Karen Barad

In this talk, physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad discussed her recent work on time and her reflections on the entanglement of time and materiality. 

Karen Barad is professor of feminist studies, philosophy, and history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad holds a PhD in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory, and was tenured in the Physics Department at UCSC before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. She is the co-director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC.

Material Performance was a series of talks focused on materiality and time—how material and passing time can be seen as reciprocal conditions for each other’s qualities. The series brought together material scientists, biochemists, philosophers, curators, and media theorists to unravel the relationship of time and materiality within each discipline.