In Conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism

In Conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism is an accessible introduction to Karen Barad’s agential realist philosophy. The authors take on a unique approach to involve the readers in in/formal conversations between Karen, postgraduate and other researchers at a research event held in 2017 at Cape Town, South Africa.

It features chapters that have been contributed by seminar delegates and organisers, which put forth the continuing impact that Karen Barad has had on their empirical work, research writing and drawing practices. The text further discusses the ethical and political significance of Karen’s work, especially in the context of de/colonizing South African higher education. The chapters offer a series of worked posthumanist pedagogical examples and describe how a research seminar was organised differently and more in line with Baradian radical philosophy. At its heart, this book makes a methodological and pedagogical contribution to the surge in literature on agential realism, whilst simultaneously challenging dominant research binaries and arguing for a more egalitarian way of working together in knowledge-creation by troubling human and more-than-human hierarchies. The book’s uniqueness is further fortified through its description of in/formal conversations, which are diffracted through chapters, a doing of agential realism to reconfigure relationships between lecturer and student, expert and novice, supervisor and supervised, researcher and research participants. These radical conversations are dis/continuing.

This book will be invaluable for students and individuals interested in advancing their understanding of agential realism and Karen Barad’s influence at large, as well as students and scholars interested in postqualitative methods in all disciplines.

Karin Murris is Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Oulu (Finland) and Emerita Professor of Pedagogy and Philosophy, the University of Cape Town (South Africa). She is a teacher educator, grounded in academic philosophy and a postqualitative research paradigm. Her main interests are in posthuman child studies, philosophy in education, ethics, and democratic pedagogies.

Vivienne Bozalek is Honorary Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University and Emerita Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her research interests pertain to the political ethics of care and social justice, posthumanism and feminist new materialisms, innovative pedagogical practices in higher education and postqualitative and participatory methodologies.