Accessible and useful 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. What makes this book special is how it actually practices agential realism by reconfiguring relationships between lecturer and student, expert and novice, supervisor and supervised, researcher and research participants. Radical conversations that are dis/continuing.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Glimpsing the Colours on the Palette: ° ’ ” Slowing Down Together/Apart
• Karin Murris and Vivienne Bozalek
• Chapter Night Sky: Temporal Diffraction: A Constellation *** of ‘New’ Electrifying Insights in Conversation with Karen Barad
• Vivienne Bozalek and Karin Murris
• Chapter Black Blood Matters: Moving Human and Non-human Bodies from ‘Question & Answer’ to a ‘Pedagogy of Questioning’
• Walter Kohan, Rose-Anne Reynolds and Karin Murris
• Chapter Red: Re-membering as a Sacred Practice
• Rose-Anne Reynolds
• Chapter Red Ochre: Marking Time, Marking Bodies: Relations Matter
• Theresa M. Giorza
• Chapter Teal: Re-searching Research: Troubling Lines as a Worlding Practice
• Joanne Peers
• Chapter Ultramarine: On Aftermaths, Afterlives and Afterimages
• Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton
• Chapter Red Brown: Gestures for Engineering and Medical Education: Drawing on Our Barad Encounter
• Siddique Motala and Veronica Mitchell
• Chapter Orange: Diffracting Drawing
• Kai Wood Mah and Patrick Lynn Rivers
• Chapter Iridescent: Th/reading through Mull: Cutting a Fashion Theory Course Together-Apart
• Nike Romano
• (No)End: Rainbow Æffects: Diffracting Colours and Futures Pallets
• Vivienne Bozalek and Karin Murris
• Index

About the editors

Karin Murris is Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Oulu, Finland, and Emerita Professor of Pedagogy and Philosophy, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is a teacher educator, grounded in academic philosophy and a postqualitative research paradigm.

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.

Paperback, Published in 2022, 206 pages with 66 black & white illustrations.