Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. In G. Dahlberg & P. Moss (Eds.), Contesting early childhood series. Routledge.

Another key section which was an important part that I had to work through when writing a review of Andrea Ballestero’s book A Future History of Water was this section where Barad traces a genealogical lineage from Lefebvre through to David Harvey, Donna Haraway, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, into her own work: Class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works . . . the friction of interests-the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise.... class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.” Sandoval, Cheyla: 1991, ‘U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World.’ Genders, 10. Here Barad notes that physical and conceptual constraints of apparatuses are co-constitutive (196) - an apparatus with fixed parts necessarily excludes momentum form having meaning during the experiment, for example. She criticises Foucault's and Butler's theories for not being precise about how matter becomes matter, or rather, the nature of the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena. In her model of agential realism, humans are also phenomena, and material-discursive apparatuses that intra-act. It's hard to overestimate the tremble of excitement that attended the publication of Karen Barad's Meeting The Universe Halfway when it first came out nearly ten years ago. Here was the work of a physicist-cum-philosopher conversant in the 'high-theory' of post-structuralism no less than the intricacies of quantum theory, a writer of exceptional clarity at home in the fields of feminist theory no less than the philosophy and practice of science. A work, moreover, that promised to rethink and reconceptualize our ideas of "space, time, matter, dynamics, agency, structure, subjectivity, objectivity, knowing, intentionality, discursivity, performativity, entanglement and ethical engagement."This is one of the greatest philosophical books I have ever read. Karen Barad draws on figures such as Judith Bulter, Donna Haraway, and Michel Foucault to investigate the ontological implications of the insights in quantum physics of Niels Bohr. She argues for a completely new way of looking at the world, which she calls "agential realism," where the relationship preexists and constitutes the relata. Subject and object (or rather, the "agencies of observation" and the "object of observation") are not independently existing individuals, but exists on in their "intra-action." Barad criticizes the metaphysics of individualism, which is responsible for problematic representationalist and humanist presuppositions, while reconceptualizing notions such as causality, agency, objectivity, and responsibility. You can also look at the conclusion or summary at the end of the chapter before reading it, so you know what to expect. Honner, John: 1987 ,The Description of Nature: Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Quantum Physics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. The most fascinating aspect of the book is its emphasis on ethics. Although "ethics" is mentioned only a few times in the whole book, a major goal of the book is to rework responsibility and obligation (which can no longer involve a relation to a radically exteriorized "other"). Her ontology makes ethics a pervasive aspect of life. Indeed, she characterizes her work as a form of ethico-onto-epistem-ology, claiming that the three cannot be disentangled.

The majority of the discussion centered around the first point of Barad’s framework: agential realism grounds and situates knowledge claims in local experiences. Does the notion that knowledge is embodied and local impede theorizing? Some of the participants felt that agential realism has similar limitations in theorizing as ANT, while others emphasized that in agential realism theorizing happens in the detailed description of physical apparatus, as a description of the agentially positioned constructed cut between the object and the agencies of observation. One of the interesting points of agential realism is its emphasis on the agency of the material, as well as the interlinked agencies of the object and the observer. In addition, the locality of knowledge does not necessarily mean its spatial position, but relates to the constructed boundaries, so theorizing also happens in the boundary-making. Framing and focus matter, and they also have real-life implications. According to the third point of the framewor Finally, TSElosophers returned to the fourth point of Barad’s framework – the implications of knowledge. We discussed the ethics of knowing and importance of considering material consequences of knowledge production. Further reading Baard takes the partial framework left by Bohr, contrasts it with that of Heisenberg and Einstein to display its characteristics and then build on it. As well as separating it from its humanist origins. Murris, K., & Borcherds, C. (2019a). Body as transformer: ‘Teaching without Teaching’ in a Teacher Education Course. In C. Taylor & A. Bayley (Eds.), Posthumanism and higher education: Reimagining pedagogy, practice and research (pp. 255–277). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/978-3-030-14672-6_15 Quantum Physics is a strangely intimidating topic, even though it just makes a whole lot of sense once you dig into it. In this publication, Karen Barad presents a worldview that has far-reaching implications for the way we humans should interact and treat our environment.

Cushing, James T.: 1994. Quantum Mechanics: Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen Hegemony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Barad then tests out her metaphysics via what she terms "empirical metaphysics". That is, the ability today to actually execute some of the metaphysical gedanken experiments posed and counter-posed by Einstein and Bohr. The results of these experiments bode poorly for Einstein's metaphysical views and better for Bohr's. However, Barad's agential realism fares better yet, having rid itself of Bohr's implicit anthropocentric biases. The book also discusses some fields of research in quantum physics that lay the foundations for the ideas presented here. Experiments like the quantum eraser experiment are explained in detail and Barad also talks about the partly contradicting theories of Einstein and Bohr. It's interesting how many questions are still left unanswered. Thus Barad outlines an approach that is sure to provide a new framework for understanding why the experience of reality is different for so many, as our material practice is the conceptual condition by which discursive practices actualize... not as representations of a transcendentalism but through the conditions of materiality itself, entangled within itself. (As Deleuze would say, differentiation isn't what happens to cytoplasm, rather cytoplasm contains all the differentials which create a given differentiation of a baby as a complete whole.)

Table of Contents

Likely the most interesting stuff in this book was Barad’s description of Leela Fernades’s work on Calcutta jute mill workers which as a section opens with this E.P. Thompson quote: