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Diffracting diffractive readings of texts as methodology: Some propositions

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DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1570843

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Diffracting diffractive readings of texts as

methodology: Some propositions

Karin Murris & Vivienne Bozalek

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EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1570843

Diffracting diffractive readings of texts as methodology:

Some propositions
Karin Murrisa and Vivienne Bozalekb
a
School of Education, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa; bUniversity of the Western Cape,
Bellville, Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Re-turning to our experiences of putting a diffractive methodology to work Diffractive methodology;
ourselves, as well as engaging with the writings of Donna Haraway and Barad; Haraway; response-
Karen Barad, we produce some propositions regarding a diffractive method- able readings of texts;
propositions; posthuman-
ology for researchers to consider. Postqualitative research disrupts the idea ism; feminist
that educationalists can be given tools or techniques to investigate the postqualitative research
world objectively, independently and at an ontological distance from the
researcher. Therefore, avoiding prescription and a rush to application, we
take up Stephanie Springgay’s proposal (drawing mainly on Whitehead) to
diffract a non-hierarchical list of propositions through the text that disrupt
the theory/practice binary and activate a self-organising potential for adopt-
ing a diffractive methodology in research. We use a diffractive methodology
(spatial and temporal), theory and practice as a way of activating experimen-
tation with the affirmative method of diffractively reading texts, oeuvres and
philosophies through one another. Propositions generated as part of a pub-
lished example of a re-view of three books on posthuman non-representa-
tional research are also diffracted through the text. These two entangled
‘sets’ of propositions creatively engage with the in/determinate direction of
what a diffractive methodology might look like in practice, while at the same
time being cognisant of the complex discussions about the appropriateness
of referring to ‘methods’ or ‘methodologies’ as human-centred activities.

Propositions activating self-organising potential

Rupturing conventional styles of doing research (e.g. literature review writing, collecting and
analysing data) that are representational,1 we use a diffractive methodology developed by
Barad (2007, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2017a). In our own research (Bozalek, 2016, 2017; Bozalek &
McMillan, 2017, Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017; Bozalek, Zembylas & Shefer, forthcoming; Murris,
2016, 2017a,b,c; Murris & Haynes, 2018; Newfield & Bozalek, 2018), we have used a method of
diffractively reading texts through one another. In this paper, we re-turn2 to some of these
experiences of putting this method to work ourselves, as well as engaging with the writings of
Haraway (1992, 1997, 2000) and Barad (2007, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2017a) in order to produce
some propositions for other researchers to consider, which are diffracted through the article.
Moreover, propositions generated by a review of three books on posthuman non-representa-
tional research is also diffracted through the text in a different font. In other words, we diffract
through diffractive methodology, theory and practice expressed through a different kind of
scholarly writing style.

CONTACT Karin Murris [email protected] University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa
ß 2019 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
2 K. MURRIS AND V. BOZALEK

What drives this piece of writing is our desire to engage with the in/determinate direction of
what a diffractive methodology might look like in practice, while at the same time being cogni-
sant of the complex discussions about the appropriateness of referring to ‘methods’ or
‘methodologies’ as human-centred activities (de Freitas, 2018; Jones & Hoskins, 2016; Manning,
2015; Mauthner, 2016; Springgay & Truman, 2018; St. Pierre, 2017; St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei,
2016). St. Pierre (2016, p. 34) warns that we should resist ‘the idea of methodology itself’,
because the ‘rush to application (to methodology), especially in applied fields like education, can
sideline ontology’ (St. Pierre, 2016. p. 26). Indeed, a diffractive methodology involves a diffractive
engagement with the feminist philosophies of Haraway and Barad and their ontoepistemologies
imply that theory and practice cannot be separated. A diffractive methodology contests the
notion that a researcher can be taught tools or techniques about a world which is independent
of and at an ontological distance from the researcher. As St. Pierre et al. (2016, p. 105) have
noted, it is neither possible to separate theory and practice, nor to teach research methods in
terms of ‘how to do’ them, rather, research creation requires ‘a re-imagining of what method
might do’ [emphasis in original]. So, without a prescribed framework (which is also not desirable)
how to adopt a diffractive methodology? Although a ‘body’ of literature is e/merging about dif-
fraction as a methodology, little guidance is given to researchers.3 How do we know how to dif-
fractively read texts (in the broad sense) through one another, if there are no guidelines? Of
course, this question might itself already presuppose criteria that can be applied from
the outside.
Avoiding prescription and a rush to application, we take up Stephanie Springgay’s proposal
to develop some propositions. Springgay (2015, p. 78) suggests that a ‘proposition versus an
instruction triggers conditions of emergence activating self-organising potential’. Quoting Alfred
North Whitehead, Truman and Springgay (2016, p. 259) argue that a proposition is a ‘new kind
of entity’ – a ‘hybrid between potentialities and actualities’. Propositions are both actual and
speculative and although they can be true or false, according to Whitehead, the key idea is that
even if they were false (in the sense of not conforming to the world order), they offer potential-
ities in terms of affecting those who experience them (Truman & Springgay, 2016, p. 259).
Propositions do not offer information or prescribed rules and pre-planned directions to follow,
but ‘gesture to how they could potentialize’ (Truman & Springgay, 2016, p. 259). Re-turning to
our own experiences of writing about diffraction and Barad’s writings on diffraction, we consider
a set of possible propositions, which are diffracted through the text. They have been numbered
for practical purposes (for ease of referencing them), but they do not express any kind of hier-
archy.4 Diffracted through these and the article are also propositions generated through a dif-
fractive reading of three books through one another as part of a book review in a different font
(Murris, 2017c). The diffractive apparatus does not work in a linear or causal way, but through
what Whitehead calls ‘feeling’ and experiencing their actualisation (Truman & Springgay, 2016, p.
260). Unlike methods that researchers apply to the data they have collected (a ‘doing to’), adopt-
ing the idea of propositions acknowledges that posthuman research is an experiential event
(Springgay, 2015, p. 79) inbetween in/determinate human and nonhuman bodies (including the
sheer materiality of this 2D article with written words). This distributed, transindividual notion of
agency shifts what we mean by causality in knowledge production. Being affected by these
propositions is more than emotion or feelings, but a kind of mutual performativity that queers
cognition/emotion and inner/outer binaries (Barad, 2007).
The challenge in adopting diffraction as a methodology is not to theorise the diffraction pat-
tern (a logic of representation), but to put it into practice, thereby disrupting the theory/practice
binary. The idea is to read theory with practice diffractively guided by, for example, key ques-
tions that move the experiment forward. As a researcher one is part of the world, hence a dif-
fractive reading is unlike a literature review as the latter assumes that you are at a distance of
the literature, having a bird’s eye point of view – creating an overview by comparing, contrast-
ing, juxtaposing or looking for similarities and themes. A diffractive reading, on the other hand,
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 3

does not foreground any texts as foundational, but through reading texts through one another,
comes to new insights.
Hence, in the following section we offer two entangled ‘sets’ of propositions diffracted
through theoretical explanations of diffraction. As referred to above, one ‘set’ was generated
by the diffractive re-view of three books (in a different font) on posthumanism and the other
(numbered) are generated afresh by re-turning to our own experiences of writing about
diffraction and Barad’s writings on diffraction. These might activate some self-organising
potential for a diffractive methodology and have been listed in any which order and starting
from the middle.

Diffraction
To live without bodily boundaries by: paying attention to affect in
knowledge production (moods, passions, emotions, intensities) and
being open to be affected by the more-than-human;

Diffraction was first developed by Donna Haraway as a metaphor (1988), and then built on by
Barad (2003, 2007, 2014, 2017a, 2017b) through her interpretation of quantum physics – in itself
a diffractive reading of physics and feminist queer theory. In an interview, Barad explains how
the methodology created her philosophy of agential realism:
At least for me it is the incredible satisfaction of taking insights from feminist theory, on the one hand, and
insights from physics, on the other, and reading them through one another in building agential realism
(Barad in interview with Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012, p. 61–62).

As a strategy for research, diffraction moves beyond the western metaphysical Subject/Object
dichotomy (and therefore it is not a metaphor) (Bozalek, Zembylas & Shefer, forthcoming).

To live without bodily boundaries by: accepting that much is not

knowable cognitively and can never be articulated;

Barad (in the same interview with Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 52, as mentioned above)
explains the difference between diffraction as a classical physics phenomenon and the way she
uses it quantum-mechanically:
Diffraction, understood using quantum physics, is not just a matter of interference, but of entanglement,
an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. This difference is very important. It underlines the fact that
knowing is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart, where [agential] cuts do violence but
also open up and rework the agential conditions of possibility. There is not this knowing from a distance.
Instead of there being a separation of subject and object, there is an entanglement of subject and object,
which is called the ‘phenomenon’. Objectivity, instead of being about offering an undistorted mirror image
of the world, is about accountability to marks on bodies, and responsibility to the entanglement of which
we are a part.

Diffraction as a methodology troubles humans’ epistemic arrogance of locating knowledge,

intelligence and meaning-making in the subject and only in the human subject.

To live without bodily boundaries by: having courage to queer the

privileging of the human mind in knowledge construction;

Diffraction is not only a research methodology, but also a pedagogical tool (see, e.g.
Murris, 2016) in place of the more qualitative and humanist reflective methodologies.
Diffraction is seen by Barad (2007) as an alternative to reflection, a metaphor which depicts
sameness or mirroring.
4 K. MURRIS AND V. BOZALEK

To live without bodily boundaries by: desiring to circumvent and

resist becoming entrapped in humanist discourses and wanting to be
in control;

Reflection is an inner mental activity, where a researcher supposedly takes a step back, distanc-
ing him/herself from the data or whatever is being contemplated.

To live without bodily boundaries by: resisting the desire to fix

meanings and to pin down sense;

1. Deconstructing the foundations of certain concepts and ideas; seeing how contingency
operates to secure the ‘foundations’ of the concepts we cannot live without. And using
that contingency to open up other possible meanings/matterings.
2. Not holding one text, theory, oeuvre, perspective as foundational.

In reflection the researcher is seen as separate from the world, whereas in diffraction, there is
no researcher who is an independent subject but rather an intra-action between human and
non-human phenomena.5 This is why Barad (2017b, G111) refers to a ‘relational agential ontol-
ogy’. She explains it in the following way: ‘Entanglements are not the mere intertwinings of, or
linkages between, separate events or entities or simply forms of interdependence that point to
the interconnectedness of all being as one’.

3. Appreciating that the researcher is always already part of the apparatus that measures and
has a specific geopolitical location.

To live without bodily boundaries by: transcending the human and

focusing on the ‘in-between’ inanimate objects, place,
technologies, etc.

Thus a diffractive methodology, rather than contemplating the meaning of texts or data, is
concerned with what phenomena do and how they are connected and co-constituted (Bozalek &
McMillan, 2017).

To live without bodily boundaries by: putting ones self at risk and
being curious about thinking and doing ‘otherwise’;

As Barad (2014, p. 168) explains ‘the quantum understanding of diffraction troubles the very
notion of dicho-tomy – cutting into two – as a singular act of absolute differentiation, fracturing
this from that, now from then’.

4. Deconstructing power-producing binaries (e.g. mind/body, cognition/emotion, researcher/

researched, man/woman, white/black, adult/child, normal/abnormal, micro/macro) by being
aware of who, or what, is included and excluded through the diffraction apparatus.

Diffraction means ‘to break apart in different directions’ (Barad, 2014, p. 168). Diffraction pat-
terns hold for water waves, as well as sound waves, or light waves (Barad, 2007, p. 74). It is
where they interfere or overlap that the waves change in themselves in intra-action and create
an interference pattern or ‘superposition’ (Barad, 2007, p. 76).

5. Working with barriers and making new patterns of thought (‘superpositions’).

 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 5

Diffraction patterns are evidence of superpositions – the new patterns created are the effect
of difference and mark where learning has occurred. Importantly, they disrupt identity produc-
ing binaries.

To live without bodily boundaries by: embracing awkward moments

that threaten human boundary-making between human/nonhuman,
nature/culture, mind/body, child/adult;

Diffraction attends to the relational nature of difference; it does not figure difference as either
a matter of essence or as inconsequential (Haraway, 1992, p. 300).

6. Thinking with and through differences rather than pushing away from and solidifying differ-
ence as less than.

As we have seen, for Barad, diffraction is not a metaphor as it is for Haraway, but it denotes phe-
nomena of matter itself (Seghal, 2014, p. 188; our emphasis). Waves are not bounded objects, but dis-
turbances. So, the methodology tries to break from the familiar habits of reflecting on the world from
the outside to a way of understanding the world from within and as part of it (Barad, 2007, p. 88).

To live without bodily boundaries by: asking speculative

hypothetical (e.g. ‘what if’) questions that include the human and
more-than-human;

The diffraction apparatuses, Barad (2007, p. 33) suggests, can be used to study
entanglements.

To live without bodily boundaries by: following multispecies

relations and tracing entanglements (not following the human);

7. Following relations, not individuals or units, and tracing human and nonhuman entangle-
ments (inanimate objects, place, technologies, etc.), we are always part of. (We are often
not aware of the fact that we are part of and with the world.)

Entanglements are specific material-discursive configurations that change with each intra-
action. Diffraction pays attention to how, for example, technoscientific practices are implicated in
what it means to teach or to do research.

To live without bodily boundaries by: embracing the role of

educational technology in disrupting binaries between teacher/
learner, animate/inanimate, fantasy/reality, mind/body,
nature/culture;

The complexity researchers deal with when using the methodology is not so much that
entanglements change from moment to moment or from one place to another, but that ‘space,
time and matter do not exist prior to the intra-actions that constitute’ them (Barad, 2007, p. 33).
So, what are the implications for knowledge production?

To live without bodily boundaries by: opening up to the unknown and

not knowing (epistemic humility);

Barad (2007, p. 91; emphasis in the original) states very clearly that the point is not that
knowledge practices have material consequences, but ‘practices of knowing are specific material
engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world’.
6 K. MURRIS AND V. BOZALEK

To live without bodily boundaries by: appreciating the entangled

nature of the human and more-than-human (including cameras) in
knowledge-production and the productive force of this entanglement
(distributed agency);

8. Trying to make visible the interference patterns that exist (and do not exist) already as part
of the world. They exist when bringing them into relation with one another. Undoing clas-
sical notions of identity and being as ‘a quantum superposition is a relation among differ-
ent possibilities’ (Barad, 2010, p. 251).

‘Which practices we enact matter – in both senses of the word’ (Barad, 2007, pp. 91–93).
Making knowledge implies giving the world specific form, for which the researcher is also
responsible and accountable by paying attention to accurate and fine details

9. Paying close, respectful, responsive and response-able (enabling response) attention to

the details of a text (in the broad sense), that is, trying to do justice to it (Barad in an
interview with Juelskjaer & Schwennesen, 2012, p. 13).
10. Being acutely aware that small differences matter enormously when using a diffractive
methodology.

Barad explains that the diffractive methodology is an ‘ethico-onto-epistemological engage-

ment attending to differences and matters of care in all their detail, in order to creatively
repattern world-making practices’ (Barad in an interview with Juelskjaer & Schwennesen,
2012, p. 16).

11. Understanding the inseparability of epistemology, ontology and ethics; research is always
political; ‘a deep appreciation of the entanglements of facts and values … Values and
facts are cooked together as part of one brew’ (Barad in interview with Juelskjaer &
Schwennesen, 2012, pp. 15, 16).
12. Not things but the phenomena are the objective referent therefore the apparatus that
produces data and things also produces values and meanings.

Moreover, the production of values and meaning through the diffraction apparatus is always
‘with an eye to our indebtedness to the past and the future’ (Barad in an interview with
Juelskjaer & Schwennesen, 2012, p. 16).

To live without bodily boundaries by: caring differently and

acknowledging our human vulnerabilities and limitations;

13. Being creative, but not in the sense of crafting the new through a radical break with
the past.

This second dimension of diffraction – a different temporality – is also salient for research
practices and deserves to be explored further.

Temporal diffraction and educational research

As researchers we re-turn to Karen Barad’s visit to Cape Town in June 2017 when she worked
with us6 and re-read two papers out aloud during a residential seminar: one called Diffracting
Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart (Barad, 2014) and one which was still to be and has now been
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 7

published (Barad, 2017, 2018). Re-turning as a method is a kind of ‘Slow scholarship’ (Bozalek,
2017), re-turning and re-turning again and again to the ‘same’ text, creating ‘thicker’ understand-
ings about diffraction, for example. As Barad points out: ‘ … the mere mark of a hyphen [in re-
turning], is an important reminder that reflection (‘returning’, not ‘re-turning’) and diffraction are
not opposites’, but overlapping optical intra-actions in practice (Barad, 2014, p. 185 ftn2). Re-
turning, as Barad explains (Barad, 2014, p. 168), is ‘a mode of intra-acting with diffraction – dif-
fracting diffraction’ and ‘is particularly apt since the temporality of re-turning is integral to the
phenomenon of diffraction’ – cutting together-apart as one move.

To live without bodily boundaries by: becoming sensitive to the

always political and ethical nature of research;

As seen in our discussion on diffraction and how it differs from the standard practice of doing
a review of the literature, diffraction is opposed to cutting into two as in ‘dicho-tomy’, and this
includes the dicho-tomy of researcher/researched.

To live without bodily boundaries by: committing oneself to human/

more-than-human equality, including queering the binaries between
researcher, researched and research participants; appreciating
that the researcher is always already part of the apparatus
that measures;

As part of a diffraction pattern – cutting together-apart – we as researchers do not exist ‘outside

of the diffraction pattern, observing it, telling its story’ (Barad, 2014, p. 181). On the contrary, in a
relational ontology, we are ‘neither inside nor outside’, and without fixed bodily boundaries, our
‘story in its ongoing (re)patterning is (re)(con)figuring’ us; we are ‘of the diffraction pattern’ (Barad,
2014, p. 181). It is in this sense that as subjects we are transindividual: ‘always already multiply dis-
persed and diffracted throughout spacetime (mattering) … in its ongoing being-becoming’ (Barad
2014, pp. 181–182). Put differently, we as researchers writing this paper are neither determinate,
nor indeterminate, but in/determinate, that is, (like atoms at micro-level) ‘being’ determinate or
indeterminate depends on the apparatus that measures: our Man-made categories (and this
includes notions of scale). What we can learn from Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is that intra-actions
and diffractions are in/determinate in both space and time, for both human and nonhuman.

14. Understanding that quantum entanglements are not only about diffractions at micro level
as the binary between micro and macro is humanmade. ‘Macro’ and ‘micro’ worlds ‘ …
are concepts that already presume a given spatial scale’ (Barad, 2010, p. 240). Quantum
superpositions tell us that being/becoming is an in/determinate matter.

Barad (2014, p. 169) reminds us that in QFT each moment ‘in’ time is ‘an infinite multiplicity
… broken apart in different directions’.

15. Making connections of how entangled relationalities that do not appear to be proximate
in space and time constitute a force (Barad, 2007, p. 74).

Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2014, p. 296) also refer to the individual as an infinite multiplicity.
Barad’s agential realism implies that the past is open for future reworkings, and yet, the traces of
iterative materialisations are sedimented into the world (Barad, 2017a, 2017b). In other words,
QFT has inspired spatial and temporal diffraction as a research methodology.

16. Appreciating that entanglements are relations of responsibility that tie us to one another.
8 K. MURRIS AND V. BOZALEK

17. Queering the stability of spacetime coordinates: Entanglements are always here, there,
now, then.

In one of her presentations during the seminar when she visited Cape Town in 2017, Karen Barad
used the concept of ‘travel hopping’ as a way of describing quantum leaps or temporal diffraction.
Introduced by Kyoko Hayashi in her novella From Trinity to Trinity (2010), Barad uses travel hopping
as a powerful concept to unpack the infinite density and complexity of a particular spatial ‘point’ in
space and time (‘spacetimemattering’). Travel hopping opens up exciting possibilities for re-turning
to the past of, for example, researching a teaching space, or as in this article reading experiences
with diffraction as a methodology through one another. This is im/possible, because travel hopping
is dis/embodied material-discursive labour involving a re-working of the past, not by creating a linear
chronology that assumes linear time, but an un/doing of universal time – the idea that moments
exist one at a time, the same everywhere, replacing one for the other (like beads on a string). It also
disrupts what it means to be a human (or a collective of humans) ‘with’ memories moving as a fle-
shy unit ‘in’ space and ‘through’ time (the modernist notion of the self with, for example, rights).

18. Collaboration inbetween people is necessary for the responsible practice of education; to
think and work together is an integral part of research and educational. Productively
engage and think with other humans and more-than-human (e.g. matter).

Living without boundaries implies that it is impossible to write ‘a’ history of a body objectively
in the traditional sense as this would involve power-producing dualisms between self and world.

To live without bodily boundaries by: encouraging imaginative,

speculative philosophical enquiry that ruptures, unsettles,
animates, reverberates, enlivens and reimagines;

QFT offers empirical evidence that past, present and future are always threaded through one
another. It is not the case that ‘the’ past is changed (as, e.g. films about time travel suggest the
past might be changed). But as the quantum eraser experiment suggests (Barad 2007, pp.
310–317), a body’s ontology remains open for future reworking. Hence the importance of travel
hopping for educational research practices. The past is never ‘here’ or ‘there’ in the sense of
objectively fixed and static. However, it does not follow that the past is not real. Re-turning to
experiences is an entering of a past that was never there for the ‘taking’ and intensifies the affect
that experiencing the experience has on human and nonhuman bodies.
Using temporal diffraction means tracing the marks left on human and nonhuman bodies and
moving beyond the anthropocentric focus on the discursive only and acknowledging the in/deter-
minate agency of the relationality inbetween the material and the discursive. Barad’s agential realism
makes us think radically differently about concepts that assume binary thinking, such as causality,
agency, power and identity – concepts still at the heart of representational research methodologies.

To live without bodily boundaries by: resisting asking research

participants for lived experiences and describing them
discursively, e.g. through coding;

What the above exercise in diffracting diffraction does, is to call the very nature of personal
identity into question and not only for human bodies, but also for nonhuman bodies.

To live without bodily boundaries by: including the more-than-

human as research participants;
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 9

Honouring our inheritances and entanglements

19. Insisting that entanglements include the aliveness of the past and the future in the pre-
sent (multiple temporalities) – we cannot and should not break with the past7
(‘dis/continuity’).
20. Honouring our inheritances and indebtedness to the past (e.g. feminist engagements with
materialism) as well as the future.

Diffractive reading as a new academic style honours our inheritances (Barad, 2010, 2017a,
2017b), because diffraction patterns are always already there, that is, for example, the ideas of
the authors of a text or the creators of an image are always already entangled – like waves in
the sea without fixed boundaries – and the task of the researcher is to make this evident.

To live without bodily boundaries by: focusing on corporeal

entanglements, embodied action and fleeting encounters;

21. Working reiteratively, re-working the spacetimemattering of thought patterns and not
turning away from or leaving behind.

Hence, the diffractive apparatus is not about making analogies, or pulling together ideas in
assemblages (as this would assume individual existence as ontologically prior), but tracing some
entanglements (‘agential cuts’) by focussing on the specificities of texts, fields, oeuvres etc. in a
broad sense and what might not be visible, there and then, here and now.

22. Adopting a situated ontology, e.g. by re-turning to ‘the’ past, creating thick understand-
ings – literally, because knowledge is sedimented into the world the researcher is part of.
So, e.g. avoiding literature reviews that adopt a bird’s eye point of view, that is, creating
an overview by comparing, contrasting and looking for similarities and themes.

Now diffraction as a methodology already assumes a relational ontological and a posthuman

subjectivity. A relational view of reading a text assumes that the relationship is prior to the
text and the reader – neither pre-exists the other. Both are articulated with and through the
other, and both are affected by and affect each other as constitutive forces, leading to unpre-
dictable and creative provocations and becomings – this of course is also true for writing.8 This
is why Barad (2007, p. x) maintained in the preface of her book Meeting the Universe
Halfway that
writing is not a unidirectional practice of creation that flows from author to page, but rather the practice of
writing is an iterative and mutually constitutive working out, and reworking of ‘book’ and ‘author’.

Importantly for us, both implicit and explicit in Barad’s work is the assumption that it is
impossible to separate epistemology, ontology and ethics. Hence, as an ethico-onto-epistemol-
ogy, what holds for theories and bodies of work, also holds for the academic reading and writing
of texts. We therefore propose a response-able methodology, and we see diffraction as one of
its manifestations, informed by such a relational ontology.

Why diffraction as methodology?

As we have argued above, diffractive readings of texts disrupt the human obsession with rep-
resentationalism and offer ‘an escape from the established academic habit of striving to
uncover meanings and values that apparently await our discovery, interpretation, judgement
10 K. MURRIS AND V. BOZALEK

and ultimate representation’ (Vannini, 2015, pp. 1–2). Why is this so important and why now
in particular?
There is an important ethico-political point about building different kinds of relationships in
the controversially termed9 ‘anthropocene’ – a geological period of permanent change to the
planet’s biosphere caused by industries in developed countries. Unlike ecologists who assume
that natural systems are universal and ‘outside, or separate, from human communities’, diffrac-
tion as a methodology offers a transdisciplinary approach that disrupts the nature/culture binary
and attends to land, the temporality of place (Rotas, 2015, pp. 91, 97).

23. Encouraging knowledge production to cross disciplinary boundaries, e.g. by diffracting

quantum physics with poetry or fiction or queer theory.
24. Accepting that there is no unity within fields or disciplines, e.g. education.

Education and research is required for ‘an affirmative ethico-political economy’ that addresses
the ‘problematic of a dying species such as ours who is on the trajectory to extinction’ through
a shift that includes ‘trans-subjective and transhuman forces’ (Jagodzinski, 2015, p. 128).
Diffractive readings ‘change the footing on which texts meet each other’ (Kaiser, 2014, p. 276)
and inevitably involves ‘the affirmation of a diffractred/ing world’ (Kaiser, 2014, p. 277).

25. Respecting rather than undermining spacetimematter entanglements.

26. Exploring and producing entanglements at the same time (through the diffraction
apparatus).

However, despite this urgent call there is little support in adopting diffractive methodologies
as a form of non-representational, posthuman research at higher educational institutions. The
relational ontology assumed and expressed in diffraction also queers the power producing
binaries of Western metaphysics (Murris, 2016; Murris & Haynes, 2018).
The point of this article is not to describe or prescribe a framework, but to intra-act with texts
about diffraction and with texts that adopt the methodology of reading texts through one
another. Our re-view of literature (as in viewing again/ re-turning to the literature, not a
‘literature review’) on the diffractive methodology is a mode of intra-actings with texts that is
objective in the sense that our diffractions are sedimented into the world in its iterative becoming
(Barad, 2007, 2014, 2017a, 2017b). We make them work in a particular way, without positioning
ourselves outside of it: our own subjectivity is constituted in and through the methodology,
thereby dissolving the objective/subjective binary. As researchers we are of the diffraction pat-
tern (Barad, 2014). Thereby also queering the researcher/researched, theory/practice and mind/
body binary.

Making the methodology work

In this article, we have produced some ‘propositions’ for researchers and practitioners to con-
sider. The idea is not to prescribe or instruct, but to offer an imaginary and to inspire a different
‘how’ of research. We focussed on reading writings and experiences with diffraction through one
another, thereby queering theory/practice binary. Such readings are affirmative, not critical, and
involve ‘close respectful, responsive and response-able (enabling response) attention to the
details of a text’, thereby trying to ‘do justice to a text’ (Barad in an interview with Juelskjaer &
Schwennesen, 2012, p. 13, emphasis in the original).
In diffractive readings, researchers are not looking for similarities or differences, for example,
by making comparisons or try and identify themes.
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 11

27. Reading texts through and around one another, rather than against each other. Taking
someone’s work to new and unpredictable places. Creating provocations, new imaginaries
and imaginings and new practices.

Guided by questions that e/merge as researchers create data, a diffraction pattern is created. The
new diffraction patterns include and do not reduce one to the other. Such diffractive readings are
not guided by a ‘lack’, but are affirmative, creative, connecting, non-representational and ethical.

28. Deconstructing rather than destroying or making a caricature of someone’s work, doing
epistemological damage by taking a position of exteriority and superiority (Barad in an
interview with Juelskjaer & Schwennesen, 2012, p. 13).

By paying attention to the differences that matter without creating oppositions, new patterns
of thought, interference patterns and ‘superpositions’ (p. 169) are created – a ‘cutting together-
apart’ (p. 168) as one move (Barad, 2014).

29. Reading parts of a text, e.g. chapters in a book, as a diffraction apparatus through which
questions of difference in the making e/merge and how these come to matter (ethical).
30. Taking what you find inventive and trying to work carefully with the details of patterns of
thinking in their very materiality that might take you somewhere interesting and that you
would never have predicted.

The ‘superposition’ created by the diffraction is not ‘critical’, but adds force to ‘both’, without
assuming that either is a unity, nor the diffraction pattern that has been created and works to
inspire posthuman research practices that make a difference in the kind of knowledge produced
and the subjectivities expressed as part of this knowledge creation. Importantly, the propositions
are self-activating and not prescriptions.

Notes
1. Representational refers to the belief that we have direct access to our thoughts and feelings, but that we do not have
access to the outside or material world. It is also predicated on the idea of ourselves as independent individuals who
are knowing subjects ontologically prior to our relationality with other humans and the more-than-human (Bozalek &
Zembylas, 2017).
2. Following Barad (2014) by re-turn we do not mean to return to our texts and experiences in using a diffractive
methodology, but to return turning them over and over again and reading them through Barad’s and Haraway’s texts
on diffraction, paying attention to the fine details and seeing what new insights emerge from this reiterative process.
Re-turning is a process of spatial and temporal diffraction in the turning over and over again across time and space.
What might be regarded by some readers as repetition in the text, is in fact a deliberate diffractive methodology of re-
turning, expressing practice/theory differently, in this way sedimenting the ideas for the reader and ourselves, as a
worlding practice.
3. Here are some examples of diffractive readings of texts we re-turned to in the process of writing this article.
From Karen Barad’s oeuvre. For example, reading queer theory through Niels Bohr’s quantum physics. Writing
chapters in a book, as a diffraction apparatus (e.g. Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007) through which questions of
difference in the making e/merge and how these come to matter (ethical). Also, diffracting quantum theory
through the works of feminist and postcolonial authors, e.g., Trinh-Minh-Ha and Gloria Anzald

ua (Barad, 2014) and
Kyoko Hayashi (Barad, 2017a). She also diffracts the works of philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault and Butler and
}dinger’s cat (Barad, 2010, p. 243). Barad also diffracts diffraction (2014) re-
events such as clocktime, calculus, Schro
turning (not going back to the past but turning over and over again) to her previous papers and intra-actions with
Gloria Anzald

ua.
From posthumanist literature where two or more philosophers are diffracted through Barad and Haraway. For
example, with Whitehead (Seghal, 2014), through Bergson (Van der Tuin, 2014), de Beauvoir through Irigaray
12 K. MURRIS AND V. BOZALEK

(Geerts and Van der Tuin, 2016), Tronto through Haraway and Despret (Bozalek, 2016; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017)
and artist philosopher Ettinger (Thiele, 2014).
Reviewing academic papers. Reviewing papers from an affirmative position rather than doing epistemological
damage by taking up an external position (Bozalek, 2017; Bozalek et al., forthcoming).
From reviewing books. Rupturing conventional styles of book review writing that foreground (rational) critique, for
example, a diffractive reading of three books on posthuman, non-representational research in order to create a set
of propositions for postqualitative, nonrepresentational research (Murris, 2017c).
From diffracting concepts and ideas. For example, deconstructing the foundations of certain concepts and ideas, e.g.
‘secret’ (Murris & Haynes, 2018); seeing how contingency operates to secure the ‘foundations’ of the concepts we
cannot live without. And using that contingency to open up other possible meanings/matterings (see:
readerlywriters and writerlyreaders in: Bozalek, 2017).
These are transversal enquiries and encourage knowledge production to move cross disciplinary boundaries (see
e.g. Barad, 2007). For examples of transversal enquiries into concepts, see the concept ‘pet’ (Murris, 2017a) and
Haraway (2000) gives an example of diffraction in her own teaching where she shows how a safety pin may have
many meanings and contexts by diffracting the meaning of the safety pin in terms of its history in state regulatory
apparatuses.
From figurations of the teacher and teaching. Murris (2017b) offers a diffractive reading of three figurations of
the educator and reads two rhizomatic pedagogies through one another: Reggio Emilia and Philosophy
with Children (Murris, 2017a). Both queer the power producing binaries involved in student and teacher-
centred pedagogies.
4. Authors such as Erin Manning, who write about propositions, do in some cases, number the propositions –
see for example Manning (2016).
5. See page x for an explanation of phenomenon, which implies an entanglement of subject and object, without
discarding the human subject as part of knowledge production. In posthumanism, subjectivity is always
already understood from the perspective of a relational agential ontology.
6. Karen Barad led a workshop for the research project Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical
Posthumanism in Higher Education in June 2017 near Cape Town. See: www.decolonizingchildhood.org.
7. The diffractive methodology doesn’t break with the past (dis/continuity), unlike transhumanism and Object
Orientated Ontology which is apolitical and is orientated towards the future.
8. See Bozalek for more details on the entanglements of reading and writing
9. For example, Donna Haraway (2016, pp. 49–57) offers eight reasons why she prefers to distance herself from
the word ‘Anthropocene’ and explains why she prefers ‘Chthulucene’ – a tentacular thinking that disrupts the
human exceptionalism of the Anthropocene discourse.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa; under Grant numbers 98992 & 105851.

Notes on contributors
Karin Murris (PhD) is professor of pedagogy and philosophy at the School of Education, University of Cape Town
(UCT). Her research interests include philosophy of education, childhood studies and postqualitative research. She
was Principal Investigator of the research project Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in
Higher Education (2016–2018) funded by the South African National Research Foundation. www.decolonizingchild-
hood.org.
Vivienne Bozalek is a Professor of Social Work and the Director of Teaching and Learning at the University of the
Western Cape. She holds a PhD from Utrecht University. Her research interests and publications include the polit-
ical ethics of care and social justice, posthumanism and feminist new materialisms, innovative pedagogical practi-
ces in higher education, and post-qualitative and participatory methodologies.
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 13

ORCID
Karin Murris http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9613-7738
Vivienne Bozalek http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3212-1910

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