Material Politics

At the heart of my research has been a concern with the importance of materials and technologies in political and economic life. My book, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (2001) focused on the vital role of technical devices in the constitution and politics of a transnational political space: the European Union. My recent book, Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (2013), interrogates the way in which the production of information about materials enables the activity of materials to be managed and monitored, while also generating the conditions within which controversies can proliferate over the quality and sources of the information produced.

I have an on-going interest in the importance and political significance of those natural sciences, including construction engineering, chemistry, and the geo- and environmental sciences, which are less concerned with the derivation of general physical principles than with the problem of how to analyse and govern the unruly or lively behaviour of materials in the field. In earlier work I interrogated the political importance of research on, for example, air quality (1998), steel (2002), pipeline coating materials (2010), and landslides (2013). In an ethnographic study of a pharmaceutical laboratory, I highlighted the complex impact of computer chemistry on the conduct of pharmaceutical research and examined the invention of what I have termed ‘informed materials’ (2005).

Political Geographies of Energy

A second concern focuses on the concept and politics of energy. In part, my interest in energy draws on my recent work on the oil industry (Material Politics). But it also emerges from my long-standing interest in materiality. Recently I have been writing on the manner in which energy has been theorised in human geography, developing from Isabelle Stengers’ analysis of cosmopolitics. I am also currently interested in the politics of the idea of the Anthropocene and, more broadly, the geopolitics of the carbon economy.

Geographical and Social Theory

Geographers have long been concerned with the question of how to understand the relations between the physical and the political. I have been particularly interested in the role of technologies and materials in the transformation of political and economic spaces (‘technological zones’) and the invention of what I have termed ‘informed materials’. At the same time, I have sought to develop an account of the relation between government, politics and the political in a way that addresses the critical importance of materials in political life (2002). This has led to the development of the idea of the ‘political situation’, central to my book Material Politics (2012, 2013) and a developing interest in the practice of geopolitics.

Interdisciplines and Ecologies of Practice

Working together with a team of anthropologists including Georgina Born, Marilyn Strathern and Gisa Weszkalnys, I carried out an ESRC funded study of interdisciplinarity (2006-8). This study involved fieldwork on a range of ‘interdisciplines’ including environmental research, ‘art-science’, and ethnographic research in the IT industry. This has led to a broader analysis of diverse ‘logics’ and ‘modes’ of interdisciplinary research that cut across the boundaries of the social and natural sciences (2008). This project has resulted in the publication of a collection of essays, (Barry and Born, Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences), that further develops our analysis of interdisciplinary, and includes chapters by leading scholars in Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology and Social Theory.