170740 UE Enacted reality/ies: Introduction to Karen Barad's agential realism (2022W)

In this seminar we will engage with one of the most influencal transdisciplinary theories of the last two decades and try to find productive connections and implications for our own reasarch in an open and explorative teaching/learning environment:

Therefore the seminar invites students interested in learning about agential realism, the program of the quantum physicist and feminist science scholar Karen Barad, to raise and discuss questions about the performative production and enactment of reality through media, apparatuses and practices in an innovative and transdisciplinary way. To do this we will engage with selected texts and passages from Barad's œuvre and with papers of various other authors highlighting how agential realism can be situated in the broader context of media studies, new materialism(s), (feminist) science and technology studies and queer theory.

Working closely together, we want to identify and carve out some of the results, ideas and inspirations from Barad's agential realist program and think about possible ways of how to use the theory for our own media studies and theater studies research. By doing that, we want to map, how an addressing of agential realism can complement and enrich existing research and how it might help to form or at least prepare a more powerful engagement with the complex and more and more pressing changes of our times. Besides the engagement with Karen Barad's agential realism the seminar also aims at teaching competences in reading and analyzing of research papers and at further developing skills in the processing and discussing of content and arguments of such texts.

For its teaching method the seminar mixes teacher-centred teaching with dialogical and interactive methods.