An onto-epistemological practice for noticing differences-that-matter by reading phenomena through one another to trace patterns of interference and consequence in how worlds are made and known.
Diffraction names a specifically onto-epistemological practice, after Haraway and Barad, for making differences-that-matter perceptible by reading phenomena “through” one another to map patterns of interference, rather than mirroring or representing them as already separate. As method and metaphor, it treats knowing as part of world-making: phenomena, researchers, and apparatuses co-constitute what becomes visible through agential cuts. Diffractive analysis follows the consequences of cuts in situated assemblages, attending to exclusions, resonances, and ethical accountabilities that reconfigure pedagogy, authorship, and agency as more-than-human practices. As a method, it moves beyond simple cause-and-effect analysis, instead focusing on the complex, generative, and often unpredictable effects that arise from the entanglement of matter and meaning in educational assemblages.
Unlike reflection, which seeks to mirror or represent a pre-existing reality, diffraction attends to the patterns of difference, interference, and entanglement that emerge when phenomena inter-act . Reading diffractively involves bringing multiple theories, data sources, or historical moments into contact not to compare them, but to see what new insights or patterns are generated in their encounter.
Diffraction describes a way of studying and composing knowledge that pays attention to how relations produce effects, rather than treating entities as already separate. In the sciences, diffraction refers to how waves bend and produce interference patterns when they encounter obstacles; in critical theory, it names a method for mapping how concepts, materials, bodies, tools, and histories affect each other when brought into contact. For Haraway, diffraction is a figure for situated, accountable knowledge: it resists a detached view from nowhere and asks how methods, metaphors, and instruments participate in shaping what becomes visible and actionable. For Barad, diffraction is central to agential realism. Inquiry is part of the world’s ongoing becoming, so analysis attends to “agential cuts” (the decisions, instruments, and concepts that delineate what counts as the phenomenon) and to the ethical stakes of those cuts. Reading diffractively means placing texts, events, and artifacts into careful encounter to notice where energies amplify, cancel, or re-route, revealing relations and exclusions that matter for practice.
Put practically, diffraction invites researchers to compose encounters that make differences perceptible. A policy, a classroom transcript, and an interface screenshot each tell something on their own; read through each other, they yield an interference pattern that shows how rules, talk, and design co-produce a situation. This practice is worldly and material: software affordances, rubric categories, prior experiences with technology, and circulating narratives all help pattern what is felt, said, and done. Diffractive work stays close to those patterns and asks what they do.
In postqualitative inquiry, diffraction shifts method from extracting stable themes to composing conditions where relations can be traced as they happen. Rather than treating data as neutral inputs, it treats the research apparatus—prompts, recording choices, analytic lenses—as part of the phenomenon. This aligns with posthumanist commitments to distributed agency and with new materialist attention to how matter is lively and participatory. Diffractive analysis is therefore also an ethical practice: each delineation of the phenomenon has consequences for which voices, materials, and actions are amplified or muted, and for how responsibility is taken up in the research encounter.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, diffraction helps make sense of lived and affective experience by reading instructors’ reflections through platform interactions and institutional policies to see how specific climates of worry, curiosity, or relief take shape. It clarifies how authorship and creativity are enacted in concrete arrangements: assignment prompts, feedback practices, model affordances, citation expectations, and histories of teaching with prior tools. It supports analysis of the pedagogical assemblage by tracing how tangible artifacts—rubrics, revision trails, chat logs, policy language—interfere to produce what counts as legitimate composing, what gets assessed as learning, and where accountability is placed when humans and models co-compose.
Diffraction involves staging careful comparative encounters—such as policy texts through classroom practices, media narratives through instructors’ fieldnotes, or LLM interface affordances through assessment rubrics—to trace how boundaries like author/tool, cheating/learning, or creativity/derivation are enacted and with what effects. This approach allows for an analysis that reads current anxieties about AI through past technological panics, tracing how they interfere and produce new affective formations. Similarly, it enables a reading of pedagogical practices, student writing, and algorithmic outputs through one another to understand how they are co-constituted.