Building on Karen Barad’s philosophy of science, this paper offers a diffractive reading of quantum indeterminacy with/across the classic structure/agency dichotomy in social science scholarship. It highlights key parallels between the metaphysics of indeterminacy in both the physical and social sciences. In the course of this analysis, we draw upon relevant Indigenous studies literature. These citations are integrated into the diffractive analysis, both as a source of important and potentially transformative insight and as a performative illustration of enactment of political responsibility under conditions of ontological indeterminacy. The inclusion of the Indigenous studies citations raises questions about how to avoid problematic practices of appropriation and/or erasure. Instead of resolving this question, we will dwell within the indeterminacy it reveals and the responsibility for constructive action it brings into focus.

In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new ways of knowing-thinking-doing response-able collaboration. In an effort to come “together-apart” as author-collaborators, working from our different positionings and locations in the world, we shared text and images of the various ways the ideas from individual papers (nodal points) and our diffractive processes were moving (with) us. Sharing these creative respondings, new relations co-emerged through the texts-images and the various diffractive patterns that traveled widely through screens, devices, bodies, from New Zealand and Australia, to Iran, London, Finland, Canada, and the West and East Coasts of the United States. Paying attention to the fine details, difference emerged, as did new forms of more-than-human connection. The visual and written respondings were then cut together-apart (literally, metaphorically and methodologically) to represent the multiplicities of the diffractive process, bodies, hauntings, absences and excess, and the tensions and affective vulnerabilities that co-emerged through our process. We present four visual montages of the diffractive patterns that surfaced from the individual papers as nodal points and our creative collaborative processes of becoming-with the special issue. We conclude with some final thoughts on the process of diffracting the special issue, inviting the reader to join us in imagining new lines of flight, alternative possibilities for becoming a more response-able, more-than-human academic community.

In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to articulate our experiences of the diffractive review process. In the later part of the dialogue, we turn toward imagining the possibilities for creatively exploring ways to represent how the ideas from this collaborative process travel with us, into our everyday lives. We discuss the ethical and political response-abilities in such diffractive collaboration and respondings, and in so doing, different author perspectives, positionalities, and productive tensions and knots, come to the fore. In so doing, this article connects the first part of the issue—the nodal points (author manuscripts)—with the final part of the issue (diffractive respondings), and provides insight into our collaborative and diffractive process.

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