Publicaties

The work of the Marxist historian Jamal al-Din Bai Shouyi (1909-2000), a member of the Chinese Muslim Hui ethnic group, offers a window into the close and complex relation between the contested categories of politics, religion, and ethnicity in modern Chinese intellectual history, particularly with respect to the historical development of Chinese Muslim identity in its encounter with Marxist historical materialism. In this article, I provide a ...

This paper responds to Victor de Lorenzo’s reply to my proposal for “agentised chemistry” as a framework for understanding life and materiality, addressing the interplay between biology, chemistry, and metaphysics. While aligning with de Lorenzo’s rejection of vitalism, the paper argues for a resolute materialist perspective that circumvents the need for elusive “life forces.” It advances the proposition that life exists as a continuum spanning ...

New materialism is not a clear-cut set of theses, or a firmly unified school of thought. It crosses discourses and theoretical commitments, but, as its name indicates, seems consistently to oppose ‘new’ materialism to an older form, or perhaps several older forms of this doctrine. The latter are typically associated with ‘mechanistic’ standpoints, with ‘reductionism’, with the denial of life, agency, embodiment, meaning, value … What happens ...

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) has recently commissioned the new Extremely Brilliant Source (EBS). The gain in brightness as well as the continuous development of beamline instruments boosts the beamline performances, in particular in terms of accelerated data acquisition. This has motivated the development of new access modes as an alternative to standard proposals for access to beamtime, in particular via the "block ...

This study focuses on the very beginning of lacquerware production with chinoiserie decoration in Spa from the end of the seventeenth century to the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the historical and material-technical context of this important historical lacquer production is elucidated. Archival research was conducted along with a stylistic study of thirty objects, mainly boxes. Furthermore, ...

Does the current debate on critical raw materials have precursors in history and is there anything we can learn from it? Notably during industrialization, certain materials were considered important to further development and at the same time prone to scarcity. A history of technology perspective shows how such considerations shaped material change.The current debate on critical raw materials lacks a historical dimension. While the idea of ...