This MSc thesis explores a transmasculine embodiment through bodies, acts, and objects, from a new materialist perspective. The study is situated within the field of transgender studies, and the research question, ‘how can transmasculine embodiment through the materialities of the body and everyday acts and objects be understood through new materialism’, is answered through an autoethnography. Key findings are that a) a trans-becoming emerges through the phenomenon of meeting someone’s eyes, b) through material-discursive practices transmasculine people work with and against the body, and c) onto-epistemologies of race and gender emerge through the interplay of temporal, spatial, and corporeal processes.

Breathing and politics are not usually considered relevant to one another. Is it therefore possible to engage with breathing as a force of social justice? What kinds of atmospheres can corpomaterial dynamics of breathing help envision for the possibility for individuals and social groups to live breathable lives?

It is my aspiration here to argue that politics can take place not only in terms of governance, social movements, identity politics, and biopolitics but also in terms of quotidian bodily actions—such as breathing. By working with breath as a force that is common to all living and breathing (in this chapter, human) beings yet differential in its enactments, I propose a rethinking of politics in which corpomaterial actions matter—politics not based on universalizing, homogenizing, or essentializing understandings of embodiment or subjectivity but conceptualized and enacted intersectionally in their specific situatedness and dispersal in the individual and structural dynamics of power relations. This chapter of the volume, therefore, explores the possibility of such politics in relation to the quotidian practices of breathing.

At tænke med agential realisme introducerer til fysiker og feministisk tænker Karen Barads arbejde.
Agential realisme bearbejder forståelser af tid, rum, materialitet, kausalitet, agens, forskel, subjektivitet og objektivitet. Dette bringer Barad frem til en teoretisering af, hvordan verden og viden materialiseres, forvikles og forbindes.
Barads transdisciplinære projekt er udviklet gennem en original samtænkning af kvantefysik, med poststrukturalistisk, feministisk, queerteoretisk og postkolonial tænkning samt feministiske teknologi- og videnskabsstudier.
Agential realisme kan hjælpe med at åbne blikket for, hvad agentialiteter i forskningspraksisser og empiriske genstandsfelter kan være. Agential realisme er samtidig et bud på, hvordan man kan undersøge forskelsproduktion og hvordan man kan praktisere videnskab etisk forpligtet og ’response-abelt’ - et bidrag til videnskabsfilosofisk tænkning om vidensproduktionens forhold til etik, politik og retfærdighed.

Hvor agential realisme også er et bidrag til naturvidenskaben, er nærværende bog først og fremmest et bidrag til human- og samfundsvidenskaben, samt til de, som arbejder henover vante skel mellem natur- og kulturvidenskaberne.
Bogen rummer to dele. Første del giver indblik i agential realistisk tænkning og begreber. Anden del demonstrerer, hvordan man kan sætte analysearbejde i gang. Omdrejningspunktet er statuen Freedom, som Danmark i 2017 modtog som gave fra det tidligere Dansk Vestindien i forbindelse med 100-års markeringen af salget til USA. Med dette omdrejningspunkt trækkes der på postkolonial tænkning og forskning om koloniale relationer konkret. Dermed er bogen også et specifikt eksempel på at tænke med agential realisme.

Throughout my fieldwork on the island of Trinidad, my interlocutors told me
“don’t study people” because it might lead one to “take on” the thoughts
and feelings of others as a kind of weight. In this article, I consider how
this cautionary adage about the dangers of proximity reframes:1) the act of
studying others through ethnography, and 2) Liberal understandings of the
person and society. Within academia’s critique of the modern West, proximity is generally assumed to be good, while individualism is considered a pernicious (and often-isolating) Western assumption. Shifting focus from binaries to entanglements, individuals to dividuals, distanced observation to vulnerability, or from informants to friends are ethically valued shifts. I suggest that the dangers of “studying people” at my field site in southern Trinidad question the limits of this framework and illustrate the importance of disentanglement for my interlocutors. My interlocutors saw individualism (manifested as stubborn recalcitrance to others’ wishes) as a valued characteristic. Yet, rather than assuming the individual as a pre-existing entity, my interlocutors saw individualism as a tenuous creation potentially threatened by “studying” others. Liberalism rests on the opposed (yet complementary) visions of the solitary individual and the togetherness of society, with the former figure at the center of Western modernity and the latter image allegedly found in traditional, premodern, or non-Western places. Instead of illustrating Romantic notions of community, however, togetherness was a key site of danger for my interlocutors in southern Trinidad. In this way, the milieu of what I call “agonistic egalitarianism” leads me to question two common assumptions structuring ideas about personhood and ethnography: that individualism is a disaggregating Western project and that proximity to others necessarily leads to trust and understanding.

Keywords: Ethics of ethnography, Caribbean, Trinidad, individualism,
agonism, egalitarianism, autology, genealogical society.

In recent years there has been a considerable intensification in practices of producing, analysing, visualising and utilising educational data, though we currently know little about how data practices unfold in the everyday life of schools. This thesis contributes a detailed analysis of the production and performance of educational data practices in one English secondary school and explores how they worked to reconfigure the possibilities for thinking and doing education. In this study I adopted an ethnographic perspective, using aspects of a sociomaterial agential realist approach to understand how material-discursive data practices surrounding pupil performance within a single school produced and constrained ‘education’.

This thesis argues that the thinking and doing of education was being reconfigured through data practices in three ways. First, the curriculum was reconfigured as assessment through algorithmic triage devices that created differential access to some subjects for different groups of students. As a result, the English curriculum was re-organised around a set of disaggregated, content-free skills orientated towards the demands of intensified data practices. Second, teachers’ professional knowledge and judgement were being systematically excluded to produce data as a more ‘objective’ and legitimate way of knowing, and their professionalism re-orientated towards an engagement with data. Third, data practices focused student and staff attention towards pupils’ futures. This, rather than their present, was what mattered most to the school. Three different, incompatible orientations towards data futures were produced: normative, predictive and probabilistic, catching teachers and pupils in the impossibility of reconciling them. Data practices in the school appeared to be a totalising machine, producing education as a cybernetic system that excluded everything outside it from mattering. Yet there were also moments where the production and effects of data practices were interrupted, destabilised and contradictory, suggesting potential openings for constituting education differently.

While the concept of communication has long been bound to a reductive model of the exchange of information, very few scholars of communication would argue that these assumptions are realistic, without a long list of qualifying caveats. But the concept of communication, built from the integration of semiotic signification with the idea of information as the 'carrier' of transmitted meaning, is so deeply ingrained and simple that even displacing it can seem futile, if not absurd. Nevertheless, these foundational assumptions tightly constrain the ways in which any interactional phenomena can be conceived--and constraints upon our ways of understanding communication drastically limit our capacity to understand our worlds and the social processes that generate them, at any scale or level of abstraction. 

Communication as Gesture traces the concept of communication from its roots in classical rhetoric to its integration in structural linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics, integrating perspectives from contemporary rhetorical theory, relational psychology, interactional sociology, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, multimodal semiotics, and more. Because so much of our contemporary world is lived with and through digital media technologies, the study of new media and social media provides a rich illustration of the constraints imposed by our reductive assumptions--and hints at the possibilities generated by rethinking them. The gesture theory of communication introduced presents a dimensional account of communication that is intuitively accessible and theoretically rich while overturning reductive assumptions of the linear character of interaction.

https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Communication-as-Gesture/?k=9781787565166

In this piece I attempt to address the ways in which Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands: La Frontera (2007), negotiates the idea of the border as having both discursive and material dimensions. In creating a new mestiza consciousness from the borderland, which is the space that is affected by the borderline, Anzaldúa develops concepts and ideas that can be linked to Donna Haraway’s articulation of the cyborg and to Karen Barad’s theory of an agential realist ontology in the sense that Anzaldúa engages creatively with contradicting parts of her identity in a cyborgian fashion, and sees the enactment of borders as both limiting and empowering, as having emotional and material effects. Anzaldúa then addresses these effects and demonstrates how she applies them in the fabrication of a new consciousness, the consciousness of the new mestiza. In this work, therefore, I explore how the border makes itself physically present in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and how the discursive meets matter; and I do this by finding common threads and possible connections among the works of Anzaldúa, Haraway, and Barad.

A transdisciplinary research project investigated the idea of framing climate and environmental change (CEC) as a new type of threat: a hyperthreat.

Traditional military analytical methods were used to assess the hyperthreat and its context and develop ideas about how an adequate response could be conceived.

This approach contrasts to prior literature and longstanding geopolitical discourse that identify the risks of taking a securitization approach.

Instead, the author argues that it is now riskier not to consider CEC within a mainstream geopolitical and nation-state security strategy.

When the hyperthreat of CEC is centered as the main threat to be contained, and its relationship to other threats is analyzed, startling new pathways to stability emerge.

The research developed a new theoretical approach called “entangled security” to develop an initial new “grand narrative” and “grand strategy” (PLAN E). This article offers a vision of how military theory can be reimagined to support new policy directions and security priorities.

Cele mai des intalnite forme de poluare sunt: poluarea apei, poluarea solului, poluarea aerului (atmosferica). Aceste elemente de baza vietii omenesti se pare ca sunt si cele mai afectate de actiunile iresponsabile ale fiintei omenesti.Solul, ca si aerul si apa este un factor de mediu cu influenta deosebita asupra sanatatii. De calitatea solului depinde formarea si protectia surselor de apa, atat a celei de suprafata cat mai ales a celei subterane.

The aim of this paper is threefold and I seek to make contributions of both empirical and theoretical significance, whilst refusing a hygienic separation of ontology and epistemology: (1) I examine the claim that AN is a "biologically based, serious mental [illness] (BBMI)" (Klump et al., 2009, p. 97) and re-assemble the onto-epistemological landscape to show how this formulation is held in place and co-produced by a number of social, political and institutional interests. (2) I propose metatheoretically, and demonstrate through writing this paper, a form of critical engagement with neuroscience and genetics research on AN that does not insist on the 'reductive' effects of neuro/genocentric inquiry, but rather seeks to elaborate its inherent complexity. (3) I invoke entanglement in order to reconceptualise AN as biopsychosocial phenomena according to Barad's technical description of phenomena as the ongoing flow of agency between ontologically indeterminate entities in their differential becoming (2003, p. 818). Furthermore, I suggest empirical support for this reconceptualization can be found within the neuroscience and genetics literature itself.

Rozprawa stanowi próbę ukazania w jaki sposób splątane konceptualizacje i praktyki ciała przenikają się w procesie samoorganizacji materii. Tak sformułowane rozważania zostały usytuowane w obrębie dwóch współczesnych nurtów filozoficznych: posthumanizmu i nowego materializmu. Przedstawicieli i przedstawicielki tych formacji myślowych łączy potrzeba przemyślenia sposobów stawania się materii, uchwytnych w dynamice przeistaczających się ciał. Tego rodzaju ukierunkowanie rozważań umożliwia rozumienie cielesności w kategoriach procesów, relacji, zależności, a także wspólnotowości. Nieodłącznym wątkiem tak sformułowanych filozoficznych dociekań są analizy poświęcone powiązaniom ludzkich i nie-ludzkich przejawów sprawczości. W takim ujęciu myślenie i ruch, zachodzące w układach powiązanych ciał, stanowią nierozerwalne przejawy aktywności materii. W związku z tym filozoficzne spekulacje zostały połączone z analizą praktyk ciała wywodzących się z tańca, performance, sztuk wizualnych itp., aby umożliwić lepsze zrozumienie ich wzajemnego przenikania się w procesie samoorganizacji materii, a tym samym w przekształceniach współdziałających ciał. Słowa kluczowe: konceptualizacje ciała, praktyki ciała, ciało, materia, cielesność, posthumanizm, nowy materializm

This article is a theory-building exercise which focuses on Baradian agential realism in the process of building a framework of key concepts and their inter-relationships to show how and why this perspective matters to social work. It makes a statement about the relevance of agential realism, in the writings of Karen Barad and other feminist posthumanist thinkers, to rethink fundamental concepts which are embedded in social work discourse, especially those humanist notions that relate to agency, subjectivity and reflection. It charts how agential realism can become foundational for social work knowledge. The article is intended both as an introduction to the thought of Barad and as a mapping of current agential realist scholarly trajectories. It guides the reader through the conceptual terrain of agential realist thought by explicating the key concepts of intra-action, entanglement, diffraction and agential cuts. In order to furnish an accessible engagement with Baradian theory the article marshals case studies, drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research, which relate to social work. It concludes by showing how agential realism can provide a rich ontological framework for social work and highlights how it disrupts some of our long held cherished beliefs about what it means to do social work.

TITLE: Schizophrenic Matter. About the Production of Bodies, Concepts and Subjectivitys

ABSTRACT ENG: Agential realism is a perspective situated within the new materialism and posthumanism which combines philosophical and physical issues. Karen Barad, feminist thinker and creator of agential realism mixes poststructuralism ideas (Michel Foucault) and feminist critical theories with quantum physics, in particular with Niels Bohr’s thesis, one of the founders of this field. The main purpose of this article is to show the relations between agential realism and ideas presented by Deleuze and Guattari in one of their most famous books–Anti-Oedipus. Author of the paper focuses on the presentation of a processual ontology (especially on an explanation of how bodies, concepts, and objects are produced) resulting from the engagement of both perspectives.

Abstrakt PL. Realizm sprawczy jest współczesnym stanowiskiem, mieszczącym się w obrębie nowego materializm i posthumanizmu, łączącym zagadnienia z zakresu filozofii i fizyki. Jego twórczyni, Karen Barad, feministyczna myślicielka, wiąże ze sobą rozważania z zakresu poststrukturalizmu (Michel Foucault), krytycznych teorii feministycznych z odkryciami współczesnej fizyki kwantowej, wynikającymi z twierdzeń przyjętych przez jednego z fundatorów tej dziedziny wiedzy – Nielsa Bohra. Celem artykułu jest ukazanie pokrewieństw zachodzących pomiędzy realizmem sprawczym oraz rozważaniami Deleuze'a i Guattariego, przedstawionym w Anty-Edypie. Autor skupia się na zaprezentowaniu procesualnej ontologii (objaśnieniu w jaki sposób produkowane są ciała, pojęcia i przedmioty) wynikającej z zazębiania się obydwóch stanowisk.

Książka stanowi oryginalną propozycję filozoficznego spojrzenia na epokę antropocenu oraz kryzysu klimatycznego. Nawiązuje do takich współczesnych nurtów filozoficznych, jak nowy materializm (Karen Barad, Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway), realizm spekulatywny (Graham Harman) oraz ontologia zwrócona ku przedmiotom (Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant).

Barad, Karen, Agentieller Realismus, aus dem Engl. v. Jürgen Schröder, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M 2012 (122 S., br" 12€) Verf. ist Nachfolgerin von Donna Haraway am Feminist Studies Department der University of California. Haraways Aufsatz, »Gender for a marxist dictionary« (1991), der ihr Verfassen des Stichworts »Geschlecht« fürs HKWM zum Thema hat (vgl. 9, Fn 1), ist einer der Referenztexte für die Thesen, mit denen der Bd. einsetzt: Die semiotische und linguistische Wende in den Geistes-und Sozialwissenschaften habe der »Sprache zu viel Macht« eingeräumt, sodass letztlich jedes Ding, ja die Materie selbst, zu einer »sprachlichen Angelegenheit oder einer anderen Form von kultureller Repräsentation« (7) zu werden scheine. Auch performative Verständnisse diskursiver Praktiken, wie jene von Judith Butler oder Michel Foucault, die die Macht der Wörter anzweifelten, »eine vorgän gige ontologische Wirklichkeit« (8) widerzuspiegeln, konnten sich nicht gänzlich davon lösen, Materie als etwas Passives zu behandeln, gleichsam als »Endprodukt diskursiver Akte« (40). Da Butler sich auf Foucaults Begriff der regulativen Macht wie auf den der Diskurspraktiken beziehe, die sich »auf den Bereich menschlicher Sozialpraktiken« (40) beschränkten, begrenze sie sich auf den menschlichen Körper, während die »Eigenart technisch-wissenschaftlicher Praktiken und ihre tiefgreifenden produktiven Wirkungen auf menschliche Körper sowie die Art und Weise, wie diese Praktiken tief in die Konstitution des Menschseins und allgemeiner in die Wirkungsweisen von Macht einbezogen sind« (30), unbeachtet blieben.

Over the past two decades sociology, including the sociology of family and personal life, has seen a ‘relational turn’ with a growing body of work seeking to explain the ‘social’ by taking social relations as the primary object of sociological analyses. Relational sociologies theorise relations in social terms as either inter-actions or trans-actions. Inter-actions are relations that bring separate entities together, while trans-actions posit a relation of interdependence between entities. This article introduces a third way of conceptualising relationality as intra-actions drawing on the posthumanist relational ontology proposed by feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad. Intra-actions are understood as social-natural or material-discursive relations of ontological inseparability and mutual constitution. Using illustrative examples from the author’s research, the article suggests that Barad’s relational ontology offers a fruitful and distinctive ontological underpinning for relational sociology and for relational approaches to theorising and studying family practices.

This practice-led PhD thesis proposes a radical reconceptualisation of painting independent of its traditional means of production: painting is the singular multiplicity of material-discursive practices cohering around ‘facing’, which names the intra-active event of ‘seeing all at once’. This and other original categorisations (such as ‘work-of-violence’, ‘painting-as-a-body’, ‘painting-for-screens’ among others) emerge from analyses of artworks that were produced either during the PhD or personally encountered. They radically reposition the artwork as an event rather than a medium and define ways in which different paintings function in terms of ‘intra-action’ and ‘diffraction’ instead of identity and reflexion. Within the consistently sensuous, non-ontological frame of ‘mattering’, such conceptual propositions are not prescriptive or totalizing. Rather, they are intended as a means for setting the images of painting and art out of equilibrium. That is, in the discontinuous/intense state from which such categories have first emerged. In this respect, the thesis structure aims at rendering the way in which artworks and arguments have cohered in an entangled singularity as research in which sense has performatively informed questions.
By focusing on a discursive method along the methodological lines of Barad, Golding, Lyotard and Stengers, the research contributes to the current debate among continental philosophy, ‘wild sciences’ and fine art by introducing conceptualisations such as ‘slowing up’, ‘artwork-in-potency’, and ‘sense of self’ (intended as the contingent pattern that implicitly embodies normality, thus making a non-directly detectable, yet grounding difference). Further contributions encompass diffractive reconceptualisations, e.g. ‘beauty’ as adequate degree of differentiation and ‘homage art’ as a methodology of art reception that is intrinsically one of art production. By moving away from the mainstream understanding of originality as creation ex nihilo and rethinking artistic agency in terms of a coincidence of care and risk-taking not belonging to the artist exclusively, the thesis offers a significant and unique contribution to methods for practice-led research and rethinks art as a non-hierarchical environment for sensuous experimentation.

This paper situates data practices in Japan in a diffractive genealogy of surveillance capitalism. It puts data conceptualized in three ways into focus: real data, data in information banks, and data of the super app LINE. While technology embodying these concepts of data is mainly used in Asia, this technology is entangled with discourses and legislation in Europe and practices of U.S. American surveillance capitalism in important aspects. This article empirically traces these entanglements and demonstrates how discourses around data sovereignty, geopolitical shifts, historical background, global political and economic trends, and international policies intermingle in contemporary accounts of data and digital sovereignty in Japanese context. Decolonial theory is consulted in order to account for Japan's recent past as a non-Western territorial empire and the privileged position that Japanese experts on data have in the drafting of international data policies.

Barad’s interpretation of quantum physics expands the sociological debate beyond the classical context of interrelated pairs of opposites, i.e. culture-nature, spirit- matter, subject-object, that have dualised Western civilisation and enabled the emergence of systems of dominance and exploitation. Barad’s body of work is a call to account for the constitutive exclusions that have differentially constituted the ‘other’ as inferior to the self. This paper offers an overview of Barad’s onto-epistemological framework of agential realism with an emphasis on the essential relationality−quantum entanglement–it supposes between “I” and “thou”, between all material (ising) entities. It introduces the framework to readers in the social sciences and invites a critical reconsideration of the question of how things / bodies come to matter, and what the consequences are. For a profound understanding, it offers an account of Barad’s methodology of diffraction and the reworked notions of responsibility and ethical accountability that this framework entails. Finally, it argues that Barad’s contribution is relevant, across the hard sciences scientific and humanistic disciplines, due to its invitation to think of ourselves and our knowledge practices as entangled within the world, ontologically inseparable from its flow of materialisation, and ethically responsible for the discursive and material practices we are enacting.

Rheomorphia is my master's dissertation for LUCA School of Arts. It covers the topic of aesthetics from a Mortonian object-oriented approach and attempts to move away from an anthropo- and egocentric worldview. To this end, a variety of topics are discussed — such as the liminality of human language and its discord with the aesthetic, gender- and queer theory; new media art practices, trickster mythology, cyborgs and rheomorphs; animal phenomenology; and also sound and resonant events.

Against the backdrop of the broad reception of Karen Barad's framework of agential realism, it comes as a surprise that there has been little discussion so far of her core concept of diffraction in the social studies of science. This article aims to evaluate the methodological potentials of a diffractive approach for science studies. In order to achieve this, I will examine Barad's take on quantum mechanics, which serves as the foundation for her ethico-onto-epistemological framework of agential realism. In doing so, I will unpack the crucial role played by diffraction in reworking the relation between the objects of observation and the agencies of observation, and subsequently in reshaping the question of the referent of objectivity. Building on this analysis, I propose the notion of the researcher as transducer, demonstrating how such a take allows for the emergence of an understanding of the researcher as themselves materializing in intra-action with other human and more-than-human forces and practices. As I will show, such a diffractive approach not only shifts our attention even more to the performative power of research as a material practice but also to the constitutive nature of knowledge-making practices, along with their ethical and political implications.

In response to the claim that our sense of will is illusory, some philosophers have called for a better understanding of the phenomenology of agency. Although I am broadly sympathetic with the tenor of this response, I question whether the positive-theoretic blueprint it promotes truly heralds a tenable undertaking. Marshaling a Schopenhauerian insight, I examine the possibility that agency might not be amenable to phenomenological description. Framing this thesis in terms of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic framework, I suggest a way to integrate the idea of streaming experiences with that of bodily strivings, which, owing to their primitive structure, can never be represented.

Zürich: diaphanes, 2016, pp. 515-540. Please refer to the final published version for citation.] 2 Karen Barad Real werden. Technowissenschaftliche Praktiken und die Materialisierung der Realität »Aber der Körper steht auch unmittelbar im Feld des Politischen; die Machtverhältnisse legen ihre Hand auf ihn; sie umkleiden ihn, markieren ihn, dressieren ihn, martern ihn, zwingen ihn zu Arbeiten, verpflichten ihn zu Zeremonien, verlangen von ihm Zeichen […] Andererseits richtet sich diese Macht nicht einfach als Verpflichtung oder Verbot an diejenigen, welche ›sie nicht haben‹; sie sind ja von der Macht eingesetzt, die Macht verläuft über sie und durch sie hindurch; sie stützt sich auf sie, ebenso wie diese sich in ihrem Kampf gegen sie darauf stützen, daß sie von der Macht durchdrungen sind.« 1 (Michel Foucault, Überwachen und Strafen) Kraft wird durch wiederholte Druckausübung auf den Körper übertragen. Der Körper reagiert auf die Kräfte, die als materielle Spannungsanpassungen undveränderungen manifest werden. Er wird dabei nicht nur zum Empfänger, sondern gleichzeitig auch zum Sender oder zur lokalen Quelle jenes Signals oder Zeichens, das durch ihn operiert. Es ist diese Empfänglichkeit des Körpers, die ihn zum Effekt und Instrument von Visualisierungstechnologien macht. Während sich Foucaults Ausführungen auf den menschlichen Körper beziehen, ist der Gegenstand meiner Überlegungen der piezoelektrische Kristall. Wird auf einen piezoelektrischen Kristall Druck ausgeübt, strahlt er ein elektrisches Signal aus, das verstärkt und visuell dargestellt werden kann […]. Sind piezoelektrische Kristalle umgekehrt jedoch einem elektrischen Feld ausgesetzt, verformen sie sich. Wirkt, genauer gesagt, ein elektrisches Signal auf den Kristall ein, dehnt sich dieser, abhängig von der Polarität des Signals, 1 Michel Foucault: Überwachen und Strafen, Frankfurt a.M. 1994, S. 37. 3 entweder aus oder zieht sich zusammen. […]. Hochfrequent schwingende Signale lassen den Kristall vibrieren, was zur Übertragung von Ultraschallwellen führt. Der piezoelektrische Effekt wurde erstmals im Jahr 1880 von Pierre und Jacques Curie beobachtet. Dank der dualen Einsetzbarkeit des Kristalls als Sender und Empfänger ist er heute Schlüsselbestandteil eines besonders scharfen Beobachtungsapparates -des Ultraschallkopfs [transducer]. In diesem Text argumentiere ich, dass der piezoelektrische Kristall ein materielles Instrument, die ›Seele‹ eines Beobachtungsapparates ist, durch das nicht nur Signale, sondern auch Diskurse operieren. Indem ich die Kopplung dieses Instruments mit einer Reihe von Apparaten untersuche, verwende ich den piezoelektrischen transducer als Werkzeug, um die Beziehung zwischen dem Materiellen und dem Diskursiven zu untersuchen. Diese Beziehung steht im Zentrum eines philosophischen Ansatzes, den ich als agentiellen Realismus bezeichne.

The common academic view asserts that funerary monuments were used as status markers, communicating various identifications of the deceased, simultaneously distinguishing them as singularized social personae, and placing them within the various groups of social peers. Funerary monuments are seen as discursive devices and rhetoric statements about the dead, produced and capitalized by the living. Nevertheless, drawing from ‘posthumanism’ perspectives, the question arises whether the ‘objects’ of funerary monumental-epigraphic practice could be instead understood as ‘subjects’ of agency per se. The paper discusses the possibility that funerary monuments were comprehended as ‘living things’ and interactive members of (local/residential/family) communities, mediating between this and ‘other’ worlds. Through their materiality, by appropriation of identification data, visual representations of the deceased or allegoric references to their lives, along with the spatial association to the resting place of a body, and the part played in mortuary ritualized behaviors, funerary monuments could have assumed the role of the reified biographical entities. Their capacity to integrate various concepts, mobilize different meanings and practices, articulate ‘the presence of the absent’ and the state of ‘in-betweenness’ could have made them powerful incarnated agents in their own right. Using the postulates of actor-network and theory entanglement theories the papers offers a view on how could inscribed funerary monuments participate in the network of relationalities between the living and dead, past, present and future and in what ways could they acted as material part of the concept of the deceased.

In recent years, feminist activists in various Latin American countries have been creating digital maps of feminicide –the gender-related violent deaths of women. The intersection of activism and mapping has been explored by scholars and activists who have addressed the performative, participatory and political nature of mapping, and by feminist scholars who have analysed and advocated for  mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to be reclaimed by and for women, and for feminist thinking and action. In this essay, I use the case of the Feminicidio Uruguay map and draw from some of the ideas of new materialism in order to put forward a novel methodological approach to study such an intersection.  An approach that might reveal more complex understandings of the agency of digital things that are created in the disobedient appropriation of everyday objects, such as Google Maps.

Ivan Petrella proposes revisiting basic principles of Latin American liberation theology in order to construct a new historical project for liberation theology that is capable of offering new solutions to emerging crises in economic, political, social and environmental realms, both in the North and South. The research question of this paper is: Can agential realism, developed by Karen Barad, constitute a methodology which allows for the construction of a new historical project for liberation theology? My hypothesis is that agential realism has an unprecedented capacity to grasp and understand reality in its complexity, and allows for practical applications of acquired insights in favour of balanced social, political, and economical solutions.
This paper is based on the book Theology and Praxis, the comprehensive elaboration of liberation theology’s methodology written by Clodovis Boff. Being written in the 1970s, it shows significant shortcomings in light of recent research on methodology conducted in the fields of critical theory and social studies. Boff’s method is revisited in light of Karen Barad’s methodology of agential realism. Barad challenges our understanding of relations between ontology, epistemology and ethics.
In order to explore the capacity of agential realism to lay the foundations for a new historical project, I test its features in the grassroots movement of the Cenacolo community. The mission of the movement is to empower people from the margins of the society, mainly (but not exclusively) drug addicts.
In the first chapter I give an overview of Boff’s method. In the second chapter I present Petrella’s critique of Boff. The third chapter presents agential realism. The fourth chapter tests the features of agential realism in the practical liberation theology settings of the Cenacolo community. The fifth chapter explores the capacity of agential realism to lay the methodological foundations for the new historical project of liberation theology. The sixth chapter presents the results of the research.
The results show that the methodology of agential realism significantly adds to the capacity of liberation theology to manage complex issues. Binary oppositions are resolved by differentiations which distinguish but do not exclude; the dynamism of agential realism is an empowering mechanism and is highly applicable in pastoral settings; agential realism’s ethical concerns, based on response-ability, contribute to balanced views on relations between rich and poor, promoting gradual change rather than augmenting conflicts; and the principle of diffraction is a useful tool in relating eschatological and earthly issues.
As agential realism has not been yet explored as a theological tool, many questions are still to be answered. The new aspects that are touched on here are ways for further research on the applicability of agential realism within theology, and, in particular, in the shaping of a new historical project for liberation theology.

This chapter aims at exploring Ferrante's construction of subject identities in the novel The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante which can be linked, on the one hand, to  Karen Barad's neo-materialism and, on the other hand, to the author’s intention of re-programming the cognitive subject in a posthuman direction. The protagonist's loss of contact with any logical process grounded on causality and space-time relations is compared with Lina's "smarginatura" in the Neapolitan Novels. In The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante starts exploring the concept, which will be further defined in her most recent novels that reality is not an object of knowledge  external to the cognitive subject but rather a “doing” or “becoming” in which subjects and objects are radically enmeshed and entangled with one another. The protagonist is thus presented not as a victim of the events but rather as one of the agents in this process of concurrent causes where all elements involved are equally weighted. In this "performative" reality, a decisive role for the reinstatement of order and rationality in the moral subject is played by the dog Otto, which represents a cathartic element and a turning point in the cognitive process of the protagonist. Otto’s death becomes an existential metaphor and the poignant symbol of the need to acquire a posthuman conscience.

This chapter illustrates how binarism is overcome through the active process of “becoming posthuman” in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Drawing on Barad’s notion of the world of phenomena as “intra-acting agency,” Ferrara describes the emergence of the interconnected identity of the characters of Elena and Lina as they confront their fear of merging with the environmental and technological “other” precisely by losing their singularity. The act of writing in Ferrante becomes the means by which the posthuman subject may successfully become “singular plural” (Nancy) and bridge the gap with the world of phenomena. Interconnected identity helps illustrating Ferrante’s struggle with an embodied notion of singular authorship as opposed to a dispersed, collaborative, “polyphonic” idea of cultural production rooted in digital culture.

Inspired by Karen Barad's views I search for an answer to the question: how can we include without excluding at the same time? This question brings into view the aporia of the discourse on exclusions, which manifests that struggle against violence invariably causes a violence of another kind. Barad takes the metaphysical point of view, according to which the world is a whole rather than composed of separate objects. From the perspective of category of " entanglement " she proposes to rethink some fundamental dichotomies: nature–culture, object–subject, body–mind, and, perhaps, to change our understanding of the mechanisms of exclusion.

"All bodies, including but not limited to human bodies, come to matter through the world's iterative intra-activity, its performativity. Boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted through the intra-activity of mattering. Differentiating is not about radical exteriorities (…) but rather what I call agential separability. That is, differentiating is not about Othering, separating, but on the contrary, about making connections and commitments. So the very nature of materiality itself is an entanglement." — Karen Barad

In context of the posthumanism we shall see art as a territory " in between " – between the area of pure knowledge and of culture. It is in art where take place the processes of working through a difficult relationships between our particular ideas about the world and its objectified and rationalized scientific version. In my paper I will deal with the relationship between human and animal existing in contemporary art from a perspective of a bi-directional gaze, generated either in the direction of an animal, or of a man.

In works such as Jannis Kounellis's Horses (1969), or performance I Like America and America Likes Me by Joseph Beuys (1974) we observe a transformation of the meaning of animal as a being, which is a result of its relocation from real world to the context of an art gallery. Through this decontextualisation, the animal as a being is re-sanctioned, and human gaze is redirected, so that the boundary between nature and culture is erased in the most literal dimension.

Starting with these art history classics, I will try to outline the game with shifting gaze in modern culture, which reflects a major change in the relation: man vs. animal. This change, dictated by latest discoveries in science, and hence, by the fascination with biological dimension of our existence, is a contribution to a reflection on, perhaps a bit frightening question: " Who is here looking at whom? ". According to John Berger, the ontological separation of human beings from animals occurred along with the development of western bourgeois society and with the birth of the zoo in the second half of the nineteenth century (the first zoo was opened to the public in 1847 in London). In the zoo institution incarcerated animals were brought to a role of exposed objects, observed from a distance by a man, standing on the opposite side of the bars.

In works of artists such as Carsten Höller, Patricia Piccinini, Janet Laurence, Danielle van Ark, Hayden Fowler, the direction of gaze is being reversed, which leads to intuitive discovery of the mutual gazes' sameness, and at the same time, to a cognitive unity that Karen Barad writes about: "feeling, desiring and experiencing are not singular characteristics or capacities of human consciousness. Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers."

How might some recent philosophical critiques grouped under the rubric of a 'new materialism' be brought to bear productively on creative writing practice and pedagogy? This article argues that the new materialism's particular – and particularly intensified – awareness of the materiality of the writing process and of its textual products can be useful for writers. I consider how the environment in which one creates might look on a new materialist view, outlining what I propose to be one of its central features: the clinamen. I describe how feminist physicist Karen Barad's concept of intra-activity can be used to view the writing environment as a posthuman assemblage of intra-acting relata, before proposing the figure of the clinamen as able to describe the movement of matter within this assemblage. My argument, ultimately, is that this movement is conducive to the production of novelty in both writing experience and product: it is through the unpredictability of the clinamen's movement that new textual directions can be brought about. I make reference to my own creative process on this score – taking as examples a collaborative writing workshop I led and an exhibited work of conceptual writing – in order to demonstrate some ways in which new materialisms can prove useful for the proliferation of writing.