Matter is active. People, materials, tools and places make each other.
Comes from working with things, not standing back. You are part of what you study.
What are the materials doing?
Key thinkers: Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti
The longer story
New materialism pushes back against the idea that everything is language or social construction. Materials, tools, bodies, technologies and environments do things: clay resists, software nudges, a room shapes a performance. Barad's term "intra-action" suggests that things do not exist first and then relate; they become what they are through their relations. Bennett writes of "vibrant matter".
It has been taken up quickly in art, craft and design research, because it gives a vocabulary for something makers already know: the material has a say. As a researcher you are not an observer outside the process but one participant among several, not all of them human.