Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Feminist New Materialism
Exploring how recovery emerges through relationships between people, bodies, materials, spaces and the worlds around us.
What Is Feminist New Materialism?
Feminist new materialism is a way of thinking that asks us to look beyond the idea that people are separate individuals whose experiences happen only ‘inside’ them.
Instead, it draws attention to the many relationships through which our lives take shape — including relationships with other people, our bodies, objects, spaces, environments, institutions, histories and the wider material world.
Importantly, these things are not understood simply as a background to human experience. Materials, bodies and environments can participate in shaping what happens and what becomes possible. A room can feel safe or threatening; an object can evoke a memory; the physical qualities of a material can change what someone makes; and access to particular spaces, relationships or resources can expand or restrict what somebody is able to do.
Feminist new materialism also challenges some familiar separations: between mind and body, people and environments, knowledge and experience, or human and non-human worlds. Instead, it asks us to pay attention to relationships, connections and what happens through encounters between things.
Within Project Becomings, this offered a different way of thinking about trauma and recovery. Rather than asking only what was happening within a person, we could also ask:
What is this person in relation with — and what are those relationships making possible?
Why Feminist New Materialism For Trauma And Recovery?
Trauma and recovery are often understood primarily in terms of what happens within an individual — their symptoms, thoughts, emotions, behaviours or ability to cope. These can all be important, but focusing on the individual alone can make other influences on recovery much harder to see.
Feminist new materialism offered a way of widening that view. It allowed Project Becomings to consider how recovery might also be shaped through relationships, bodies, spaces, objects, environments, institutions, histories and everyday practices. Rather than treating these as external factors that simply influence an otherwise separate person, they could be understood as part of the relations through which experiences of recovery emerge.
This matters because the possibilities available to somebody can change as these relationships change. A particular space might enable a sense of safety; another might restrict what someone feels able to do. Relationships can expand or diminish possibilities for connection. Bodies can carry sensations, capacities and histories that do not fit neatly into cognitive accounts of recovery. Material conditions can also shape whether particular ways of living and recovering are possible at all.
Thinking in this way helped challenge the expectation that recovery should involve an individual progressing along a predictable pathway towards a fixed endpoint. Instead, recovery could be understood as relational, situated and continually changing, as different people, bodies, environments, histories and practices come together in different ways.
It also shifts an important question. Rather than asking only:
“What does this person need to change in order to recover?”
Feminist new materialism allows us to also ask:
“What relationships and conditions are shaping what is possible for this person here and now?”
For Project Becomings, this opened up a way of thinking about recovery that extended beyond treatment or individual change and towards the wider material, relational and embodied worlds in which recovery is actually lived.
Matter, Matters
We often think of objects, materials and environments as the background to our lives — things that people use, move through or act upon. Feminist new materialism asks us to think differently by paying attention to how matter itself participates in what happens.
This does not mean that a piece of clay or a room has intentions in the way a person does. Rather, different materials, bodies and environments have particular qualities and capacities that can enable, constrain, interrupt or change what becomes possible.
We encountered this throughout Project Becomings. Clay could resist the hands working with it, thread could tangle or connect, an image could provoke an unexpected response, and the atmosphere of a space could affect how somebody felt or participated. The material world was therefore not simply a container in which the research took place — it was part of the research encounter itself.
Bodies matter too. Trauma and recovery are not experienced only through thoughts or language. Sensations, movement, pain, comfort, tension, energy and bodily responses can all participate in how the world is encountered and what someone feels able to do.
Paying attention to matter therefore widened what could count as significant within the research. Rather than asking only what people said or thought, we could also notice bodies, objects, textures, spaces, sounds, materials and the relationships forming between them.
Matter matters because changing the material conditions of an encounter can change what that encounter makes possible.
Relations, Entanglement And Intra-action
We often think of relationships as happening between separate things: first there is a person, an object or an environment, and then these things interact with one another.
Feminist new materialist scholar Karen Barad offers a different way of thinking about relationships through the concept of intra-action. Rather than assuming that everything exists independently before it meets, intra-action suggests that what things are and what they can do can emerge through their relationships with one another.
A simple example might be a person working with clay. We could describe this as somebody using clay to express an idea they already have. But if we pay closer attention, something more complex may be happening. The clay has weight, texture and resistance. It responds differently depending on how it is handled. The person's hands move and adjust in response. Memories, sensations or ideas may emerge through making. The environment, other people and what has happened previously may also become part of that encounter.
Neither the person nor what is being made necessarily remains unchanged through the process. What emerges is produced through these relations rather than belonging entirely to any one part of them.
This helped Project Becomings pay attention to entanglement. Experiences of trauma and recovery could not always be neatly separated into individual, social, bodily or environmental influences. Bodies, histories, relationships, places, materials and ideas could become entangled in ways that shaped what someone experienced and what became possible.
Thinking through intra-action therefore changed the kinds of questions we could ask. Instead of only asking:
“What effect did this have on the person?”
we could also ask:
“What is happening through this encounter — and what is becoming possible through these relations?”
Assemblages And Becoming
Feminist new materialism also influenced how Project Becomings thought about assemblages. Drawing particularly on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, an assemblage can be understood as a changing coming-together of different people, bodies, relationships, objects, environments, histories, ideas and practices.
An assemblage is not simply a collection of separate things. What matters is what happens when they come together. Different relations can strengthen or weaken one another, create tensions, open possibilities or make particular ways of thinking, feeling and acting more difficult.
We can think about recovery in this way. Someone might, at a particular moment, be in relation with family, friends, practitioners, medication, work, money, housing, memories, their body, a diagnosis, creative practices, physical spaces and many other things. None of these operates entirely on its own. Their changing relationships can shape what recovery becomes and what someone is able to do.
Assemblages are also never completely fixed. Relationships change. Bodies change. Environments change. Something that once supported a person may later become restrictive, while a new relationship, place, practice or encounter may create possibilities that did not previously exist.
This brings us to another important idea: becoming. Rather than understanding a person as moving towards a final, recovered version of themselves, becoming draws attention to ongoing change and to the different possibilities that can emerge through our encounters with the world.
For Project Becomings, this offered a way of resisting the idea of recovery as a single pathway with a predetermined destination. Recovery could instead be understood as an ongoing assemblage — continually made and remade through changing relations and encounters.
The question therefore becomes less:
“Has this person recovered?”
and more:
“What is this assemblage enabling or constraining — and what might become possible if some of these relations change?”
Space, Time And Recovery
Recovery is often described through time. We talk about moving forward, making progress, reaching milestones or returning to how things were before. These ways of speaking can make recovery appear like a journey along a straight line.
Project Becomings questioned whether recovery is really experienced this way.
Experiences of trauma can trouble straightforward distinctions between past, present and future. Something that happened many years ago may become intensely present through a sensation, relationship, place or encounter. At other moments, a different environment or relationship may create possibilities for experiencing ourselves and our futures differently.
Feminist new materialist thinking helped us consider space and time as entangled with these experiences, rather than simply being the background against which recovery happens. Drawing on Karen Barad, the concept of spacetimemattering challenges the idea that space, time and matter are entirely separate.
This means that where something happens, when it happens, the bodies and materials involved, and the histories carried into an encounter can participate together in shaping what that encounter becomes.
A place, for example, is not necessarily experienced in the same way at different moments. Somewhere that once felt unsafe might later become associated with connection or possibility. Equally, a sound, object or environment encountered in the present might bring aspects of the past into someone's experience of the here and now.
Thinking in this way helped Project Becomings move away from recovery as a process of simply leaving the past behind and progressing towards a recovered future. Past, present, space, bodies, materials and relationships can become entangled in much less predictable ways.
Recovery therefore does not necessarily unfold in a straight line through time. It is continually shaped through the spaces, times, bodies, histories and relations through which life is lived.
What Did Feminist New Materialism Allow Us To Think Differently?
Feminist new materialism did not provide Project Becomings with a new set of rules for what recovery should look like. Instead, it helped us ask different questions about where recovery happens, what participates in it, and what might make different possibilities possible.
It shifted attention away from understanding recovery as something located solely within an individual. Bodies, relationships, environments, objects, histories, institutions, practices and material conditions could all participate in shaping how recovery was experienced and what someone was able to do. This reflects the theoretical framing of the research, in which trauma and recovery emerge through ongoing relations rather than residing only within individuals.
It also challenged the idea that these influences could always be separated from one another. Recovery could be relational, material, embodied, spatial and temporal at the same time. What mattered was not simply identifying each influence, but attending to how they came together and what those particular arrangements enabled or constrained.
This changed how we could think about change itself. Rather than asking whether someone was progressing towards a predetermined state of being ‘recovered’, we could pay attention to shifts in capacities and possibilities: What can a person do, feel, experience or imagine within this particular set of relations? What becomes easier or harder? What changes when those relations change?
It also made uncertainty important. If people and their worlds are continually becoming through changing relations, recovery cannot necessarily be fully known or prescribed in advance. New possibilities may emerge through encounters that could not have been predicted beforehand.
These ideas eventually contributed to the development of the Visual Assemblage of Trauma Recovery, where recovery was conceptualised not as a linear pathway or collection of isolated factors, but through the dynamic relations among multiple dimensions of lived experience.
Feminist new materialism therefore helped us move from asking what recovery is towards exploring what recovery does, how it becomes possible, and what different arrangements of relations might allow to emerge.
