Neo-materialism: From Bio Power to Social Movements

This book describes the emergence of a new materialist orientation in social theory, driven by acknowledgement of the centrality and irreducibility of difference as a key concept in both the social and natural sciences and the problems this poses for scientific enquiry, political decision-making and collective action. Using examples from climate change to genomics to social justice movements, it examines how feedback processes between the organic, material and social realms are increasingly being revealed as determinants of our capacity to sustain planetary diversity and to shape the form and quality of human life. It argues that, as we confront the complexity and contingency of such processes, there is an ever-greater need for an ontology that re-admits the non-discursive to social theory.

Graeme Chesters is RCUK Senior Academic Fellow in the Department of Peace Studies and Deputy Director of the International Centre of Participation Studies at the University of Bradford. He researches and teaches on participatory politics, social movements and social change in complex societies.

Ian Welsh is Reader in Sociology at Cardiff University. He has worked on social movements since the late 1970s. This work spans the use of direct action by anti-nuclear movements in the UK, the role of environmental activism in the transition societies of Eastern Europe, anti-roads activism in the 1990s, complexity theory and global social movements.