Initial intra-actions becoming

Agential realism evokes the generative intra-actions it expresses, with the queering of all boundaries as indeterminate in nature. This makes it difficult to hold a position of absolute individualised separation while engaging and knowing with Barad’s work. Each reading and discussion of Barad’s work is a new and re-newed iteration of intra-active entanglement, a perpetually unfolding knowing and becoming with/in the material-discursive phenomena of our lives and learning (see later section for further explanation of material-discursivity). This entanglement includes here the intense and often poetic writings of Barad, especially in her seminal work, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Reference Barad2007). Thus, the intentional interweaving of many direct quotes throughout this article gives Barad’s work voice while offering the reader the space to engage with Barad’s knowledge and theories with us, as we delve into the implications of these theories for environmental education.

Through engaging with agential realism, our Barad study group expresses intra-active relational generativity by learning together and each of us applying our learning to our own PhD research. Our PhD topics are varied, with Shae exploring the use of a patterns-based approach to teaching, learning and applying participative complexity thinking and understanding; Lisa exploring collective storytelling that helps us understand lived experience; and Simone delving into teachers’ perceptions and practices of childhoodnature.Footnote ¹ These differences enable rich layers of depth in our animated conversations and unfolding understanding of Barad’s concepts. Our process of learning and knowing, relating and being, bringing forth who we are, is constantly emergent as we consider the very nature of what it means to be human. We think about how we can understand/experience the response-ability within our entangled inseparability; with response-ability being a thought provoking and expansive concept from Haraway that implies ‘collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices’ through our capacity to respond (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016, p. 34). Barad (Reference Barad2007) defines all human practices, including conceptualising, as material and therefore cogenerative within phenomena; in other words, there is responsibility inherent within all action.

Agential realism is a broad theory based in the quantum physics of a Bohrian ontology, whereby intra-actions create all matter and entities from within foundational phenomena, expressing the continuous entanglement of humans and world together/apart (see discussion in Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 67–70). This perspective of grounding in quantum physics challenges the traditional Newtonian idea of the world made of separate parts that dominates much of Western ontology. Boundaries of being, knowing, acting and becoming then express themselves through patterns of diffraction (Barad, Reference Barad2007). When the three of us meet together physically or virtually, diffractive patterns of discussion and sharing are generated, where the ripples within our generative engagement both enhance one another as resonance and cancel one another out as dissonance. Barad’s writings are part of the generativity, with their marks of mattering, emanating agentic relationality, meeting us halfway.

With agency of its own, our learning and knowing rippled out beyond its three-person dynamic, and sharing our entangled and diffractive process with others became inevitable. The entity of our creative generativity sought evolving expression, and the AAEE Conference Research Symposium presented a timely opportunity. The theme of the symposium was ‘Creating Capacity for Change’. As Barad states clearly that the agential realist framework ‘provides a posthumanist performative account of technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices’ (Reference Barad2007, p. 32), we felt that a conversation on the relevance of Barad’s theories would be an appropriate addition to the forum.

Sharing the innovative and multifaceted ideas of Barad was a challenging task for a 90-minute workshop. When we consider a phenomenon such as a research symposium through the notion of intra-action, ‘a lively new ontology emerges: the world’s radical aliveness comes to light in an entirely non-traditional way that reworks the nature of both relationality and aliveness (vitality, dynamism, agency)’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 33). Our intention for our forum conversation was to try a new way to explore the possibilities for developing a collective awareness of our agential participation with/in the phenomena of knowledge production and of the impact it has on our actions and practice as educators. A positivist perspective views humans as essentially separate entities who must have knowledge downloaded into them, much like data onto a hard drive. An approach such as Barad’s may be an important and game-changing path to participatory, relational and generative knowledge building in environmental education and research, given that we need new and creative ways of relating with others (including nonhumans) within environmental education to promote socio-ecological justice.

In planning the workshop, we sought to enact emergent conditions in which participants could embody knowledge to apply in their own work and/or life context. We were not there to present rhetoric, or explain what we ‘knew’, but to open our own learning and re-learning, our diffractive relationality with Barad’s work and each other, to a collective engagement with other environmental educators and researchers, and indeed also with the other-than-human phenomena that also existed in that space. With the understanding that we are always already entangled, and that the boundaries between ‘knower’ and ‘known’ are not fixed, we hoped that the conversation would act to open the possibilities for response-ability with/to each other’s being and becoming, learning and knowing, as environmental educators, researchers, colleagues. As Barad writes: ‘Knowledge making is not a mediated activity, despite the common refrain to the contrary. Knowing is a direct material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articulation’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 379). We further address the implications of this for environmental education towards the end of this article.

Agentially realising agential realism

The university classroom that had been designated for the Research Symposium session was a double room — long and narrow. Participants meandered in from morning tea, some with cups still in their hands, and sat mostly around the edges. A steady flux of people, some known to the presenters and others not known, contributed to expectation through presenter-participant intra-activity. After an acknowledgement of Country and a brief scene setting — introducing ourselves and Barad’s work — we sat down in the front of the room in a small semicircle of three chairs facing each other to discuss agential realism, just as we would in our monthly study group.

Although the conversation at this point was three-way, we were aware that the intra-activity of bodies (both human and nonhuman), and all other phenomena — with place itself participating and enabling — also existed between all present. Even those not present materially (including Barad), contributed to configuring this particular phenomenon called ’Research Symposium Session’. As Barad (Reference Barad2007) writes in the preface to Meeting the Universe Halfway: ‘… time and space, like matter and meaning, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future’ (p. ix). Our venturing forward was ‘new’ for us and simultaneously a discontinuous continuation of an unfolding of knowledge. Barad’s ideas are explored through the following conversation, in a similar way to the discussion about agential realism that the authors shared during the Research Symposium session.

As this intra-action between the three of us came to an end, the other workshop participants were invited to more actively engage with each other and us by moving into three smaller groups. The intention for each group was to consider a facet of the theory of agential realism: intra-action and phenomena, material-discursivity, and diffraction. We now turn to a diffracting of the workshop through these three lenses — and the entanglement of each one of us in our respective group.

Lisa intra-actively intra-acts phenomenon

Six humans gathered around a rectangular table on one side of the large rectangular room to learn collectively, with ‘phenomena’ and ‘intra-action’ the focus of discussion. There was a large sheet of paper in the middle of the table, with some markers scattered over the centre. There was a pile of photocopied sheets that included excerpts from Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, with the font of the subtitles carefully chosen to mirror the cover of the actual book. We read off the sheet to define phenomena: ‘… phenomena are the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting “agencies”. That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations…relations without pre-existing relata’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 139).

While some of us in the group knew each other, we had never gathered as a group before, in that place, to engage with Barad’s work. Through the phenomenon of a research symposium, we were trying to individually and collectively understand how our previous understandings of the term ‘phenomena’ meshed with this new suggestion that we were all already entangled within-and-as phenomena ourselves, in our very being. As we talked, we developed the understanding of ourselves as intra-actional in nature; forming new configurations of phenomena; in this case, a ‘discussion group’. Some of the group asked questions, others added their thoughts, a few sat silently observing. The table sat solidly in the middle; the markers were picked up by a few people and used to write generative thoughts on the paper, then set down again. Conversation from the other groups buzzed in the background. The entanglement of all these actions and words contributed to the uniqueness of this discussion, the unfolding of phenomena, which could not have happened anywhere else, with anyone else, at any other time. We went on to read off our identical sheets about ‘What is intra-action?’:

The discussion turned towards the interconnectedness of all things, and how this is reflected in the ecosystems of the natural world, and indeed our bodies. We mused on the fact that our human bodies are made up of more microbiotic cells than human cells, in continuous intra-action, and we explored how this idea, were it more widely understood by most humans from an early age, would greatly affect our current (so-called ‘Developed World’) mentality of individualism. For example, in the Australian National Curriculum, the Science content for the Foundation Year is based on understanding that ‘Living things have basic needs, including food and water’, and the content for Year 1 is based on ‘Living things have a variety of external features’, including objectives such as ‘recognising common features of animals such as head, legs, and wings’ and ‘describing the use of animal body parts for particular purposes such as moving and feeding’ (ACARA, n.d.-b) But what if our youngest school students, instead of learning about individual beings and body parts and plants, began their ‘science’ learning with lessons on the foundational relationality between living things, and between living and nonliving things? We would have a more collective understanding from an early age. In other words, in many ways we are always already a multitude; or, as Barad describes, always already a differentiated becoming with/in the phenomena of life, whereby absolute boundaries do not exist (Barad, Reference Barad2007). In the group, we continued on to consider how environmental education may be enhanced by the agential realist view that the differentiating boundaries we are accustomed to could be viewed instead as entangled phenomena, therefore embodying meaning and inherent response-ability.

‘Phenomena…come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-activity’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 336). In questioning, pondering and discussing in language as well as being receptive to each other’s nonverbal communications — in this intra-active material-discursive space — we collectively widened our preconceived ideas of human/other-than-human relationships. The becoming-with that this space engendered now had the potential to ripple out into our respective responsibilities as educators, family members, and humans acting in the world.

Simone meets material-discursivity

Barad (Reference Barad2007) provides an answer to this call in developing the concept of material-discursivity. In Barad’s account, discursive practices are part of the entangled material conditions of the world. Through a diffractive mix of new materialism, science studies and quantum physics theory, Barad describes all material bodies, both human and nonhuman, as agentially involved in material-discursive enactment, that is, agentic participation and contribution as integral within phenomena. As we sought to explore these ideas with/in our group, both conceptually and tangibly, cause and effect became impossible to position. With butcher’s paper and markers in hand, we moved, each of us and together, through the workshop room, and gathered around some pushed-together tables in a circle to explore the meaning and mattering of the term material-discursive, and how it might look in environmental education practice.

The conversation began by reading preprepared sections from Barad’s (Reference Barad2007) work specific to the (re)conceptualisation of material-discursivity. Our group sought a way of learning, being and becoming together in a space where there was little preconceived familiarity with the topic, uncovering the vulnerability of navigating the unknown as a collective. Being very different from the humanist position of people as the ‘central measure of all things’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 136), or the constructivist view of language being the measure of what is ‘real’, material-discursivity required us to expand our ideas of knowing. We moved our thinking away from the Cartesian separation of knower and known towards ‘knowing-together-with’ matter and each other as mutually agentic in participation. The language of agential realism can be quite complex for those new to it, with Barad aiming to avoid the reductive pitfalls of representationalism by placing theorising and writing itself as part of the material-discursive mattering of the world. Barad does not shy away from creating new terminology when current words fail to express an intended meaning. Engaging with Barad’s work requires being open to understanding the happenings and matterings of the world and the universe in a different way, as foundationally intraconnected from within.

Delving into Barad’s philosophy of the quantum nature of matter opened us to an exploration of how matter can and does come in/to being through material-discursive practices and how these matterings matter. We considered the perspective that ‘materiality has an agentive and productive factor in its own right’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 225). Through this ‘meeting with’ matter, materiality can be re-envisioned to open our thinking to the possibility of meaning being inherent in everything that we are part of bringing forth and/or excluding, in our engagement with/in material-discursive processes. In this way, discursive practices are far more than acts of speech, in Barad’s words:

We philosophised, explored and adventured into new becomings, unique to that timespace and woven through with all entangled moments before and those to come. In this process of navigating, space opened for sharing, listening, observing, considering and growing our ideas: entangled becoming in-action. We contextualised material-discursive meaning through the lived and embodied dynamics and experiences of our daily work and life practices. We stretched our perception beyond the traditional representations of speaking and listening, into the significance of the relationality of everything that exists with/in all we do as material discursive practices. Not just the story of individual people, but the stories of matter — stuff, objects, spaces — every thing, acknowledging the perpetual iterativity of material-discursive practices in the process of the world’s becoming, that is, how every moment in the classroom is so complex with/in everything that is taking place. In other words, considering that the story of matter, matters.

Barad’s use of the word ‘discourse’ as discursivity repositions its common use (as a fixed language-based representation) through the lens of quantum theory, and contributes to a (re)conceptualisation of the relationality of discourse and matter as an ongoing becoming. This includes an ‘account of the materialization of all bodies — “human” and “nonhuman” — including the agential contributions of all material forces (both “social” and “natural”)’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 66). In this account Barad defines discursivity as not ‘requiring intellection in the humanist sense’, but rather as the world articulating itself through integrated material-discursivity (Reference Barad2007, p. 149). We questioned how this inseparability influences and impacts the way we understand, know and feel with the world, particularly how we understand classrooms and learners. We wondered about becoming more aware of the complexity of intra-actions, with the learner and classroom as more than ‘products’ of what is happening at face-value. Material-discursivity describes these dynamics and acknowledges that there is no end: only an ongoing and reiterative unfolding of phenomena.

Our sharing diffracted through our group’s knowing and we emerged expanded, considering ways of being that included awareness and perception of our entangled becomings. In the timespace that this encounter offered, we expressed our journey together through the material-discursive terrain in verbal and written language with markers and paper, back to the larger group when we reconvened.

Shae diffracts diffraction

Our group engaged with Barad’s use of the word diffraction. Settling into chairs around a large table we began with reading some quotes from Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad, Reference Barad2007), together with a few points on meanings of the term diffraction, preprepared on a paper handout that also showed a simple image of a diffraction pattern (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Superposition of two wave systems, in ‘Water-Waves and Sound-Waves’ by Joseph Norman Lockyer, Popular Science Monthly, Volume 13, June 1878. Public domain. http://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/LOCKYER_1878_Superposition_of_two_wave_systems.jpg.

First, we considered the literal meaning of diffraction. The ripple pattern we see forming when a pebble is dropped into water is described as diffraction. When two pebbles are dropped, a diffraction pattern of the relationality of the ripples from the two pebbles is formed, with some ripples synergising into peaks and some co-cancelling into troughs. This overlapping waveform can be described as interference in a field, as illustrated in Figure 1. We then considered how the concept of diffraction could be used both metaphorically and practically in our teaching practice. Describing both phenomena and as a methodology, diffraction illuminates the indefinite nature of boundaries (Barad, Reference Barad2007), and brings attention to the enactment of those boundaries. What is included and what is excluded are highlighted (Barad, Reference Barad2014). In this way diffraction denies absolute exteriority (separateness), defining difference as marked from within (Barad, Reference Barad2007, Reference Barad2014). In terms of difference ‘a diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear but … where the effects of difference occur’ (Barad, Reference Barad2014, p. 172). We shared our thoughts about how Barad’s ideas highlight that actions, both material and discursive, generate difference. Making difference relational rather than being a property of an entity.

All matter is described by Barad as diffractive on a quantum level, a principle illustrated in Meeting the Universe Halfway with an image of a steel razor blade whereby there really is no edge as such, but rather a diffractive rippling between ‘blade’ and ‘not blade’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 76). Barad informs us that diffractive relationality is the fundamental state that generates ‘individual entities’ as difference, through internal dynamics described as intra-action. Agential realism thus places connectedness as the default state, and offers diffraction as the process of all becoming. This quantum process that is always already occurring at every level of life is described by Barad as ‘the world’s differential becoming’ (Reference Barad and DeKoven2001, p. 91), being life’s fundamental dynamics of the connectedness of entanglement, and differentiating described as ‘cutting-together-apart’ into entities, in a dynamic of perpetual becoming (Barad, Reference Barad2014). According to Barad, it is a process that has no ‘outside’; it is a process that we cannot be external to.

In engaging with Barad’s work, it became obvious to us that it is not easy to express such an intra-actively connected world using the linear cause and effect language of English, a language that reflects the reductionist Newtonian paradigm of life made of simple separate parts, and the Cartesian separation of subject and object. After exploring diffraction as a fundamental process, we turned to thinking about its use as a metaphor and methodology. Haraway (Reference Haraway1985) first described diffraction as an optical metaphor that is useful for making a difference in the world. It is an approach to engaging with meaning making through relationality, which can be expressed as interference, reinforcement and/or difference. In this way a diffraction metaphor can be used for paying attention to the ‘between’; the relational dynamics and resulting effects that Barad describes as the objective materiality of marks on bodies. The word ‘bodies’ here means matter, including the bodies of entities, both human and nonhuman.

In our Conference conversation the diffraction of focus was the relating and relational meaning being generated by us as we discussed and embodied Barad’s work; a focus that contrasts with attention to the individual as the fundamental centre of meaning. Being, knowing and learning were continually and communally reconfigured as we engaged with the concept of diffraction as a way of communicating with each other across moving difference; a place/being/enactment ‘composed from interference patterns’ (Haraway, Reference Haraway, Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler1992, as cited in Barad, Reference Barad2014, p. 172). In this way knowledge became an alive, shared dynamic, not a preformed, ‘correct’ and external objectivity. We understood that fixing things in our ideas and definitions was a habit of mind that could be dissolved in the engagement of diffraction as methodology. This was a new approach, particularly for anyone used to holding the space of being the knower. The level of response-ability to each other and our shared experience increased in our group as this awareness grew with/in us. We wrote notes on large paper, marks of what mattered in our moment. Moving back in/to the whole room, we chose to express our diffractive experience of intra-active-becoming-in-knowing through collective movement, some making waves of embodied communication that aligned with another’s movement, building ‘peaks’ of synergy and energy, while others were ‘cancelling’ each other out, forming ‘troughs’ of dissonance. We noted that it was interesting how the boundaries of ‘self’ and ‘other’ could soften, enabling ‘I’ and ‘them’ to emerge in/to a concurrent murmuration of ‘we’ and ‘us’.

Diffractive understanding offers a perspective of connectivity through Barad’s view that shows that:

And, unlike the perspective that ‘reality’ is constructed from human attention or language, in using the metaphor of diffraction to engage with knowledge making and meaning making we are reminded that we are ‘materially engaging as part of the world in giving it specific material form’ (Barad, Reference Barad and DeKoven2001, p. 91). Applying diffraction as a methodology and method in education generally, and in environmental education in particular, may provide a starting point to consider relationality as inherent in the classroom with differences generating agentically from within such connectivity, through our agentic actions, as agential cuts within everything we enact. This understanding can then ripple further towards considering such relationality on a wider scale.

Agential realism and environmental education

We regathered from the small groups back into a whole group in order to share before moving out into the Conference, and the entanglement of phenomena that was and is our personal lives. Subsequently, we wondered together, how did the agential cuts that were enacted through our workshop diffract out into the world? How could the theory of agential realism be immediately and specifically applied to environmental education and research? What effect might be generated? Through our post-workshop collective study, we identified four main ripples of agential realist theory that have great relevance to the praxis of environmental education.

1. Agential realism helps us to fracture binary thinking. ‘According to classical Newtonian physics, everything is one or the other: particle or wave, this or that, here or there. Quantum physics queers the binary type of difference at every layer of the onion’ (Barad, Reference Barad2014, p. 174).

In their analysis of environmental education research, Gough and Whitehouse (Reference Gough and Whitehouse2003) wonder how innovative environmental education can actually be, if it continues to dwell within the ‘powerful binary discourses holding a “humanised identity” firmly in place’ (p. 38). These binary human discourses extend their reach into all aspects of educational practice, forming limited and limiting ideas and stories of human versus nature, male versus female, black versus white, and mind versus body. Agential realism’s basis is non-binary, as well as describing all matter as diffractional in nature, which could influence the methodologies and praxis of environmental education at the very core. In a nonbinary and diffractive approach, our enactments are always making new (re)configurations of becoming. We want to acknowledge the multiplicity of contingent entanglements, as well as our own embodied perspective, to consider all aspects of a phenomenon. We see any learning experience as being inclusive of all elements, human and other-than-human. All we include and exclude ‘matters’ in all senses of the word; this is a central tenet of Barad’s agential realism. We are all always already participating in the unfolding of the knowledge and action happening all around us. There is inherent responsibility in this relational view. This understanding could bring us towards feeling our entangled inseparability with ‘others’ as not-other, self as not a separately fixed individualised ‘self’, but self as natureculture, and natureculture as self (Haraway, Reference Haraway2003). We are no longer humans versus the natural world; we are inseparably with/in/as the world. This notion challenges many anthropocentric, mechanistic and technicist ideologies that inform many current sustainable development goals. Agential realism rejects the focus on achieving only outcomes and instead iterates response-ability to the agentic process of becoming that acknowledges each element and facet as significant in the reconfiguring of the whole.

2. Agential realism helps us to understand that interdisciplinary learning could (should?) be the foundation of all educational praxis. In an interdisciplinary educational paradigm, the space opens up for new directions for environmental education. In their book The Socioecological Educator, Wattchow et al. (Reference Wattchow, Jeanes, Alfrey, Brown, Cutter-Mackenzie and O’Connor2013) argue that ‘the world badly needs citizens who can see and work in inter-disciplinary ways’ (p. 207). The authors argue for systems of education that support the understanding that no discipline stands alone, and that a holistic and interconnected approach is key to meeting current world challenges. While most educational systems are built on scaffolding that does not yet allow these interdisciplinary approaches to come to fruition (Olvitt, Reference Olvitt2017), could current educational practice be turned on its head by reconfiguring the curriculum? In other words, instead of breaking it into smaller pieces of siloed learning as is currently practised, could we consider all learning as always already an intraconnected whole?

There is an aspiration in the current Australian National Curriculum towards an interdisciplinarity of sorts, with environmental education funnelled across different disciplines via the cross-curriculum priority of ‘sustainability’ (ACARA, n.d.-a). Sustainability as a cross-curriculum priority allows it to be taught across and through all key learning areas, and in doing so facilitates the implementation of authentic interdisciplinary learning approaches. This is a start; however, agential realism supports the understanding that interdisciplinary learning cannot be just relegated to a side note that will ‘enrich the curriculum’ and ‘enable the delivery of learning area content’ (ACARA, n.d.-a). If we adopt the understanding that all life is agentic intra-actions with/in phenomena, with the differencing of bodies arising with/in entanglement, then learning cannot be siloed into always separate ‘learning areas’.

Through fracturing the segregations and separations established in traditional single disciplinary approaches, learning can be grounded in real-life situations through intra-actions with all agential beings. This inspires a different perspective about how sustainability and other learning areas are approached, and invokes a different and more immediate kind of responsibility, a response-ability. Which leads us to our third suggestion of how agential realism is relevant to environmental education.

3. Agential realist theory helps us to understand and work with agency as potential that always already exists in an entity, both human and nonhuman — rather than something that needs to be received or obtained from outside sources.

Educational practice based in an ethico-eco-onto-epistemological perspective of agential realism can enable us to evolve from thinking we need to ‘achieve’ agency and reconnection to nature, to an understanding that agency is an ongoing potentiality with/in every moment, and that connectivity — and the responsibility that entails — are inherent. Human beings always have the potential to enact their inherent agency. We can also then ask ourselves a series of questions that destabilise the narrowly humanistic concept of agency. Can we consider environmental education from the question of ‘How does this insect, plant, animal, bird, tree, human express agency?’ Questions such as ‘How is this river, person, tree, rock, animal excluded from mattering?’ can remind us that entanglements are fundamental. With all of life expressing ongoing agency, we can ask: ‘What are the dynamics and relationships of this entity’s being/becoming?’ Rather than the reductive categorising of ‘What is it’, ‘What does it look like’, and ‘How can we use it’, we can ask: ‘How is it entangled?’, and ‘How is it differentiated?’ In this way, we understand agency as the potential and actualising of intra-acting entanglements with/in phenomena. Responsibility — response-ability — permeates such an approach.

4. Agential realism helps us question everything …, which is what we need to do in this time and space.

At the opening forum for the AAEE Conference Research Symposium, environmental educator and researcher Paul Hart challenged researchers to integrate environmental education research more deeply with social education theories and discourses, utilising ‘complexity as a bridge’ (Hart, Reference Hart2018) to enable this integration. Hart further proposed for the use of post-methodologically driven and data-based theories; research not only based on data collection and analysis but rather theoretical frameworks such as new materialism to capture ‘what is really going on’ (Hart, Reference Hart2018). There was a call to read more, read further and to play outside the field by extending ourselves beyond our discipline. This call can clearly be answered through the agential realist framework developed by Barad. It enables the asking of questions that dig deeper than ‘What needs to be done next?’ or ‘How do we address the urgent signs of the Anthropocene?’Footnote ² Agential realism offers a way to question how intraconnected becomings and beings come to matter, in both meanings of the word. This view begins with entangled connectivity as foundational and opens towards understanding the agency we all have in the exclusions and inclusions of matterings in the world. (Barad, Reference Barad2017). This questioning is crucial in that it helps us understand the multiple entanglements of our current global situation. It questions the very nature of nature in offering possibilities for changes that matter now.