RESPONSE-ABILITY, a concept drawn from Karen Barad (2007), invites, welcomes, and enables the response of the Other (Kleinman, 2012). It emphasizes that a researcher is always already part of the phenomena being researched, and, therefore, how the researcher comes to know is inseparable from research events. Researcher is not apart or an outsider to what comes to matter. Instead, by paying attention to the ways in which phenomena are always becoming otherwise, researchers welcome Other ways of being-knowing-responding. Mattering is crucial to response-ability, because of its dynamic, ongoing process that also involves non-human agencies. These agencies are natural, social, cultural and technological intra-actions. As Barad (2007) argues, “with each intra-action, the manifold of entangled relations is reconfigured … there are no singular causes. And there are no individual agents of change. Responsibility is not ours alone” (p. 394). Haraway (2016) reminds us that consequences of response-ability shape the conditions and futures of our multispecies ecologies.

REFERENCES

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Kleinman, A. (2012). ‘Intra-actions’ (Interview of Karen Barad by Adam Kleinman). Mousse 34, 76–81.

Renold, E., Ashton, M. R. & McGeeney E. (2021). What if?: becoming response-able with the making and mattering of a new relationships and sexuality education curriculum. Professional Development in Education, 47(2-3), 538-555. DOI: 10.1080/19415257.2021.1891956