The lecture series "Thinking (further) Through Materialities" builds on the 2023 edition "Thinking through Materialities: Insights from and for Gender Studies and Cultural Anthropology". It continues to explore how "matter comes to matter," and related questions: How can social scientific thinking (re)engage with materialities and repopulate the social with what has long been its "missing masses"? How can practices that are both enacting and embedded within materialities-such as sciences, crafts, or arts-inform new approaches within the social sciences? And more fundamentally, how can they contribute to reflect upon the often unrecognized materialities in which social scientific thinking itself is embedded?

The lectures are open to everyone interested.

PROGRAM 

October 15, 2025
Dormant Things: The Vital Materiality of the Unnoticed Everyday
Sophie Woodward (University of Manchester, UK)

October 22, 2025
Caring with Haunted Marine Microbes
Astrid Schrader (University of Exeter, UK)

October 29, 2025
Microbes, Embodied Knowing, and the Materiality of Fermentation
Maya Hey (University of Helsinki, FI)

November 5, 2025
Substance as Method, Material Bodies
Joseph Dumit (University of California, Davis, USA)

November 12, 2025
String Figures: A Cultural, Material, Collaborative Practice
Sarine Waltenspül (University of Lucerne, CH) & Mario Schulze (University of Basel, CH) 

November 26, 2025
What Is Social about AI? Lessons from the Street
Noortje Marres (University of Warwick, UK)

December 03, 2025
Eco-Aesthetic Entanglements in Filmmaking: The Materiality of Sound and Image 
Işıl Karataş (University of Vienna, AT)

December 10, 2025 *
Avowing Loss
Fernando Domínguez Rubio (University of California, San Diego, USA)

* starts at 16:55