Karen Barad as educator: agential realism and education

Abstract

Murris declares up front, ‘This is not a book about Barad’. However, Karen Barad as educator: Agential realism and education is a significant contribution to engagement with, and understanding of, Barad’s agential realism. Barad’s feminist and human/more-than-human entangled theoretical physics is profoundly relevant to people/world relationality, and is therefore important for environmental education, as we face unprecedented challenges. The connected nature of those challenges means that in one way or another every area of knowledge and education is related to the environment. An embodied and relationally entangled approach to knowing, not just about, but with, other species, ecosystems, weather and climate, offers learning for us all, and agential realism provides a foundational ethico-onto-epistemology. Barad’s work needs to be widely accessible, and Murris supports and enables this opportunity for environmental educators, indeed all educators. Murris’ book invites the reader in and provides possibilities and opportunities for participating in an agential realist approach to teaching and learning. Any idea of a critical review of Murris’ book dissolves into relational engagement with the knowledge it communicates, stimulating consideration of all educational and knowledge making practice, and why it matters. This effect is co-generated through the book’s well-crafted enactment of Murris’ own relational engagement with Barad and their work and through inclusion of examples of educational knowledge making/ practice that do not apply agential realism but live it. Agential realism, Murris explains, is not a representational knowledge that we can look at from the outside or use as a tool. Rather, it is a reworking of knowledge, teaching and learning, which includes a reworking of identity, relationship, space and time in the coming-into-being of the world. Barad’s agential realism conceptualises life as participatory and performative, and Murris enacts this ethico-onto-epistemology in her book, through the lens of education. The book itself is ‘iterative and intra-active’ (p. 3). The process and experience of enacting agential realist education is demonstrated by Murris in a few different ways. First, through the well thought out and integrated structure of the book. Engaging the reader with the ontological perspective of knowledge as embodied and relational immediately invites us to become entangled with Murris, Barad and agential realism. Any dichotomy, on Murris’ part or indeed Barad’s, of expert and beginner, or them and us, is bypassed,