Feminist New Materialisms: Activating Ethico-Politics Through Genealogies in Social Sciences

For the editors of this collection new materialisms have always been the entanglement of epistemology ontology ethics and politics. Looking back to the notion of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) that - among others - planted the seed for feminist new materialism (van der Tuin 2015 26) - one sees how those (at least) four planes are entangled (Rogowska-Stangret 2018) in order to bring forth response-able (Haraway 2008) research. New materialism is thus an ethico-onto-epistemological framework (Barad 2007; Revelles-Benavente 2018) that by activating its ethico-politics helps to diagnose infer and transform gendered environmental anthropocentric social injustices from a multidimensional angle. Social injustices are a driving motivation to pursue research and are the reason why the editors and authors of this Special Issue cannot understand new materialism without feminism (in the lines of eds. Hinton & Teusch 2015). Contemporary feminist researchers are providing new materialisms with a transversal approach (Yuval-Davis 1997) that comes from many different disciplines without canonizing back again knowledge creation and production and in hope that they will not enter back into classifixations (van der Tuin 2015). It is situated (Haraway 1988) research response-able (Haraway 2008) to material-discursive practices that iterate in a dynamic conceptualization of matter.