A commitment to the inseparability of ethics, ontology, and epistemology in knowledge-making, where practices of knowing are simultaneously practices of being and doing, and therefore always matters of responsibility.
Coined within agential realism by Karen Barad, ethico-onto-epistem-ology names the view that knowing, being, and doing are entangled in every research act. The term foregrounds how research apparatuses, concepts, bodies, and materials co-constitute phenomena, so decisions about what to attend to, how to measure, and where to draw boundaries are already ethical because they reconfigure the world as part of the inquiry. This is a refusal of any stance that would separate methods from ethics or position the researcher as an uninvolved observer. In Barad’s formulation, phenomena emerge through intra-action, agential cuts enact what becomes included or excluded, and these cuts carry obligations. Ethico-onto-epistem-ology therefore orients inquiry toward response-ability: the cultivated capacity to be affected by, to answer to, and to account for the relations that inquiry brings into being.
The term sits within a wider posthumanist and feminist technoscience lineage, indebted to Donna Haraway’s critique of disembodied vision and the “god trick” and to situated knowledges as accountable, partial viewpoints. In this view, ethics is not a set of rules appended after data collection; it is threaded through apparatus design, analytic attunements, and representational choices that world phenomena. As Barad frames it, practices of knowing and being are mutually implicated; we know because we are of the world, and analysis is a material-discursive intervention in its becoming. Recent syntheses emphasize how this orientation reshapes methodology as “an ethics of worlding,” binding responsibility to the specific cuts and compositions researchers enact (see New Materialism Almanac: Ethico-onto-epistem-ology; for concise background on agential realism’s onto-epistemic stakes, see New Materialism Almanac: Phenomena – Agential Realism; and the publisher summary of Meeting the Universe Halfway at Duke University Press).
Postqualitative inquiry treats concepts as methods and methods as world-making practices. Ethico-onto-epistem-ology clarifies why designing an apparatus, composing a corpus, and staging a reading are inseparable from ethical obligation: each agential cut reconfigures what the research makes possible to sense, say, and do. It invites methodological choices that foreground response-ability—careful attunement to exclusions, accountabilities, and the differential consequences of research arrangements. This includes working with diffractive reading, tracing material-discursive performativities, composing analyses that render cuts explicit, and cultivating sensitivity to how findings enact realities rather than merely report on them. It aligns with posthumanist commitments to distributed agency and with new materialist attention to how materials, tools, and environments participate in thought and pedagogy.
In AI-entangled writing classrooms, ethico-onto-epistem-ology reframes instructors’ decisions—about prompts, platform settings, disclosure guidelines, feedback protocols, and assessment rubrics—as agential cuts that enact what counts as learning, creativity, and authorship. It supports analysis of instructors’ lived and affective experiences as part of the apparatus: the feel of an interface, the tempo of drafting with a model, and the atmospheres induced by policy discourse all participate in what becomes thinkable and teachable. It also helps articulate distributed authorship without reducing it to ownership disputes, attending instead to how composing practices, model affordances, and institutional expectations intra-act to produce recognizable texts and accountable actions. Under this lens, classroom artifacts (revision histories, prompt-engineering notes, feedback traces) are not neutral evidence but performative components of a pedagogical assemblage through which responsibilities and capacities are configured. The approach thereby anchors practical design choices—such as reflective disclosures, iterative co-composing protocols, and assessment of processual traces—in a rigorous account of how knowing-doing-being in writing is materially and ethically configured with AI.