Conceptualising 'materialities of care': making visible mundane material culture in health and social care contexts

'Materialities of care' is outlined as a heuristic device for making visible the mundane and often unnoticed aspects of material culture within health and social care contexts, and exploring interrelations between materials and care in practice. Three analytic strands inherent to the concept are delineated: spatialities of care, temporalities of care and practices of care. These interconnecting themes span the articles in this special issue. The articles explore material practice across a range of clinical and non-clinical spaces, including hospitals, hospices, care homes, museums, domestic spaces, and community spaces such as shops and tenement stairwells. The collection addresses fleeting moments of care, as well as choreographed routines that order bodies and materials. Throughout there is a focus on practice, and relations between materials and care as ongoing, emergent and processual. We conclude by reflecting on methodological approaches for examining 'materialities of care', and offer some thoughts as to how this analytic approach might be applied to future research within the sociology of health and illness.

Foregrounding Sociomaterial Practice in Our Understanding of Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework

Social coordination and affordance perception always take part in concrete situations in real life. Nonetheless, the different fields of ecological psychology studying these phenomena do not seem to make this situated nature an object of study. To integrate both fields and extend the reach of the ecological approach, we introduce the Skilled Intentionality Framework that situates both social coordination and affordance perception within the human form of life and its rich landscape of affordances. We argue that in the human form of life the social and the material are intertwined and best understood as sociomateriality. Taking the form of life as our starting point foregrounds sociomateriality in each perspective we take on engaging with affordances. Using ethnographical examples we show how sociomateriality shows up from three different perspectives we take on affordances in a real-life situation. One perspective shows us a landscape of affordances that the sociomaterial environment offers. Zooming in on this landscape to the perspective of a local observer, we can focus on an individual coordinating with affordances offered by things and other people situated in this landscape. Finally, viewed from within this unfolding activity, we arrive at the person's lived perspective: a field of relevant affordances solicits activity. The Skilled Intentionality Framework offers a way of integrating social coordination and affordance theory by drawing attention to these complementary perspectives. We end by showing a real-life example from the practice of architecture that suggests how this situated view that foregrounds sociomateriality can extend the scope of ecological psychology to forms of so-called "higher" cognition.

Listening-touch, Affect and the Crafting of Medical Bodies through Percussion

The growing abundance of medical technologies has led to laments over doctors' sensory de-skilling, technologies viewed as replacing diagnosis based on sensory acumen. The technique of percussion has become emblematic of the kinds of skills considered lost. While disappearing from wards, percussion is still taught in medical schools. By ethnographically following how percussion is taught to and learned by students, this article considers the kinds of bodies configured through this multisensory practice. I suggest that three kinds of bodies arise: skilled bodies; affected bodies; and resonating bodies. As these bodies are crafted, I argue that boundaries between bodies of novices and bodies they learn from blur. Attending to an overlooked dimension of bodily configurations in medicine, self-perception, I show that learning percussion functions not only to perpetuate diagnostic craft skills but also as a way of knowing of, and through, the resource always at hand; one's own living breathing body.

Home enteral nutrition: Use of photo-elicitation to capture patient and caregiver experiences

BACKGROUND

Despite the importance of home enteral nutrition (HEN), there is a lack of understanding within the medical and general community of how HEN impacts the lives of patients and caregivers. Using a theoretical orientation that attends to the materiality of both everyday and medical objects, we explored patients' and family caregivers' everyday experiences of administering feeds during HEN.

METHODS

Using the photo-elicitation interviewing method, patients on HEN and their family caregivers were asked to take up to 10 photographs to portray material items and activities that they considered foundational to HEN. They subsequently narrated their experiences and the participant-generated photographs in an interview. Participant-generated photographs (126) and accompanying narratives were analyzed using layered analysis, and results were theorized with attention to both social and material significance of HEN.

RESULTS

Patients and caregivers detailed overcoming misconceptions of HEN, and through their use of photographs, they conveyed their expertise in developing their own HEN feeding systems and practices, that used both the material artifacts provided by the hospital (the tube, syringe, and formula) as well as everyday material items found in the patient's home. More than this, photographs and patient narratives depicted intimate involvement of patients' families in tube feeding. This yielded a more comprehensive understanding of the material and experiential realities of HEN.

CONCLUSION

Home enteral nutrition was found to be a shared familial experience, that in addition to requiring medical equipment also incorporated ordinary material artifacts within the social setting of the home and family life. To more accurately convey the material, experiential, and social realities of HEN to future patients, our findings underscore the importance of drawing on both visual and textual forms of patient-produced information in the development of HEN patient educational materials.

Materiality matters: Blurred boundaries and the domestication of functional foods

Previous scholarship on novel foods, including functional foods, has suggested that they are difficult to categorise for both regulators and users. It is argued that they blur the boundary between ‘food' and ‘drug' and that uncertainties about the products create ‘experimental' or ‘restless' approaches to consumption. We investigate these uncertainties drawing on data about the use of functional foods containing phytosterols, which are licensed for sale in the EU for people wishing to reduce their cholesterol. We start from an interest in the products as material objects and their incorporation into everyday practices. We consider the scripts encoded in the physical form of the products through their regulation, production and packaging and find that these scripts shape but do not determine their use. The domestication of phytosterols involves bundling the products together with other objects (pills, supplements, foodstuffs). Considering their incorporation into different systems of objects offers new understandings of the products as foods or drugs. In their accounts of their practices, consumers appear to be relatively untroubled by uncertainties about the character of the products. We conclude that attending to materials and practices offers a productive way to open up and interrogate the idea of categorical uncertainties surrounding new food products.

Evidence-based policymaking and the wicked problem of SDG 5 Gender Equality

Evidence-based policymaking (EBP) contends that policy decisions are successful when informed by evidence. However, where policy problems are “wicked” (systemic, ambiguous, complex, and conflictual), politics trumps evidence and solutions are never first best or permanent. Applying an EBP approach to solving wicked problems (WPs) therefore appears to be a daunting, impossible task. Despite the difficulties, we contend that blending insights from the EBP and WP literatures can provide actionable and practical policy advice to governments and MNEs for dealing with the WPs of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We support our thesis with a case study applying EBP to the WP of SDG 5 Gender Equality. We compare the statistical evidence from gender inequality indexes to SDG 5’s targets and indicators. We provide five insights from the EBP and WP literatures into why and how good evidence is necessary but not sufficient for progress on SDG 5. Building on these insights, we recommend that governments adopt an EBP approach employing public–private partnerships to address SDG 5. We also recommend that MNE executives use our new SDG Materiality Matrix, designed on EBP principles, to build SDG 5 into their global corporate social responsibility strategies.

Turning the World Upside Down: Playing as the Deliberate Creation of Uncertainty

Risk is big business. It has assumed almost universal acceptance as an ever-present reality of life, something out there waiting to cause harm (most notably to political, economic and health systems). It commands vast resources to develop preventative measures that are the preserve of experts issuing often contradictory advice and warnings. Children’s play is caught up in this account. No longer something that children just do, it is subject to adult scrutiny that simultaneously and paradoxically attempts to manage risk and promote “risk-taking” for its perceived instrumental benefits, primarily the development of risk assessing skills. Adults thus guide children’s play, rendering children passive and needy recipients of expertise. This article takes a broader perspective to consider how this contemporary understanding of risk plays out in material discursive practices in relation to childhood, play, health and wellbeing. It then draws on conceptual tools of relationality, materiality and performativity to reconfigure playing as an emergent co-production of entangled bodies, affects, objects, space and histories in ways that make life better for the time of playing. Such moments produce health-affirming potential as an intra-dependent phenomenon rather than an individual achievement. Finally, it considers implications for “health promotion” and health enabling environments.

Family food practices: relationships, materiality and the everyday at the end of life

This article draws on data from a research project that combined participant observation with in-depth interviews to explore family relationships and experiences of everyday life during life-threatening illness. In it I suggest that death has often been theorised in ways that make its 'mundane' practices less discernible. As a means to foreground the everyday, and to demonstrate its importance to the study of dying, this article explores the (re)negotiation of food and eating in families facing the end of life. Three themes that emerged from the study's broader focus on family life are discussed: 'food talk' and making sense of illness; food, family and identity; and food 'fights'. Together the findings illustrate the material, social and symbolic ways in which food acts relationally in the context of dying, extending conceptual work on materiality in death studies in novel directions. The article also contributes new empirical insights to a limited sociological literature on food, families and terminal illness, building on work that theorises the entanglements of materiality, food, bodies and care. The article concludes by highlighting the analytical value of everyday materialities such as food practices for future research on dying as a relational experience.

Making Sense of Family Deaths in Urban Senegal: Diversities, Contexts, and Comparisons

Despite calls for cross-cultural research, Minority world perspectives still dominate death and bereavement studies, emphasizing individualized emotions and neglecting contextual diversities. In research concerned with contemporary African societies, on the other hand, death and loss are generally subsumed within concerns about AIDS or poverty, with little attention paid to the emotional and personal significance of a death. Here, we draw on interactionist sociology to present major themes from a qualitative study of family deaths in urban Senegal, theoretically framed through the duality of meanings-in-context. Such themes included family and community as support and motivation; religious beliefs and practices as frameworks for solace and (regulatory) meaning; and material circumstances as these are intrinsically bound up with emotions. Although we identify the experience of (embodied, emotional) pain as a common response across Minority and Majority worlds, we also explore significant divergencies, varying according to localized contexts and broader power dynamics.

When African teenagers become fathers: culture, materiality and masculinity

Between 1996 and 2010, the percentage of African children living with their fathers in South Africa dropped from 44% to 31%, with only a third of preschool children living with their parents. Concern about the spate of father absence and its effects on children's well-being has led to a growing focus on fathers in family interventions, although there is relative silence on teenage fathers. In this paper, we draw on an interview-based study with teenage fathers living under conditions of poverty to show how their understandings of fatherhood and constructions of provider masculinity intersect with cultural demands that express both weakness and power. In expressing the desire to care and be involved with their children, and aligning with patterns of masculinity that sought enhanced options for contraceptive use based on gender-equitable relationships, we show a new direction in the making of teenage fatherhood, diverging from hierarchical gender relations where men make the decisions. These changes, however, are limited by constructions of masculinity that contradictorily reinforce provider status, gender inequalities and male patterns of sexual entitlements within a context where teenage fathers are unable to achieve the cultural status of provider masculinity. Implications are discussed in the conclusion.

The everyday lives of energy transitions: Contested sociotechnical imaginaries in the American West

This article brings together two growing literatures - on sociotechnical imaginaries in science and technology studies and on resource materialities in anthropology - to explore how two energy-producing communities in the American West understand the moral salience of energy systems and the place of labor within them. Studies of energy sociotechnical imaginaries overwhelmingly focus on the role that state and transnational actors play in shaping perceptions of the 'good society', rather than how these imaginaries inform and are transformed in the lived experience of everyday people. We illuminate the contested dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries and their positioning within structures of power that inform visions of moral behavior and social order. Whereas the role of energy in national imaginaries is grounded almost entirely in the consumption it enables, examining the everyday ethics of people who live and work in Colorado's uranium-rich Western Slope and Wyoming's coal-rich Powder River Basin reveals an insistence that 'good' energy systems also provide opportunities for dignified and well-paid blue-collar work. This imaginary, we argue, remains 'bounded' at a local scale rather than circulating more widely to gain national or international traction. Theorizing this boundedness illustrates not only the contested nature of sociotechnical imaginaries, but also the constraints that material assemblages and sediments of the past place on imagined futures.

Meaning in hoarding: perspectives of people who hoard on clutter, culture and agency

Hoarding has become increasingly prominent in clinical practice and popular culture in recent years, giving rise to extensive research and commentary. Critical responses in the social sciences have criticised the cultural assumptions built in to the construct of 'hoarding disorder' and expressed fears that it may generate stigma outweighing its benefits; however, few of these studies have engaged directly with 'hoarders' themselves. This paper reports on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 10 individuals living in England, who received assessment and intervention for hoarding from Social Services. Their narratives drew on the cultural repertoire of values and discourses around waste and worth, the mediation of sociality and relationships through material objects, physical constraints on keeping order and the role played by mental health. Analysing these perspectives anthropologically shows how dominant models of hoarding, such as the DSM-5 paradigm, potentially lend themselves to reductionist understandings that efface the meaning 'hoarding' may have and thereby deny agency to the person labelled as 'hoarder'. More culturally informed analysis, by contrast, affords insights into the complex landscape of value, waste, social critique, emotion, interpersonal relationships and practical difficulties that may underlie hoarding cases, and points the way to more person-centred practice and analysis.

Culture's building blocks: investigating cultural evolution in a LEGO construction task

ONE OF THE MOST ESSENTIAL BUT THEORETICALLY VEXING ISSUES REGARDING THE NOTION OF CULTURE IS THAT OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND TRANSMISSION: how a group's accumulated solutions to invariant challenges develop and persevere over time. But at the moment, the notion of applying evolutionary theory to culture remains little more than a suggestive trope. Whereas the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory has provided an encompassing scientific framework for the selection and transmission of biological adaptations, a convincing theory of cultural evolution has yet to emerge. One of the greatest challenges for theorists is identifying the appropriate time scales and units of analysis in order to reduce the intractably large and complex phenomenon of "culture" into its component "building blocks." In this paper, we present a model for scientifically investigating cultural processes by analyzing the ways people develop conventions in a series of LEGO construction tasks. The data revealed a surprising pattern in the selection of building bricks as well as features of car design across consecutive building sessions. Our findings support a novel methodology for studying the development and transmission of culture through the microcosm of interactive LEGO design and assembly.

Anatomical Mercury: Changing Understandings of Quicksilver, Blood, and the Lymphatic System, 1650-1800

The use of mercury as an injection mass in anatomical experiments and preparations was common throughout Europe in the long eighteenth century, and refined mercury-injected preparations as well as plates of anatomical mercury remain today. The use and meaning of mercury in related disciplines such as medicine and chemistry in the same period have been studied, but our knowledge of anatomical mercury is sparse and tends to focus on technicalities. This article argues that mercury had a distinct meaning in anatomy, which was initially influenced by alchemical and classical understandings of mercury. Moreover, it demonstrates that the choice of mercury as an anatomical injection mass was deliberate and informed by an intricate cultural understanding of its materiality, and that its use in anatomical preparations and its perception as an anatomical material evolved with the understanding of the circulatory and lymphatic systems. By using the material culture of anatomical mercury as a starting point, I seek to provide a new, object-driven interpretation of complex and strongly interrelated historiographical categories such as mechanism, vitalism, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, which are difficult to understand through a historiography that focuses exclusively on ideas.

From situated space to social space: Dyke bar commemoration as reparative action

Drawing on an ethnography of dyke bar commemoration in four U.S. cities, this article applies Sedgwick's concept of "reparative reading" to commemorative practices, tracing how commemorators leverage this reading to guide a logic of reparative action. They commemorate material spaces rooted in place, but cultivate mobile and inclusive space. That is, commemorators, most of whom have had limited exposure to the spaces that they mourn, carefully situate the lost dyke bar, highlighting geographic, esthetic, demographic, and temporal attributes. The images they construct of the situated bar contrast with their commemorative events, which emphasize social over alternate attributes. Commemorators repair and critique the situated bar - not to restore it, but to harness it for their forward-facing efforts - by using memory to advocate for a move from specificity to generality; from situated to mobile and inclusive social spaces. I elucidate how this turn toward social space and bar commemoration itself emerges not merely from institutional and territorial loss, but from commitments to diversity, inclusivity, and queer identities and politics.

Farewell to humanism? Considerations for nursing philosophy and research in posthuman times

In this paper, I argue that critical posthumanism is a crucial tool in nursing philosophy and scholarship. Posthumanism entails a reconsideration of what 'human' is and a rejection of the whole tradition founding Western life in the 2500 years of our civilization as narrated in founding texts and embodied in governments, economic formations and everyday life. Through an overview of historical periods, texts and philosophy movements, I problematize humanism, showing how it centres white, heterosexual, able-bodied Man at the top of a hierarchy of beings, and runs counter to many current aspirations in nursing and other disciplines: decolonization, antiracism, anti-sexism and Indigenous resurgence. In nursing, the term humanism is often used colloquially to mean kind and humane; yet philosophically, humanism denotes a Western philosophical tradition whose tenets underpin much of nursing scholarship. These underpinnings of Western humanism have increasingly become problematic, especially since the 1960s motivating nurse scholars to engage with antihumanist and, recently, posthumanist theory. However, even current antihumanist nursing arguments manifest deep embeddedness in humanistic methodologies. I show both the problematic underside of humanism and critical posthumanism's usefulness as a tool to fight injustice and examine the materiality of nursing practice. In doing so, I hope to persuade readers not to be afraid of understanding and employing this critical tool in nursing research and scholarship.

The Social and Material Life of Antimicrobial Clay: Exploring Antimicrobial Resistance, Medicines' Materiality, and Medicines Optimization

While sociologists have made significant theoretical contributions to the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) debate, little attention has been given to the antimicrobial products themselves. Here we advocate a significant new direction which centers on the social and material life of antimicrobials, specifically on what they are made from and how this affects their use. This focus is timely because, in the context of declining efficacy of biomedical antibiotics, diverse materials are increasingly taking center stage in research and drug discovery as potential agents for new antimicrobial treatments. Of particular significance are natural antimicrobials, such as plants, honey and clay, whose antimicrobial potential is well-documented and which are increasingly moving into mainstream antimicrobial research. Alongside this biomedical focus, we suggest that the social and material lives of these antimicrobial materials require attention to (i) highlight the ways they have been, and continue to be, used in diverse cultures globally, (ii) explore ways we might theorize these materials within wider AMR debates, and (iii) examine the impact of antimicrobials' materiality on their use by patients. This article takes the example of clay, whose antimicrobial properties are well-established and which has been used to treat wounds and gastrointestinal problems for millennia. We first locate clay as an exemplar of a wider shift toward natural products drug discovery in pharmaceutical science and antimicrobial research. We then offer a number of theoretical "ways in" for sociologists to begin making sense of clay as it comes under the western biomedical gaze. We map these conceptual lenses on to clay's physical and symbolic mobility from its use in the global south into western biomedical research and commercialization. We particularly concentrate on post-colonial theory as a means to understand clay's movement from global south to north; laboratory studies to examine its symbolic transformation to a black-boxed antimicrobial artifact; and valuation practices as a lens to capture its movement from the margins to the mainstream. We finish by reflecting on the importance of materiality in addressing optimal use of medicines and by advocating an interdisciplinary approach to AMR which positions sociology as a key contributor to AMR solutions.

Bodily circulation and the measure of a life: Forensic identification and valuation after the Titanic disaster

This article analyzes the process of body recovery that took place after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Focusing on how identification was intertwined with valuation, I show how notions of economic class informed decisions about which human bodies were fit for preservation as human bodies. The RMS Titanic steamship was a microcosm of social circulation in the early 20^th-century Atlantic, and life on board was systematically stratified according to economic class. During the recovery that following the sinking, 114 bodies, or one-third of the total recovered, were buried at sea, most of them crewmembers or immigrant passengers who had held third-class tickets. Sea burial exposed the bodies to rapid and inaccessible decomposition, thereby selectively excluding those bodies from the archival and forensic record even as those victims' names and personal artefacts were recorded for posterity. The recovery process thus demonstrates that the material existence of those passengers' remains was not a given, but instead emerged in varied ways through identification and recovery practices. Such practices drew on notions of economic value and identifiability to shape bodily materials, which were selectively preserved, transformed, and/or put out of reach. As such, I argue that identification and valuation are thoroughly enmeshed with what I call instantiation, or determinations of how and whether something exists.

Identification as translation: The art of choosing the right spokespersons at the securitized border

This article pursues a translational approach to the securitization of migration. It argues that sociotechnical processes of identification at the border can be conceived of as translations into legible identities of individuals who are unknown to authorities. The article contributes to the materiality debate on securitization across Critical Security Studies (CSS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) by answering the call to conduct empirical explorations of security, and by revisiting the potential of the early sociology of translation (i.e. actor-network theory) to account for the identification of border crossers. Data collection was conducted at four identification facilities in the Hellenic Republic. Three sets of implications for the CSS-STS debate on the materiality of securitization are discussed. First, a translational approach can replace a representational understanding of identity with a performative apprehension of identification. Second, adopting a translational approach leads to acknowledge that the identification encounter is mediated by multiple, heterogeneous actors. It thus helps to open technological black boxes and reveal the key role of material qualities, affordances and limitations of artefacts. Third, a translational approach to the securitization of migration can help advance the field of 'alterity processing' by appreciating the de facto re-arrangements of institutional orders elicited by techno-political alignments with global security regimes.

'Strong clinging to objects': materiality and relationality in Melanie Klein's Observations after an Operation (1937)

This article presents and analyses a set of notes written by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein following an operation in 1937. The notes, entitled Observations after an Operation, act as a case study of the intersection of psychical, material and social relations as they play out in the immediate aftermath of surgical intervention. Using a close reading method, the article contextualises an analysis of Observations after an Operation by linking it to Klein’s wider corpus of theoretical work. It deals in turn with the representation of anxiety mechanisms in the patient experience, drawing upon Klein’s notes on the similarity with ‘anxiety-situations’ in early childhood; with Klein’s changed relation with both external objects and their counterparts in the individual’s mental landscape; with the role of sensation in phantasy, and the connection to bodily pain; with the doctor-patient relationship and the way this is perceived as being embodied in material objects, played out across two dreams experienced by Klein during her recovery; with the emphasis on illness as a form of mourning; and with the creative potential that the experience offers for a renewed structure of object relations. The article concludes that a greater attention to the role and representation of material objects, using psychoanalytic object relations theory as a starting point, can enhance how we collectively understand and assess the psychical impact of healthcare settings upon the patient. It also invites other scholars across the critical medical humanities to consult and analyse the newly available text upon which this article is based.

Enrolling the body as active agent in cancer treatment: Tracing immunotherapy metaphors and materialities

Immunotherapy is heralded as the 'fifth pillar' of cancer therapy, after surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and genomic medicine. It involves 'harnessing' patients' own immune system T-cells to treat cancer. In this article, I draw on qualitative interviews with practitioners working in oncology and patients in the UK, to trace metaphorical and discursive framing around immunotherapy. Immunotherapy aims to restore the functioning of the immune system to detect cancer (non-self), working with the self/non-self model that pervades immunology discourse more widely. Practitioners draw on metaphors that cement this self/non-self model, and that tend to depict the relationship between cancer and the immune system as an internal battle. Yet the discursive framing around immunotherapy also involves shifts that emphasize the body's own capacity to heal, where it is framed as 'gentle' or 'tolerable' on the body. Through this discursive shift, immunotherapy refigures the antagonism associated with the self/non-self model in the context of cancer. Analysing patients' embodied experiences of treatment, this article attends to the material realities and tensions provoked by this shift in discursive framing. This article contributes to feminist STS analyses of immunology discourse, and extends this literature by arguing that it is critical to address the material stakes of these discursive shifts by paying attention to patients' day-to-day experiences of treatment. The discursive framing of immunotherapy brings into being new forms of embodied patienthood in the context of cancer.

Remaking critical care: Place, body work and the materialities of care in the COVID intensive care unit

In this article, we take forward sociological ways of knowing care-in-practice, in particular work in critical care. To do so, we analyse the experiences of staff working in critical care during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. This moment of exception throws into sharp relief the ways in which work and place were reconfigured during conditions of pandemic surge, and shows how critical care depends at all times on the co-constitution of place, practices and relations. Our analysis draws on sociological and anthropological work on the material culture of health care and its sensory instantiations. Pursuing this through a study of the experiences of 40 staff across four intensive care units (ICUs) in 2020, we provide an empirical and theoretical elaboration of how place, body work and care are mutually co-constitutive. We argue that the ICU does not exist independently of the constant embodied work of care and place-making which iteratively constitute critical care as a total system of relations.

Early triadic interactions in the first year of life: a systematic review on object-mediated shared encounters

Infants' early interactions with adults and everyday objects are key to socio-communicative development, but their emergence and development are still under debate. Aiming at describing the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches on triadicity during the first year of life, we conducted a systematic and qualitative review of recent literature. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, we explored the scientific production of recent decades on triadic interactions up to 12 months of age. We initially screened 1943 items from which we obtained a final sample of 51 publications. Studies are usually conducted in laboratory settings, while ecological research is becoming increasingly common, especially in home settings. According to a thematic analysis of the data, we discussed the different perspectives on the origin and conceptualization of triadic interactions, and how they contribute to structuring and facilitating other developmental phenomena, such as the children's communicative gestures and uses of objects. Prior to the origin of intentional communication, adults facilitate early forms of triadicity based on fostering opportunities for infants' communication and engagement with both adults and materiality. However, there is a need for further research that explore the potential of early triadic interactions for parenting and early childhood education practises.

'The body is difficult': reproductive navigation through sociality and corporeality in rural Burundi

The route from family planning intentions to practices is not linear, it is contingent on different social factors including the preferences of individuals and couples, their gendered positions and bargaining power, the wider political, economic and social context, and also physical and bodily circumstances. We used qualitative data collected in rural Burundi between 2013 and 2016 to explore how these diverse factors influence reproductive navigation in a context framed by uncertainty and changing social norms. We describe representations of bodily (pre)dispositions for fertility and reproduction, such as the 'natural' capacity for birth spacing or the bodily capacity to use 'natural' (having a regular cycle) and 'modern' methods (not having negative side effects) that contribute collectively to an understanding of 'the body is difficult'. We found that despite these bodily constraints, women enact embodied agency to ensure livelihoods and social status, thus framing their reproductive intentions and practices. In the context of Burundi where corporeality is key to gendered social belonging, family planning programmes fail to respond to the needs and concerns of women and their embodied reproductive experiences.

Beyond intersubjectivity in olfactory psychophysics II: Troubles with the Object

This article takes advantage of the sense of smell's peculiar spatiality to reflect on how we may render our engagement with the world other than through manipulating well-defined objects. The lived spatiality associated with olfaction is not reducible to the known parameters of 'distant observation' and 'reaching toward', familiar from the visual and tactile modalities. Instead, olfactory spatiality is one of immersion: Odors ask us to give up our dominance while we continue to be involved. The article attends to this immersive quality of the sense of smell by tracing multimodal, embodied qualities of mundane events in a laboratory of olfactory psychophysics, also considering the spatial organization of laboratory chambers, and how researchers fashion their bodies while they recognize the frailty of their enterprise. To engage these complexities, the article illustrates an exercise in experimenting with re-production, re-enactment and re-experiencing. While the exercise functions as a reflection on how to orient a laboratory study to non-ocular dimensions of science, the article, in parallel, enquires into semiotic articulations of smell experiences. By pointing out how smell language, rather than being 'mute', speaks the spatial quality of our olfactory experiences, it concludes the argument against the olfactory ineffability, initiated in the sister essay on 'troubles with the Subject'.