The inseparable co-constitution of phenomena, where relations do not link preformed parts but generate the very terms that seem to be related. Differences materialize within specific configurations of humans, nonhumans, technologies, materials, and discourses.
Entanglement names a relational ontology in which entities are not primary units that later interact; they arise within, and as, relations. In agential realism, Karen Barad develops this claim by reworking Niels Bohr’s philosophy-physics: measurement is not a passive mirror but part of the phenomenon, and “agential cuts” do not reveal already-existing boundaries so much as enact them. On this view, relata emerge through intra-action, a technical term signaling that causality and difference are configured from within a phenomenon rather than transmitted between separate things. Entanglement thus describes the ongoing, situated knitting-together of matter and meaning in which apparatuses, bodies, tools, concepts, and histories are threaded through one another.
Across feminist technoscience and posthumanist theory, Haraway emphasizes situatedness, kin-making, and worlding to describe how companions—human and more-than-human—become with each other. This sensibility resonates with entanglement: partial perspectives and “situated knowledges” take shape in and through concrete attachments, infrastructures, and practices. New materialist thinkers such as Braidotti and Bennett amplify the vitality and distributed agency of matter, while Deleuze & Guattari provide a vocabulary of relations in flux—assemblage, becoming, transversal connection—that helps track how entanglements intensify, stabilize, or open new lines of flight. Affect theorists, including Ahmed and Massumi, add that feeling circulates across bodies and media, composing atmospheres that are part of how entanglements take hold. Together, these strands orient inquiry toward how phenomena crystallize from relational fields, and how ethical responsibilities follow from the cuts and compositions that make some relations durable and others untenable.
Entanglement shifts research from seeking linear causes to tracing how configurations come to matter. Methodologically, it foregrounds apparatus design: what materials, tools, and concepts are brought into relation, and with what world-making effects. Data are approached as events of configuration rather than neutral records. Analysis attends to the performativity of research practices, treating coding, writing, visualization, and interpretation as part of the phenomenon’s ongoing articulation. Ethics is integral, because every analytic cut enacts boundaries and responsibilities, redistributing visibility, agency, and accountability across the assemblage.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, authorship, learning, and assessment arise within assemblages that include prompts, interfaces, datasets, classrooms, policies, and histories of composing. Entanglement clarifies why instructors’ experiences feel visceral and shifting: affects circulate through media reports, institutional messaging, and the tactile rhythms of platform use, shaping how possibilities and risks are sensed. It reframes authorship as a practice patterned across students, instructors, models, training corpora, and feedback systems, where originality is enacted by how relations are configured in specific composing episodes. It also brings pedagogical artifacts into view as material-discursive forces—assignment designs, revision logs, interface constraints, and analytics dashboards actively pattern what counts as inquiry, evidence, and voice. Investigating how these elements co-constitute each other provides traction for redesigning prompts, redistributing feedback, and composing evaluative practices that acknowledge distributed agency while sustaining accountability and care.