Affect and Materiality Among Highways, Heat, and Wheat: A New Materialist Auto/Ethnography of Be(com)ing Kansan.

This article presents an auto/ethnographic exploration of the author's ongoing embodied and affective experience of becoming Kansan, employing a new materialist approach that emphasizes the agentive role of matter and more-than-human entanglements in shaping identity and sense-making. Through reflections on sensory encounters with Kansas's environment, cultural practices, and mobility—including physiological reactions to climate, haircare experiences, urban walks, and (re)learning to drive—the piece highlights how embodiment, place, and materiality intersect with sociopolitical privileges and binaries such as metropolitan/rural and human/more-than-human. The inquiry challenges language-dependent frameworks by centering affect and material agency to reveal the fluid, evolving nature of being and knowledge beyond anthropocentric and static conceptions. Ultimately, the work invites ongoing questioning of settled ontologies and privileges while acknowledging the complexities of emplaced, embodied becoming within layered social and environmental contexts.