Perhaps one of the more challenging but also enjoyable parts of writing my dissertation has been grappling withe the idea of sociomateriality. There are a number of approaches to defining and researching sociomateriality, but the most obvious take away is that sociomateriality directs the researcher towards examining the role of materiality in the structuring/durability of human action. Some authors dance around the idea while others, through superb rhetoric, unveil this condition with profound clarity. A passage (see below) from Bruno Latour’s 1996 work,“On Interobjectivity”, is particularly illuminating:

We circulate smoothly from the offices of the post office’s architect, where the counter model was sketched and the flux of users modeled. My interaction with the worker was anticipated there, statistically, years before-and the way in which I leaned on the counter, sprayed saliva, filled in forms, was anticipated by ergonomists and inscribed in the agency of the post office.Of course they didn’t see me standing there in the flesh, any more than they saw the worker. But it would be a serious mistake to say that I was not there. I was inscribed there as a category of user, and today I have just carried out this role and have actualized the variable with my own body. Thus I am indeed connected from the post office to the architect by a slender but solid thread that makes me go from being a personal body in interaction with a worker to a type of user represented on a blueprint. Inversely, the framework sketched out years ago remains, through the intervention of Portuguese workers, concrete, carpenters and fiberglass, the framework that holds, limits, channels and authorizes my conversation with the post office worker. As soon as the objects are added in, it will be seen that we must get used to circulating in time, in space, across levels of materialization.

-Latour, 1996:238