Karen Barad | University of California, Santa Cruz (original) (raw)
Books by Karen Barad
Papers by Karen Barad
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2015
Drawing on a disparate set of naturalcultural phenomena from regenerative biology, quantum field ... more Drawing on a disparate set of naturalcultural phenomena from regenerative biology, quantum field theory, and queer and trans theories that include lightning, primordial ooze, frogs, bioelectricity, monstrosity, trans rage, virtual particles, and errant pathways, this article is about the materiality of political imageries and the possibilities for making queer alliance with nature's nonessentialist nature. In particular, it makes an argument for the radically deconstructive, queer, and trans nature of nature, including nature's own engagement with materialist practices of imagining.
Entangled Worlds, 2020
In “What Flashes Up,” Karen Barad exposes a startling new sense of matter. The “agential realist”... more In “What Flashes Up,” Karen Barad exposes a startling new sense of matter. The “agential realist” interpretation of quantum physics in her monumental Meeting the Universe Halfway had already brought the indeterminacy and relationality—the “intra-activity”—of quantum ontology into resonance with human ethics: All beings compose and partake in the responsive structure of the world. “Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us flourish.” In the present discussion, Barad draws Walter Benjamin’s messianic “now-time” via Judith Butler and quantum field theory into a deep meditation on the matter of time, a time that breaks from the scientific and political modernisms of purportedly linear progress.
Nuclear Physics B - Proceedings Supplements, 1988
A high statistics calculation of quenched hadron masses on an 83 x 16 lattice is discussed. The r... more A high statistics calculation of quenched hadron masses on an 83 x 16 lattice is discussed. The results are compared with previous results and are found to be systematically higher for the rho meson.
This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its material... more This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its materiality. It begins and ends with the Marshall Islands, at the crossroads of two great destructive forces: nuclear colonialism and the climate crisis. In the aftermath of sixty-seven US nuclear bomb "tests" visited upon the Marshall Islands, the concrete "dome" built on Runit Island by the US government was an act of erasure and avoid -ance-an attempt to contain and cover over plutonium remains and other material traces of the violence of colonial hospitality that live inside the Tomb (as the Marshallese call it). Taking the physicality of the hostility within hospitality seriously, and going into the core of the theory that produced the nuclear bomb, I argue that a radical hospitality-an infinity of possibilities for interrupting state sanctioned violence-is written into the structure of matter itself in its inseparability with the void. How shall we remember you? You were a whole island, once. You were breadfruit trees heavy with green globes of fruit whispering promises of massive canoes. Crabs dusted with white sand scuttled through pandanus roots. Beneath looming coconut trees beds of ripe watermelon slept still, swollen with juice. And you were protected by powerful irooj, chiefs birthed from women who could swim pregnant for miles beneath a full moon.
Annals of Physics, 1986
Monte Carlo simulation can provide a direct determination of the distribution of quarks inside ha... more Monte Carlo simulation can provide a direct determination of the distribution of quarks inside hadrons. Such distributions are useful for a variety of purposes, including the study of confinement. We discuss the theoretical and practical issues involved. A detailed study of twodimensional QCD is described.
PLoS Biology, 2013
The Community Page is a forum for organizations and societies to highlight their efforts to enhan... more The Community Page is a forum for organizations and societies to highlight their efforts to enhance the dissemination and value of scientific knowledge.
The Multispecies Salon, 2014
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting tru... more Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting trust in institutions has led to significant changes in the organization and funding of research and education. These changes have troubled the very foundations of universities, but they also have created new opportunities to re-imagine and re-form practices of knowledge production, a key concern of Science and Technology Studies…
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 2017
Theory & Event, 2019
This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its material... more This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and
problematics of hospitality in its materiality. It begins and ends with the Marshall Islands, at the crossroads of two great destructive forces: nuclear colonialism and the climate crisis. In the aftermath of sixty-seven US nuclear bomb “tests” visited upon the Marshall Islands, the concrete “dome” built on Runit Island by the US government was an act of erasure and a-void-ance—an
attempt to contain and cover over plutonium remains and other material traces of the violence of colonial hospitality that live inside the Tomb (as the Marshallese call it). Taking the physicality of the hostility within hospitality seriously, and going into the core of the theory that produced the nuclear bomb, I argue that a radical hospitality—an infinity of possibilities for interrupting state sanctioned violence—is written into the structure of matter itself in its inseparability with the void.
New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, 2017
This paper examines the political-ontoepistemological-ethical implications of temporal dis/juncti... more This paper examines the political-ontoepistemological-ethical implications of temporal dis/junction by reading insights from Quantum Field Theory and Kyoko Hayashi's account of the destruction wrought by the Nagasaki bombing through one another. The diffraction [indeterminacy] of time at the core of quantum field theory, troubles the scalar distinction between the world of subatomic particles and that of colonialism, war, nuclear physics research, and environmental destruction; all of which entangle the effects of nuclear warfare throughout the present time, troubling the binaries between micro and macro, nature and culture, nonhuman and human. Barad thus attempts to think through what possibilities remain open for an embodied remembering of the past which, against the colonialist practices of erasure and avoidance and the related desire to set time aright, calls for thinking a certain undoing of time; a work of mourning more accountable to, and doing justice to, the victims of ecological destruction and of racist, colonialist, and nationalist violence, human and otherwise-those victims who are no longer there, and those yet to come. This task is related to rethinking the notion of the void. Against its Newtonian interpretation as the absence of matter and energy, as that which does not matter and thus works to justify colonial occupation, Barad understands the void in terms of Derrida's hauntology; a spectral domain where life and death are originarily entangled, and inanimate matter itself gives itself to be thought in its mortal finitude. The void is rather the yearning and the imagining of what might yet have been, and thus also the infinitely rich ground of imagining possibilities for living and dying otherwise.
Special Issue on "Diffracting Worlds, Diffractive Readings - Onto-Epistemology and the Critical Humanities", 2014
Diffract -dif-frange˘re -to break apart, in different directions 1 (as in classical optics)
Power of Material/Politics of Materiality (English/German), edited by Susanne Wtizgall and Kirsten Stakemeier, 2015
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2015
Drawing on a disparate set of naturalcultural phenomena from regenerative biology, quantum field ... more Drawing on a disparate set of naturalcultural phenomena from regenerative biology, quantum field theory, and queer and trans theories that include lightning, primordial ooze, frogs, bioelectricity, monstrosity, trans rage, virtual particles, and errant pathways, this article is about the materiality of political imageries and the possibilities for making queer alliance with nature's nonessentialist nature. In particular, it makes an argument for the radically deconstructive, queer, and trans nature of nature, including nature's own engagement with materialist practices of imagining.
Entangled Worlds, 2020
In “What Flashes Up,” Karen Barad exposes a startling new sense of matter. The “agential realist”... more In “What Flashes Up,” Karen Barad exposes a startling new sense of matter. The “agential realist” interpretation of quantum physics in her monumental Meeting the Universe Halfway had already brought the indeterminacy and relationality—the “intra-activity”—of quantum ontology into resonance with human ethics: All beings compose and partake in the responsive structure of the world. “Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us flourish.” In the present discussion, Barad draws Walter Benjamin’s messianic “now-time” via Judith Butler and quantum field theory into a deep meditation on the matter of time, a time that breaks from the scientific and political modernisms of purportedly linear progress.
Nuclear Physics B - Proceedings Supplements, 1988
A high statistics calculation of quenched hadron masses on an 83 x 16 lattice is discussed. The r... more A high statistics calculation of quenched hadron masses on an 83 x 16 lattice is discussed. The results are compared with previous results and are found to be systematically higher for the rho meson.
This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its material... more This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its materiality. It begins and ends with the Marshall Islands, at the crossroads of two great destructive forces: nuclear colonialism and the climate crisis. In the aftermath of sixty-seven US nuclear bomb "tests" visited upon the Marshall Islands, the concrete "dome" built on Runit Island by the US government was an act of erasure and avoid -ance-an attempt to contain and cover over plutonium remains and other material traces of the violence of colonial hospitality that live inside the Tomb (as the Marshallese call it). Taking the physicality of the hostility within hospitality seriously, and going into the core of the theory that produced the nuclear bomb, I argue that a radical hospitality-an infinity of possibilities for interrupting state sanctioned violence-is written into the structure of matter itself in its inseparability with the void. How shall we remember you? You were a whole island, once. You were breadfruit trees heavy with green globes of fruit whispering promises of massive canoes. Crabs dusted with white sand scuttled through pandanus roots. Beneath looming coconut trees beds of ripe watermelon slept still, swollen with juice. And you were protected by powerful irooj, chiefs birthed from women who could swim pregnant for miles beneath a full moon.
Annals of Physics, 1986
Monte Carlo simulation can provide a direct determination of the distribution of quarks inside ha... more Monte Carlo simulation can provide a direct determination of the distribution of quarks inside hadrons. Such distributions are useful for a variety of purposes, including the study of confinement. We discuss the theoretical and practical issues involved. A detailed study of twodimensional QCD is described.
PLoS Biology, 2013
The Community Page is a forum for organizations and societies to highlight their efforts to enhan... more The Community Page is a forum for organizations and societies to highlight their efforts to enhance the dissemination and value of scientific knowledge.
The Multispecies Salon, 2014
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting tru... more Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting trust in institutions has led to significant changes in the organization and funding of research and education. These changes have troubled the very foundations of universities, but they also have created new opportunities to re-imagine and re-form practices of knowledge production, a key concern of Science and Technology Studies…
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 2017
Theory & Event, 2019
This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its material... more This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and
problematics of hospitality in its materiality. It begins and ends with the Marshall Islands, at the crossroads of two great destructive forces: nuclear colonialism and the climate crisis. In the aftermath of sixty-seven US nuclear bomb “tests” visited upon the Marshall Islands, the concrete “dome” built on Runit Island by the US government was an act of erasure and a-void-ance—an
attempt to contain and cover over plutonium remains and other material traces of the violence of colonial hospitality that live inside the Tomb (as the Marshallese call it). Taking the physicality of the hostility within hospitality seriously, and going into the core of the theory that produced the nuclear bomb, I argue that a radical hospitality—an infinity of possibilities for interrupting state sanctioned violence—is written into the structure of matter itself in its inseparability with the void.
New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, 2017
This paper examines the political-ontoepistemological-ethical implications of temporal dis/juncti... more This paper examines the political-ontoepistemological-ethical implications of temporal dis/junction by reading insights from Quantum Field Theory and Kyoko Hayashi's account of the destruction wrought by the Nagasaki bombing through one another. The diffraction [indeterminacy] of time at the core of quantum field theory, troubles the scalar distinction between the world of subatomic particles and that of colonialism, war, nuclear physics research, and environmental destruction; all of which entangle the effects of nuclear warfare throughout the present time, troubling the binaries between micro and macro, nature and culture, nonhuman and human. Barad thus attempts to think through what possibilities remain open for an embodied remembering of the past which, against the colonialist practices of erasure and avoidance and the related desire to set time aright, calls for thinking a certain undoing of time; a work of mourning more accountable to, and doing justice to, the victims of ecological destruction and of racist, colonialist, and nationalist violence, human and otherwise-those victims who are no longer there, and those yet to come. This task is related to rethinking the notion of the void. Against its Newtonian interpretation as the absence of matter and energy, as that which does not matter and thus works to justify colonial occupation, Barad understands the void in terms of Derrida's hauntology; a spectral domain where life and death are originarily entangled, and inanimate matter itself gives itself to be thought in its mortal finitude. The void is rather the yearning and the imagining of what might yet have been, and thus also the infinitely rich ground of imagining possibilities for living and dying otherwise.
Special Issue on "Diffracting Worlds, Diffractive Readings - Onto-Epistemology and the Critical Humanities", 2014
Diffract -dif-frange˘re -to break apart, in different directions 1 (as in classical optics)
Power of Material/Politics of Materiality (English/German), edited by Susanne Wtizgall and Kirsten Stakemeier, 2015
Kvinder, Køn og forskning/ Women, Gender and Research (Copenhagen, 2012), No.1-2, pp. 10-24., 2012