The “quantum” label has become a desirable brand in social studies, with notable prominence being given to Karen Barad’s agential realism, as presented in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway. This article provides an overview of the key ideas in the book, exemplifying the ways these ideas may help us “do inquiry” in the social sciences. By drawing from Barad’s writing and making comparisons with other social thinking with quantum elements, we can demonstrate the potential for productive and insightful avenues of investigation across interdisciplinary areas, particularly through a consideration of diffractive approaches to inquiry.
AbbottB. P.AbbottR.AbbottT. D.AbernathyM. R.AcerneseF.AckleyK., . . . LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration. (2016). Observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger. Physical Review Letters, 116, Article 061102. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102
2.
ÄnggårdE. (2016). How matter comes to matter in children’s nature play: Posthumanist approaches and children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 14, 77-90. doi:10.1080/14733285.2015.1004523
3.
BalabanA. T.KleinD. J. (2006). Is chemistry ‘The Central Science’? How are different sciences related? Co-citations, reductionism, emergence, and posets. Scientometrics, 69, 615-637. doi:10.1007/s11192-006-0173-2
4.
BaradK. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 283, 801-831.
5.
BaradK. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, UK: Duke University Press.
6.
BaradK. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3, 240-268.
7.
BaradK. (2011). Erasers and erasures: Pinch’s unfortunate “uncertainty principle.”Social Studies of Science, 41, 443-454. doi:10.1177/0306312711406317
BatesT. (2015). Cutting together-apart the mould. Antennae, 32, 44-66.
12.
BrøggerK. (2014). The ghosts of higher education reform: On the organisational processes surrounding policy borrowing. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 12, 520-541. doi:10.1080/14767724.2014.901905
13.
ChenM. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham, UK: Duke University Press.
14.
de FreitasE. (2017). Karen Barad’s quantum ontology and posthuman ethics: Rethinking the concept of relationality. Qualitative Inquiry, 23, 741-748. doi:10.1177/1077800417725359
15.
DeLandaM. (2015). Philosophical chemistry: Genealogy of a scientific field. London, England: Bloomsbury Academic.
FenwickT.EdwardsR. (2013). Performative ontologies: Sociomaterial approaches to researching adult education and lifelong learning. European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 4(1), 49-63. doi:10.3384/rela.2000-7426.rela0104
18.
FoxN. J.AlldredP. (2015). New materialist social inquiry: Designs, methods and the research-assemblage. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18, 399-414. doi:10.1080/13645579.2014.921458
HarawayD. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and technoscience (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
22.
HarmanG. (2016). Agential and speculative realism: Remarks on Barad’s ontology. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 30, e10. doi:10.20415/rhiz/030.e10
23.
HirdM. J.GiffneyN. (2016). Queering the non/human. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
24.
HollinG.ForysthI.GiraudG.PottsT. (2017). (Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics. Social Studies of Science, 47, 918-941.
25.
HultmanK.Lenz TaguchiH. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23, 525-542. doi:10.1080/09518398.2010.500628
26.
JacksonA. Y.MazzeiL. A. (2011). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. Abingdon, NY: Routledge.
27.
KirbyV. (2002). When all that is solid melts into language: Judith Butler and the question of matter. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, 7, 265-280. doi:10.1023/A:1020382712385
28.
KirbyV. (2011). Quantum anthropologies: Life at large. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
29.
KirbyV. (2017). What if culture was nature all along?Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
30.
LedfordH. (2015). How to solve the world’s biggest problems. Nature, 525, 308-311. doi:10.1038/525308a
31.
MauthnerN. (2015). ‘The past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold’: A posthumanist performative approach to qualitative longitudinal research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18, 321-336. doi:10.1080/13645579.2015.1022298
32.
MazzeiL. A. (2014). Beyond an easy sense: A diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 742-746. doi:10.1177/1077800414530257
33.
MjaalandT. (2017). Imagining the real: The photographic image and imagination in knowledge production. Visual Anthropology, 30, 1-21. doi:10.1080/08949468.2017.1255079
34.
O’BrienK. L. (2016). Climate change and social transformations: Is it time for a quantum leap?Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 7, 618-626. doi:10.1002/wcc.413
35.
TaylorC. A. (2013). Objects, bodies and space: Gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom. Gender and Education, 25, 688-703. doi:10.1080/09540253.2013.834864
36.
TaylorC. A.IvinsonG. (2013). Material feminisms: New directions for education. Gender and Education, 25, 665-670. doi:10.1080/09540253.2013.834617
37.
TownsendJ. (2000). A modern approach to quantum mechanics (1st ed.). Sausalito, CA: University Science Books.
38.
UlmerJ. B. (2016). Diffraction as a method of critical policy analysis. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48, 1381-1394. doi:10.1080/00131857.2016.1211001
39.
van der TuinI. (2011). “A different starting point, a different metaphysics”: Reading Bergson and Barad diffractively. Hypatia, 26, 22-42. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01114.x
van DoornN. (2011). Digital spaces, material traces: How matter comes to matter in online performances of gender, sexuality and embodiment. Media, Culture & Society, 33, 531-547. doi:10.1177/0163443711398692
42.
WarfieldK. (2016). Making the cut: An agential realist examination of selfies and touch. Social Media + Society, 2(2), 2056305116641706. doi:10.1177/2056305116641706
43.
WendtA. (2015). Quantum mind and social science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
44.
WoolgarS.LezaunJ. (2013). The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies?Social Studies of Science, 43, 321-340. doi:10.1177/0306312713488820
45.
ZoharD.MarshallI. (1995). The quantum society: Mind, physics and a new social vision. New York, NY: William Morrow.
