Recent developments in critical policy analysis have occurred alongside the new materialisms in qualitative research. These lines of scholarship have unfolded along two separate, but related, tracks. In particular, the new materialist method of diffraction aligns with many elements of critical policy analysis. Both involve critical theory, complexity and multiple analyses. To examine diffraction as a potential method of critical policy analysis, this paper enacts Karen Barad’s method of diffraction through the theoretical writings of Jane Bennett and (...) Gloria Anzaldúa. Using the example of teacher leaders who are involved in educational policy, Bennett’s vibrant ecologies illustrate ecosystems of teacher leadership and Anzaldúa’s borderlands demonstrate how teacher leaders bridge their roles within multiple layers of community, governance and identity. Through the method of diffraction, critical policy analyses may produce broader perspectives regarding the ways in which differing stakeholders, groups, technologies and even theories collectively shape policy. Significantly, understanding educational policy differently may result in better educational policy-making. (shrink)

This article explores the possibilities of considering how ‘matter and meaning are mutually constituted’ in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007: 152) through presenting a diffractive analysis of a piece of interview data with a six-year-old boy in a preschool class. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1997) and Karen Barad’s (2007) theorising, I understand diffractive analysis as an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming-with the data as researcher. Understanding the body as a space (...) of transit, a series of open-ended systems in interaction with the material-discursive ‘environment’, diffractive analyses constitute transcorporeal engagements with data. Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) theorisation of the transcorporeal is put to work diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) thinking on the process of becoming minor or minoritarian. This implies a reconceptualisation of the very act of thinking as a transcorporeal process of engagement, going beyond the idea of reflexivity and interpretation as inner mental activities taking place in the mind of the researcher understood as separated from the data. Through my example, I argue that diffractive analysis can make visible new kinds of material-discursive realities that can have transformative and political consequences. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the possibility of adopting a representational approach for technoscience, in which representation is considered as a situated process of dynamic “intra-action” (Barad 2007 ). Re-elaborating the recent critiques of representationalism (Thrift 2008 ), my analysis begins by analysing Hayles’s situated model of representation from an early essay where she explains her definition of constrained constructivism (Hayles [ 1991 ] 1997). The essay then discusses the notions of figuration and diffraction and the way they are employed (...) by Haraway in many of her writings for her critique of technoscience (Haraway 1991 , 1997 ). Finally, after considering diffraction through Barad’s reading of this practice in the context of her theory of agential realism ( 2007 ), it shows the links that relate constrained constructivism, situated knowledge and agential realism, and the way all of them work at “diffract[ing] the rays of technoscience” (Haraway 1997 : 16) through an alternative representational practice. (shrink)

Articulating a non-representational perspective on knowledge production and artistic practices, combined with an analysis of space, this book offers a new performative and relational re-turn to representation in contemporary technospaces. The radically materialist, posthumanist and performative position from which this situated aesthetics of technospaces is elaborated, aligns this book not only with non-representational theory, but also with the theories of material feminism, feminist geography, situated epistemologies, science and technology studies, actor-network theory, performance studies and new media studies.

The time-of-flight neutron diffraction technique and the elastoplastic self-consistent model were used to study the behaviour of single and multi-phase materials. Critical resolved shear stresses and hardening parameters in austenitic and austenitic–ferritic steels were found by analysing the evolution of the lattice strains measured during tensile tests. Special attention was paid to the changes of the grain stresses occurring due to transition from elastic to plastic deformation. Using a new method of data analysis, the variation of the stress localisation (...) tensor as a function of macrostress was measured. The experimental results were successfully compared with model predictions for both phases of the duplex steel and also for the austenitic sample. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to provide a diffractive reading of the concept of ressentiment through decolonial theory. I would like to see what sort of light this sheds on the psychological undercurrents that impose barriers on colonial and decolonial thought, as well as on the conceptual dynamism of ressentiment. This essay is split into two different experiments in thought. The first will be to diffract ressentiment through the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and Gilles Deleuze. To (...) this end, I will begin by providing an analysis of ressentiment as developed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals and then supplement this with Deleuze’s analysis of ressentiment in Nietzsche & Philosophy. I will create a bridge with decolonial thought by interpreting Anzaldúa’s concept of the nopal de castilla and mestiza consciousness through the interpretive lens of ressentiment to show the affinity that exists between the work of Anzaldúa and Nietzsche. I will finish the first experiment by looking at ressentiment through some of the concepts Glissant offers us in the Poetics of Relation. In particular, I will argue that ressentiment resists the creolization of identity and culture, and that Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity for all is the sign of a thinking that has overcome ressentiment. The second experiment is to diffract ressentiment through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, beginning with an analysis of the most relevant points of that text for our discussion then putting our diffracted version of ressentiment in conversation with Amerindian perspectivism. However, this does not mean that I am aiming at a synthesis of ressentiment with Amerindian perspectivism. Rather, in the spirit of the Brazilian author’s post-structural anthropology, this essay sees only a disjunctive synthesis of the two: a ressentiment becoming-Amerindian perspectivism and an Amerindian perspectivism-becoming-ressentiment (we will focus on developing the former). I hope that, by the end of this experiment, we may have a richer conceptual understanding of ressentiment by offering this concept an image of itself that only our decolonial thinkers and an Amerindian perspective can offer. (shrink)

This dissertation, located at the crossroads of Continental political philosophy, feminist theory, critical theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies, provides a critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought in its various constellations and assemblages, while using diffractive theorizing to examine two Continental terror(ist) events. It is argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism), are in need of a (...) Zeitgeist-adjusted conceptual framework, and, thus, a revitalization of philosophizing as such, that could lead to an analysis of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, the actual terror they produce, and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender. -/- Using the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this project’s first part explores what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist manner, while furthermore offering a situated critical cartography of new materialist thought. Within the contours of this Deleuzoguattarian mapping exercise, new materialist thought is shown to be grounded in foregoing materialist philosophies, transversal and trans(/)disciplinary, and, moreover, a revitalizing ever-evolving philosophical strand of thought with crisscrossing, transcontinental roots and a strong foundation in (post-)Foucauldian poststructuralist thought. Particular attention is paid to what in this project are called “critical” new materialisms, or those new materialist philosophies that take the necessity of critical power analyses seriously, and could be said to be “eco-ethico-political” in nature. This cartography is furthermore accompanied by a digital critical cartography that can be utilized for pedagogical means. -/- The second and final part of this dissertation, preceded by an excursus that accentuates the importance of Harawayan ecophilosophical thought for critical new materialist philosophies, consists of one chapter that puts the idea of diffractive theorizing into practice; subsequently exploring theorizing on terror(ism), the Habermas-Derrida dialogues with regard to 9/11, and the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks as affect-inducing events of “feeling-thinking-through.” This chapter ends with a diffractive rereading of Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, and also partially Levinas, on the subject of the contemporary democratic state, terrorism, and the legitimacy of lockdowns and emergency state declarations. By doing so, this final chapter anticipates on this dissertation’s epilogue, in which the need for an up-to-date critical new materialist eco-ethico-political model of justice and responsiveness-as-response-ability, is highlighted. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to do a “diffractive reading” of texts by Karl Marx and Michel Serres. A diffractive reading, as this term is used by thinkers like Karen Barad, aims at the appearance of something new from the confrontation of two texts that at first sight seem to have very little to do with each other. I do a close reading of the start of “The Chapter on Capital (Continuation)” (from Notebook 5 in the Grundrisse), (...) where Marx speaks about nature, the land, and about how the common was lived by German tribes (he rejects the way the Romans speak of the Ager Publicus because of its already existing link to property). The German tribes on the contrary practice their community through a Vereinigung and not through a Verein which means that what binds them is temporary, caused by a need, and not institutionalized indefinitely. More important even, he speaks of the land as part of the commune, as part of us temporarily, and caused by a need. This “inorganic self,” which is how he defines the land that feeds us, and thus belongs to us, is what gives rise to our being and is thus an inextricable part of who we are. Then, I turn to Serres, who, in his book The Five Senses also analyzes what gives form to us. Starting from the etymological analysis of the Homo sapiens, in which Homo refers to humus, the rich topsoil of the earth and sapiens to sapient, to “having a taste for something,” Serres too speaks of the earth that feeds us. Their earthly analysis of what forces us to think then brings me to take another look at how we think about intelligence today, and how the alienation that both Marx and Serres are speaking of, seems to have installed itself in how we are imagining technology and food. I talk of how the American military designs meals for the American soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, knowing that “the sense of home” should be included in their ready-to-eat meals. I talk of the Museum for Forgotten Skills, an art project set up by Casco Art Institute, in Utrecht (the Netherlands), in which a new population was introduced to their land, to the idea of becoming part of the community again, taking part in its rituals, in understanding the land, the language and the history accompanying it. My conclusion, in line with Serres (and Marx) is not very uplifting though. Alienation, which in the end is all about how we have alienated ourselves from the land, from the earth, prevents us from living together, from becoming a community, and in the end, from living a life. (shrink)

The analysis of the Helmholtz equation is shown to lead to an exact Hamiltonian system describing in terms of ray trajectories, for a stationary refractive medium, a very wide family of wave-like phenomena (including diffraction and interference) going much beyond the limits of the geometrical optics (“eikonal”) approximation, which is contained as a simple limiting case. Due to the fact, moreover, that the time independent Schrödinger equation is itself a Helmholtz-like equation, the same mathematics holding for a classical optical (...) beam turns out to apply to a quantum particle beam moving in a stationary force field, and leads to a system of Hamiltonian equations providing exact and deterministic particle trajectories and dynamical laws, and containing the laws of Classical Mechanics in the eikonal limit. (shrink)

In this article the argument is that in order to find women who participate in the design of IT, it is not enough to analyze gendered divisions of labor in terms of professional belongings but also to analyze the practices behind the professional categories that are involved in IT design. The purpose of the article is to explore how actors in various ways were configured during an IT design project. The article is based on an IT design project, and the (...) empirical material for the study was gathered through the use of ethnographic methods, and analyzed diffractively. This analysis showed that the boundaries between actors shifted, that the actors were placed in several different positions, and that what was done in practices did not always fit with the formal positions. The analysis made it possible to see that in this IT design project, women were important participants on which the whole project depended. If this project is representative also for other IT design projects, the problem of women as outsiders of IT design could be rephrased, and the problem is no longer that women are not included in IT design, but that their participation does not always become visible. (shrink)

Quantum theory brings into question the compatibility of the twin desiderata of exact knowability of the present state of the physical world and perfect predictability of its future states. Bohr’s coordination–causality complementarity principle transforms this tension into one between properties (as ordinarily understood in classical physics) and deterministic causality. Here, we develop an explicit model of quantum properties which accommodates this essential tension. Our approach integrates operational, reconstructive, and metaphysical standpoints. In particular, we make use of an operational framework employed (...) in a recent operational reconstruction of Feynman’s formulation of quantum theory; base our property model on an analysis of property types; and use the notions of actuality and potentiality to frame the model. We show that this quantum property model provides a natural resolution of Zeno’s paradox of motion, and provides reliable intuitions about phenomena such as electron diffraction and the non-local behaviour of entangled states of non-identical particles. (shrink)

A missed phone call. A misheard word. An inaudible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement. Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between biopolitical (...) theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings. Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of "over-hearings" between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability. Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality's subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening. Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound's capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered. (shrink)

Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality critically reads the intersubjective theories on educational relations and uses a posthuman approach to ascribe agency relationally to humans and nonhumans alike. The book introduces the concept of ‘educational relationality’ and contains examples of nonhuman elements of technology and animals, putting educational relationality and other concepts into context as part of the philosophical investigation. Drawing on educational and posthuman theorists, it answers questions raised in ongoing debates regarding the roles of students and teachers (...) in education, such as the foundations of educational relations and how these can be challenged. The book explores educational relations within the field of philosophy of education. After critically examining intersubjective approaches to theories of educational relations, anthropocentrism and subject-centrism are localized as two problematic aspects. Post-anthropocentrism and intra-relationality are proposed as a theoretical framework, before the book introduces and develops a posthuman theory of educational relations. The analysis is executed through a diffractive reading of intersubjective theories, resulting in five co-concepts: impermanence, uniqueness-as-relationality, proximity, edu-activity, and intelligibility. The analysis provided through educational examples demonstrates the potential of using the proposed theory in everyday practices. Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, early childhood education, research methodology and curriculum studies. (shrink)

_This article reconstructs from Pāli texts a care (karu__ṇ__ā)-based philosophy for building an isonomic, complex society. The Greek term isonomia (lit. equality), in Karatani Kōjin’s sense of no-rule, means a categorical rejection of any ruler–ruled social hierarchy. I extend this use of isonomia to include practices of spiritual cultivation that relinquish habitual tendencies of the ruler–ruled mentality such as domination, coercion, and submission. To better appreciate this kind of care-based philosophy of isonomia, I argue, one needs to sidestep rights-based conversations, (...) adopt a processual paradigm, and rethink what counts as sociopolitical philosophy. _ _ __As the analysis in my article reveals, a core feature of relation-centered, care-based sociopolitical philosophies is that they diffract seemingly stable categories such as the inner psyche, personhood, group, community, institution, and nation-state into recurring patterns of motivated actions, coactions, and consequences of actions and then guide the reassembling of non-coercive patterns of thoughts, actions, habits, and social relations so to build a friendlier, more pluralistic future._ _ __This study is as much an effort to recover a marginalized voice from the past as it is a future-oriented project of testing out new ways of thinking about key issues concerning humanity and the planet. A baked-in flaw of established social contract theories is that they presume a rational, autonomous agent and in doing so relegate the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled to the realm of the unthought or the afterthought. In contrast, a care-based processual philosophy of isonomia has its theoretical origins in the existential__ reality of interconditionality and precarity. Thus, it offers vital insights into how to reimagine justice, equity, freedom, and pluralism in processual terms of care and equal support for life and liberation._ _ _. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism is an invitation to think differently about knowledge and educational relationality between humans and the more-than-human. This philosophical and political shift in subjectivity builds on, and is entangled with, poststructuralism and phenomenology. In this paper we read diffractively through one another the theories of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and feminist posthumanists Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. We explore the implications of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ for early childhood education. With its emphasis on a moving away from the dominant (...) role of human vision in educational research we show how videoing and photographing works as an apparatus in an analysis of data from an inner-city school in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are struck by children’s seeing with the ‘eyes of their skin’ and ‘seeing’ with/in the world, as their obvious distress is felt when a small tree sapling has been mowed down in a nearby park. We analyse the event with the help of a variation on Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming-child’: ‘becoming-little’, and Anna Tsing’s ‘the arts of noticing’. ‘Becoming-little’ as a methodology disrupts the adult/child binary that positions ‘little’, younger humans as inferior to their ‘bigger’ fully human counterparts. We exemplify ‘becoming-little’ through 4 and 5 year-olds’ learning with the little tree and adopt Barad’s temporal diffraction to ‘see’ what is in/visible in the park: the extractive, exploitative, colonising mining practices of White settlers. These are still part of the land on which the park was created but are in/visible beneath the ‘skin’ of the earth. (shrink)

Introduction. According to the well-established opinion of specialists in social sciences and humanities, a person diffracts his selves in the modern world: real spaces (professions, statuses) and virtual (accounts, profiles). In the diffraction of a person through spaces of different order, each “new” self acquires relative autonomy (a trace of the self in the network, which is present regardless of the attitude to it), and at the same time there remains the connection that, as it were, keeps the self with (...) his digital images and “prints”. The main questions of the article are: in what relation and in relation to what is it possible to talk about the identity of a modern person; what fundamentally significant do the researches on human identity give us today; what do those who ask questions about personal identity in the digital age focus their attention on? In order to answer these questions, let us turn to scientific articles from domestic and foreign journals. This article presents the analytics of publications from Scopus and RSCI databases, in which the problem of personal identity is posed. The purpose of the article is to analyze scientific publications on human identity and summarize the main ideas presented in those publications. Methods. The research is based on general scientific methods, analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction, and abstraction. The author analyzes scientific publications on the basis of the interpretation method and a systematic approach method. Content analysis was used as a method, but it was used within the scope of the purpose. The publications were selected on the basis of the authors’ research of various aspects of identity and the difference in interpreting the phenomenon. Results. Analysis of Scopus publications made it possible to assert that the problem of identity is moving out of the anthropological context and acquiring new technical and technological frameworks (for example, scholars are raising the problem of the digital data identity, digital identification in the context of online transactions). At the same time, the anthropological view of identity remains. It is found for instance in the context of narratives, texts of a person about self that are posted on the Internet. In this context, the concept of “Person Life View” (M. Schechtman) is presented as a variant of a person’s holistic view of the self. The analysis of domestic publications makes it possible to conclude that representatives of social sciences and humanities in their research strive to overcome the dynamic view of a person (dissolving of identity or an absent self), are in search of models of “stability” of identity. Conclusion. Posing the question about the personal identity of a modern person, it seems that the border between the directly human (consciousness and body, for example) and the technical and technological (the Internet and the objective world) is becoming more and more destabilized every day. This predetermines the direction of the research. Contemporary scholars, who publish the results of their work in journals included in scientific databases, are faced not only with the problem of substantiating human identity as a theoretical concept that reflects the modern situation, but also with the problem of finding models in which a person is able to embody the idea of “stability” of identity in the everyday life. (shrink)

Pyrochlore compounds have a number of technological applications, such as dielectrics for high-frequency and magnetoelectric devices. In bulk materials, they exhibit stimulated cation arrangement and good long-distance order within the pyrochlore framework. Bismuth titanate ceramics containing SiO2 and Nd2O3 were synthesized in the Bi2O3-TiO2-SiO2-Nd2O3 system using the melt-quenching method. In a previous study, the phase composition of selected samples was determined by X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis and the microstructure was studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The preparation of monophase (...) polycrystalline materials was concluded. Infrared Fourier-transformed spectroscopy (FTIR) was applied in order to identify the structure. The electrical conductivity, as well as the dielectric losses and dielectric constants of selected samples were determined, and the influence of the phase composition on the dielectric characteristics was evaluated. The combination of the pyrochlore phase with the amorphous phase represented by the structural groups Bi-O-Si and Si-O-Si exerts a grain boundary strengthening effect. (shrink)

The childlike elements of deconstruction—deconstruction's suggestion of play—require an interdisciplinary attention that they have previously not been afforded in scholarly discourse on Derrida. The power of the child in children's literature scholarship has similarly been immune to binary-disrupting forces common in adjacent literary fields; such immunity has been granted under the banner of ‘aetonormativity,’ which norms adult power while subverting that of the child. In light of the posthumanist turn in critical thinking, which demands a dissolution of binaries in favour (...) of heterogeneity, deconstruction offers a novel approach to analysing the child in children's literature. In this paper, I draw upon Donna Haraway's diffractive approach to textual analysis to read Derrida's discussion of pharmakon through Maria Nikolajeva's conceptualization of aetonormativity. The resulting shift in understanding of both concepts allows for a reading of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio that explores a figure I term the posthumanist child, whose undecidable embodiment works to disrupt the aetonormative binary. (shrink)

Traditionally, in Anglo-American and Continental philosophy, music is addressed as the object of philosophical analysis: it is either a case study for developing broader, generalizable ideas about ontology, metaphysics, or ethics, or it is the thing that we apply philosophical methods and concepts to.1 It is the philosophy of music, remember. But in the last several decades philosophers in these traditions have increasingly taken “music” as a model for philosophical analysis: There is a branch of Deleuze studies dedicated (...) to this; new materialisms constantly refer to things such as vibration, resonance, and other wave behaviors such as diffraction; and Continental figures such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Adriana... (shrink)

Famously, James Watson credited the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953 to an X-ray diffraction photograph taken by Rosalind Franklin. Historians of molecular biology have long puzzled over a remarkably similar photograph taken two years earlier by the physicist and pioneer of protein structure William T. Astbury. They have suggested that Astbury’s failure to capitalize on the photograph to solve DNA’s structure was due either to his being too much of a physicist, with too little interest in (...) or knowledge of biology, or to his being misled by an erroneous theoretical model of the gene. Drawing on previously unpublished archival sources, this paper offers a new analysis of Astbury’s relationship to the problem of DNA’s structure, emphasizing a previously overlooked element in Astbury’s thinking: his concept of biological specificity. (shrink)

Since its discovery in 1912, X-ray crystallography has become a most useful tool in physics, chemistry, material science, mineralogy, metallurgy, and even in the biological sciences. In 1914, Max von Laue was awarded the Nobel Prize “for the discovery of X-ray diffraction by crystals,” followed by the 1915 Nobel Prize to William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg “for their services in analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays.” And these early Nobel prizes marked only the beginning of (...) X-ray crystallography as one of the most fruitful methods in the history of modern science. A 100 years after Laue’s Nobel Prize and 50 years after another Nobel Prize to Dorothy Hodgkin “for her determination by X-ray technique of the structures of important biochemical substances,” the UN proclaimed 2014 the International Year of Crystallography. “In all, 45 scientists have been awarded over the past century for work that is either directly or indirectly related to crystallo .. (shrink)

This article is the third part of a trilogy investigating the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. All three essays are inspired by Foucault’s diagnosis of our epoch in terms of biopower. They therefore aim at the creation of a new concept of life. In ‘Un Ecart Infime (Part III)’, I lay out Foucault’s analysis, from the first chapter of The Order of Things, of Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas. By stressing what Foucault says about the ‘sagittal lines’ exiting the painting, (...) one can show that that there are three major phases in Foucault’s analysis: locating the blind spot; multiplying the invisibility; and the diffraction of the multiplicity into singularities. More generally, we can see that Foucault’s analysis of the painting concerns the informal space in auto-affection; in other words, it concerns the ‘blind spot’ in the mirror relation, in the ‘psyché’. The blind spot in the ‘soul’ - and the ambiguity in the French word psyché between mirror and soul - is why we can say that Foucault’s analysis concerns life: being blind, life must be conceived as informal and unmappable. I show in the conclusion that the inability of mapping and of seeing this space in fact allows for the increase of power. (shrink)

Whatever the domain in question, the vocabulary of contemporary research cannot nelp but make clear that the major concern is the study of relations of power, domination or authority—terms that, by the way, are often used for one another. Thus, each issue of the journal edited by Pierre Bourdieu, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, gives an example of a different method of examining the mechanisms of domination. Is this interest in the phenomenon of power the sign of a (...) return of political analysis to a focal position? Nothing could be less certain. Look at the way the contemporary intellectual motor functions. One begins from the hypothesis of a super power (grand pouvoir)—the essence of power—which is taken as diffracting itself into multiple regions of the social sphere, taking on the most diverse forms, be they institutional or not. (shrink)

Quantum dots (3–4 nm) of Zn1− x Cd x S (both free of Mn2+ and with Mn2+ incorporated) were synthesized through a novel solvothermal-microwave irradiation technique. Detailed structural analysis of the Zn1− x Cd x S and Zn1− x Cd x S:Mn2+ (x = 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1) materials was carried out using powder X-ray diffraction technique. For all the compositions, the crystallite size was controlled to less than 1.5 nm. The optical energy gap for Zn1− x (...) Cd x S was found to vary from 3.878 to 2.519 eV and for Zn1−x Cd x S:Mn2+ it varies from 3.830 to 2.442 eV when x is increased from 0 to 1. Overall, the optical energy gap could be tuned from a minimum of 2.442 eV to a maximum of 3.878 eV. DC conductivity analysis (from 40°C to 150°C) and electrical energy gap analysis for all the compositions were also performed. The dc conductivity for Zn1− x Cd x S solid solutions varies from 0.3840 × 10−10 to 8.7782 × 10−10 mho/m at 150°C and for Zn1− x Cd x S:Mn2+ it varies from 0.5751 × 10−10 to 9.8078 × 10−10 mho /m at 150°C (for x = 0 to x = 1). The method of synthesis and the results observed in this investigation may assist in the fabrication of optical devices when the required operational performance falls under the range observed in the study. (shrink)

We report the results of an optical analogue of the fullerene molecule diffraction experiment. Our results, and an analysis of the fullerene experiment, suggest that the patterns observed in the latter can be explained using a localized particle model. There is no evidence that the grating period contributed to the published fullerene diffraction pattern. De Broglie waves, if they exist, are unlikely to have played a significant part in the fullerene diffraction experiment. The observed patterns are not consistent with (...) those expected according to wave theory for the experimental geometry corresponding to the slit-detector system and the de Broglie wavelength. The measurements were performed in the near field, making the demonstration of wave properties difficult. We outline a new classical approach to the electron and neutron interference experiments. The magnetic moment is crucial to this model, which emphasizes a mechanism for generating narrow-band continuum X-radiation. Some experiments are proposed which can decide between the suggested model and quantum mechanics, and which can also rule out an alternative stochastic model. (shrink)

This short essay presents a critical cartography of the critical new materialist notion and methodology of diffraction.

Re-turning to our experiences of putting a diffractive methodology to work ourselves, as well as engaging with the writings of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, we produce some propositions re...

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including (...) poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different ‘agential cuts’ in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading’s intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live. (shrink)

De Broglie gravitational waves form an axially symmetric class of vacuum solutions of the linearized Einstein equations. Unlike the well-known massless transverse perturbations in the weak-field regime, they possess an effective mass and exhibit longitudinal degrees of freedom, allowing them to act as guiding fields for elementary particles. In this paper, we show that the dynamics of the de Broglie gravitational wave, described in terms of the real part of a classical field $$\psi$$, is compatible with single particle Quantum Mechanics, (...) and that the complex field $$\psi$$ can be interpreted as the single particle wave function. In particular, we find that $$\psi$$ satisfies the Schrödinger equation for a free particle and, using the principles of gravitational lensing, the same holds in the presence of a weak central potential. We show that when our gravitational wave passes through two closely separated slits, it diffracts and interferes, creating the characteristic pattern of bright and dark bands observed in quantum experiments. We propose two different interpretations: a wave-particle picture, in which wave and particle are two distinct entities, and an effective background field perspective, in the spirit of soliton theory. A variant of the double-slit experiment that could serve, in principle, as an experimental test of the proposed framework is also discussed. (shrink)

Humans are living in damaged landscapes within a new geographical epoch known as the Anthropocene. The COVID-19 outbreak fuels uncertainty, instability, and ambiguity for humans. This viral disaster has been blamed for losing and further exacerbating ecological imbalance, and prompts a need to re-examine multispecies relations and, in particular, human exceptionalism. The authors, by applying a new theoretical assemblage that brings the new materialist turn entangled with Buddhist philosophies into our stories and diffractions of child-virus bodies, have been prompted to (...) raise two questions about how multispecies justice could disrupt environmental sustainability education. The questions we will engage with in the paper include: Can we explore these new theoretical assemblages (east-west) with child-virus relations as a means for raising multispecies justice that critiques the universalisation of human forces in the Anthropocene? What possibilities does the pandemic offer to rethink multispecies relations as an entangled ecological crisis by exploring what a ‘new normal’ in post-COVID-19 sustainability education could emerge? (shrink)

Diffraction gratings are famously associated with Henry Rowland of Johns Hopkins University but there were precursors. Although gratings were first made and used in Europe, reliable machines for ruling gratings were developed in the USA, and two men, Lewis Rutherfurd and William Rogers, tackled the problem before Rowland. Rutherfurd, a wealthy independent astronomer, designed and built the first screw-operated engine for ruling diffraction gratings, the fore-runner of almost all subsequent ruling engines. With it he and his assistant D. C. Chapman (...) ruled many gratings which he generously distributed to practising scientists, thereby materially advancing the science of spectroscopy. Rogers was a Harvard astronomer who developed an interest in the ruling of fine lines on glass that led him to construct a ruling engine with which he investigated the causes of the errors in the rulings he had examined. He continued to seek improvements with a second engine designed for ruling diffraction gratings. He ceased developing this engine when Rowland’s excellent gratings began to be available, concentrating instead on related problems to which he could apply the knowledge and skills he had gained, but his investigations assisted Rowland and other later ruling engine builders. This paper brings together what is known about the ruling engines of Rutherfurd and Rogers, their development, the gratings they produced, their quality and the work that was done with them, and assesses and compares their achievements and the impacts of the work of these two men. (shrink)

In 1997 the radical body-artist Stelarc hooked himself up to an external muscle stimulation system that was triggered by changing images from the Internet, producing a host of digital, visual, embodied and discursive performances. What an event! This uncanny performance, entitled ParaSite, did not merely represent something but was also simultaneously performative in that the unfolding of the performance itself produced new diffractions in the moment, doing something to and with the performer’s body in a flow of active human and (...) nonhuman participation. Differing from rendering an event, the performative mode does what it says rather than shows something already captured and ‘reflected’ in a representational mode. Here, Stelarc does not act ‘as if’ he were hooked up to the Internet in a meeting of fleshly and digital realities in order to represent issues of entanglement – he actually does it. Furthermore, the performance produces new, unanticipated diffractive iterations as it unfolds in the moment. Although the scene is set, as it were, no one, not even its creator can predict how the show will progress or what diffractions will emerge and become vital parts of the performance. (shrink)

The current neurosciences contribute to the construction of gender/sex to a high degree. Moreover, the subject of gender/sex differences in cognitive abilities attracts an immense public interest. At the same time, the entanglement of gender and science has been shown in many theoretical and empirical analyses. Although the body of literature is very extensive and differentiated with regards to the dimensions of ‘neuroscience of gender’ and ‘gender in neuroscience’, the feeding back of these findings into the field of neuroscience remains (...) a desideratum. Especially, the question of how gender knowledge, i.e. insights from feminist theory on gender/sex and from gender and science studies on knowledge production, may be integrated and applied within the neurosciences has been strongly neglected. Presumably due to their epistemic culture and epistemological presuppositions, these critical engagements are conceived as externalist by critical scholars and neuroscientists alike. In this context, the question arises of how substantiated gender knowledge may be accounted for in neuroscientific research practice? The article outlines methodological considerations for a critical research agenda in the cognitive neurosciences. I present thoughts on how insights and expertise from gender and science studies can be taken into account in the neuroscientific practice of knowledge production. Starting from the assumption that changes in neuroscientific research practices are possible, my aim is to point out possibilities of integrating gender knowledge into the neurosciences. (shrink)

International studies report that teachers increasingly seek safety through compliance rather than pursue professional autonomy. Yet what remains insufficiently explored is the way in which teachers inhabit imposed educational policies without adhering to their intended logic. This article mobilizes Michel Foucault’s concept of counter-conduct and Karen Barad’s diffractive reading to analyze multiple enactments of everyday resistance through an empirical case of a South Korean teacher. By diffractively reading qualitative data drawn from a teacher’s experiences within state-led educational policies, this (...) article reveals how a teacher’s day-to-day counter-conduct emerges through material and discursive entanglements. This article foregrounds the subtle and informal practices through which teachers inhabit power differently. It advocates creating new spaces for unheard or unvoiced empirical cases of teachers’ everyday resistance within contemporary educational reforms. (shrink)

In the field of education, some theories become a quotidian feature of the disciplinary landscape, embedded in teacher learning, licensure, professional learning, assessment, design, and practice. Such theories can become authoritative, iconic, set on a pedestal. Pedestals can be smashed. This paper introduces and illustrates a destructive/creative process of engaging with authoritative (or iconic) theory to open possibilities of thinking differently with them: Diffractive iconoclastic bricolage. This process entails encounter of a theory, identifying a specific critique of the theory (...) to dismantle it (iconoclasm), reading it through another theory (diffraction), and assembling a new theory/illustration based on the result (bricolage). Bloom’s Taxonomy, as both a theory and an illustration of a theory, is presented as an example of an iconic theory. Arguably, the linear hierarchical pyramid of the six categories of the cognitive domain has an influence that has grown well beyond its initial intended design. In this example, the history and background of Bloom’s Taxonomy is described (encounter), the linear, cumulative, and hierarchical organization of the Taxonomy is critiqued and diffracted through complexity theory, and a new figure, Bloom’s Complexity, is produced. This new figure emphasizes potential of thinking of Bloom’s cognitive categories as dynamic, nonlinear, and nested in complex ecologies of learning. Diffractive iconoclastic bricolage is offered as an approach for scholars to find new possibilities in established theories in education. (shrink)

The phenomenon of diffraction is a key methodological notion for Karen Barad. This article elaborates on Barad’s comments about diffractive methodology and argues that the approach can be fruitfully applied to the history of philosophy. It deals with potential objections to this application, such as Barad’s rejection of “analogical reasoning” and the possibility that the history of philosophy does not represent a properly interdisciplinary context. Using as a case study the recent books on Lucretius by Thomas Nail, the article (...) also describes three major consequences of extrapolating diffractive method to the history of philosophy: it promises to be more detailed, rigorous, and attentive to specialized arguments than competing “reflective” approaches; it implies that the objects of inquiry (the historical philosophers and their concepts) do not simply pre-exist awaiting representation by a historian or commentator; and the same point also applies to the subjects of inquiry or the contemporary philosophers themselves. (shrink)