Agential Realism and Educational Ethnography

Abstract

This chapter reviews some philosophical and methodological literatures that developed concepts like agential realism specifically Indigenous philosophy and pragmatist philosophy. It offers that the new spirit of realism can make important contributions to the practice of educational ethnography. There are some key differences between these earlier versions of agential realism and that found in the new materialist literature, differences in emphasis that have potential implications for the practice of educational ethnography and social inquiry generally. Karen Barad's agential realism is conceived of as a response to the excesses of poststructuralist anti-materialism. Agential realism permitted theorizing racism as a material-semiotic agency defined not by some specific mechanism such as personal bias, economic accumulation, or discursive processes, but instead by an ordering activity that at times involves all of those mechanisms. This certainly fit what we found in the study of school resegregation and with contemporary observations about the history of institutionalized racism.

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