Diffractions and Entanglements, Weavings and Mending. For an Onto-Epistemology of Careful Visions and Contacts

Abstract

Busy in inquiring into other ways of researching and producing academic activist knowledge, in what follows we introduce the relational ontology of the neomaterialist feminisms of Karen Barad and María Puig de la Bellacasa to provide a critical perspective of representation as a basis for the epistemology. From these positions, “matter comes to matter” and the categories of diffraction and intra-action of the agential realism of the first, appear, and in dialogue, an ethic of caring for touching visions of the second. This vision that touches knowledge is related to the world from affections and encounters, affinities and entanglements that push pre-established dualisms (theory/practice, subject/object, humans/non-humans, matter/discourse, academy/territory) to the limit and reconfigure them carefully. The diffractions of the vision must be able to be combined with the material touching and of the bodies in relational commitments of care involved with tangible transformations of the world. In a commitment to techniques located in the south, we resume the investigations that Tania Pérez-Bustos (and others) have carried out in this materialist key on openwork and weaving with seams to, on the one hand, question the modes of production of techno-scientific knowledge, and thus "accounting for how practices matter", and on the other hand understand how material relationships with others, more- than- humans constitute us.