Thinking with the grain

Abstract

In this short commentary, I consider William Jamieson’s proposal ‘For Granular Geography’. I focus on two parallel arguments at work in his piece: the proposal for a political ecology of sand foregrounding the physical dynamics of sand as a granular system; and second, his programmatic agenda for human geography in which the instability and unpredictability of granular systems become a ‘conceptual grammar’ for the material geographies of value transformation. I am sympathetic to thinking through materials and alive to the poetic possibilities of sand, but ultimately find neither of Jamieson’s arguments persuasive. I suggest a fuller engagement with existing ‘grammars’ – including those of new materialism, elemental geographies, and the role of friction in global commodity chains – could help clarify the contribution that ‘granularity’ might be able to make.