Karen Barad Beyond New MaterialismRhetoric, Transdisciplinarity, Physics

Reinterprets Karen Barad’s work by showing that rhetoric is constitutive of agential realism, not merely ornamental

• Challenges reductive accounts of Barad as either a scientific import into the humanities or a marginal figure for physics
• Brings feminist theory, science studies and foundational physics into a new conversation through close rhetorical reading
• Offers a new account of transdisciplinarity beyond models of boundary-crossing, synthesis and institutional collaboration
• Places new materialism in the context of contemporary debates on transdisciplinarity and disciplinary relation

Stacey Moran reevaluates Karen Barad’s legacy, by showing that agential realism cannot be understood apart from the rhetorical and transdisciplinary practices through which it is articulated. Against humanities readings that celebrate Barad’s concepts while neglecting their formal construction, and against dismissals from physics that treat the work as philosophically suggestive but scientifically marginal, she argues that rhetoric is not secondary to Barad’s thought but constitutive of it.

Through close readings of style, metaphor, analogy, dramatisation and other textual strategies, Moran reconceives agential realism as a project that reshapes the relations among disciplines rather than simply borrowing across them. In doing so, she repositions Barad within debates in feminist theory, science studies and foundational physics, while also advancing a broader account of transdisciplinarity as an open, iterative and transformative engagement among heterogeneous practices of knowledge.