Karen Barad is a scholar of theoretical physics and feminist theory, and is known as a leading figure in new realism and new materialism. Positioned roughly in the same period as Matthew Fuller, she advanced posthuman and ecological thought from a more philosophical angle. Her major work, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), develops a distinctive ontology-epistemology called “agential realism,” which rethinks the relations among humans and nonhumans, subjects and objects, and matter and meaning.
At the center of Barad’s thought is the principle that things do not preexist as separate individuals; rather, they come to appear through specific interactions. For this reason, she deliberately uses the term “intra-action” instead of “interaction.” The point is that the related elements do not exist independently prior to relation; they emerge from within relation itself. In this view, relation comes first and things come later. Human beings and matter are therefore not fixed substances, but phenomenal existences that continually transform within a mesh of relations and entanglements. Matter is not a static essence, but a process of becoming through intra-action, and is understood not as a “thing” but as “doing.”
Barad also argues that knowing cannot be separated from being and ethics, and she names this position “ethico-onto-epistemology.” Because acts of knowing participate in the world’s being, ethical responsibility accompanies every agential cut made in the world. She treats observation apparatuses not as neutral barriers between observer and object, but as active components that help produce specific phenomena. From this perspective, boundaries between observer and observed are not given in advance; they arise only provisionally from within phenomena that include both human and nonhuman elements.