This monograph 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, this issues addressed include the politics of intimacy and its different characterizations -as attachment, belonging and companionship, but also as ordinary and dangerous sites of alterity and contamination.
Latimer, J. & López, D. (2019). Intimate Entanglements, London: Sage.
Joanna Latimer (University of York)