CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Markowitz, Shane David |
|---|---|
| Title | World of "Our" Making: A Socio-Material Constructivist Accounting of the Debate over Genetically Modified Organisms in the European Union |
| Summary | Scholars of international relations have increasingly questioned and problematized the historical theoretical attunement to materiality in social and political analysis, particularly as it concerns the conceptualization of matter as passive vehicles inscribed with meaning or as raw sources of material power that determine the actions of individuals and political entities. The “materialist turn” has instead shed light on the ways in which the world is the ever continuing product of processes of materialization in which matter agentially shapes political action. These approaches too though encounter their own limitations on account of the fact that they tend to bracket off history, situation, and context and conflate the properties of different types of matter (e.g. human/non-human). This dissertation aims to provide an interjection into these discussions through the development of a socio-material constructivist approach. This perspective draws on Karen Barad’s agential realism and its emphasis on the constituting of phenomena through the interplay between discourse and matter, but differentiates itself in the recognition that although agency is performed through “intra-actions”, the entanglements themselves – and consequently their effects – also emanate from positions of differentiation in terms of the specific types of enactment of agency that can be and are performed by different types of matter. Recognizing that meanings are conferred both through the relations between discourse and matter and the incisions enacted by matter itself, the dissertation unpacks four modes of action in which material entities engender effects on the world, including through resistance, displacement, gatekeeping, and symbolic action. Employing an abductive research methodology attuned to intermaterial exposure, this conceptual development and an evaluation of its added value is facilitated by an engagement with the field of practice with regard to several field sites within the debate over genetically modified organisms in the European Union, including the constituting of the biotechnology sector and agricultural agential landscapes that publicly framed the issue in the EU and the political mobilization of farmers/beekeepers and the nuances therein, deemed crucial to issue outcomes, specifically within the region of Bavaria in its debate over becoming a GMO-free region. The socio-materialist constructivist perspective is argued to provide added value to our understandings of politics by clarifying gaps in knowledge left unexplained by rationalist and constructivist narratives of phenomena through the highlighting of the socio-material work put into constituting interests and identities, channeling these interests and identities into specific actions and mobilization decisions (in some cases and not others), and enabling these actions to come to make a difference or not. The stories narrated here elucidate the fragile and complex relations and overlooked sites of power in particular entanglements between material-discursive practices, including between recalcitrant genetic technologies, local topographies, farmer address databases, insects and pollen, industrial meat demand, and neo-liberal political economy, shedding light on how the capacities of different material entities and the shifts in the coming together of these relations engender different patterns of phenomena emergence. Improved understanding of these processes is consequently argued to be crucial if we wish to better inform social and policy intervention. |
| Supervisor | Merlingen, Michael |
| Department | International Relations PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/markowitz_shane.pdf |
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