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Karen Barad's quantum ontology and posthuman ethics: Queering relationality
Book chapter

Karen Barad's quantum ontology and posthuman ethics: Queering relationality

Elizabeth de Freitas, Matthew X. Curinga, Maggie MacLure, David Rousell, Laura Trafí-Prats and Sarah E. Truman
Posthuman Social Science and Computational Culture: Essays on Methodology, Theory and Practice, pp.57-69
Routledge, 1st
2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003538769-4
Appears in  Recent Faculty of Education Publications

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Abstract

In her renowned study of Niels Bohr’s work in quantum physics, Barad (2007) attempts to recast the relationship between method and concept, claiming that “Bohr’s unique contribution is this: he proposes that we understand concepts to be specific material arrangements of experimental apparatuses” (Barad, 2010, p. 253). This offers insight into the ways in which concepts are themselves apparatus. The concept is thus neither a universal ideal instantiated in the material plane nor a social construct abstracted from the material plane. For Barad, concepts are not detached codes for sorting and naming activity. Nor are they mere distorted reflections of the world, a perspective that feeds into an “aggrieved postmodern antirealism” (Sheldon, 2016, p. 10). This means that research methods – and any use of experimental apparatus - are constitutive of conceptual content in profound ways. In other words, concepts are working material assemblages rather than pure forms subject only to recognition, imposed on formless and inert matter. Her approach aims to encounter and engage with the conceptual on the material plane; in other words, this approach refuses the ontological dualism between matter and meaning – concepts are material, and matter is conceptual.

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