Beyond hierarchical oppositions: A feminist critique of Karen Barad’s agential realism

Braunmühl, Caroline

doi:10.1177/1464700117741243

Cited by 24 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 35 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…She does not expound on what it means to be accountable or responsible. I echo Caroline Braunmuhl's critique of Barad conferring agency, and by definition ethics, to the nonhuman (Braunmühl, 2018). For example, it probably does not make sense to hold a disease responsible and accountable for doing what nature has designed for it to do.…”

Section: Participating In Realitiesmentioning

confidence: 93%

'A Return to the World': Diffraction and Truth-telling in Post-Cartesian IR

Chee¹

2021

Preprint

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This paper presents an ethics premised on a post-Cartesian ontology: that what we know is how we know and vice-versa. The acknowledgment of the IR scholar’s constitutive relation to the world she seeks to describe, and of which she is a part, entails an ethics that is also a practice and an agency. I build on the notion of diffraction in Karen Barad’s quantum theory and on Foucault’s notion of parrhesia. In place of reflection, Barad offers diffraction as a nonrepresentationalist methodology which attends to the difference knowledge can make rather than the accuracy of our representations. Parrhesia is the ‘third hermeneutic’ which problematizes our relationship with the activity of knowing itself. In the pragmatist sense, we are asked not only to be of use to our communities, but to be mindful of who we are and what kind of subject we become in our inscriptions of the world. This diffractive research ethics addresses two problems in IR theory as they present in the conduct of fieldwork – the limits of reflexivity, notably the impossibility of objectively representing ourselves to ourselves, and the critique that the pragmatist concerns in the ‘doing’ of science pays insufficient attention to how power conditions knowledge production. I suggest that this ethic, which is a performance of our relation to truth, allows us to better realize the pragmatist ideal of a democratic social science by allowing us to resist the centripetal force of epistemic sovereignty.

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Section: Participating In Realitiesmentioning

confidence: 93%

'A Return to the World': Diffraction and Truth-telling in Post-Cartesian IR

Chee¹

2021

Preprint

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“…STS approaches have historically been accused of being apolitical or siding with the strong due to their inability to fully theorize how and to what ends materials link to the capitalist mode of production or institutional power relations (e.g. Braunmühl, 2018 ; Law, 2004 : 13–14; Mol and Mesman, 1996 ; Rekret, 2018 ). It can be argued, however, that STS approaches to knowledge production and its methods provide the tools to attend to ‘goodness’ in various activities: caring for many participants simultaneously including oneself (see Davies and Horst, 2015 ; Homanen, 2019 ; Lemke, 2018 : 45; Mol, 2008 ) and encompassing all participants’ economic conditions.…”

Section: Practices Of Knowing In the Laboratorymentioning

confidence: 99%

When craft kicks back: Embryo culture as knowledge production in the context of the transnational fertility industry

Helosvuori

Homanen

2022

Soc Stud Sci

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The multibillion-dollar fertility industry promotes standardization in in vitro fertilization laboratories. Transnational pharmaceutical and biotechnological giants distribute a wide range of fertility products, from embryo culture mediums and incubator technologies to add-ons such as time-lapse embryo monitoring. These technologies are designed to standardize and automate knowledge production regarding embryonic viability. More effective knowledge production enables the more effective selection of embryos for transfer, which in turn leads to more future babies and enables economic scaling-up. Drawing on two multi-sited ethnographic studies at eight fertility clinics in Finland during 2013–2020, this article discusses how knowledge about embryos is produced in the processes and practices of embryo culture. We argue that automation and standardization in clinical practice are not always perceived as economically desirable. Sometimes standard technologies do not replace hands-on knowledge production, although they may transform it. The technologies are also perceived as modifying the object of knowledge itself in undesired or unnecessary ways. In such cases, concerns are raised regarding the best interests of patients, embryos and future babies, who might be better served by masterful laboratory craftwork. We conclude that embryo culture is not only a site of knowledge production – one that aims to make babies and parents through standard and craftwork knowledge practices – but also a site of multiple bio-economies of assisted reproduction, some of which resist automation and standardization.

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“…However, a few comments on Barad’s notion of intra-action and the understanding of the human as part of material-discursive entanglements are apt, since these have been central to some feminist technoscience works/STS on subjectivity (for examples of work that, like Barad, combine feminist technoscience with reasoning on subjectivity, see: Højgaard and Søndergaard, 2011; Søndergaard, 2013; Johnson and Åsberg, 2017; Johnson, 2019. For a critical discussion of Barad’s agential realist approach and an argument for the need to ‘hold on’ to subjectivity as ‘capacity for experience’, see: Braunmühl, 2018: 223).…”

Section: Feminist Technoscience Subjectification and Subject Positionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why feminist technoscience and feminist phenomenology should engage with each other: on subjectification/subjectivity

Zeiler

2020

Feminist Theory

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Feminist technoscience and feminist phenomenology have seldom been brought into dialogue with each other, despite them sharing concerns with subjectivity and normativity, and despite both of them moving away from sharp subject-object distinctions. This is unfortunate. This article argues that, while differences between these strands need to be acknowledged, such differences should be put to productive use. The article discusses a case of school bullying, and suggests that bringing these analytic perspectives together enables and sharpens examinations of the role of subjectification and subject positions for subjectivity in the phenomenological sense; affectivity within material-discursive entanglements and constellations of humans and things, and as connecting the body, things and the world in specific ways; and normativity as enacted, lived and embedded in perception.

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Beyond hierarchical oppositions: A feminist critique of Karen Barad’s agential realism

Cited by 24 publications

References 35 publications

'A Return to the World': Diffraction and Truth-telling in Post-Cartesian IR

'A Return to the World': Diffraction and Truth-telling in Post-Cartesian IR

When craft kicks back: Embryo culture as knowledge production in the context of the transnational fertility industry

Why feminist technoscience and feminist phenomenology should engage with each other: on subjectification/subjectivity

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