I’m looking forward to giving one of the plenary talks at the STS Hub 2025 in Berlin, themed as Diffracting the Critical. It takes place at Humboldt University, Tuesday, March 11, 1700-1900.
TITLE: The apparatus as diffractive methodology
ABSTRACT: Physicists’ double slit experiments exposed a surprising aspect of the cosmos, that the universe’s fundemental existants enact a wave-particle duality, acting as one or the other depending on the experimental setup. Such intra-actions demonstrate foundational relations between observer, observed, and instrumentation presenting an entangled universe without separability between subjects and objects. Barad’s articulation of the apparatus explains how scientific practices entangle instrument and measurement to iteratively reshape the world and what comes to matter. Drawing on my own struggle with unlearning the objectivity and universality imbued in my own scientific training, in this talk I examine how scientific apparatuses are enacted and the ways they produce difference. Using examples from my own collaborative work, exploring physical and biological scientific practices, and focused on oceanic and outer spaces, I’ll relate how the apparatus reshapes my own elementary questions from ‘What is sea level?’ or ‘What is biodiversity?’ into an operationalizable project like ‘What does species do in seabed mining assessments?’. Considering apparatuses broadly as infrastructures, sites, bodies, and relations through which knowledge is produced and universalized, a diffractive approach reframes species through the ongoing production of an apparatus composed of idealized controls of nature, tools of sample capture, hierarchical classifications bounding difference, and Western jurisdictions bordering ocean spaces for extraction. My hope is that unpacking such scientific concepts down to their core can drive reevaluations of, as Barad writes, “which differences matter, how they matter, and for whom.”
saltygeographies 