The Sociological Review Monographs 67/2

Intimate Entanglements

This monographs rethinks the abstract and generalised connection between entanglement and knowledge-making by grounding it within specific socio-material relations. As a focus of sociological research and theory, intimacy is usually discussed in the context of distinguishing local and experiential knowledge from universal and scientific knowledge. In contrast, by foregrounding what is so often made invisible in extant accounts of how knowledge is done, the authors explore how a focus on affect restructures possibilities for a more situated knowledge that involves non-anthropocentric modes of relatedness in a wide range of substantive domains and communities of practice. Drawing on research on laboratories, spaces of care and disability, twinning and eco-experiments, as well as human-nonhuman relations with animals and objects, the issues addressed include the politics of intimacy and its different characterizations – as attachment, belonging and companionship but also as ordinary and dangerous, as sites of alterity and contamination. Intimate Entanglements brings together international scholars from a range of disciplines to open-up the value of intimacy as an often overlooked or disregarded quality of socio-material relations. In reworking human/nature and socio/technical boundaries in knowledge-making, the various chapters press the affective turn in Science & Technology Studies to explore how intimacy can be foregrounded as a site for the social production of knowledge across the social, human and life sciences. Adopting a different perspective and involving a wide array of empirical and speculative methods, the focus is on how a dominant politics of knowledge can be undone as expressions of what is being cared for. Papers are particularly concerned with the kind of attachments and detachments that appear crucial to understanding affective relations and ecologies – inside and beyond the sciences, including the social sciences – and with helping to readdress the balance over what is at stake in notions of care and over what is usually concealed."