Diffraction: Onto-Epistemology, Quantum Physics and the Critical Humanities

Kaiser, Birgit Mara; Thiele, Kathrin

doi:10.4324/9781315144108-1

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…We employed diffraction in this study first by drawing together high-profile events from two different US organizational contexts, the military and higher education. Following Kaiser and Thiele (2014), we moved away from ‘discrete, given entities as units of analysis’ (p. 166), an approach that would consider either the military or higher education separately as if they were stones. Instead, we considered the impact of high-profile incidents at these organizations through one another, at the point where the concentric circles of ripples meet.…”

Section: Methods and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The promise and peril of agency as motion: A feminist new materialist approach to sexual violence and sexual harassment

2019

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Organizational scholars have established that sexual harassment, the most studied kind of sexual violence, is an organizational problem. Extending this work, we analyze two critical events regarding sexual violence in the United States—one in the military and another at a university—in which discourse detracts from understanding the problem in this way. We draw upon feminist new materialism and its primary method—diffraction—to track ‘cuts’, the practices that simplify and pause agency’s complex, perpetual motions. Our analysis shows that agency moves in discussions about the aftermath of violence. That momentum highlights the organization’s capacity to respond to rape. Even so, during discussions about enacting violence, the perpetual motion of agency congeals around discrete humans, thereby maintaining assault as an individual act. These cuts, whereby agency pauses on individual perpetrators, obscure how organizational dynamics make sexual violence more or less likely to occur. We suggest that a focus on agency’s kinetic qualities can help feminist scholars continue to highlight how the systemic aspects of harassment and other forms of violence become hard to notice.

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Section: Methods and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The promise and peril of agency as motion: A feminist new materialist approach to sexual violence and sexual harassment

2019

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“…For example, it refigures the relations between the human/non-human and self/other as emergent and co-constituted, rather than fixed and oppositional. As Kaiser and Thiele (2014) explain, the metaphor of diffraction is an attempt to ‘move our images of difference/s from oppositional to differential, from static to productive, and our ideas of scientific knowledge from reflective, disinterested judgement to mattering, embedded involvement’ (p. 165). A counterpoint to the traditional metaphor of reflection, with its emphasis on sameness and mirroring, diffraction attends to differences, including the material differences that practices of knowing produce.…”

Section: Theoretical Approach: Diffracting Addictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diffracting addicting binaries: An analysis of personal accounts of alcohol and other drug ‘addiction’

et al. 2016

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Associated with social and individual harm, loss of control and destructive behaviour, addiction is widely considered to be a major social problem. Most models of addiction, including the influential disease model, rely on the volition/compulsion binary, conceptualising addiction as a disorder of compulsion. In order to interrogate this prevailing view, this article draws on qualitative data from interviews with people who describe themselves as having an alcohol or other drug 'addiction', 'dependence' or 'habit'. Applying the concept of 'diffraction' elaborated by science studies scholar Karen Barad, we examine the process of 'addicting', or the various ways in which addiction is constituted, in accounts of daily life with regular alcohol and other drug use. Our analysis suggests not only that personal accounts of addiction exceed the absolute opposition of volition/compulsion but also that the polarising assumptions of existing addicting discourses produce many of the negative effects typically attributed to the 'disease of addiction'.

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“…They offer critique of and resistance to the western economic rationalism that is imposing these accountabilities (Greenwood, 2008). In recognising the histories of mutual co-evolution that have 1The term onto-epistemologies recognises the inter/intra-relationship of ontology and epistemology (Kaiser & Thiele, 2014). enabled both cultural and biological survival, they also provide hope for the protection of linguistic and biodiversity that continue to be threatened by globalisation (Gorenflo, Romaine, Mittermeier, & Walker-Painemilla, 2012;Wehi, Whaanga, & Roa, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social, cultural, and ecological justice in the age of the Anthropocene: A New Zealand early childhood care and education perspective.

Ritchie¹

2021

Preprint

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© 2016 by Jenny Ritchie. Educators have an ethical responsibility to uphold the wellbeing of the children, families and communities that they serve. This commitment becomes even more pressing as we move into the era of the Anthropocene, where human induced climate changes are disrupting the planet's systems, threatening the survival of not only humans, but of eco-systems and the earth's biodiversity. This paper draws upon examples from Aotearoa (New Zealand) to demonstrate ways in which a critical pedagogy of place informed by local traditional knowledges can inform early childhood education whilst also enhancing dispositions of empathy towards self and others, including more-than-human others.

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Diffraction: Onto-Epistemology, Quantum Physics and the Critical Humanities

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

The promise and peril of agency as motion: A feminist new materialist approach to sexual violence and sexual harassment

The promise and peril of agency as motion: A feminist new materialist approach to sexual violence and sexual harassment

Diffracting addicting binaries: An analysis of personal accounts of alcohol and other drug ‘addiction’

Social, cultural, and ecological justice in the age of the Anthropocene: A New Zealand early childhood care and education perspective.

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