written reflections and visual documentation. This examination suggests that by including material as a reference point, design and making can reflect the ecology of the material in a way that combines human power with the activeness of the material.

Actor Network Theory has grown into one of the most innovative and influential approaches for social science research. Originating in the field of science and technology studies with scholars Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John Law, it is now used widely across the social sciences and beyond. In this four-volume collection, Richie Nimmo brings together defining research articles on Actor-Network Theory to chart its emergence, development and transformation over time, as well as its application in multiple fields. This comprehensive major work is organised thematically and features sections on:

Part One - Emergence, Development and Transformation:
The Sociology of Translation
Techno-Politics and Sociotechnical Relations
Reflexivity, Heterogeneity and Symmetry
Topology and Post-Social Ontologies
Materiality and Ontological Politics
Method Assemblages and Inscriptions
Critiques and Clarifications

Part Two - Translations, Parallels and Mobilisations:
Performing Markets, Finance and Economics
Arts, Taste and Cultures
Bodies, Medicine and Disabilities
Hybrid Geographies and Spaces
Ecologies, Natures and Environments
Animal Actants and Multi-Species Assemblages

Meanwhile/Becoming is a practice-led research project that includes a written thesis and a final exhibition of work investigating methods of creating photographs that do not conform to the Cartesian perspective prevalent in photographs taken with a standard format camera. The research explores the opportunity of examining a visual space other than that offered by the standard single lens reflex camera through manipulation of the pinhole camera. The photographic series that constitutes Meanwhile/Becoming uses processes that produce what the research describes as a reinterpretation of phenomenology, postphenomenology and posthumanism through photographic practice; where the photographs are expressive of the what and how humans see and the lived experience of the situated perspectives of a specific space. The research question reflects and critiques this position asking, if multiple viewpoints are presented within a single photograph, does the resulting photograph incorporate the human...

The deep influence Ancient Egypt has on the modern world is a well-rehearsed topic. The Bible, Greek and Roman sources, and in general a particular modern conceptualizations of the so-called 'western world' have all been identified as key to this. But could it also be that the agency of ancient Egyptian objects themselves played a decisive role? Reflecting on a new book on this theme, attention is given to the question what we actually mean by stating that 'things have agency'. Is this a useful subject at all, and if so, how could it be studied?

During the Early Bronze Age in northern Europe, tree-like features appear in henges, burials, and rock art in ways that differ from earlier periods. Rather than investigating this phenomenon in symbolic or metaphorical terms, a concept of tree-ness is explored that focuses on the real constitution of trees and what trees actually do. It is suggested that the accentuation of tree-ness in Early Bronze Age ritual contexts can be related to an ontological shift in conjunction with emerging bronze technology in which different entities can merge or take advantage of each other’s generative properties.

Keywords: Bronze Age, trees, rock art, oak-coffin burial, henges

Many contemporary scholars have recently defended the idea that the agency of things is symmetrical and equivalent to human agency. We propose an alternative approach to artefacts’ agency based on a field study concerned with contextually situated observations of the process of design of artefacts in Amazonia. By means of participant observation and interviews, we address the role of artefacts in relation to human agency. In so doing, we focus on the human-unique capacity for design as it is related to cognitive resources such as intentionality, decision-making, planning, and volitional adaptations of the material world to human purposes. We argue that such cognitive resources are ultimate manifestations of human agency. The findings allow us to conclude that artefacts possess a special form of agency, which operates in different ways from the agency of true agents. This agency is derived: it depends on the actions of true agents, with either function as remote intentions or are req...

Cities are promising machines always holding out prospects for better lives, always attempting to guarantee that things will not remain the same and that whatever changes do ensue are for the better. We propose a notion of "promise" not as simply another descriptor in a long line of adjectives about the city. Rather, we argue that the urban institutional landscape constantly generates new promises as way of anticipation, which in turn allows residents to write themselves into select urban operations. This article engages two central districts in Rio de Janeiro and Jakarta to explore how residents "stand by" the promise, not of passive waiting, but as maneuvers of either staying tuned to or as way of tactical detachment from the multiple trajectories which have been conjured up in the here and now. We understand these maneuvers as acts of "minor" future making that rely upon practices and materials that may seem of little use, but which enable a process of incremental small adjustments and collective subversion of urban trajectories of the transitory.

Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis; and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then ‘finding relations’ in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations, but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed ‘relational constellations’. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC – third century AD): the fluid, the categorical, and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories, and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives, and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.

This article explores the methodological implications of actor-network theory for social research. Pointing to an increasing awareness of ANT in sociological discourse, but assuming that it is more widely known than well understood, the article outlines some of the key features of ANT as an approach to social life, before addressing the tricky question of how these ideas translate into methodological practice. The possibilities of the approach are illustrated by reference to my own ANT-inspired historical research on the socio-material history of dairy milk in the UK, which is used as a point of reference and an example throughout. Particular attention is given to the practical method deployed in the milk study, namely documentary historiography, leading to a critical exploration of the use of ANT in the analysis of historical texts. This involves considering the nature of the relationship between texts and lived practices, and drawing out how ANT offers a distinctive way of seeing texts which challenges the standard ethnographic view of texts and fundamentally transforms the issue. Given that documentary historiography is not a method strongly associated with actor-network theory because it raises considerable methodological dilemmas, this provides one particular account of how such dilemmas can be managed or overcome. Social researchers interested in the potential of actor-network theory should be able to draw upon this in exploring the possibilities of the approach for their own work.

Keywords

Actor-network theory; Methodology; Hybrids; Heterogeneity; Nonhuman Agency; Relational Ontology; Texts; Practices; Historiography.

The material fabric of a city is never neutral. It speaks to the opportunities of access and usage that some are given at the exclusion of others. Scholars of the everyday have analyzed how city residents counter oppression by appropriating and transforming spaces. Less attention, however, has been given to how not only people, but also material things have agency in producing opportunities for insurgency. This paper examines how people and materialities imbricate, co-producing geographies of survival on Ponte Sant'Angelo, a bridge in Rome where diverse immigrants eke out a living by selling trinkets. Interviews and observations revealed that both seniority on the street and immigration status divide vendors into three groups, each with a different degree of power over other users of the bridge. At the same time, Ponte Sant'Angelo, a physical entity made by permanent built forms as well as contingent elements such as water levels and car traffic, generate five distinct areas, each with a different degree of attractiveness in the eyes of diverse vendors. Differences across vendors and material elements intertwine with one another. The nitty-gritty of the city, its seemingly banal materialities, partner with vendors as they negotiate power and counter exclusion. These circumstances call for expanding scholarship of the everyday, exploring how multiple, interdependent agencies shape urban patterns of oppression and resistance.

This paper discusses the elemental materialities of water mobilities, bringing the agentive qualities of water to the centre of theoretical discussion of tourism. Analysing data collected through qualitative interviews with, and participant observation of, British boating tourists, the analysis of watery materialities and the corresponding tourist assemblages are presented across water bodies: on inland waterways and in coastal areas. Examining the mobilities of the water materialities and the cooperation between water, boat and the tourist, we propose the concept of water-boat-human assemblage for examining boating tourism in terms of liquid relationships. The paper also introduces the notion of liquidness: the relational conglomerate between mobi-lities, materialities and practices as an analytical category for theorising water tourism.