Enactment
A way of understanding how realities come to be in practice, where concepts, tools, bodies, and settings do things together such that a phenomenon takes shape as a consequence of those relations.
Enactment names a commitment to studying reality as something done in and through practices, rather than as something discovered after the fact. In agential realist terms, Barad treats phenomena as the outcome of specific configurations of people, materials, discourses, and devices—what she calls apparatuses—through which “agential cuts” bring certain aspects into focus while backgrounding others. In this view, agency does not reside inside preexisting subjects or objects; it is distributed across the arrangement that makes the phenomenon possible, and different arrangements enact different worlds. This emphasis on practice is shared by Haraway, whose work on situated knowledges and technoscience shows how things like categories, instruments, and embodied skills co-produce what counts as an object of knowledge. When an assessment rubric meets a writing prompt, an LLM interface, and the habits and histories of teachers and students, those relations actively compose the “thing” under study—for example, what counts as authorship or originality here and now.
In posthumanist and new materialist conversations, enactment is closely linked to performativity and assembling. Performativity highlights that speech, tools, and gestures do consequential work; assemblage emphasizes how heterogeneous elements hang together to make effects. Enactment gathers these insights into a methodological stance: to understand something, trace the practices that make it present and effective. Rather than treating “the same” object migrating across contexts, enactment asks how different apparatuses bring about different versions of that object. A “student essay,” for instance, may be enacted as a personal expression in one set of relations, as an assessable product in another, and as a collaborative, model-mediated composition in a third.
Enactment aligns with postqualitative inquiry by centering practice, materiality, and researcher participation in world-making. Methods become ways of composing and tuning apparatuses, not neutral lenses. Description focuses on how settings, bodies, documents, devices, and concepts collectively do work, including how agential cuts differentiate “student,” “tool,” “plagiarism,” or “learning.” Accountability follows from showing how particular arrangements produce particular realities and with what consequences. This invites designs that trace practices across sites and artifacts, and analyses that follow how a phenomenon shifts when the apparatus changes.
Enactment helps clarify how authorship, creativity, and learning take form within concrete classroom arrangements. A writing assignment enacted through a prompt template, an LLM’s suggestion interface, version histories, and an instructor’s feedback practice may produce a very different “essay” than one enacted through peer workshops and analog drafting. It also makes affect legible as part of the practice: interface friction, institutional messaging, and professional norms can enact climates of curiosity or suspicion, shaping how instructors and students feel and act with models. By tracing how policies, platforms, and pedagogical routines work together, enactment reveals how accountability is distributed, how originality gets defined in use, and how new artifacts—prompt libraries, annotation layers, process logs—become participants in composing and assessment.