Diffracting Boundaries: Toward Post-Philosophies of Quantification and the Black Radical Tradition

Abstract

This article is derived from a webinar series conversation titled, “Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry” co-hosted by Candace R. Kuby and Viv Bozalek. Featured in this conversation is Ezekiel Dixon-Román and he discusses some of the backgrounds to his scholarship and how he has come to his questions and approach of inquiry on/in quantification and the Black radical tradition. He and his students discuss their respective projects and the interventions they are making in the technologies and practices of quantification through their engagement with critical theory, Black radical thought, new materialisms, cybernetics, and media studies.

The Logic of Posthuman Inquiry: Affirmative Politics, Validity, and Futurities

“…These are studies that make claims about the activity of actor networks, the constitution and movement of sociomaterial assemblages, the ontological movement of nomadic subjects, the agentic behavior of nonhuman and material phenomena, and the complexity of intra-actions 3 between humans, our ways of knowing, and the materiality of things—for example, studies of neuron functions (Taguchi, 2016), curriculum content (Gleason, 2021; Gleason & Franklin-Phipps, 2019; S. L. Pratt, 2022; Sellers, 2013), health and disease (Andrews & Duff, 2019; Mol, 2002), marketing products (Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2016), architecture (Dovey & Wood, 2015), the experience and function of gender (Huuki & Renold, 2016; Renold & Ringrose, 2019), racism (Dernikos, 2020; Dixon-Román, 2017; Guerrero-Arias, 2021; Rosiek, 2019; Rosiek & Kinslow, 2016), artificial intelligence and data science (Dixon-Román, 2020; Dixon-Román et al, 2020, 2022), mathematics education (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014), educational research (Wong, 2021), and more. The focus on describing the movement of ontologically protean phenomena constitutes a novel unit of analysis in contemporary social inquiry, one that is more dynamic than those found in positivist social analysis, interpretive studies of social meaning, critical studies of ideology and material economic power, or genealogical studies of the discursive production of culture and institutional arrangements.…”

“…The indeterminacy and mutability of the object of study itself are treated as something that can be described. The principle of the excluded middle and noncontradiction is violated with relation to the specific character of the object of the study-for example, the indeterminacy of a subatomic particle's particle and wave nature (Barad, 2007); the inhuman core of the human subject (Colebrook, 2014); the representational and relational nature of thinking (Braidotti, 2019a(Braidotti, , 2019b; the indeterminacy of quantitative data (Dixon-Román et al, 2022) or numbers themselves (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014); the instability of data in qualitative inquiry (Mazzei & Jackson, 2017); the virtuality of embodied affect (Massumi, 2002); and indeterminacy of inclusion/appropriation in citational politics (Rosiek & Adkins-Cartee, 2023). At a more global scale of this analytic approach, however, the overarching purpose is to map this indeterminacy and mutability as a whole and speculate about its effects.…”