The lecture series "Thinking (further) Through Materialities" builds on the 2023 edition "Thinking through Materialities: Insights from and for Gender Studies and Cultural Anthropology". It continues to explore how "matter comes to matter," and related questions: How can social scientific thinking (re)engage with materialities and repopulate the social with what has long been its "missing masses"? How can practices that are both enacting and embedded within materialities-such as sciences, crafts, or arts-inform new approaches within the social sciences? And more fundamentally, how can they contribute to reflect upon the often unrecognized materialities in which social scientific thinking itself is embedded?

Venue: University of Basel, Kollegienhaus, Room 116
Start: 16:15 pm

The lectures are open to everyone interested.
 

October 15, 2025
Dormant Things: The Vital Materiality of the Unnoticed Everyday
Sophie Woodward (University of Manchester, UK)

Domestic spaces abound with things that people keep but are not using, rather than dismiss these as unused, unwanted, stored and therefore dead, this presentation pays heed to how we can understand their vital materiality. I do this by developing an understanding of these things as ‘dormant’ by drawing metaphors from the natural worlds to see this period of rest is one which is still part of life. Whilst these can be empirically methodologically challenging to interrogate, I explore how ‘attentiveness’ to the materiality can allow us to develop new ways of thinking about materiality of everyday life. I draw from ideas of ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2010), the everyday ‘charges’ (Mason, 2018) of things to explore how things with no big narratives or meanings are still potent.

October 22, 2025
Caring with Haunted Marine Microbes
Astrid Schrader (University of Exeter, UK)

Exploring scientific accounts of marine microbes that update understandings of microbial existences in the controversially named Anthropocene, this talk argues that attention to the temporalities of microbes allows for new modes of caring in the practice of science.

Making sense of newly affirmed phenomena such as the collective suicide of marine algae or the circadian rhythms of cyanobacteria requires new ontologies that replace the priority of being and presence with inheritance and transgenerational communications: that is, a hauntology as introduced by Jacques Derrida. I argue that these biohauntings make explicit the contribution of scientific observation to the observed phenomenon. Caring becomes enabled by an out-of-jointness of the microbial self.

October 29, 2025
Microbes, Embodied Knowing, and the Materiality of Fermentation 
Maya Hey (University of Helsinki, FI)

This talk introduces my forthcoming monograph on fermentation, in which I theorise human-microbe relations now and ahead. Microbes are everywhere, all of the time, making up our bodies and environments in ways that confound being ‘human’ on this highly microbial planet. By focusing on the process of making ferments, versus its outcomes, I examine the hands-on, repeated practices of fermentation that render certain futures more possible than others. Based on an ethnography at a natural sake brewery in Japan, and with theoretical commitments to feminist approaches, I’ll discuss the situated, material practices for knowing microbes in improvisational ways.

November 5, 2025
Substance as Method, Material Bodies
Joseph Dumit (University of California, Davis, USA)

If we pay it due attention, we will find more in nature than what we observe at first glance. — Whitehead in Stengers.

In what he calls the instinctive attitude, mystic and philosopher Whitehead describes the essence of science and of everyday life. The more we look at something, attend to it, investigate it, the more we find in it. Its substance changes before our eyes, surprisingly so. We notice things we hadn’t even thought of before. This is the way of ethnography, of writing up fieldwork, and of reflecting on our own methods.

In this presentation, I suggest that we might make a study of those who are surprised by a substance they are investigating: surprised to the extent that they had to invent new ways of talking about and working with the substance. They also cannot help but talk about the process since they are equally struck by how long they had not been able to notice what is now obvious. And they recognize something new about themselves and the assumptions that they have been holding. They recognize that the very concepts and metaphors and methods they have been using were based on different substances. This is what can be called: substance as method, an approach that suspects that each substance might be its own method and metaphor. In turn we might start asking what substances our theories and metaphors and methods are based on.

Here I present some of my ongoing fieldwork with artists, clinical researchers, and scientists and their substances, reflecting on anthropology's role in collaboration, being alongside, and learning with.


November 12, 2025
String Figures: A Cultural, Material, Collaborative Practice 
Sarine Waltenspül (University of Lucerne, CH) & Mario Schulze (University of Basel, CH) 

Stretched between eight fingers and two thumbs – sometimes even between teeth and toes – lengths of string form shapes. String figures are known across the world and can do many different things for different people: they tell stories, pass the time, make the unsayable showable, and create connections. Whatever else they may be, string figures have been taken up by artists striving to decolonize art, by ethnologists looking for more embodied methods of research, and by theorists seeking non-Western ways of thinking. In our talk, we will present string figures as a practice for thinking through the relationships between people, places, and materialities.

November 26, 2025
What Is Social about AI? Lessons from the Street
Noortje Marres (University of Warwick, UK)

The street provides ample opportunity for observation of the situated infrastructures that are necessary to enable the functioning of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in society. Differently put, in the street we can observe the socio-material modes of existence of AI – in the form of apps, automated vehicles and smart infrastructure – in situ and we can examine how these manifest, intersect, and transform collective life in a type of multifarious environment that is characteristic of contemporary society: the street is part public/part private space, both communal place and utility infrastructure.

With this in mind, the interdisciplinary project AI in the street took up creative methods to facilitate situated encounters between everyday publics and AI technologies in four different streets in UK cities, and one in Australia. While the project collected diverse observations of AI in the street, it also found that AI is defined more by its absence than by presence in this environment. Along commuter roads, at difficult crossings, and in the urban thoroughfares where we conducted our participatory research, AI operates mostly outside the zones of human-non-human interaction that organise collective life in these settings. In the street, AI manifests only indirectly, through proxies (smart traffic lights, sensors in lampposts, digital billboards), and is marked by withdrawal from and indifference to local settings. AI – unlike other relevant digital technologies such as ANPR or media platforms – lacks a social interface in the street.

Reflecting on these findings, I posit a general challenge for situated perspectives on AI: while online platforms stood out for their attempted approximation of the technical and the social, which could be apprehended on the level of socio-material practice and infrastructure, the AI economy is defined by its negation of actually existing forms of sociality. While the former invited investigation of the enactment of social life with devices and infrastructures, AI signals the undoing of the "socio-technical" as an analytic and normative horizon for the social study of technology.

December 03, 2025
Eco-Aesthetic Entanglements in Filmmaking: The Materiality of Sound and Image 
Işıl Karataş (University of Vienna, AT)

To rethink photochemical filmmaking today means engaging with a medium that is at once obsolete and re-emergent, fragile and stubborn, petrochemical and ecological. This talk moves through three trajectories that connect ethnographic research, artistic practice, and experimental film through ecological and aesthetic layers of materiality.

The first considers analogue practices in a digital era, where artists and collectives reinvent the meanings of film materiality through repair, DIY methods, and experimentation. The second introduces my method of sonorous materiality, exploring how the resonances and vibrations of filmmaking technologies open ecological understandings of matter beyond the visual. The third turns to speculative image-making in both ephemeral and recorded forms, with the screening of Anarchafeminist Divinations (2024, 16 min). This film expands coffee-cup reading into a technique of experimental image-making, where divination intersects with friendship and gender to create space for imagining futures of coexistence between human and more-than-human worlds.

December 10, 2025 *
Avowing Loss 
Fernando Domínguez Rubio (University of California, San Diego, USA)

The objective of this talk is to claim the urgent need to re-think the aesthetic infrastructures that sustain contemporary production of cultural memory through a radical avowal of loss. The talk will explore how modern aesthetic infrastructures have been organized around a disavowal of loss. That is, they have been built around the premise that it is possible to deny loss and to sustain the image of cultural objects remaining identical over time. The talk will examine the rather particular unnatural ecologies that have been built to sustain this disavowal of loss, and the kinds of climatic, financial costs, as well as logics of exclusion and dispossession, that this logic has created. The talk will then call for the need to abandon once and for all this unsustainable disavowal of loss. It will do so by breaking the false equation that modernity has enforced upon us which states that memory and permanence is only possible by negating change and disavowing loss. It will then conclude by asking what kind of cultural memories and pasts can be created through a radical avowal of loss, that is, by accepting the change and loss as productive elements to be embraced rather than elements to be fixed or eliminated. 

* starts at 16:55