There is broad acceptance across the Humanities and Social Sciences that our deliberations on the social need to take place through attention to practice, object-mediated relations, non-human agency and the affective dimensions of human sociality. This Companion focuses on the objects and materials found at centre stage, and asks: what matters about objects? Original chapters from over forty international, interdisciplinary contributors address an array of objects and materials to ask what the terms of collaborations with objects and materials are, and to consider how they become integral to our understandings of the complex, relational dynamics that fashion social worlds.

Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and Director of CRESC, the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

Eleanor Conlin Casella is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Manchester.

Gillian Evans is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

Hannah Knox is a Research Fellow at CRESC, the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester.

Christine McLean is a Senior Lecturer at the Manchester Business School, University of Manchester.

Elizabeth B. Silva is Professor of Sociology at the Open University.

Nicholas Thoburn is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester.

Kath Woodward is Professor of Sociology at the Open University.

1. Objects and Materials: An Introduction Part I: Material Qualities Part I Introduction 2. An Interview with Artist Helen Barff 3. A Poor Workman Blames His Tools or How Irrigation Systems Structure Human Actions 4. The Material Construction of State Power: Artifacts and the New Rome 5. The Material Politics of Solid Waste: Decentralization and Integrated Systems 6. From Stone to God and Back Again: Why We Need Both Materials and Materiality 7. New Materials and Their Impact on the Material World 8. Decay, Temporality and the Politics of Conservation: An Archaeological Approach to Material Studies Part II: Affective Objects Part II Introduction 9. Boxing Films: Sensation and Affect10. Tactile Compositions 11. Bodies and Cadavers 12. Domination and Desire: The Paradox of Egyptian Human Remains in Museums 13. A Dream of Falling: Philosophy and Family Violence 14. Sarah Kofman's Father's Pen and Bracha Ettinger's Mother's Spoon: Trauma, Transmission and the Strings of Virtuality 15. Spectral Objects: Material Links to Difficult Pasts for Adoptive Families Part III: Unsettling Objects Part III Introduction 16. Haunting in the Material of Everyday Life 17. The Fetish of Connectivity 18. Useless Objects: Commodities, Collections and Fetishes in the Politics of Objects 19. The Unknown Objects of Object-Orientation 20. How Things Can Unsettle 21. Objects Are the Root of All Philosophy Part IV: Interface Objects Part IV Introduction 22. True Automobility 23. The Environmental Teapot and Other Loaded Household Objects: Re-connecting the Politics of Technology, Issues and Things 24. Interfaces: The Mediation of Things and the Distribution of Behaviours 25. Idempotent, Pluripotent, Biodigital: Objects in the 'Biological Century' 26. Real-ising the Virtual: Digital Simulation and the Politics of Future Making 27. Money Frontiers: The Relative Location of Euros, Turkish Lira and Gold Sovereigns in the Aegean 28. Algorithms and the Manufacture of Financial Reality Part V: Becoming Object Part V Introduction 29. Animal Architextures 30. Objects Made Out of Action 31. Quantitative Objects and Qualitative Things: Ethics and HIV Biomedical Prevention 32. Potentialities and Possibilities of Needs Assessment: Objects, Memory and Crystal Images 33. Digital Traces and the 'Print' of Threat: Targeting Populations in the War on Terror 34. Intangible Objects: How Patent Law is Redefining Materiality 35. Thinking through Place and Late ANT Spatialities 36. What Documents Make Possible: Realising London's Olympic Legacy