Material, The

This article reviews a burgeoning number of material objects that have come to figure in the work of human geographers. It starts off by foregrounding disparate and clustered objects that have been scattered around various places in the disciplinary field, a presence of things made perceptible as they are subject to negotiation and contested claims. Coincident with the intellectual enquiry of social scientists more broadly, it then refers to a ‘material turn’ in geography which situates objects in three key areas, namely the consideration of the object as commodity; materials in networks and networks as material manifestations; and the embodiment of things whose performance unsettles any understanding cast in object/subject dualism. In geography, attention to ‘the material’ is becoming increasingly important in theory and practice, speaking within a world where humans, nonhumans, artifacts, and technologies are drawn together in complex relationships. It has also produced fecund engagements with cognate disciplines such as consumption studies, sociology, social practice of scientific knowledge, philosophy, and the physical sciences, to name but a few. Finally, these entanglements will be highlighted using the frequently considered material trope of the car. Like the car, materials in geography have a strong and resilient in their role of interrogating scholarship that has come before and that which they have yet to become.