A practice of sensitizing perception to the rhythms, intensities, and relations that compose a situation, so that inquiry can feel-with and think-with the more-than-human forces shaping what becomes possible.
Attunement in postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist work names a cultivated responsiveness to the emergent textures of a phenomenon. It is less a technique than a disposition and practice: learning to notice how bodies, materials, affects, histories, and concepts co-compose an event. In this sense, attunement is about calibrating with the situation’s own signals and tempos, allowing research to be guided by what “glows,” to borrow from MacLure, and by how intensities gather and disperse. It is informed by affect theory’s attention to preconscious forces (Massumi), by ecosophical sensitivity to vibrancy in matter (Bennett), and by process philosophies that foreground ongoing relational becoming (Manning). Rather than filtering experience into pre-set categories, attunement expands perceptual bandwidth: listening with the whole apparatus (researcher, tools, concepts, spaces, platforms) to catch shifts that might otherwise be missed.
In an agential realist register (Barad), attunement is part of apparatus design and use: it concerns how agential cuts are enacted, which differences are made to matter, and how accountabilities are taken up. In Haraway’s idiom of situated knowledges and SF (speculative fabulation, string figures, science fact/fiction), attunement is a commitment to partial, located, worlding practices that stay with the trouble of complex entanglements without premature simplification. Put narratively: attunement is a way of showing up to a phenomenon with receptive discipline, adjusting one’s sensing and thinking so the phenomenon can show what it is becoming.
Attunement shifts inquiry from extraction to participation. It treats data as events and traces in motion rather than as pre-given units to be coded. It emphasizes slow noticing, iterative return, and sensitivity to material-discursive performativity: how instruments, spaces, bodies, and concepts co-produce what appears. It supports methods that compose with phenomena (walking-with, listening-with, reading diffractively and privileges responsiveness over representational capture. This reorients validity toward accountability for one’s cuts, responsiveness to exclusions, and fidelity to the situation’s unfolding relationalities. Attunement is thus both methodological (how to proceed) and ethical (how to be accountable within the entanglement).
Attunement helps instructors and researchers sense the lived textures of AI-entangled writing practice. It supports attention to the feel of interaction rhythms between writers and interfaces, to the ambient atmospheres of classrooms shaped by policy discourse and platform affordances, and to moments when creativity thickens or thins as prompts, drafts, suggestions, and feedback circulate. It clarifies how authorship and learning are enacted in small, situated decisions—accepting a model suggestion, resisting it, rephrasing, iterating—that give the work its contour. By attuning to the pedagogical assemblage (prompts, rubrics, platforms, feedback channels, peer exchange, assessment timelines), inquiry can register how distributed agency is coordinated and where it sticks. This equips studies to follow affective shifts (hesitation, relief, frustration, curiosity) as consequential parts of composing, and to notice how material-discursive elements—interface latency, token limits, citation detectors, rubric language—shape what becomes legible as good writing or legitimate help. In practice, attunement may guide the selection and placement of recording devices, the pacing of observations, or the framing of interviews to catch emerging intensities rather than only reported beliefs.