Accommodating the Elements: Sociology and Elemental Thinking

An interesting recent development in the humanities and social sciences is the growing attention given to the elements. Geographers and eco-critical scholars have led the way in revisiting the importance of elemental phenomena. However, elemental thinking has also popped up in fields such as communication and media studies: for example, John Durham Peters’ (2015) Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. The latter proposes that, if we shift our conception of communication from ‘mental content intentionally designed to say something to someone’ to something like ‘repositories of readable data and processes that sustain and enable existence, then of course clouds and fire have meaning’. In contemporary sociology, engagement with the elements has been mixed. We have Clark and Yussof’’s explorations of the geosocial and the Anthropocene; Brighenti’s article ‘The Elemental Forms of Social Life’; and Kammer and Farias’ call for an urban sociological agenda based on ‘elemental urbanism’. A century earlier Simmel had written essays on ‘gravity’ and emphasised geophysical processes in analyses of ‘the ruin’ and the Alps; and Park and Burgess’ Introduction to the Science of Sociology included chapters on geology and maritime geographies. This session invites presentations on what earth, air, water, and fire might mean for sociology? As well as theoretical reflections on the sociological import of quasi-elemental phenomena such as climate, soil, landscape, the vegetative, or mixtures of the elemental (for e.g., mud, snow, fossil fuel deposits, or air entailing varying degrees of humidity).