Objects, affects, aesthetics: New materialisms and religious studies
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".