Taking things seriously: the politics of new materialism

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Philosophy (MA) (120 EC)

Maanen, Gijs van (2017)

Taking things seriously: the politics of new materialism

Master thesis | Philosophy (MA) (120 EC)

In this thesis I discussed three authors writing in a relatively new tradition of contemporary feminist thought. Chapter one taught us that the world might be more complicated than we initially thought it was. All of our authors argue that we should understand our place in the world in terms of networks. Chapter two focused on the ethical claims made by our materialists. If everything can be (or is) related, how does that influence the way we should act towards others? In chapter three, I argue that new materialism is not so much about reflecting upon how the world is, or proposing rules which explain how the world should be. By contrast, new materialists present ‘figures of the thinkable’, or creative attempts to let people rethink their relationship with specific parts of their environment.