New Materialism and Intersectionality Making Middles Matter

Introduction
Making Middles Matter- Feminist and Gender Studies in-between Intersectionality and New Materialisms

Tara Mehrabi, Milla Tiainen, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Taru Leppänen

Part I: Non-Anthropocentric Intersectionality

1. With a Flip of a Light Switch: A Socio-Environmental Understanding of Intersectional Power Relations

Magdalena Górska

2. In the Middle of it all: Plants, History, and Feminist Encounters in Central Europe

Olga Cielemęcka

3. Allergic Encounters in Contact Zones: Rethinking Intersectionality through Debility and Trans-corporeality

Tara Mehrabi

Part II: Makings of Race in the Middle

4. Beyond Narratives of Newness, Abandonment, Loss, and Return: An Emergent Discussion between Feminist New Materialisms, Posthumanities and Intersectionality

Maneesha Deckha and Liu Xin with Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Milla Tiainen, Taru Leppänen and Tara Mehrabi

5. Assemblage Converters

Abraham B. Weil

6. Everybody Waits but Waits Differently: A Methodological Account of Waiting as an Intersectional Matter of Quotidian Socio-political Middlings

Anastasia (A) Khodyreva

Part III: Responsible Relationalities

7. Writing Exercises in the Middle: Towards Healing Methodologies

Hanna Guttorm

8. A Critical Cartography of the Mattering(s) of Identity Politics: Intersectional and Interferential Explorations

Evelien Geerts

9. Can Middling Foster New Feminist Coalitions? On Transgender, Race and the Ethics of Unease

Nina Lykke

10. Tangible T/hereness and Affective Middles in Memory Work: Experiences of Temporality in Birthing-stories of Laestadian Women

Teija Rantala

Biography

Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Associate Professor (Docent) of Contemporary Art Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. She specialises in feminist art and theory, processes of making and encountering art, new materialist methodologies, and art-based research, and is the author of Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration (2018). 

Taru Leppänen is Professor of Gender Studies at the Åbo Akademi University. Her research interests include music and sound, feminist new materialisms, intersectionality, and children’s musical practices. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph Politics of Feminist New Materialisms at Music Playschools: Musicking in the Middle. 

Tara Mehrabi, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Social and Psychological Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden. Her research is situated in feminist technoscience studies, feminist new materialisms, intersectionality, gender studies, and queer death studies. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Queer Death Studies. 

Milla Tiainen, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Turku and Associate Professor (Docent) of Musicology at the University of Helsinki. She has published widely on musical performance research, feminist and ecocritical studies of music and sound, and new materialist and posthumanist research approaches to the arts. She is co-editor of Mattering Voices: Studying Voice through New Materialisms (forthcoming). 

"This book pushes theories of identity, intersectionality and new materialisms to their limits while weaving these paradigms together. In doing so, the book offers a vital rethinking of identity and identity politics in polarized times. Grounded in critical new materialisms and posthumanisms, the individual chapters offer an innovative toolbox for sustainable research practices, essential as geopolitical developments challenge the values of the social sciences, humanities and arts."

Iris van der Tuin, Professor in Theory of Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University, Netherlands