This chapter examines the complex physical relations that characterized a range of eighteenth-century literary, visual, and material objects that attached small fragments together into a new larger form. Arguing that these created a dynamic dialogue of part and whole, it explores how the process of joining allowed small fragments, displayed and placed together, to materialize emotional connection. It focuses on four key material forms: the production of herbaria; a series of collaged stained-glass windows at Plas Newydd, the home of the “Ladies of Llangollen,” Lady Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), in Llangollen, North Wales; the interior decoration and furnishings of A la Ronde, in Exmouth, Devon, home to cousins Jane and Mary Parminter (1750–1811 and 1767–1849); and the creation of eighteenth-century patchwork.

Drawing on various distributive frameworks – distributed cognition, distributed agency, distributed language – this paper makes a case for understanding identity along similar lines. While poststructuralist approaches to identity usefully undermined monological cognitive approaches to identity (where identity is a characteristic of the individual) – emphasizing instead the discursive construction of subjectivity as multiple, conflictual and flexible – many failed by and large to escape the constrictions of methodological individualism, or to account adequately for non-discursive factors, the place of agency or the material world. Distributive frameworks, by contrast, seek to break down the barriers between inside and outside, between humans and their surrounds, between language and context. From this point of view, language, cognition and agency are not solely properties of individuals bur rather operate through larger networks, assemblages or entanglements. In this paper we draw on recent data from our ten-year metrolingualism project to explore ways in which identity may be understood as a relational quality of an assemblage of people, places, things and linguistic resources.

During the slave trade, Signares kept domestic slaves and accumulated considerable wealth. As Signares walked to Midnight Mass, their dresses were illuminated by the light of lanterns made and carried by their slaves, highlighting their wealth. This chapter examines the historical origins of the lantern festival or Fanal, as it is known in Saint-Louis, and its continuous performance as cultural heritage in the city. Celebrated as Creole legacy by President Senghor, he made it a national heritage. This chapter examines the assemblages the festival establishes between the patrons and their craftspeople as their relations are mediated by the materiality and performativity of the lanterns paraded at the festival. Although the heirs of the Signares left Saint-Louis at national independence and the festival has been appropriated by African citizens, it continues to celebrate forms of difference and distinction reminiscent of domestic slavery. Furthermore, by celebrating the achievements of the patrons, the lantern festival still establishes the status of patrons as ‘shining lights’ of the nation. This suggests that the African citizens who act as patrons have accepted the responsibilities with which their colonial predecessors have endowed them. Through colonial nostalgia they have assumed the legacy of colonialism.

Chapter 3 presents an ethnographic case study of Chrislam, a series of religious movements that mix Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices, in its sociocultural and political-economic setting in Lagos. In contrast to conventional approaches that study religious movements in Africa as syncretic forms of ‘African Christianity’ or ‘African Islam’, I suggest that ‘syncretism’ is a misleading term to describe Chrislam. In fact, Chrislam provides a rationale for scrutinizing the very concept of syncretism and offers an alternative analytical case for understanding its mode of religious pluralism. To account for the religious pluralism in Chrislam, I employ assemblage theory because it proposes novel ways of looking at Chrislam's religious mix that are in line with the way in which its worshippers perceive their religiosity. The underlying idea in Chrislam's assemblage of Christianity and Islam is that to be a Christian or Muslim alone is not enough to guarantee success in this world and the hereafter; therefore, Chrislamists participate in Christian as well as Muslim practices, appropriating the perceived powers of both.

This chapter outlines “more-than-human” approaches being used in the social sciences, and explores their implication and use in environmental sociology. Considering how non-human elements influence human society is one way that we can center ecological life in our sociological work. Moreover, it provides theoretical tools to do so without being deterministic; that is, without assuming that the effects of particular ecological elements in society are inevitable, essential, or one-dimensional. Nor does it assume that those effects are entirely social, discursive, or immaterial. We discuss concepts in actor-network theory, assemblage theory, and new materialism, in the context of environmental sociology and sociological thought more generally. We use the case of apples in agriculture to further elaborate the use and implications of a more-than-human approach to the social life of plants.

This chapter maps the emerging conceptual terrain of posthumanism and its relevance for discourse studies, with a particular focus on sociolinguistics and applied linguistics work. Posthumanism is a label applied to a range of theoretical and methodological approaches across the humanities and social sciences that are calling into question dominant assumptions generated by Western Enlightenment thinking about the human by giving greater consideration to the role of material objects, animals and the environment in understanding the social world. Posthumanism thus considers the implications of the central role of materialism in our understandings of human agency, language, cognition and society. For discourse studies, a turn to posthumanism requires us to examine the role of discourse in how humans become entangled with the material world through their everyday embodied interactions with objects, artifacts, technologies, plants, animals, and the built and natural environment. Through embracing an activity-oriented perspective toward these human–nonhuman entanglements, the implications are that we must rethink modernist categorical boundaries between subject/object, human/nonhuman and society/nature, both within metadiscourses about these dichotomies and through a more microanalytic lens in the analysis of text and talk.

Chapter 4 explores the methodologies and significance of Sarah Sophia Banks’s collections, firstly in relation to her brother’s sociability, and secondly as an archive of fashionable sociability and public culture after 1760, with particular reference to her interest in ballooning from the 1780s.

This concluding chapter draws The Law of the List together and is structured in three parts. First, the key arguments of the book are reiterated by providing a brief summary of each chapter. Second, six original contributions the book brings to the study of global security law and governance are highlighted. These include: (i) studying global law empirically as an assemblage of relations and practices, (ii) studying ‘the global’ through local structure-making sites rather than from international institutions (like the Security Council), (iii) mapping the politics of expertise in global law-making, (iv) studying technologies of governance as devices that assemble legal and political relations and that have performative effects, (v) analysing how preemptive security produces novel rearrangements of law and governance that require empirical study, and (vi) rethinking global emergency governance as something assembled from mundane practices, rather than an effect of sovereign power. The chapter closes by arguing that the Law of the List, first introduced as a temporary preventive measure by the Security Council, is now a permanent feature of the global security law landscape. This book is an experiment in strategic knowledge production and an invitation for further socio-legal studies of global security law to come.

Chapter 3 focuses on the problem of accountability in global governance. It follows what happens when UN sanctions powers originally designed to discipline states are used to target individuals suspected of being associated with terrorism. It provides a detailed genealogical account of the emergence of the UN1267 Office of the Ombudsperson - a procedural mechanism created by the Security Council in 2009 to provide redress to listed individuals. Most scholars argue that the Ombudsperson is an important step in the right direction towards greater human rights compliance by international organisations. This chapter challenges this narrative of global legal progress by advancing two main arguments. First, that different actors in the listing assemblage enact fundamentally different versions of the list through their practice. The ISIL and Al-Qaida list is best thought of as what STS scholars call a ‘multiple object’. Second, the Ombudsperson is an important figure of legal expertise that helps contain this multiplicity and hold the different strands of the listing assemblage together. This chapter closes by arguing that the Ombudsperson’s delisting processes and practices are primarily concerned with embedding new forms of preemptive security, aligning different actors and smoothing over conflicts of the list.

Ontology (i.e. thinking about what’s out there) is intimately connected to epistemology (i.e. questions such as, “how can we know what’s out there?”). Both are also connected to ideology (i.e. whose interests do those perspectives on ontology and epistemology serve?). The once dominant cognitivist and structuralist orientations on language and communication are increasingly challenged by new thinking about what is out there. This new thinking is in turn changing the way we engage in inquiry about language and communication. Among the many philosophical paradigms challenging cognitivism and structuralism, I present the set of theories espousing a flat ontology as facilitating a more inclusive and dynamic understanding of language in communication. Flat ontology questions binaries such as mind/body, cognition/matter, human/nonhuman, and verbal/nonverbal, with the former in each pair treated as agentive and more significant. It considers all resources as working together in the construction of meaning and activity. Flat ontology is adopted by philosophical schools such as posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013), new materialism (Barad, 2007), actor network theory (Latour, 2005), and spatiality (Massey, 2005). In this chapter, I will articulate how such schools provide a different orientation to the ontology of English, with new implications for meaning and communication, and for changes in the way we conduct language analysis and teaching in the future.