Yes / This paper seeks to understand leaders as material presences. Leadership theory has traditionally explored leaders as sites of disembodied traits, characteristics and abilities. Our qualitative, mixed method study suggests that managers charged with the tasks of leadership operate within a very different understanding. Their endogenous or lay theory understands leadership as physical, corporeal and visible, and as something made manifest through leaders’ material presence. This theory-in-practice holds that leadership qualities are signified by the leader’s physical appearance: the good leader must look the part. Actors consequently work on their own appearance to present an image of themselves as leader. They thus offer a fundamental challenge to dominant exogenous, or academic, theories of leadership. To understand the unspoken assumptions that underpin the lay theory of leadership as material presence, we interrogate it using the new materialist theory of Karen Barad and the object relations theory of Christopher Bollas. This illuminates the lay theory’s complexities and sophisticated insights. In academic terms it offers a theory of how sentient and non-sentient actors intra-act and performatively constitute leadership through complex entanglements that enact and circulate organizational and leadership norms. The paper’s contribution is thus a theory of leadership micro-dynamics in which the leader is materialised through practices of working on a corporeal self for presentation to both self and others.

This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher education, and yet the representations we rely on dangerously oversimplify teaching. My central questions emerge from this dilemma. In telling stories about teaching, how messy can the story be before it becomes unintelligible? Why does messiness matter and what does it produce for teachers-to-be? After examining both canonical accounts of teacher knowledge and emergent research that is productively disrupting the field, I draw on the work of Karen Barad to help me imagine both a new way of telling teaching stories, what I call diffractive storytelling, and a new way of thinking about their use in teacher education. In particular, I take up Barad’s concept of apparatus to consider what knowing is made possible by traditional teacher stories, what knowing is foreclosed, and what these possibilities and limitations mean for teacher education. Finally, I turn to other apparatuses at work in teacher education, especially standardized assessments such as edTPA, the new performance-based assessment of teacher readiness being implemented across the country. I argue that attending carefully to the apparatus-ness of the instruments used in teacher preparation allows us to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustains the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.

Yes / This paper develops a performative theory of resistance. It uses Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s theories of performativity to explore how resistance (to organisational strategies and policies) and resistants (those who resist such strategies and policies) co-emerge, within and through complex intra-actions of entangled discourses, materialities, affect and space/time. The paper uses empirical materials from a case study of the implementation of a talent management strategy. We analyse interviews with the senior managers charged with implementing the strategy, the influence of material, non-sentient actors, and the experiences of the researchers when carrying out the interviews. This leads to a theory that resistance and resistants emerge in moment-to-moment co-constitutive moves that may be invoked when identity or self is put in jeopardy. Resistance, we suggest, is the power (residing with resistants) to say ‘no’ to organizational requirements that would otherwise threaten to render the self abject.

The aim of the study is to elucidate what enables positive attitudes towards buying sex. The study has a posthumanist approach and the data is gathered trough hidden observations of a Swedish web forum dedicated to discussions of prostitution. The theoretical frame that is used in the study consist of concepts from the material feminists Karen Barads and Donna J. Haraways theories and Niels van Doorns argument of the embodiment of virtual texts. A theoretical inspired thematic analysis is used to examine the data from the observations of the web forum. The study shows that positive attitudes towards buying sex are given space and permanence though a variety of intra-actions between material and human agents. At the same time the result of the intra-actions is that the positive attitudes get mediated and endorsed, which enables positive attitudes towards buying sex. In addition to that, the intra-action between material and human agents creates normative understandings about buying sex and prostitution, which also enables these attitudes. In conclusion, the study shows that the enablement of positive attitudes towards buying sex is created through intra-action between not only human agents, instead the material shows to have a significant part in the enablement of positive attitudes towards buying sex.

In this thesis the aim is to examine how objects matter with regards to orientation in the work To Pieces written by the Finnish author Henry Parland. The question posed by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology becomes the starting point of this work. The aim of returning to this question is to accentuate the role of objects in the process of orientation. More specifically how the things themselves make up the life-world, which can be described as a “coherency of things”. When the lifeworld and the subject is aligned the world is familiar and open. It becomes a world that lets the subject in question extend itself and act as it intends. When the orientation fails, the subject becomes disorientated, the world falls apart. The things are used as tools to extend the subject in its world. But things are not mere tools for the subject to extend itself with. The things can be seen as having agency, something that is examined through the theory of agential realism by Karen Barad. Here the agency of matter is examined in such a way that the binary opposition of subject-object is questioned. Instead Barad suggest that we return to the matter itself and examine how it intra-acts in such a way that the boundaries and entities are formed within the so-called phenomena. Together these two theories are put to work in the novel To Pieces which becomes a place for them to join together by showing how orientation is formed reciprocally in the subject-object discourse. The novel is full of human intra-action with things, be it mirrors, photografies, cigarettes, hats, or other humans who are reduced to objects. From here the things themselves set in motion a kind of revolution, which questions the anthropocentric order.

The theoretical movement known under the heading of posthumanism has entered the academic field. Posthumanisms most prominent feature is to retrieve the concept of matter into the analytical framework. Matter is understood to be under-theorized within the social sciences as a result of the permeative focus upon language and discourse. A prevailing understanding of posthumanism that has been used within educational science and philosophy thus consists of moving the searchlight from language/discourse onto matter. Notably, these scholars are turning to the philosopher Karen Barad in order to spell out their posthumanistic implications. The aim of the thesis is to give an account of the philosophy of Karen Barad in contrast to other prevailing renderings of her. The analysis is carried out using a contrastive methodological approach. In this study I demonstrate how my reading of Barad differs from the scholarly readings that I choose to engage with. The results show that with an alternative conceptual understanding of Barad’s posthumanistic theory the analysis is being steered towards the entanglement of matter and discourse rather than towards the materialistic components of a posed problem. In addition, the results also show how a focus on the ontological underpinnings of Barad’s theoretical framework can give crucial contributions when it comes to understanding the generative conditions of science and knowledge-making.

The aim of this thesis is to look closer at the phenomena Snapchat dysmorphia and the underlying aspects of what it involves. I have done this by using Karen Barads concept of intra-action, agency and discourse together with glitch theory. Through a materialistic influenced discourse analysis of several videos of young people discussing the phenomena I have seen how discourses on femininity play a crucial part in the making and taking of selfies. I have found that young women taking lots of selfies do this as a part of a selfie making practice that is a part of a selfie culture. By deconstructing the phenomena and what parts that play a part in it I could see what the underlying features was for example discourses on femininity and ideals but also the normalization of plastic surgery and image editing on social media.

Chapter one, “Narrating Entanglement: Posthuman Agency and Subjectivity in Shane Carruth’s Filmography,” considers the resonances of independent filmmaker Shane Carruth’s two SF films, Primer (2004) and Upstream Color (2013) with the ethos of quantum entanglement through close-readings of Primer’s anti-individualistic portrayal of scientific invention and Upstream Color’s metaphorically entangled human-pig character system. Chapter two, “Race and Schrödingers’s Legacy: History is Both Alive and Dead in Hari Kunzru’s White Tears” analyzes the 2017 novel White Tears as a narrative figuration of of the political, racial, and cultural entanglements set in motion by the economic structure of slavery, ultimately arguing that Kunzru’s entangled plotlines and histories critique the entanglement of contemporary U.S. capitalism with its past and present exploitation of black bodies. The third and final chapter, “Problem Child: Untangling the Reproduction Narrative in Lai and Phang’s SF Bildungsromans” uses close readings of two SF bildungsromans, Larissa Lai’s 2002 novel Salt Fish Girl and Jennifer Phang’s 2015 film Advantageous, both of which follow women of color protagonists not permitted to grow up in the ‘right’ ways, to shed light on the instability of a social order simultaneously grounded in the exploitation of marginalized bodies and the illusion of a reproducible, homogenous nation. Ultimately, “Entangled Bodies” uses a literary exploration of quantum entanglement to reveal both the limits of seemingly-totalizing power structures, narrative or otherwise, and the collective possibilities for re-definition that can, in part, be kindled by a favored tool of Western science: the human imagination.

Riverine avulsion is a radical divergence of a riverbed. In this dissertation, I take this movement as a paradigm for understanding the features of radical change. I develop a model for understanding the essential features of radical change. I argue that the main features involved in avulsion are tension, abandonment, and material freedom. In my analysis, tension provides the catalyst for change, such that it pressurizes complex systems of organization to the point of collapse. I use Catherine Malabou's work on denegation to understand the collapse of a system as an accident; the rupture of a system entails that it is no longer affirmed nor negated, it is abandoned by the process of becoming. Utilizing the work of Deleuze, I present the moment of rupture itself as the moment where materiality breaks free from the restrictions of an organizing system to becoming consolidated into countless new forms of organization. In my analysis of the ontology of avulsion, I employ a new materialist process of becoming to capture the complex networks of relations involved in the moment of creation. I challenge these Deleuzean and new materialist fields of philosophy over their affinity for affirmation by integrating accidental abandonment. Finally, I propose a potentiality for the freedom of materiality as a transcendental property of all systems of organization, thereby revealing their precarious continuity and inevitable abandonment.

This thesis for PhD by Publication presents artworks and writing that propose and create ‘other worlds’. Many of the artworks and writing engage scientific concepts, both historical and contemporary, however it is the phenomenological aspects of these ideas that are engaged. The research mostly deals with the infinitesimal and the distant, neuroscience, astrophysics and sometimes both. It also deals with boundaries as porous and indefinite thresholds, a reoccurring concept in my research. The artworks are mainly participatory as it is my aim to develop a strategy for ‘inhabitation’. I introduce three forms of intuition as methodologies with which to engage with phenomena outside of our human sensorium. They are as follows: Firstly, structural intuition by means of Martin Kemp, a sensory and haptic understanding of the world that affords insights into more abstract or elusive materials or ways of being. Secondly, intuition as method by means of Henri Bergson, a form of ‘looking from within’ that attempts to engage the with beings or phenomena that lie outside of our sensory system and abstract or intellectual domain. I expand on Bergon’s method via Gilles Delueze’s heterogeneous field and Elizabeth Grosz’s further development of this method. And thirdly I also include panpsychism as a form of ‘being with’ the non-human or phenomenon by means of William James, David Chalmers, Karen Barad and Christof Koch. This is not to prove panpsychism as a reality but to understand it as a tool to build a bridge between human and other beings, things, atmospheres with which we share our world and beyond. In the conclusion I briefly address the ‘non-human turn’ as an expansion of our understanding of sentience in things, beings and atmospheres. I have proposed these forms of intuition to draw attention to the methodologies I use when working with ideas that lie outside of my expertise. These methods also apply to research that does not have scientific origins. These methods form a framework for process and production of artworks when engaging with the abstract, invisible or elusive. The main body of the research in this PhD by publication is presented in the forms of artworks and articles. The artworks The Fragmented Orchestra (Grant, Matthias, 6 Ryan, 2008), Ghost (Grant, 2011) and Plasticity (Grant, Matthias, Kin, Ryan, 2011) have at their core research on models of firing neurons with particular reference to Eugene Izhikevich’s work on spike timing dependent plasticity. I also draw from Henri Bergson’s work on memory and Gilles Deleuze’s work on fields. Other research presented includes artworks and papers relating more to astrophysical concepts at their core are Soft Moon, (Grant. 2010), Soft Moon: Exploring Matter and Mutability in Narratives and Histories of the Earth-Moon System, (Grant, 2013) Fathom, (Grant, Matthias, 2013) and newer works. These works reference Bergson once more, the physicist Lee Smolin, writer Italo Calvino and Stanislaw Lem, and others. Here I integrate art, science, science-fiction, and philosophy alongside the writing of architect Juhani Pallasmaa. This document describes my aim to inhabit other worlds (often from the histories of science) by engaging overlapping methodologies of intuition and practice in which I attempt to engage directly with the abstract, the unfathomable, the distant, or the miniscule. I have developed this strategy to allow me to create artworks and writing that externalize these aims and that allow others, participants and readers, to encounter and engage in these other worlds too. This interdisciplinary and rhizomatic strategy synthesizes ideas into new forms with which we can inhabit the uninhabitable.