The Ethics of Entanglement: Using a Phenomenology of the Material to Study School Bathrooms

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Phenomenology: Beyond Experience

Abstract

In this work, I attempt to theorize students’ experiences with school bathrooms within the framework of Barad’s onto-epistemology. Thinking with Barad, I see the school bathrooms at my study site as part of an intra-active phenomenon. Entangled within this phenomenon are human and non-human agents, the material world, and discursive and socio-cultural structures (Barad, 2003; Taylor, 2013).
Research using a phenomenology of the material acknowledges that when we reach into the phenomena it reaches back – the configuration we find is determined by the apparatus we construct to observe it. This momentary fixing of the intra-active phenomenon is not “discovering” something that was uncertain, it is defining something that was indeterminate.

Author

• Kristidel McGregor, University of Oregon