A posthumanist onto-epistemology that understands reality as composed of phenomena—entangled relations without preexisting relata—where concepts, bodies, and instruments co-constitute what becomes determinate through intra-action and agential cuts.
Agential realism, developed by Barad drawing on Bohr and in conversation with Haraway, reframes ontology, epistemology, and ethics as inseparable. The primary unit of analysis is the phenomenon: an ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies, and an entanglement in which what will count as “object,” “subject,” “cause,” and “effect” takes temporary form through specific material-discursive arrangements called apparatuses. Relations do not connect already-formed entities; rather, relata emerge within phenomena through intra-action, and agential cuts enact provisional boundaries that make some differences intelligible while excluding others. Knowing is a material practice of world-making; it enacts realities, rather than reflecting an independent one ; objectivity is accountability for the cuts and configurations through which the world becomes determinate here-and-now. In this frame, agency is distributed and eventful, and ethics is immanent to method, since different apparatuses enact different worlds.
Agential realism provides a concrete grammar for postqualitative inquiry by dissolving the separation between researcher and researched, method and reality, as it treats method as apparatus design and analysis as tracing how phenomena are enacted. It shifts research from coding representations to composing encounters and attending to the performativity of materials, tools, and concepts in generating “data.” Research itself is understood as an apparatus that enacts agential cuts, thereby participating in the materialization of the very phenomenon it studies. Objectivity is no longer a “view from nowhere” and is reframed as a matter of accountability for the specific cuts enacted and the constitutive exclusions they produce. Inquiry shifts from seeking representation to tracing the performative effects of material-discursive practices, mapping how phenomena are stabilized, and attending to the ethical stakes of how the world is cut together-apart. Sampling frames, prompts, interfaces, and theoretical lenses are not outside observations; they are world-making practices that cut together-apart, distributing agency and responsibility. This makes ethico-onto-epistemology operational: researchers account for constitutive exclusions, detail how different configurations materialize different findings, and treat validity as situated responsibility for the worlds a study helps stabilize.
Agential realism clarifies how AI-entangled composing emerges from the intra-action of prompts, models, platforms, rubrics, institutional policies, and embodied writerly habits. What counts as authorship, creativity, collaboration, and assessment is enacted by pedagogical apparatuses that perform agential cuts—detector policies, “AI-free” assignments, or process-facing portfolios each configure different determinations of writer, tool, originality, and accountability. Lived and affective experiences of instructors take shape within these entanglements: anxiety, curiosity, confidence, and care are not merely internal states but effects of specific material-discursive configurations. Designing studios that foreground interaction logs, revision trails, and reflective commentary reconfigures the phenomenon so that distributed agency and entangled creativity become legible, assessable, and ethically accountable.