A movement in philosophy and cultural studies that took shape in the US and Europe in the early 2000s. No single body of work can be said to have founded new materialism, but the work of scholars like Stacey Alaimo, Barad, Karen, Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Félix, Haraway, Donna, Latour, Bruno, and Tim Morton, who combine philosophy and science, have been instrumental in building critical interest across the humanities and social sciences in the material underpinnings of daily life. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, in the introduction to their groundbreaking collection of essays New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010), argue that the turn towards new materialism was prompted by several different factors: firstly, in the twentieth century advances in scientific knowledge and practice have been so dazzling they compel humanistic attention---e.g. the discovery of subatomic particles has raised questions about the very nature of matter itself; secondly, many of the dazzling scientific advances raise serious ethical and political questions---e.g., in an era of assisted reproduction, cloning, organ transplants, and so on, all the former ethical certainties concerning definitions of life and death have been put into question; and thirdly, the growing sense that constructivism models of thinking are inadequate to the critical needs of a world that is rapidly being reshaped by new developments in science and technology. With regards to this last point, rising concern about the environment and climate change has undoubtedly contributed to the feeling in certain quarters that the humanities needs to get its hands and feet dirty again after years of avoiding earthy materiality. Coole and Frost identify three broad trends in the field of new materialism: a posthumanism reorientation of ontology that conceives matter as ‘lively’ and possessing its own agency; a vitalism concern for non-human and other-than-human forms of life, including the inorganic; and lastly an interest in the relationship between material and the political economy.