Despite the current environmental crises of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation afflicting the world, dualisms of culture/nature, human/non-human and animate/inanimate sustain a perspective on ‘the environment’ in which the human and the cultural are privileged over the natural world and other species. Policies on ‘sustainable development’ are likewise predicated upon efforts to assure future human prosperity. Our objective in this paper is to establish an alternative, post-anthropocentric perspective on environmental sustainability. Drawing on feminist materialist scholarship supplies an ontology to critique humanist approaches, and establishes the foundation for a posthuman sociology of environment, in which (post)humans are an integral but not privileged element. We consider the implications of this perspective for both sustainability policy and ‘climate justice’. A posthuman ontology leads to the conclusion – perhaps surprisingly, given the anthropogenic roots of current climate change – that some unusual human capacities are now essential to assure environmental potential.

National and international policy‐makers have addressed threats to environmental sustainability from climate change and other environmental degradation for over 30 years. However, it is questionable whether current policies are socially, politically, economically, and scientifically capable of adequately resolving these threats to the planet and living organisms. In this paper we theorize and develop the concept of a “policy assemblage” from within a new materialist ontology, to interrogate critically four policy perspectives on climate change: “liberal environmentalism”; the United Nations policy statements on sustainable development; “green capitalism” (also known as “climate capitalism”) and finally “no‐growth economics.” A materialist analysis of interactions between climate change and policies enables us to establish what each policy can do, what it ignores or omits, and consequently its adequacy to address environmental sustainability in the face of climate change. None, we conclude, is adequate or appropriate to address climate change successfully. We then use this conceptual tool to establish a “posthuman” policy on climate change. Humans, from this perspective, are part of the environment, not separate from or in opposition to it, but possess unique capacities that we suggest are now necessary to address climate change. This ontology supplies the starting point from which to establish sociologically a scientifically, socially, and politically adequate posthuman climate change policy. We offer suggestions for the constituent elements of such a policy.

This article sets out a more-than-human framework within which to explore the contribution of non-human matter to social inequality. Applying an approach based in Deleuzian ethology, we extend three invitations: to address the multiplicity and fluidity of dis/advantage, to explore its production in everyday interactions, and to acknowledge non-human as well as human matter in the emergence of dis/advantage. The article examines how the interactions between human and non-human matter produce and reproduce context-specific bodily capacities and incapacities, and consequently ‘a thousand tiny dis/advantages’. These dis/advantages may accumulate to produce substantive inequalities and social divisions. An illustrative re-reading of Paul Willis’s 1970s study of the cultural reproduction of social inequality Learning to Labour reveals the complex ways in which daily encounters between human and non-human matter produce both transient and lasting dis/advantage. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this more-than-human perspective for the sociological study of inequality.

University students tend to have greater sexual health knowledge than the general public, yet condom use among this group continues to be a public health concern because effective condom use could reduce sexually transmitted infections and, for heterosexual women, unwanted pregnancies. We report findings from a small, qualitative study of condom use among sexually active heterosexual university students in the UK. In interviews, students shared their views about condom use and sometimes their personal experiences too. This paper identifies some of the meanings attributed to condom use in the accounts of nine heterosexually active 20–25 year-olds. Participants explained that when they felt comfortable communicating with their partners, they were more likely to use condoms, and those with negative sexual experiences or under social or psychological pressure were less likely to use them. The findings highlight issues of trust and power between men and women in heterosexual relationships, and describe contexts for dishonest sexual practice, including the traditional notions of femininity that were linked to condom use by this group. The issue of stealthing arose in one woman’s account of her experience and in several others’ reports of what occurs commonly. Stealthing, the secretive removal of a condom by a (usually male) partner during sexual intercourse without a partner’s knowledge or permission, produces non-consensual unprotected sex. We present stealthing as a product of the sexual double-standards described and as a form of interpersonal violence (IPV) and, among these heterosexual partners, as a form of gender-based violence. This study provides a glimpse into university students’ decision-making regarding condom use and highlights how gendered inequalities shape heterosex, in particular, communication about safer sex, that in some cases, compromise women’s decisions about (safer) sex.

This paper assesses how a new materialist ontology can inform the sociological study of gender-related violence (GRV). The new materialisms are relational rather than essentialist; post-anthropocentric as opposed to humanist; and replace dualisms such as agency/structure, reason/emotion and micro/macro with a monist or ‘flat’ ontology. To make sense of GRV from within this ontology, we explore violence as assemblages of human and non-human matter and draw upon the DeleuzoGuattarian micropolitical concepts of ‘the war machine’ and ‘lines of flight’. While violence may supply a protagonist with new capacities (a line of flight), it typically closes down or constrains the capacities of one or more other parties in a violence-assemblage. This theoretical exploration establishes the basis for a methodological approach to studying GRV empirically, using a Deleuzian toolkit of affects, assemblages, capacities and micropolitics. The paper concludes with an assessment of what is gained from this new materialist ontology of GRV.

Programmes for sexual violence prevention have focussed historically on university, school or college students rather than staff working at these institutions. The Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence project (USVreact), co-funded by the European Commission, worked across universities in Europe to address this gap in the provision and knowledge of programmes aimed at staff. Each institutional partner in the project designed a programme to enable staff to respond appropriately to disclosures of sexual violence. This paper focuses on one UK university to explore the use of and reception to education principles and feminist pedagogy with staff from across the institution. These diverse pedagogical approaches were significant to the design of the university’s innovative programme. The findings demonstrate the importance of a process of sexual violence pedagogy, as opposed to training, and highlight its positive implications for the whole university community.