Leila Dawney
Against a logic of data ‘collection’ that assumes that data pre-exists its production through processes of investigation and research, ‘diffracting’ offers us a take on methodology that pays attention to the researcher as composer: as active participant in the making of worlds and objects. The term ‘diffracting’ as an approach to scholarly research was originally developed by Donna Haraway and later elaborated by Karen Barad. For Barad, diffraction is an ‘ethico-onto-epistemological matter’ (Barad 2007: 381): through acknowledging that as researchers we are part of the making of the world, we then have an ethical responsibility in how we orient to that world. It is about making visible the histories of objects and ideas, about letting the complexities of these histories speak without reducing them to a single narrative, and about intervening in the production of knowledge.
‘Diffraction’ in physics is the change in direction of waves as they encounter an obstruction or overlap with other waves. Water waves, for example, travel around corners, around obstacles and through openings, as can be seen in the changing patterns of waves as they come up against boats and walls in a harbour. Diffraction apparatuses are instruments that study the effects of such interference and difference. In the physics classroom, these apparatuses often shine a laser through slits onto a screen to make visible the patterns that the light waves produce as they diffract. Diffraction apparatuses were central to the development of quantum physics since they demonstrated that matter, in certain circumstances, behaves like a wave insofar as it can demonstrate diffraction patterns. If we take this concept into the world of interdisciplinary methodologies, we can understand diffracting as a way of attending to and experimenting with interference patterns, as an ethos of embracing and, indeed, playing with contamination and entanglement to see what happens, and also as a means of exposing the complexity of the world. Diffraction apparatuses are used to produce knowledge about both the object being passed through the apparatus, but also about the apparatus itself. In this way, diffracting can be understood as a practice that acknowledges its participation in world-making, and which makes visible its own interference and the material effects of this interference.
Donna Haraway discusses diffraction as a research approach developed in contradistinction to reflection and reflexivity. Against reflection, but using a similarly optical metaphor, diffraction challenges the drive to undertake research by representing an object in a different form elsewhere, to make a new picture of the research object, instead focusing on the patterns of difference, movement and entanglement that come into play when making visible the histories of entangled objects and ideas: ‘[d]iffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. Diffraction is about heterogeneous history, not originals’ (Haraway and Randolf 1997: 273). In other words, the diffraction apparatus that makes interference visible becomes a metaphor for a particular approach to knowledge production. Diffraction in Haraway’s work becomes a two-fold practice: first, a making-visible of the histories of the production of an object; a recording of the passage of the material histories of its ongoing formation, and the registering of that process, and second, a distinctly critical practice for making a difference in the world – diffraction makes it impossible for us to be a voyeur, but asks us to engage critically, to interfere (Haraway and Goodeve 2000). Haraway’s collaborations with the artist Lynn Randolf are a good example of this – their arguments participate in the world and alter its flow (Haraway and Randolf 1997). Their work reconfigures the human through the figure of the cyborg: they bring the ‘naturecultures’ that separate scientific knowledge from cultural knowledge to visibility.
Karen Barad further elaborates the concept of diffraction as a scholarly approach, arguing for a diffractive method that makes visible the entanglements of scientific practices with the social. Barad discusses how diffraction apparatuses ‘measure the effects of difference, [and] even more profoundly, they highlight, exhibit, and make evident the entangled structure of the changing and contingent ontology of the world’ (Barad 2007: 73). Her book develops the concept comprehensively as a method and approach to research ontology and epistemology. She discusses ways to build a diffraction apparatus in order to study the effects of entanglements and interferences of the natural and the social, of the discursive and the material. Central to this argument is the refusal to hold anything still; the apparatus plays each aspect against each other, encouraging the visibilities produced through their entanglements to question their integrity and highlight their messiness. Diffraction also involves experimenting and intervening in the world: as Barad puts it: ‘diffraction is a material practice for making a difference, for topologically reconfiguring connections’ (Barad 2007: 381). Diffracting is about ‘how differences matter’ (Barad 2007: 378), about asking which differences matter, and how they are made to matter.
Arguing against using mixed methods research as a means of simply validating or reinforcing one ‘dominant’ method, Emma Uprichard and I have argued for diffracting as an approach to social science methodology that refuses to take as given any pre-existing research object (Uprichard and Dawney 2016). Building on Barad and Haraway, we are interested in how a diffractive approach precludes the possibility of using one set of data to illustrate, enrich or verify another, since that would involve the ‘holding still’ of one and a refusal to see it as a messy, processual entity. The methods that we choose when conducting research enact ‘cuts’ through the world that make certain aspects of research phenomena visible, and these cuts are, in themselves, part of the ongoing production of knowledge-making that produces particular phenomena as objects.
Diffracting as an approach to research might involve a consideration of the ways in which ‘cuts’, when read through their interaction with each other, and with other objects, such as philosophical or literary texts, can produce different objects and even call into question the ontological stability of the object in question. It is a project of making ‘manifest the extraordinary liveliness of the world’ (Barad 2007: 91) that refuses to reduce or reflect, or to hold anything still. It is about experimentation: putting things together and seeing what happens; or putting ourselves in particular situations; or recovering histories and genealogies that became lost as objects were being made into objects. Diffracting involves thinking with disjuncture; thinking about where data rubs up against data and what that exposes about how subjects and objects of research are made through the research. As an approach to the study of philosophical and cultural texts, diffracting involves reading them against each other, without situating one as a fixed frame of reference, and seeing what happens. It unsettles and mixes, producing disturbances to watch how they pan out. It delves into forgotten material histories, making visible and asking what caused them to be forgotten: it exposes the world in its complexity and messiness.
What would it mean to change a noun to a verb? What does it mean for us to ‘do’ diffracting? Diffracting is about doing research as participating, experimenting and inserting ourselves into the world in ways that have particular effects, and paying attention to those effects; it is about acknowledging how we may be the diffraction apparatus, the object and the screen all at once. Diffracting in research is about intervening and world-making: it is a provocation to a status quo that assumes the stability of object and/or researcher. In refusing to tie anything into a single narrative, it allows social entities to exist as multiple, tangled ontologies, tracing their multiplicity and entanglement. The final section elaborates this by pointing to three things that diffracting can do to research practice.
1 Diffracting troubles the case and messes the categories. Diffracting involves getting rid of the assumption that there is an unproblematic ‘object’: it is a practice of attending to relationality, process and messiness in the always-incomplete object. It welcomes the emergence of disjunctures, things that go against the grain, lacunae, difference and diversion as a means of troubling the research case as a bounded, isolated unit and revealing the ways in which processes of objectification, the making of the research object, take place.
2 Diffracting lets the world be messy and complex. It allows histories of objects to participate in their making; it makes visible the complexity, messiness and instability of research objects, and their excess to knowing. It lets data non-cohere and disintegrate: composing and recomposing objects, cases and phenomena; questioning how we remake cases methodologically; confusing and clarifying.
3 Diffracting acknowledges how researchers participate in world- and knowledge-making – as composers of data and as diffraction apparatuses. Diffracting involves thinking about how researchers participate in the making of objects, knowledges and worlds. Diffracting acknowledges how we represent the world, through language, creativity, social scientific and natural scientific practices. It refuses representationalism and operates in a performative mode. It ‘does not concern homologies but attends to specific material entanglements’ (Barad 2007: 88). When we approach problems, we bring some aspects of them to visibility, and in doing so alter their histories and contribute to their making. Research norms and practices make objects; they substantiate them through composing them as such.
Overall, diffracting opens up opportunities for researchers across the disciplines to approach research practices a little differently from those approaches more usually written into social research methods textbooks. It provides a framework for a performative politics of social research practices and objects, acknowledging the role of the research process in the ‘making’ of objects and worlds.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. J. and Randolf, L. M. (1997). Modest_witness@second_millennium: femaleman_meets_oncomouse: feminism and technoscience. London: Routledge.
Haraway, D. J. and Goodeve, T. N. (2000). How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. Psychology Press.
Uprichard, E. and Dawney, L. (20 October 2016). Data diffraction: challenging data integration in mixed methods research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research. Online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/1558689816674650