Feyerabend, P. K.: 1962, ‘Problems in Microphysics’, in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, ed. Robert G. Colodny. Pittsburgh: U. of Pitt. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Einstein, A., Podolsky, B., and Rosen, N.: 1935, ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ Physical Review, 47, 777–780. Murris, K., Reynolds, R., & Peers, J. (2018). Reggio Emilia inspired philosophical teacher education in the Anthropocene: Posthuman child and the family (tree). Journal of Childhood Studies: Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Early Childhood Environmental Education Special Issue, 43(1), 15–29. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.Barad is a professor of feminist studies using this chunk of a book to explain her interpretation of Niels Bohr's thought experiments. Niels Bohr was both a physicist as well as a philosopher and made foundational contributions to the way we understand quantum physics today. Drawing from his thought experiments, Barad introduces the concept of agential realism, which challenges the way we humans perceive and interact with our environment. Murris, K. (2020). Posthuman de/colonising teacher education in South Africa: Animals, anthropomorphism and picturebook art. In P. Burnard & L. Colucci-Gray (Eds.), Why science and art creativities matter: STEAM (re-)configurings for future-making education (pp. 52–78). Brill Publishers. https://brill.com/view/title/54614 The implication of this is that everything is connected. We humans can't separate ourselves from our environment, as we are our environment. As a result, we should be questioning our ethics, as the otherness we perceive needs to be understood as something way more familiar.

Barad builds out from the philosophyphysics of Neils Bohr, the Danish physicist widely credited with having developed the main principles of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. She merged the two words “philosophy” and “physics” into one, contending that Bohr did not separate them, and going on to imply that we shouldn’t either. One of Bohr’s firm beliefs arguably lies at the heart of the matter, namely that we -- scientists, observers, curious people -- are a part of whatever reality we may study. From the basis Bohr provides, she builds, absorbing much, expanding occasionally, objecting rarely. Leibowitz, B., & Bozalek, V. (2018). Towards a slow scholarship of teaching and learning in the South. Teaching in Higher Education, 23(8), 981–994. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1452730 One of the most important books of the 21st century. Known as a competent feminist critical theorist she is also an excellent quantum physicist. She reforms Bohr then offers a posthuman performativity that diffractively interferes with quantum mechanics yielding far-reaching impacts upon poststructuralism and a profoundly authentic new materialism. I highly recommend this book. Thus Barad outlines an approach that is sure to provide a new framework for understanding why the experience of reality is different for so many, as our material practice is the conceptual condition by which discursive practices actualize... not as representations of a transcendentalism but through the conditions of materiality itself, entangled within itself. (As Deleuze would say, differentiation isn't what happens to cytoplasm, rather cytoplasm contains all the differentials which create a given differentiation of a baby as a complete whole.) Murris, K., & Borcherds, C. (2019b). Childing: A different sense of time. In D. Hodgins (Ed.), Feminist post-qualitative research for 21st childhoods (pp. 197–209). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350056602

Honner, John: 1987 ,The Description of Nature: Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Quantum Physics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Haraway, Donna: 1991 ,Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

This chapter includes a (to my eyes) brutal criticism of linguistic and cultural turns, on the basis that they all ignore the importance of matter (132). Barad's intervention is to emphasise the notion of performativity (intra-acting with things) rather than representationalism (words and symbols meaning things by themselves). This is quite clear and convincing (although I’m not sure if her definition of “apparatus” (142) can get any more obnoxious! That might be me though). Apparatuses are in Barad’s words the material conditions of possibility and impossibility (148). Her definition of “matter” (151) is perhaps even more obnoxious. I wonder whether it’s just my unfamiliarity with academic-philosophical language that makes me think that though. It could be that this reflex is caused by a kind of Occam's Razor instinct: surely a less complicated and abstruse definition for something so fundamental and mundane can be found? To her credit though, I do like the style of how Barad is introducing her little bits of the definition, frequently returning to her existing definition and adding little bits of information once we get them. I suppose I’m a little annoyed at how open-ended the definition is. In her Introduction Barad wants to understand the epistemological and ontological issues that quantum physics forces us to confront, like what it means to be objective, what the nature of measurement is, or the meaning of “making”(24). She says she wants to employ a “diffractive” method (25) in her study, reading insights from different social and scientific theories through each other. The ambition in this is evident, as she explicitly explains that her model of "agential realism" - her core theoretical framework – applies equally to the realm of physics as it does to the realm of social science ("new interpretation of quantum physics" (36), which initially I thought was pretty nuts). The “diffractive” in that methodology is inspired by the likes of Donna Haraway, who argue that we need to diffract rather than “reflect” in social science methodology (29 – there is a nice but slightly misleading table visualising this on pp. 89-90). A term that frequently reappears is "intra-action", which is Barad’s alternative to the common notion of interaction, which necessarily implies two separate entities bridging some kind of divide to affect one another (33). Instead, most of the phenomena she talks about in her book involve actions of matter/beings that cannot be “objectively” (in the traditional, Einsteinian sense of the word) be distinguished. These concepts of “diffraction”, “infra-action”, and “objectivity” reappear frequently throughout the book. Took very few notes here. Barad mainly talks about Leela Fernandes' study of Indian jute mill workers and the perspectives of intersectionality/scale/apparatuses at play. This is by far the most “social science” chapter of the book.Here Barad notes that physical and conceptual constraints of apparatuses are co-constitutive (196) - an apparatus with fixed parts necessarily excludes momentum form having meaning during the experiment, for example. She criticises Foucault's and Butler's theories for not being precise about how matter becomes matter, or rather, the nature of the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena. In her model of agential realism, humans are also phenomena, and material-discursive apparatuses that intra-act. In part, this is the insight of postmodernism on modernism, that there is no such thing as neutral, and thus no metanarrative, or at least a pregiven agential arrangement. Pais, Abraham: 1982, ‘ Subtle is the Lord…’: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein. NY: Oxford Univ. Press.

This is one of the greatest philosophical books I have ever read. Karen Barad draws on figures such as Judith Bulter, Donna Haraway, and Michel Foucault to investigate the ontological implications of the insights in quantum physics of Niels Bohr. She argues for a completely new way of looking at the world, which she calls "agential realism," where the relationship preexists and constitutes the relata. Subject and object (or rather, the "agencies of observation" and the "object of observation") are not independently existing individuals, but exists on in their "intra-action." Barad criticizes the metaphysics of individualism, which is responsible for problematic representationalist and humanist presuppositions, while reconceptualizing notions such as causality, agency, objectivity, and responsibility. Thus, employing the famous 'double slit experiment' as her exemplar - in which light appears as either a wave or a particle depending on the 'observer' - Barad pitches herself against the prevailing readings according to which the status of light is simply unknowable or 'indeterminate' until measured (recall Schrodinger's unfortunate cat, both/neither dead and/nor alive until observed). Following Bohr, Barad argues that the situation is in fact far more interesting and far more complex than one can imagine: rather than a deficiency in knowledge, at stake is in fact the very 'being' of light itself, insofar as the very idea of 'determination' only makes sense in the context of an experimental apparatus that would give determinate values meaning in the first place. Sandoval, Cheyla: 1991, ‘U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World.’ Genders, 10. Harding, Sandra: 1990, ‘Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques’, in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson. NY: Routledge. Agential realism privileges neither the material nor the cultural. The apparatus of bodily production is material-cultural, and so is agential reality.Haraway's critique of models of spatialization that reify complex prac­tices and make them into things inside containers captures some of the key elements of the kinds of shifts in refiguring space, time, and matter that I am interested in exploring here, including the dynamic and contingent material­ization of space, time, and bodies; the incorporation of material-social fac­tors (including gender, race, sexuality, religion, and nationality, as well as class) but also technoscientific and natural factors in processes of material­ization (where the constitution of the "natural" and the "social" is part of what is at issue and at stake); the iterative (re)materialization of the relations of production; and the agential possibilities and responsibilities for recon­ figuring the material relations of the world. I offer a systematic development and further elaboration of these and related ideas. I consider how agential realism can contribute to a new materialist understanding of power and its effects on the production of bodies, identities, and subjectivities. Central to my analysis is the agential realist understanding of matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than a property of things. I de­velop and explore these ideas in relation to the political theorist Leela Fer­nandes's ethnographic study of the materialization of the relations of production, where questions of political economy and cultural identity formation are both at work on the shop floor. This book challenges the entire epistemological framework with which we think. It explains the history and workings of quantum mechanics and uses it to build this framework.