Auguste Rodin's bronze sculpture Le Penseur (The Thinker) from 1902 presented an image of Dante deep in thought, pondering The Divine Comedy. The naked sculpture emphasizes how Dante's heroic mind created this masterpiece independently, solely equipped with his bare human faculties, without instruments, without techniques, without social relations, even without clothing. In popular culture, the sculpture has come to symbolize the (gendered) subjectivity of genius, an autonomous, pure and purely individual (male) subject, an ideal worthy of emulation. In line with former volumes of Subjectivity (for example, Blackman et al, 2008), this special issue challenges such individualistic and mentalist visions of the human and contributes to a contextual understanding of human subjectivity.Of the multiplicity of aspects that have to be taken into account when exploring subjectivity, this special issue goes beyond a focus on the social and societal world and bare human interrelations, and scrutinizes the material world and relations between social beings and technologies, things and materials. Our aim is to invite readers to engage in a broad discussion on how to systematically include technology and materiality in the study of subjectivity. To stimulate that debate, we have collected six articles in this special issue that are each deeply involved with the theoretical, epistemological and empirical concerns of how subjectivity can be conceptualized and explored as a genuinely sociomaterial phenomenon. Together, the papers provide insights into how relations between the social and the material, and indeed the sociomaterial, can be approached, drawing on traditions of thought ranging from psychoanalysis, cultural-historical activity theory, critical psychologies, post-structuralism and feminist theories to science and technology studies (STS), actor-network theory (ANT), post-phenomenology and speculative philosophy. Aside from providing insights into individual approaches, we believe that the way these papers and approaches speak to r