Karen River Barad in dialogue with Rebecca Schneider on Barad's forthcoming book "Energetics of the Otherwise: A Laboratory of the Possible."

Karen River Barad's new book, Energetics of the Otherwise: A Laboratory of the Possible, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. The book presents a unique understanding of the inseparability of the theological, political, and scientific aspects of worlding, while offering alternative ways of (re)configuring Kabbalah, materialism, and quantum physics in their intra-relationality. It puts forward a critical methodology that attends to entangled histories of the oppressed and the urgently required messianic work of ever ongoing reparation. Rebecca Schneider, a performance theorist, has been in conversation with Barad for some time. Their conversations -- on gesture, worlding, inseparability, interinanimation, emergency, and Black feminist thought -- have informed some of the book's errant currents.  Introducing the book, this public conversation will flow and pool in and around some possible thoughts Barad and Schneider have shared in the interstices of their (un)disciplines. 

After the dialogue, Barad and Schneider welcome questions and comments from the audience.

Karen River Barad, Ph.D., Physics, SUNY Stony Brook, is Distinguished Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz, with an affiliation in Philosophy. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department 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, and nuclear studies. Barad's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is a founding member of the Science & Justice Research Center and served as the Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC. Barad is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Gothenburg University, a Fulbright fellowship, and the Kresge College Teaching Award, among other honors.

Their research interests are science studies, multispecies studies, science & justice, physics, nuclear studies, continental philosophy, epistemology, ontology, ethics, politics, philosophy of physics. 

Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in the USA, teaches performance studies, decolonial methods in media and live arts, prehistories of the screen, and theories of intermedia. Engaging with Black Feminist Thought and cognates in Indigenous and postcolonial studies, she is the author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (a second edition forthcoming in 2026); The Explicit Body in Performance; Theatre And History; and “Slough Media” in Remain  (2018). Edited special issues of TDR include “Precarity and Performance,”“Performance and New Materialism,”  “Performance and Social Reproduction,” and "Possession and Automation."  She has published over 60 essays including “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future" and "Solo Solo Solo" in After Criticism. A digital book, Standing Still Moving: Gesture, Temporality, and the Interval is underway. Schneider was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2021 for the ongoing project "Shoaling in the Sea of History."