A methodological practice of reading multiple sources through one another to generate novel insights from the interference patterns they produce when brought into contact.
Building on Haraway’s initial proposition, diffractive reading is a practice that moves beyond the interpretation of a single text’s inherent meaning. Instead, it stages an encounter between two or more texts, theories, or data sources to see what new meanings and material effects emerge from their interaction. The guiding metaphor is the physical phenomenon of diffraction, where waves overlap and create a new, complex pattern of interference. Similarly, when one reads a piece of data through a theoretical concept, or one policy document through another, they are not compared as separate entities. Rather, the reading creates a new pattern of understanding that was not present in any of the individual sources. This approach, further developed by theorists like Barad and applied to qualitative inquiry by scholars such as Jackson and Mazzei, treats the act of reading itself as a material practice. The combination of texts and the chosen theoretical lens form an “apparatus” that produces, rather than simply reveals, knowledge.
Diffractive reading is a core practice in postqualitative inquiry because it is generative. It produces new concepts and possibilities from the analytical encounter instead of aiming to represent a pre-existing truth or code data for themes. This aligns with a posthumanist commitment to decentering the human researcher as the sole source of meaning. In a diffractive reading, the texts, theories, and data are active participants in the analysis; they have agency in the production of knowledge. This practice embodies a new materialist sensibility by treating concepts and data as lively matter that intra-acts, creating tangible effects in the research process and the world.
This practice offers a powerful method for analyzing the complex entanglements of AI in writing instruction. A researcher could read instructors’ narratives of classroom experiences through the technical affordances and opaque rhetoric of an LLM’s user interface, revealing how pedagogical agency is distributed and negotiated. It allows for an analysis of student writing by reading final drafts through the archived chat logs of their interactions with an AI, showing how authorship becomes a layered, hybrid performance. Furthermore, by reading institutional policies on academic integrity through the marketing materials of GenAI companies, a diffractive reading can illuminate the competing material-discursive forces that produce anxiety, adaptation, and new pedagogical forms.