New materialism is a broad intellectual movement across philosophy, the humanities, and social sciences that treats matter as active and dynamic rather than passive stuff waiting to be shaped by human hands or minds. The term was coined by Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti in the second half of the 1990s, and it has since grown into a significant current in fields ranging from feminist theory to environmental law. At its core, new materialism rejects the old dividing lines between nature and culture, mind and body, human and nonhuman, arguing that these categories have always been entangled.
The Central Idea: Matter Is Not Passive
Traditional Western thought, going back centuries, treats matter as inert. Rocks, rivers, bacteria, electrical grids: these are the backdrop against which humans act, think, and make meaning. New materialism flips this assumption. It argues that nonhuman things have a kind of agency, not consciousness in the way humans experience it, but the capacity to influence, shape, and participate in events. A wildfire is not just a disaster humans failed to prevent; it is an actor within a complex and dynamic system. A virus reshapes economies and political orders. The electrical grid’s failures cascade into social crises no single person authored.
This perspective challenges what new materialists call “human exceptionalism,” the deeply embedded belief that humans are fundamentally different from everything else and sit at the center of all meaningful action. New materialism broadens the concept of agency to include not only other living beings but everything that influences and interacts, along with the processes by which interaction occurs.
How It Differs From Older Materialisms
The word “materialism” already has a long philosophical history, most famously in Marx’s historical materialism, which focused on economic production, labor, and class struggle as the material forces driving history. New materialism departs from this tradition in several important ways.
Marxist materialism is primarily concerned with human social activity: work, production, and the conditions of life under capitalism. It treats “material” as shorthand for practical, economic, and political reality. New materialism, by contrast, is interested in the agency of matter itself, from microorganisms to weather systems to the physical properties of building materials. Where Marx wanted to critique and transform bourgeois society, new materialists want to rethink the very foundations of what counts as real and who (or what) gets to count as an actor.
This shift is also philosophical in a technical sense. Marxist materialism, at least in its more critical versions, is suspicious of grand claims about the nature of reality, insisting that knowledge is always situated and partial. Many new materialists move in the opposite direction, proposing sweeping accounts of how matter behaves at a fundamental level. Critics have pointed out that this can sometimes amount to a “view from nowhere,” a claim to see reality as it truly is without acknowledging the limits of one’s own perspective.
Key Thinkers and Concepts
Several figures have shaped the movement in distinct ways. Karen Barad, a physicist and philosopher, developed a framework called “agential realism.” Barad argues that the world is made of entanglements of social and natural forces, and that the distinction between the two only emerges through specific interactions. She uses the term “intra-action” (rather than “interaction”) to emphasize that the things involved in a relationship don’t exist as separate, independent entities beforehand. They are constituted through their meeting. This idea draws directly on quantum physics, where the act of measurement shapes what is being measured.
Jane Bennett, a political theorist, introduced the concept of “thing-power” in her book Vibrant Matter. Bennett argues for what she calls “vital materiality,” a liveliness that runs through and across all bodies, human and nonhuman alike. Her point is political as much as philosophical: if we recognize that agency is distributed across webs of human and nonhuman forces rather than belonging solely to individual people, we might develop a more ecologically responsible politics. Instead of fixating on blame and individual responsibility, we could learn to trace the wider networks of forces that produce events like blackouts, food contamination, or ecological collapse.
Donna Haraway, while not always classified strictly as a new materialist, contributed the influential concept of “naturecultures,” the idea that nature and culture are never truly separate but always already intertwined. This term captures one of new materialism’s most persistent themes: the old boundaries between the natural and the social, the biological and the cultural, are artificial and misleading.
New Materialism as a Feminist Project
The movement has deep roots in feminist theory, and many of its leading figures identify their work as feminist. This connection is not accidental. Feminist scholars have long grappled with the problem of the body, specifically how biology gets used to justify social hierarchies. Earlier waves of feminist thought often responded by emphasizing social construction: gender is not biology, it’s culture. New materialist feminists push back on this move, not to return to biological determinism, but to take the body and its material reality seriously without reducing it to either genes or discourse.
Within this framing, something like masculinity is understood as neither genetically programmed nor purely a social invention. It emerges through what Bennett calls “assemblages,” living, dynamic groupings of diverse elements including bodies, hormones, cultural norms, physical environments, and objects. The type of person someone becomes is not simply a product of individual choice, biology, or social construction alone. It is contingent on the whole constellation of material and social elements present in any given situation. This opens space for thinking about gender beyond current binaries and beyond the rigid human/nonhuman distinction.
Rethinking the Environment
New materialism has had a particularly strong influence on environmental thinking. The dominant way of understanding the current ecological crisis casts humans as villains responsible for mass extinctions, polluted oceans, and climate change. While this framing captures real harms, new materialists argue it also reinforces a familiar binary in which humans are separate from nature and doing things to it.
A new materialist approach starts from different assumptions. Rather than seeing wildfire, flooding, and other events as problems to be solved, there would first be a recognition of these events as actors within a complex system. Humans are actors within that system too, but not necessarily at its center. This doesn’t absolve humans of responsibility. Instead, it reframes the relationship: we have always profoundly influenced, and been influenced by, the earth system simply by being part of it.
This perspective has practical implications. Labeling droughts, floods, and wildfires as “disasters” reveals how current approaches are out of touch with environmental processes. A new materialist approach to environmental management involves recognizing humans as part of a larger system, not at its center or top. Some legal scholars have begun exploring what this might mean for law and policy, arguing for legal forms that more accurately reflect the dynamism and complexity of human-environment entanglements rather than treating nature as a resource to be managed or a threat to be controlled.
How It Shapes Research Methods
New materialism doesn’t just offer abstract philosophy. It has changed how some researchers in the social sciences design and conduct studies. Drawing on the concept of “assemblages,” some scholars now treat the research process itself as a material arrangement. The researcher, the data, the methods, and the context are all entangled, and each shapes the others.
In practice, this means paying attention to how standard research tools act as filters. A structured interview schedule, for instance, ensures every respondent answers the same questions, but it also imposes the researcher’s categories onto the event being studied. Thematic analysis organizes and reduces messy data into tidy codes, privileging coherence and structure over divergence and randomness. New materialist researchers don’t necessarily abandon these tools, but they approach them with greater awareness of how each method shapes what can be found. The goal is to remain open to the agency of the materials being studied rather than forcing them into predetermined frameworks.
Common Criticisms
New materialism has attracted serious criticism from several directions. One recurring objection is that by extending agency to nonhuman things, the movement dilutes the concept of responsibility. If a power grid, a bacterium, and a politician all have “agency,” it becomes harder to hold specific people accountable for specific harms. Critics argue this has undesirable consequences for democratic politics, where the ability to assign responsibility matters.
A related concern is anthropomorphism. When new materialists describe matter as feeling, desiring, or remembering, critics ask whether this is genuine insight or simply projecting human qualities onto things that don’t have them. The philosopher who coined the term “strategic anthropomorphism” to describe this move acknowledged it as a deliberate rhetorical choice, but skeptics argue it is inconsistent and fails to deliver what it promises.
Perhaps the sharpest critique comes from scholars rooted in critical social theory. By flattening the distinction between human and nonhuman agency, new materialism risks ignoring relations of domination, power, and difference within and among human societies. If a rock and a refugee both have “agency” in some philosophical sense, the framework may lack the tools to address the very real and very human structures of inequality that shape most people’s lives. Some scholars have warned that when the concept of “matter” is stretched to include everything from gravity to gender to thought, it risks becoming an empty signifier, too broad to do meaningful analytical work.
Its Relationship to Posthumanism
New materialism overlaps significantly with posthumanism, though the two are not identical. “Posthuman” has become an umbrella term covering a wide range of movements, including philosophical posthumanism, transhumanism, critical posthumanism, and the feminist new materialisms. What these share is a skepticism toward the idea that “the human” is a stable, self-contained category at the center of all meaning and value.
Where posthumanism tends to focus on rethinking what it means to be human (through technology, through ecological entanglement, through the blurring of species boundaries), new materialism focuses more specifically on the nature of matter and materiality. Posthumanism often draws on new materialist ideas, particularly insights from quantum physics, complex systems theory, and ecological thinking, to build its arguments. In practice, the two movements frequently cite the same thinkers and share the same conferences, but new materialism’s distinctive contribution is its insistence that the physical world is not a stage for human drama but an active participant in it.