The inseparability of matter and meaning in the production of phenomena, where practices, concepts, bodies, tools, and signs co-constitute what comes to exist, to be sensed, and to count as knowledge.
Material-discursivity names a core commitment across agential realism and allied posthumanist and new materialist approaches: matter and discourse are not separate domains that later interact but are entangled in the very becoming of phenomena. In agential realism, Barad argues that apparatuses—concepts, instruments, bodies, codes, protocols, habits—do not merely describe the world; they help enact it. Agential cuts, the patterned delineations produced by specific apparatuses, simultaneously configure what is materialized and what is intelligible. Material-discursive practices are thus the concrete arrangements through which the world takes shape as knowable, artifacted, and actionable, making ontology, epistemology, and ethics co-implicated.
Feminist technoscience and posthumanist ethics extend this orientation. Haraway’s situated knowledges foreground how narratives, metaphors, categories, and visualizations are inseparable from the material infrastructures and labors that scaffold them. Braidotti’s posthuman theory and Bennett’s attention to vibrant matter emphasize that forces, bodies, and things have trajectories and capacities that participate in meaning-making. Affect work from Ahmed and Massumi highlights how intensities circulate through spaces, interfaces, and encounters, shaping what becomes perceptible and thinkable. Material-discursivity is a name for this co-productive weave, where the sensible and the sayable are configured together in practice.
For postqualitative inquiry, material-discursivity reframes research from representing a pre-given reality to intervening in how phenomena take form. Apparatus design—prompts, platforms, interview protocols, analytic lenses, visualization choices—is consequential, because each arrangement configures what can appear as data, who can speak, and which relations are amplified or obscured. Analysis becomes an account of how specific material-discursive practices make differences that matter, along with a reflexive articulation of the cuts enacted by the research. This orientation supports methodological moves such as composing multiple traces, documenting apparatus choices, and attending to how concepts and materials co-operate in producing findings.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, material-discursivity clarifies how authorship, creativity, and assessment are enacted through the interplay of interfaces, prompts, model training legacies, institutional policy language, feedback genres, and classroom routines. The text box, autocomplete suggestions, temperature settings, plagiarism-detection dashboards, and revision histories are not neutral containers; they co-produce what writing becomes in practice and how it is recognized. The discourses of academic integrity and originality circulate with the material affordances of LLMs to configure how students compose, when instructors intervene, and where accountability is placed. Paying attention to material-discursive arrangements enables instructors to redesign prompts and feedback practices so that the apparatus itself makes visible processes of inquiry, attribution, and decision-making. It also supports analysis of affective atmospheres—curiosity, apprehension, fatigue—as effects of how tools, policies, and pedagogical narratives come together in concrete classrooms.