AUTHOR=Höppner Grit TITLE=Rethinking Socialization Research through the Lens of New Materialism JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sociology VOLUME=2 YEAR=2017 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2017.00013 DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2017.00013 ISSN=2297-7775 ABSTRACT=

In recent decades, socialization research appears to have suffered the loss of its former capacity to explain the processes of becoming a socialized subject in a social environment. In this article, I review socialization theories taking into account assumptions regarding human subjects and their social environments. I confront them with the idea of rethinking dualisms, ontologies, and agencies addressed by the field of new materialism. I propose a new materialist-inspired socialization theory that assumes that humans, knowledge, and material environments become inseparable parts of (gendered) socialization processes in a world of constant change. This approach contributes to socialization theory and methodology because it illustrates precisely how humans and non-humans coproduce socialization in situated material-discursive processes.