The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
example, increases in greenhouse gasses causing temperature increases and glaciers to melt). And yet technology has adopted the language of nature to naturalise itself: twitter, web, stream, cloud, amazon, apple, for example. The large corporations who own the mouthpieces of social media both facilitate and obstruct bridging between local communities and the global materiality; the storying of the materiality of lives can build or destroy community investment in sustainability beyond what counts as ‘now’ or ‘here’ or ‘me’ or ‘you’. Barad says, ‘it is possible for entangled relationalities to make connections between entities that do not appear to be proximate in space and time’ (2007: 74).
Braidotti argues that we cannot use the same language to create solutions that has been used to create the problems we face (Braidotti, 2013). But what language do we use? Climate activists have used the language of ‘climate emergency’ to jolt people into an awareness that time is running out for effectively protecting the earth's ravaged ecology. However, language in itself is not enough. Urgent messages about the environment are frequently refuted by those whose short-term interests are served by, for example, deforestation. There are many examples of how language is used against activists to undermine their campaigns, often using pathologising mental health discourses to dismiss powerful speakers especially when from oppressed groups. We need to understand how those not concerned with social justice are using language to maintain an imbalance of power and appropriating the language of the ‘natural’ to continue with their endeavours.
There is a challenge then in social constructionist inquiry to include a presence of other contexts which offer a broader context for the smaller, immediate issues to make visible the implicative influences of changes within our environment on human life. What characterises the movement in and between these levels of context is local reflexivity which asks, ‘What is happening here?’ and global reflexivity which asks, ‘How does our experience here connect with what else is going on out there?’ (Simon, 1998, 2012, 2014).
Transmaterial Research Questions
Transmaterial worlding as inquiry asks investigative questions such as:
‘How can we show what matters, how it matters, and to whom it matters?’
‘How can we show others what is being constructed, how and with whom?’
‘How can we use our understanding of communication to show how relations in the world are being created?’
The how can we show questions are not innocent or decontextualised research questions. They reflect some anxiety that facts and findings alone will not be accepted as evidence. They anticipate an increasingly sceptical audience. Members of the public see politicians fighting with scientists over who is telling the truth. Black and indigenous communities struggle to have their realities of systematic and institutionalised abuse taken seriously by those in positions of influence. Evidence using what was traditionally considered robust research methods is no longer enough. On the one hand, methods often reproduce colonising values that serve to reproduce material which does not reflect lived experience, for example, of oppressed and minority peoples. On the other hand, approaches that do reflect experiences of minority or oppressed peoples are often critiqued for being too subjective and insufficiently rigorous.
These questions then also need including to address the voices of human and also of non-human life forms.
‘How is material being defined?’
‘Which voices are being included or excluded?’
‘How are they represented?’
‘What negotiations are involved in the process of knowledge generation and knowledge sharing?’
There are different kinds of power to consider in transmaterial worlding as a method of inquiry:
1 The power to influence how people configure realities through discourse and narrative;
2 The power to create structures which solidify and embody those realities;
3 The power to deconstruct and reconstruct material and linguistic structures;
4 The power to recognise that truths are not representative of one's own, other people's or the material environment's experience;
5 The power to deliberately seek out first person experience and alternative truths.
In order for research to make a difference, researchers need to ask
‘What are the governing contexts that have given rise to such a problem?’
‘How are imbalances of power maintaining this problem?’
‘How can this research disrupt the power relations that prevent social-justice-driven change?’
‘Which voices need to be heard and how can we extend what we can hear and see?’
‘Who is best placed to represent issues and how and with what support?’
Social constructionist research needs to draw on systemic and posthuman understandings of context and power to explain
1 Why change is difficult to effect;
2 Why challenging the social construction of language is in itself not going to result in systemic change, desirable, sustainable change over tokenistic gestures;
3 How to create change and why it might be difficult.
Using questions such as these, transmaterial worlding offers a form of inquiry which integrates a concern for the ecology of the planet into the concept of social.
Examples of Transmaterial Worlding as Inquiry
What then can research look like in a material world in which the matter of materiality of people's lives and the environments in which we/they live can be storied or researched but not always heard and acted on? Here are a few examples of transmaterial worlding which use a range of systemic questions to bring forth both human and beyond human knowledges, to explore narratives and act as transformational practice by inviting new and empathic ways of knowing.
Research driven by concern for young people at risk in their neighbourhoods could extend the framework of contextual safeguarding (Firmin and Hancock, 2018) to include human and non-human voices and understand research as transformative of people, places, discourses and power structures:
If the voices of stairwells in housing estates were included as research participants, what would they say works well about them as spaces to allow effective intimidation of young people by people who lead them into trouble?
How can research support young people to re-design the stairwells in their block of flats and empower them to make their views heard by those in power to make changes?
How can research map where local people, landlords and local organisations say the threshold is between personal monetary gain and social gain? And how can research bring forth their ideas for what can be done where doing nothing is not an option?
Research into the impact of mountain climbing on Everest could ask climbers, guides and travel agents questions designed to disrupt common tourism practice by enhancing transmaterial empathy and imagining more eco-sensitive positioning:
How could the snow at the bottom of Everest make its experience of being transformed by climbers heard in ways that climbers changed their practices?
How might human and non-human stakeholders in Everest map the tipping point between profit or gain of the individual, and the well-being of the mountain and its indigenous communities?
What kind of pre-booking preparation could there be for climbers to empathise with the mountain and its surrounding ecology before making a decision to book their trip?
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