Situated Socio-material Assemblages: Nordisco23 Keynote

This presentation examines video data from a variety of socio-material settings where humans, nonhumans, materials, technology, and nature assemble through ongoing, emerging productions. Based in ethnomethodology, the presentation suggests a “misreading” (Garfinkels term) of Deleuze and Guattaris concept of assemblages to work out a replacement of agency from being a human characteristic to being a distributed accomplishment within situated assemblages. The talk presents excerpts from human-animal, human-food, human-plant and human-technology interactions and shows how we can understand these in radical terms as emerging and being accomplished through the distribution of agency. The talk suggest that the replacement of the unit of analysis from being the individual to being the assemblage calls for a respecification of ethnomethodology as assemmethodology (Due, 2023a, 2023b).

Due, B. L. (2023a). Assemmethodology? A Commentary. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 6(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.7146/si.v6i1.137001
Due, B. L. (2023b). Situated socio-material assemblages: Assemmethodology in the making. Human Communication Research, hqad031. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqad031