Abstract
This chapter introduces the work of Karen Barad. Karen Barad can be categorised as belonging to the new materialist and posthumanist paradigms, although we explain at the front of the chapter why she is perhaps better understood within post-anthropocentric thinking. Like Butler, Barad draws from an eclectic range of scholars and reworks their ideas. Barad’s work is focused on giving matter its due recognition in the meaning-making process. This chapter outlines how Barad has extended Butler’s notion of performativity and infused it with posthumanist thinking. Throughout the chapter, possible links with educational leadership are made, and an extended example of what a Baradian framework could ‘do’ is given.
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Notes
- 1.
I think it is important to point out from the outset that there is some scepticism about the degree of ‘new’ in this ‘new ontological turn’ of thinking. This scepticism exists on a couple of fronts. First, the label of ‘new’ often conjures up the idea of brand new. This is somewhat misleading. Perhaps, a better label is ‘reworked materialism’. This pays homage to the work of previous scholars in this area and the existence of some threads of thinking from them. Second, new materialist thinking, which is integral to this new ontological turn, has been critiqued in some of its applications for not really reworking the dualisms it purports to reconfigure. For discussion about this, I suggest reading Bendix-Petersen (2018), Bruining (2016) and Ahmed (2008).
- 2.
Where to situate Barad’s work, be it new materialist, post-anthropocentric or posthumanist, is challenging. While prefixes such as ‘new’ and ‘post’ may be read as inferring something completely new – an original so-to-speak (ironically) – this is not what I think Barad would claim. ‘On the contrary, diffraction is a matter of inheritance and indebtedness to the past as well as the future’ (Barad in Juelskjær and Schwennesen, 2012, p. 13). Barad’s work is thus a response to what precedes it and an entanglement with those ideas. Her notion of agential realism is forged through reworking previous understandings about the formation of meaning. While I do find it easier to situate Barad within post-anthropocene thinking (as I outline in this chapter), it would be remiss of me to label her ideas as ‘new’ or ‘post’ without clarifying that I see them as entangled with others.
- 3.
Where animals sit within this paradigm of thought is another interesting discussion. It is important to resist the temptation to associate non-human with only non-living.
- 4.
Dispositif is French and loosely translated into ‘apparatus’ or ‘device’. Roughly speaking, it is used by Foucault (1980) to talk about elements that are both linguistic and non-linguistic, which can include things such as discourses, policies, objects and ideas (to name a few). An apparatus is the network produced by these elements to govern behaviour.
- 5.
Judith Butler’s concept of performativity is explained in Chap. 4 of this book, which is dedicated to discussing Butler’s work and its utility for the field of educational leadership. However, you may also wish to read Butler’s book called Gender Trouble as it is in this book that she fleshes out the concept in more explicit detail. In the field of sexualities research, the notion of performativity has been instrumental in rethinking how knowledge about sexuality is formed.
- 6.
The stronghold of metaphysics as a way of understanding the world is discussed in Barad’s paper entitled Posthumanist Performativity (see Bibliography). I foreground this for the people who may not have a science background and thus need to situate Barad’s work within a much broader history of meaning-making processes.
- 7.
I make reference to and draw a thread of continuity with Butler here as it may be worthwhile for people to also read the Butler chapter in tandem with Barad. Butler’s concept of performativity is especially helpful for understanding Barad’s concept of posthuman performativity.
- 8.
I think it is important to float the idea of re-naming ‘educational leadership’ to ‘educational innovation’ or ‘schooling innovation’ or ‘educational change’. A Baradian framework is concerned with de-centering the human and this reframing would possibly help to facilitate this shift. Leadership research has a long history of being focused on people (leaders), and a re-naming of the field may assist this reconfiguration.
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Niesche, R., Gowlett, C. (2019). Entangling Karen Barad with/in Educational Leadership. In: Social, Critical and Political Theories for Educational Leadership. Educational Leadership Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8241-3_6
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