Affect and Materiality Among Highways, Heat, and Wheat: A New Materialist Auto/Ethnography of Be(com)ing Kansan

Abstract

This auto/ethnographic piece adopts a new materialist approach to articulating my affective, material journey about/with/through be(com)ing [a] Kansan. By unpacking moments that occurred-but-are-still-occurring, I highlight the data-glowing, intimate connections I make about/with/through materiality and affect to cut across boundaries of the more-than/human social world, reinforcing the agentive role of matter in our qualitative and environmental sense-making. And so, this piece attempts to challenge my initially static conceptualizations of body, context, and inquiry; to complicate notions of em/placement, privilege, and mobility and to amplify the significance of affective entanglements with/in more-than/human materiality.