AGENCY = According to Karen Barad “agency is not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements. So agency is not about choice in any liberal humanist sense; rather, it is about the possibilities and accountability entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production, including the boundary articulations and exclusions marked by those practices.”
AGENTIAL REALISM = ‘Pheneomena are constitutive of reality. Reality is composed not of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena, but of things-in-phenomena. The world is a dynamic process of intra-activity and materialization in the enactment of determinate causal structure with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patters of marks on bodies ( Barad, 2007:140)
ANTHROPOMASS = the mass (human-made materials, like concrete, aggregates, metals, bricks, plastic, and glass) produced by humans, and the concern that this has now exceeded the living biomass ( trees, plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and viruses) on earth. Anthropomass reminds us of our influence on Earth and how our activity has set the Earth system on a different trajectory. These human-induced shifts have significantly impacted the carbon cycle and human health and caused scientists to propose that a new Earth era is upon us: the Anthropocene, the period during which human activity has become the dominant influence on the biosphere.
According to a recent study by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the total mass of human-made objects in use has grown so considerably that it is currently surpassing the mass of all living things on our planet.)(Elhacham, E., Ben-Uri, L., Grozovski, J. et al. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. Nature 588, 442–444 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5)
CARE = Care is everything that is done (rather than everything that ‘we’ do) to maintain, continue, and re-pair ‘the world’ so that all (rather than ‘we’) can live in it as well as possible. That world includes… all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (modified from Joan Tronto 1993, definition of care as a conceptual anchor. Matters of Care, 161) and viewed at https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/matters-of-care-by-maria-puig-de-la-bellacasa#:~:text=The%20book%20opens,de%20la%20Bellacasa) Maria Puig de la Bellacase opens her book by offering Joan Tronto’s (1993) definition of care as a conceptual anchor. For Tronto, care includes “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”
Care is about involvement, and according to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, it is not about getting involved but about how we are already always involved with object, other animals, living beings, organisms, and physical forces…care is there; it is implied in the world. It is about realising this neglected part, even in research – that place where we pause and highlight things we care about., even learning to ask different questions. (ways of thinking with care)
ENTANGLED
ECO FEMINISM = This philosophy emphasizes how both nature and women are treated by patriarchal (or male-centred) society. Ecofeminists examine the effect of gender categories to demonstrate the ways in which social norms exert unjust dominance over women and nature.
FUNGAL
HYBRID = Hybridity in contemporary art is defined as mixing two or many elements to form the other. Hybridity artists usually use traditional mediums to blend their new or already existing material. The addition of the materials creates a lot of meaning in the contemporary artwork.
INTRA-ACTION = A mutual emergence, a transformation and shifting of boundaries such as matter or material entities (phenomena) which do not exist a prior. it is a moving away from individualism. It signals that by engaging with other agencies – a process of mutual transformation happens. Barad’s notion of intra-actions gives a presence to the “constructed boundary between the ‘object’ and the ‘agencies of observation’.” “Abstract objects or observation-independent beings” do not exist according to Barad, and therefore “there is no sense of two things to interact” (1996: 179-180).
ONTOLOGY = philosophical study of being, existence, becoming (do further work on this in
relation to …)
MATTERS of CARE = Latour intervened here in a classic question: How are critical people, in particular researchers, thinkers, and theorists, involved in the making of the world? MoC emphasizes an ethico-political dimension of that problem: respect for the concerns embodied in the things we represent implies attention to the effects of our accounts on the life of things. In other words, if exhibiting the entanglements of concerns at the heart of human–nonhuman assemblages increases, the affective perception of the worlds and lives we study beyond cartographies of interests and practical engagements, the staging of a scientific matter of fact or a sociotechnical assemblage, or any other human–nonhuman arrangement as a MoC, is an ethico-political intervention in its becoming, its mattering. (Matters of Care, Chapter 2 , p 48) Then more to this subject later in this chapter and discussed further in Chapter 4:
An approach claiming to avoid a moralistic approach to caring knowledge
politics asks for some subtlety. A close commentary on how the notion of
concern relates to care is an attempt to offer a tactful way to start asking
what care can mean for the thinking of things, that is, for the “disobjectified” objects of science and technology. If staging things and matters of
fact as MoC adds affective modalities of relation to their reality, how does
care in turn affect MoC?
Concern and care have acquainted meanings—both come from the
Latin cura, “cure.” But they also express different qualities. Because of that,
however great the importance of care, it does not replace concern at the
heart of the politics of things; it brings something else. I have stressed the
capacity of the word “concern” to move the notion of “interest” toward
more affectively charged connotations, notably those of trouble, worry,
and care. As affective states, concern and care are related. But care has
stronger affective and ethical connotations. We can think on the difference
between affirming “I am concerned” and “I care.” The first denotes worry
and thoughtfulness about an issue as well as, though not necessarily, the
fact of belonging to the collective of those concerned, “affected” by it;
the second adds a strong sense of attachment and commitment to something. Moreover, the quality of “care” is to be more easily turned into a
verb: to care. One can make oneself concerned, but “to care” contains a
notion of doing that concern lacks. This is because understanding caring
as something we do materializes it as an ethically and politically charged
practice, and one that has been at the forefront of feminist concern with
devalued agencies and exclusions. In this vision, to care joins together an
affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation
(the entangled aspect of these dimensions and the consequences for ethics
are developed further in chapter 4)
MYCORRHIZAL FUNGI = It is fungi that form a relationship with plants that is mutually beneficial for plants and fungus. The plant receives nutrients from the soil that the fungus extracts, while the fungus receives sugars from the plant.
PRACTICE BASED RESEARCH = is where to explore their research question; the researcher makes things as part of the process. The research is exploratory and embedded in a creative practice.
RHIZOME = The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari developed the terms “rhizome” and “rhizomatic” to stress non-hierarchic systems of thought whilst working with trans-species connection. They used “rhizomatic” in opposition to hierarchic, tree-like knowledge structures. See Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Paris 1972 (vol 1), 1980 (vol 2); Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari: Mille Plateaux, Paris 1980.
SYMBIOTIC INTERACTIONS
UBUNTU = The term ubuntu comprises two parts: the root ntu, and the prefix ubu. The root means “entity” or “object”, while the prefix ubu means “human.” So, the term suggests the entity that is a human being. As an ontology, Ubuntu narrates how human beings are intertwined by their social bond. It is also about how we see the world; this intertwinement is inherently ethical.
I also want to share a definition of Ubuntu by a South African philosopher, Mabogo P. More (More 2005)
“In one sense, ubuntu is a philosophical concept forming the basis of relationships, especially ethical behaviour. In another sense, it is a traditional politico-ideological concept referring to sociopolitical action. As a moral or ethical concept referring it is a point of view according to which moral practices are founded exclusively on consideration and enhancement of human well-being; a preoccupation with the ‘human’. It enjoins that what is morally good is that what brings dignity, respect, contentment and prosperity to others, self, and the community at large. Ubuntu is a demand for a respect for persons no matter what their circumstances may be. In its politico-ideological sense it is a principle for all forms of social or political relationships. It enjoins peace and social harmony by encouraging the practice of sharing in all forms of communal existence”.
INVOLUTION. The readiness of organisms to involve themselves in one another’s lives.
COLLABORATION
INTER CONNECTEDNESS
SYNERGY
VIBRANT MATTER = Bennet states that it is talking to what is pressed in many historical senses of the word nature – an active becoming. In short I take this as Bennet writes (Vribrant Matter: 146) “it is a shift in thinking about a world of nature versus culture, to a heterogeneous monism of vibrant bodies.”
Bennett demonstrates that human and nonhuman entities (including inorganic matter) are composed of ‘vibrant matter’. In Bennett’s view, matter that we consider ‘dead’, such as fossils and stones, is not actually dead but very much alive and is constituted by a lively and energetic play of forces. Following a long tradition of thinkers who have sought to decentre ‘the human’ (e.g. Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault), Bennett’s emphasis on non-human matter challenges the ontological privileging of ‘the human’. However, her notion of ‘distributive agency’ creatively affirms the necessity of human embodiment, understood as one site of agency within and across a multiplicity of other material bodies and formations.