Contributions of Barad's New Materialism to Well-Being Research

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the contributions that Karen Barad's theorizations can make to the study of well-being, particularly their ontoepistemological framework, “agential realism,” that emphasizes the inseparability of matter, ethics, and knowledge, as the relational entanglements of agencies. We use these ideas to imagine well-being as differential materializations, entanglements of human, and the non-human agencies that “intra-act” with each other and are inseparable from how we know about them and our responsibilities in their reconfigurations. From this perspective, we see well-being as a phenomenon, underpinning its dynamism and processuality. Analyzing an interview fragment, we exemplify how Barad's theorizations can offer a different way to think about well-being, recognizing the differences within and the consequences of thinking about it as being otherwise. We argue that this approach opens new possibilities and research trajectories that expand the field of well-being studies, understanding well-being studies as a more local, dynamic, open-ended phenomenon.