Re-turning to the Literature: Thinking with Diffraction Differently

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Encounters with Method: Narrative, Decolonial, and Diffractive Reorientations

Abstract

This paper enacts a re-turn (Barad, 2014) with recent literature that mobilizes diffraction in qualitative educational research. Across this re-turn, four forces make themselves felt, not as gaps or failures, but as sites where diffraction thickens, overextends, and begins to bend. Refraction becomes a supplement for situations where power does not simply produce patterns but exerts force, where histories do not just shape emergence but weigh it down or torque its direction. It allows researchers to attune to affective distortion (i.e., how emotional saturation bends perception, attention, and relation), institutional density (i.e., how apparatuses refract agency unevenly, compressing or amplifying bodies and subjectivities), and post-reflexive subjectivity (i.e., how a researcher’s own interpretive position is shaped, ethically, relationally, materially, and affectively).

Authors

• Katherine Ayers, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

• Susan N. Nordstrom, University of Alabama