Paper short abstract:

What possibilities for engaging with non-Western and non-scientific knowledge practices emerge from studying efforts to establish new forms of Western bioscientific practice?

Paper long abstract:

In both anthropology and science studies, performativist inspired meditations on natureculture(s) and/as ontolog(y/ies) have taken multiple expressions in recent years. This paper considers Karen Barad's (onto-epistemo-ethical) agential realist framework in examining the diffraction patterns made when ethnographic and bioscientific research methods move through one another. Specifically, from 2007 to 2010, I was an ethnographer of a short-lived open concept laboratory. Deemed a 'failure' under particular metrics, I want to address 'failure' as an unbecoming, a movement away from possibilities, in order to explore what it can tell 'us' about how to do human and/as natural science differently so that movement toward trading zones (Galison), broadly conceived, can be facilitated among non-scientific and non-Western knowledge practices. I argue agential realism may not specifically address other non-Western and non-scientific onto-epistemo-ethical horizons, but does provide a means for moving toward less imperial ontological encounters.