Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous
fields in the natural sciences social sciences and humanities. In this volume Karen Barad
theoretical physicist and feminist theorist elaborates her theory of agential realism.
Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and
social realms agential realism is at once a new epistemology ontology and ethics. The
starting point for Barad's analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels
Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr's philosophical views in light of current
scholarship in physics science studies and the philosophy of science as well as feminist
poststructuralist and other critical social theories. In the process she significantly
reworks understandings of space time matter causality agency subjectivity and
objectivity. In an agential realist account the world is made of entanglements of "social" and
"natural" agencies where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific
intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures
relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity Barad reveals questions about how
nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she
reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their
"interrelationship." Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science
and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices critically reworking
Judith Butler's influential theory of performativity. Finally Barad uses agential realism to
produce a new interpretation of quantum physics demonstrating that agential realism is more
than a means of reflecting on science it can be used to actually do science.
