Diffracted Worlds - Diffractive Readings


Book Description

Diffraction patterns in quantum physics evidence the fact that the behavior of matter is the result of its entanglements with measurement, or as Karen Barad suggests, the entanglement of matter and meaning. In this sense, therefore, phenomena (including texts, cultural agents, or life forms) are the results of their relational, onto-epistemological entanglements and not individual entities that separately pre-exist their joint becoming. As such, ‘diffraction’ proposes a new understanding of difference: no longer a dualist understanding, but one going beyond binaries. Diffraction is about patterns, constellations, relationalities. From this angle, the book explores ‘diffraction’, which has begun to impact critical theories and humanities debates, especially via (new) materialist feminisms, STS and quantum thought, but is often used without further reflection upon its implications or potentials. Doing just that, the book also pursues new routes for the onto-epistemological and ethical challenges that arise from our experience of the world as relational and radically immanent; because if we start from the ideas of immanence and entanglement, our conceptions of self and other, culture and nature, cultural and sexual difference, our epistemological procedures and disciplinary boundaries have to be rethought and adjusted. The book offers an in-depth consideration of ‘diffraction’ as a quantum understanding of difference and as a new critical reading method. It reflects on its import in humanities debates and thereby also on some of the most inspiring work recently done at the crossroads of science studies, feminist studies and the critical humanities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Parallax.




Diffracted Worlds - Diffractive Readings


Book Description

Diffraction -proposes a new understanding of difference beyond binaries. Reflecting on the term's implications and potentials, the book pursues new routes for our onto-epistemological and ethical responses to a fundamentally relational and entangled world. This book was originally published as a special issue of Parallax.




Diffractive Reading


Book Description

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different ‘agential cuts’ in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading’s intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.




New Materialism


Book Description




Entangled Worlds


Book Description

Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world “He” created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, “enlightened” Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, “primitive,” and “animist” non-Europe on the other. The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms—and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity? While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of “the new materialism.” Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.




Meeting the Universe Halfway


Book Description

A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.




Practice Theory and Education


Book Description

Practice Theory and Education challenges how we think about ‘practice’, examining what it means across different fields and sites. It is organised into four themes: discursive practices; practice, change and organisations; practising subjectivity; and professional practice, public policy and education. Contributors to the collection engage and extend practice theory by drawing on the legacies of diverse social and cultural theorists, including Bourdieu, de Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Dewey, Latour, Marx, and Vygotsky, and by building on the theoretical trajectories of contemporary authors such as Karen Barad, Yrjo Engestrom, Andreas Reckwitz, Theodore Schatzki, Dorothy Smith, and Charles Taylor. The proximity of ideas from different fields and theoretical traditions in the book highlight key matters of concern in contemporary practice thinking, including the historicity of practice; the nature of change in professional practices; the place of discursive material in practice; the efficacy of refiguring conventional understandings of subjectivity and agency; and the capacity for theories of practice to disrupt conventional understandings of asymmetries of power and resources. Their juxtaposition also points to areas of contestation and raises important questions for future research. Practice Theory and Education will appeal to postgraduate students, academics and researchers in professional practice and education, and scholars working with social theory. It will be of particular interest to those who wish to move beyond the limiting configurations of practice found in contemporary neoliberal, new managerialist and narrow representationalist discourses.




A World Scientific Encyclopedia Of Business Storytelling, Set 2: Methodologies And Big Data Analysis Of Business Storytelling (In 5 Volumes)


Book Description

This set of multi-reference works is meant to be read together as the five volumes interlace one another like the laces of a shoe in the famous painting by Vincent van Gogh. The question of who will wear the shoes is long debated in art history and philosophy. If we take these five volumes from different points of view on the theory and practice of business storytelling then we have a crisscrossing, a new and impressive dialogue for the reader. This set is presented as a new way to lace up the laces of business storytelling.Volume 1 aims to help and inspire leaders, business owners, and researchers in creating a commitment to ethical and sustainable changes and ideas, and live in a world of high complexity without getting stressed but experiencing freedom instead.The book combines tools, case studies, and theories about the ethical change-management method of True Storytelling and other perspectives and views on ethics and storytelling. It delves into important topics such as true storytelling sustainability and freedom, storytelling and start-ups in the health industry, storytelling and diversity and culture, storytelling and teams, storytelling, sustainability and the UN Goals, storytelling and well-being, storytelling in higher education, and storytelling and fundraising.Book authors are experienced and successful researchers, business owners, leaders, and consultants from Scandinavia, the USA, Africa, and Europe.Volume 2 is an endeavor into the creation of new concepts for engaging with sustainability. It maintains that storytelling is important for our emplacement in nature and can be important for enacting another relationship between nature and the cultural artifice — our social and material constructions of houses, cities, villages, harbors, streets, and railways, and our use of objects and artifacts to construct our lives.Business storytelling communication is that space for social symbolic work that brings the symbolic objects of the organization, the human, and the natural environment into a dialogical relationship. Volume 3 posits that organizations are arranged as social symbols that are arranged in institutions based on the needs of organics, for example health, food, shelter, mating, leisure, and labor. Organics, as a social symbolic object, specifically humans, have emotions, language, and culture to organize their institutions and organizations. In this book, readers will find that many of the authors attempt to understand the body's exclusion or attempt to bring the body back into the organization. Business storytelling communication takes aim at the social symbolic work of making space to negotiate the social arrangement of organizations with its organic components.Volume 4 covers a variety of methodological topics from a storytelling perspective. Why a storytelling perspective? Consider that a common business research goal is to convince others that what the researcher has to say matters. If the researcher is a basic researcher who wishes to promote a theory, the goal is to make a convincing case for the value of that theory. If the researcher is an applied researcher who wishes to promote a particular application, intervention, or policy change, the goal is likewise to make a convincing case. Either way, the researcher has a story to tell, and the onus is on the researcher to tell the best possible story; storytelling failures likely will result in a failure to convince others of the value of one's theory or application.Here is where methodological issues come into play. Poor methodology, whether in the form of less-than-optimal study designs or invalid statistical analyses, harms story quality. In contrast, high-quality methods and statistics enhance story quality. Moreover, the larger one's methodological and statistical toolbox, the greater the opportunities for researchers to tell effective stories. The chapters in this book come from a wide variety of perspectives and should enhance researchers' storytelling in the following ways. By opening many different methodological and statistical perspectives, researchers should be more able to think of research stories that otherwise would remain unavailable or inaccessible. Secondly, the present chapters should aid researchers in better executing their research stories. Therefore, researchers and graduate students will find this book an invaluable resource.Volume 5 opens a window into the world of quantum storytelling as an organizational research methodology, providing numerous exemplars of work in this storytelling science that has disrupted qualitative inquiry only with the intention of providing expanded, improved, and generative ways of understanding and knowing the narratives that emerge from qualitative interviews and observations during organizational research studies.




Diffractive Technospaces


Book Description

The entanglements of information and materiality in our media environment, that new information and communication technologies make increasingly mobile and locative, changes the mediations between space and society. The fluidity and continual reworking of the boundaries of contemporary technospaces - the sociotechnical environments in which humans and machines relate and intersect - is key to the production and consumption of contemporary technologies. Theoretical analyses of communication and space have tended to engage in the representation of such changes without interrogating the representational instruments used at a broader methodological level. Articulating a non-representational perspective on knowledge production and artistic practices, combined with an analysis of space, this book offers a new performative and relational re-turn to representation in contemporary technospaces. The radically materialist, posthumanist and performative position from which this situated aesthetics of technospaces is elaborated, aligns this book not only with non-representational theory, but also with the theories of material feminism, feminist geography, situated epistemologies, science and technology studies, actor-network theory, performance studies and new media studies.




On Flat Ontologies and Law


Book Description

This book examines the importance of flat ontologies for law and sociolegal theory. Associated with the emergence of new materialism in the humanities and social sciences, the elaboration of flat ontologies challenges the binarism that has maintained the separation of culture from nature, and the human from the nonhuman. Although most work in legal theory and sociolegal studies continues to adopt a non-flat, anthropocentric and immaterial take on law, the critique of this perspective is becoming more and more influential. Engaging the increasing legal interest in flat ontologies, this book offers an account of the main theoretical perspectives, and their importance for law. Covering the work of the five major theorists in the area – Gabriel Tarde, Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad and Graham Harman – the book aims to encourage this interest, as well as to explicate the important problems of and differences between these perspectives. Flat ontologies, the book demonstrates, can offer a valuable new perspective for understanding and thinking about law. This book will appeal mainly to scholars and students in legal theory and sociolegal studies; as well as others with interests in the posthumanist turn in philosophy and social theory.