Material and digital cultures

Exploring how everyday life is shaped through things, technologies, platforms and infrastructures

Morgan Centre members investigate how everyday lives unfold through entanglements with material things and digital technologies. Across the Morgan Centre, we examine how objects, devices, platforms, data and infrastructures mediate the ‘ordinary’, and its routines, relationships, attachments and inequalities. This means taking seriously both the social life of things (material and digital) and exploring the complex interplay between human lives and materiality in all their multiplicity, in everything from our homes, possessions and environments, to apps, algorithms, platforms and AI systems.

Our work asks how everyday practices are shaped by what people hold, use, keep, discard, click, feel and remember, and how these processes are embedded in wider histories of power, governance and social change.

This theme builds on the Centre’s broader commitment to researching the relational dynamics of everyday lives and connects with work on material cultures and digital media and technologies; our members explore for example dormant things (Sophie Woodward), dating app connections (Brian Heaphy) posthuman digital intimacy and wellbeing (Liang Ge), materiality, consumption and sustainability (Helen Holmes) and feminism, gender politics and digital platforms (Briony Hannell).