A boundary is a temporarily stabilized differentiation produced within entangled relations; it is enacted by specific material–discursive practices that mark what counts as inside/outside, subject/object, or human/machine in a given situation.
In a postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist register, boundaries do not pre-exist relations; they take shape through practices that configure relations as if they were between already separate entities. In Barad’s agential realism, what appear as stable borders are local effects of “agential cuts,” the situated arrangements through which phenomena become determinately knowable and actionable. Apparatuses—conceptual, technical, institutional—do the boundary-work that makes certain distinctions operative at a moment, while excluding other possibilities. Boundaries, then, are not lines that divide a prior world; rather, they are the ongoing results of world-making practices, constantly re-enacted and open to reconfiguration.
Haraway’s material-semiotic thinking similarly treats boundaries as sites of composition rather than containment. Asking “why should bodies end at the skin?” is an ontological claim: bodies are relationally composed with tools, codes, infrastructures, and other species. Boundaries figure as connective membranes that organize capacities and accountabilities, not as rigid walls. New materialist work takes this seriously by tracing how boundaries are sensed, maintained, and transformed in everyday technocultural life, where the distinctions that matter—organism/machine, private/public, tool/author, teacher/learner—are enacted through concrete practices rather than given in advance.
For postqualitative inquiry, boundary-making is a methodological concern as much as a theoretical one. Research designs, concepts, and devices act as apparatuses that enact agential cuts, producing which actors, artifacts, and relations become visible as “data,” which questions become askable, and which responsibilities are taken up. Treating boundaries as situated achievements shifts analysis from categorizing preformed units to tracing how units come to be, with what inclusions and exclusions, and with what ethical consequences. This is where accountability lies: not in pretending to stand outside the phenomenon, but in specifying how the inquiry participates in stabilizing certain boundaries and not others, and what that stabilization enables or forecloses.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, boundaries are continually drawn and redrawn in practice. The distinction between human and machine is enacted by policies, interfaces, prompts, version histories, and classroom talk that set terms for what “counts” as legitimate composing. The role division of author/tool emerges in the choreography of prompting, editing, and citing, where platform affordances and assessment rubrics function as boundary-making devices. Instructor identities and responsibilities are likewise configured at the boundary between facilitation and detection, between collaboration and prohibition, as pedagogical choices enact cuts that foreground certain values—craft, process transparency, critical literacy—while backgrounding others. Attending to boundary-work makes visible how affective atmospheres of curiosity, worry, or relief take hold as media narratives, institutional directives, and interface frictions meet in the classroom, and how artifacts such as prompts, feedback templates, and process logs stabilize particular distinctions that shape what creativity, originality, and learning can become.