A situated practice of responsibility: an orientation to inquiry, pedagogy, and care that takes obligations to arise from concrete relations and effects, rather than abstract rules, because every act of knowing participates in making worlds.
Ethics in posthumanist and new materialist thought is inseparable from how beings and knowledges come to be. This is crystallized in the ethico-onto-epistemological proposition associated with Barad, where knowing, being, and doing are co-implicated in each research move. Ethics is designed into the apparatus: the questions asked, the concepts operationalized, the materials gathered, and the modes of rendering. Responsibility is located in the specificity of entanglements, since agential cuts make some relations sensible while excluding others and thereby redistribute risks and capacities. An ethos, in this register, names a cultivated mode of attention and comportment. Haraway forwards the notion of “response-ability,” a cultivated capacity to respond to the invitations and needs of others in complex, co-constitutive relationships. This is an ethics of “staying with the trouble,” and making kin: practicing situated accountability, composing livable relations with more-than-human others, and refusing the fantasy of a view from nowhere, but rather embracing how to learn to live and die well together on a damaged planet by nurturing unexpected collaborations and kinships. This involves what Haraway calls “sympoiesis,” or making-with, which reframes creation not as the act of a singular genius but as a collective, worldly process.
Across Braidotti, affirmative posthuman ethics centers distributed agency, transversal alliances, and the expansion of capacities for collective flourishing, while remaining alert to harms and asymmetries. With Bennett, materialities have vibrancy and efficacy; with Ahmed, an ethics of orientation tracks how bodies and discourses come to face certain worlds and not others, shaping who bears the weight of institutional norms; with Puig de la Bellacasa, care is a speculative, hands-on practice for maintaining and repairing worlds. In aggregate, ethos and ethics here are less a code and more an attunement to how research cuts, pedagogical designs, and scholarly genres participate in worlding.
This reconceptualization of ethics is fundamental to the practice of postqualitative research. If the researcher is always already entangled with the phenomenon of study, then ethics cannot be a procedural checklist managed by an institutional review board before the inquiry begins. Instead, ethics becomes an ongoing, emergent practice woven through every aspect of the research design, enactment, and representation. The researcher’s response-ability extends to the data, the material-discursive practices of inquiry, and the human and nonhuman participants who are part of the assemblage. The research process itself is an agential cut that reconfigures the world in some way, and the postqualitative researcher is accountable for the cuts they make and the realities they help to materialize. The ethical imperative shifts from a logic of representation, which seeks to give voice to subjects, to a logic of diffraction, which aims to read phenomena through one another to understand the material effects of their entanglement and to be accountable for the differences that these entanglements produce, as detailed by Lenz Taguchi (2010).
A postqualitative ethic matters because it shifts inquiry itself from a representational stance to a performative one. Methodological choices are interventions with consequences for what comes to exist for analysis. Apparatus design and sampling become ethical decisions as much as technical ones. Analysis attends to exclusions and to whose capacities are amplified or constrained. Writing and dissemination are treated as further sites of responsibility, since genres, citations, visualizations, and dataset sharing distribute value, voice, and vulnerability. This stance embodies an ethos of attentiveness, reciprocity, and reparative care across human and more-than-human participants, including infrastructures and computational systems.
In writing pedagogy entangled with large language models, an ethos-oriented ethics asks how prompts, interfaces, institutional policies, and assessment regimes enact authorship, credit, and accountability. It foregrounds data dignity: whether student texts, keystrokes, or feedback trails feed model training pipelines; how provenance is documented; and what transparency practices make these flows legible. It attends to affective climates that gather around AI tools—anxiety, curiosity, play, fatigue—and treats pedagogical choices as levers for shaping safety, dignity, and generative inquiry. It orients instructors to designing assignments and feedback as material-discursive interventions that open conditions for reflective judgment about when and how AI assistance aligns with learning as inquiry. Practically, this can involve process documentation and audit trails that render composing pathways visible; dialogic policies that co-articulate acceptable AI uses with students; and assessment practices that reward exploratory risk within accountable parameters. Ethos here is the ongoing cultivation of relations where students, instructors, and systems can learn with care, while tracing how credit, risk, and benefit are distributed across the assemblage.