About the Journal

Focus and Scope

‘Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research’ is a scientific, open-access and peer-reviewed journal designed as a space for interdisciplinary dialogue and reflection about ‘new materialism’ – a growing trend in contemporary humanities. The term ‘new materialism’ or ‘neo-materialism’ was first coined by Rosi Braidotti in Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women and Contemporary Philosophy (1991) and by Manuel DeLanda in an essay entitled The Geology of Morals. A Neo-Materialist Interpretation (1996). Braidotti coined the term to rethink materialism with reference to poststructuralism and its increasing impact on feminist theoretical work. Iris van der Tuin (2014) in turn sees the origins of new materialist methodologies in Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges (1988) that allows, among other things, to ‘push dualism to an extreme’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012) showing how thinking in binary terms is a power move. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin point also to new materialisms’ rootedness in monism and philosophies of immanence, its posthumanist or a-humanist positioning and its transversal movement across traditions, materialist genealogies and scientific disciplines.

New materialism is a vibrant theoretical movement that inspires different methodologies, notions, and research and as such it has varied theoretical realizations. Diana Coole in her keynote lecture during the 6th Conference on New Materialisms New Materialist Politics and Economies of Knowledge (2015) provided a tentative definition of new materialism using 5 characteristic features: (re)turn to matter, flat ontology, spread agency, posthumanism, including human and more-than-human entanglements and critical/ transgressive perspective. This does not serve to define new materialism once and for all but rather to point to some of its characteristic traits.

In response to this theoretical variety the focus and scope of ‘Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research’ lies, among other things, in: exploring the theoretical aspects of contemporary (new) materialisms; reflecting on and putting to work new methodologies to grasp the relations between researchers and object of research, the dynamics of research and pedagogical practices; investigating into how institutional structures and power relations function in contemporary societies as well as creating visions of ways of organizing, living, and imagining various praxes; looking for alternative perspectives on language and literature through new materialist lens; zooming into the processes of canonization of knowledge production and classification; examining the relation between different scientific disciplines; rethinking the relations between nature and technology, matter and code, energy and information, science and philosophy; researching the contemporary reconfigurations of bodies and affects (human and more-than-human); grasping the implications of new materialism approach for ethical, pedagogical and educational theories and practices; seeking for the matter of media, art and culture and for the ways in which the media cultures the matter of life.

In ‘Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research’ we are also interested in putting new materialisms in conversation with rich and varied contemporary scholarship and in challenging new materialisms to stimulate the autoreflexive movement in this research field, critically think about its origins and rethink the entanglements between e.g. new materialisms and postcolonialisms (Hinton, Mehrabi and Barla, 2015).

 

Objective of the Journal

‘Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research’ publishes articles that respond to Journal’s focus and scope and invites monographic issues that concentrate on specific themes and newly emerging subjects.

The objective of ‘Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research’ is to provide an interdisciplinary platform to discuss the condition of new materialism today, to put to work new materialist methodologies, and to rethink and envision new practices. The Journal aims at opening a forum for research from a variety of perspective including but not limited to: ontological, epistemological, methodological, ethical, political, social, literary, artistic, aesthetic, activist and struggling to capture the connections and relations between those approaches.

 

Knowledge area

Interdisciplinary research, (post)humanities, philosophy, methodology, cultural studies, literary studies, pedagogy, research on education, sociology, science and technology studies, art research, performance studies, gender studies, queer studies, critical race studies, postcolonial theory, critical disability/ crip studies, indigenous studies, environmental humanities, critical animal and plant studies, object-oriented ontology.

 

Public

Potential readers of the Journal include MA and PhD students as well as senior scholars interested in new materialism, interdisciplinary research and methodologies, feminist theory, art and research, theory and politics as well as critical posthumanities.

 

Peer Review Process

All the published articles are subject to double-blind peer-review by at least two external referees considered to be experts in the article’s research field. The final decision on the publication is made by the editorial team of the journal. The intention of the Journal is to provide rigorous, good-quality articles of interest to the academic community.

All the authors will receive notification of receipt of their work. Nonetheless, reception of a manuscript does not entail any commitment or obligation on the part of the journal.

When a manuscript is submitted it is subject to a double-blind peer-review. This process consists of the following steps:

  1. a) it is first reviewed by the members of editorial board which may reject it outright if it clearly fails to comply with the journal’s editorial line;
  2. b) otherwise, two experts are asked to make a double-blind assessment of the document. The committee may make suggestions for the article to be revised and improved. The assessment is performed in accordance with the peer-review guidelines issued;
  3. c) on the basis of the experts’ reports, the editorial board decides whether to publish the article as it is, return it to the author with suggestions of improvement or reject it; the author is informed about the editorial board’s decision and its justification as soon as possible (in a period of no more than six months after the date of the receipt of the article).  If changes are requested, the author must confirm if they are willing and in a position to make them. If there is no reply or the reply takes more than one month, the journal will consider that the changes are not accepted and the article will therefore be considered rejected.

The Almanac, Intra-view and Affecting Affirmative Reviews sections are not double-blinded. The contributions are directly reviewed by the section editors.

 

Publication Frequency

Since 2024, the journal will be published once a year, in May. Articles will be published as they are ready without the need for the issue to be completed.

 

Open Access Policy

The texts published in this journal are – unless otherwise indicated – covered by the Creative Commons Spain Attribution 4.0 International licence. The full text of the licence can be consulted here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

‘Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research’ provides free access to the full texts of all its contents immediately upon publication. Once published, authors can post a copy of their articles on their websites and in an Institutional or subject repository providing acknowledgment is given to the original source. 

 

Declaration of publishing ethics and best practices

The journal subscribes the Declaration of publishing ethics and best practices for scientific journals published by the University of Barcelona.

The University of Barcelona promotes open access publication of digital journals and endeavors to guarantee quality and conscientiousness in the transfer of scientific knowledge. The University is committed to ensuring that the articles it publishes and the publishing process itself observe the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). It is therefore essential that all of the stakeholders in this process – journal editors, reviewers, technical editors and authors – know and act according to the Code.

 

Journal History

The journal was born as an initiative to continue the work that began with the project ‘New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on “How Matter Comes to Matter”’, European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), Action IS 1307 chaired by Iris van der Tuin and Felicity Colman. It is created by the network of scholars who took part in the COST Action.