The material force of categories

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Percival, Tomas and Bergstrom-Katz, Sasha. 2025. The material force of categories. History of the Human Sciences, 38(2), pp. 3-17. ISSN 0952-6951 [Article]

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951251318223

Abstract or Description

The function of categories of the human sciences is a well-established field of scholarly inquiry, animated by debates over their capacity to reduce, exclude, determine, abstract, produce, loop, control, and/or restrain. This special issue takes an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate urgent questions about the ‘material force’ of categories as they operate in practice. Specifically, we emphasise the plasticity of categories and how their ambivalent boundaries can render their categorical forcefulness continuously operative. Categories morph and shift as they traverse different fields, re-articulating difference as they interact with divergent institutions and epistemic infrastructures. The five interdisciplinary articles in this issue explore the material force of categories across varied contexts, including the prison system, digital culture, legal frameworks, psychiatric diagnostics, and applied governmental research. In so doing, the special issue as a whole emphasises the capacious yet persistent nature of categorisation, revealing how, in multiple ways, categories can stabilise the management of people precisely through their inherent structures of contingency and ambivalence.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951251318223

Additional Information:

Funding: The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Birkbeck’s Wellcome Trust Institutional Funding for Research Culture (IFRC).

Keywords:

assessment, categories, classification, decision making, plasticity

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Visual Cultures
Visual Cultures > Centre for Research Architecture

Dates: