Tomas Percival is an artist, researcher, and writer. His work critically investigates the intersections of space and security, with a particular interest in structures of assessment, risk governance, carceral geographies, data infrastructures, and border administration. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was an artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was also a Lecturer on the MA Research Architecture / Forensic Architecture programme. He is currently an Affiliated Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
tomas.percival@mailbox.org
The Material Force of Categories
Special issue of the History of Human Sciences journal
Editor with Sasha Bergstrom-Katz
Date: April 2025
Special Issue here
Open access introduction here
The Material Force of Categories is a special issue of the History of Human Sciences journal. The function of categories of the human sciences is a well-established field of scholarly inquiry, animated by debates over their capacity to reduce, exclude, determine, abstract, produce, loop, control, and/or restrain. This special issue takes an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate urgent questions about the ‘material force’ of categories as they operate in practice. Specifically, we emphasise the plasticity of categories and how their ambivalent boundaries can render their categorical forcefulness continuously operative. Categories morph and shift as they traverse different fields, re-articulating difference as they interact with divergent institutions and epistemic infrastructures. The interdisciplinary articles in this issue explore the material force of categories across varied contexts, including the prison system, digital culture, legal frameworks, psychiatric diagnostics, and applied governmental research. In so doing, the special issue as a whole emphasises the capacious yet persistent nature of categorisation, revealing how, in multiple ways, categories can stabilise the management of people precisely through their inherent structures of contingency and ambivalence.
Contributors: Margarita Aragon, Alfred Freeborn, Eoin Fullam, Becka Hudson, Julian Molina, and Tomas Percival & Sasha Bergstrom-Katz. Publication
Research