Objects, affects, aesthetics: New materialisms and religious studies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article provides a picture for religious studies scholars of the overlaps and differences between three recent theories of material religion which concern human perception, perceptible things, and the sometimes im perceptible forces that configure humans and things. The theories of note are: affect studies (an approach to the visceral forces that drive relations between beings); object‐oriented ontology (a contentious movement in speculative realist philosophy); and everyday aesthetics (a subfield of philosophical aesthetics i.e. equally fragmented but less fractious). Although they all share interest in the interplay of material and experience, affect studies, everyday aesthetics, and object‐oriented inquiry overlap with each other in ways that are rarely, if ever, explicitly addressed. For this reason, scholars of lived, embodied, and material religion should know about them, how they differ, and when to use one or the other. In religious studies, I suggest we should think of them as three methodological responses to a desire the field has to think about material religion. Importantly, they are not three equal choices. I argue that everyday aesthetics is not only the most interesting but the most useful option, and I illustrate its potential uses.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it