PERSON
Karen Barad
The feminist physicist-philosopher who dissolved the boundary between observer and observed—whose agential realism reconceives human-AI
collaboration not as interaction between pre-existing entities but as the entangled process through which both parties are simultaneously constituted.
Karen Barad is the philosopher who made the boundary unstable. Trained as a theoretical physicist and shaped by her encounter with
Niels Bohr’s philosophy of quantum mechanics, she built a framework—
agential realism—in which the world does not consist of independent objects that interact across stable boundaries but of entangled phenomena that produce distinct entities only through specific boundary-making practices she calls
agential cuts. The standard vocabulary for describing human-AI collaboration—a person uses a tool, an author employs an assistant, a professional delegates a task—carries a hidden assumption: that the person and the tool exist as separate, pre-defined things before the exchange begins, and remain the same separate things after it ends. Barad’s framework makes the assumption visible and argues, from both physics and philosophy, that it is wrong. What actually happens is
intra-action: the human and the machine are mutually constituted in the process of engagement, and the question of what each is cannot be answered by looking