Mundane materiality and agential cuts: A sociomaterial reading of disabled people’s identity work

Corlett, Sandra and Williams, Jannine (2016) Mundane materiality and agential cuts: A sociomaterial reading of disabled people’s identity work. In: 12th International Conference on Organizational Discourse, 13-15 July 2016, Amsterdam.

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Abstract

This paper proposes that the role of materiality in research on identity formation has been marginalized. We bring materiality to the fore of identity formation, through a posthumanist performative (Barad, 2007) reading of the way in which ‘agential cuts’ - specific material-discursive practices which determine particular boundaries and properties of ‘entities’, including of one’s identities - are made within and through material and human intra-actions. Through analysis of interview texts of a disabled academic’s everyday work experiences that refer to mundane material artefacts and practices such as box files, chairs, and standing in meetings, we intend to “critically reflect on ... the seemingly insignificant and all-too-mundane ... realities of everyday organizational life” (Ybema et al., 2015) for disabled people, to explore “the boundary-making practices that distinguish ‘disabled and ‘non-disabled’ people.

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