“Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions, rather individuals emerge through, and as part of their entangled intra-acting.” Karen Barad, 2007, p. ix The quote from Barad captures the key idea that informs our presentation. One issue for educational research is the premise that the world is composed of individuals awaiting representation. Representationalism is accepted in Western societies as the natural way knowledge is constructed. Many forms of educational research begin with the assumption that humans are individual participants possessed of inherent attributes, political, linguistic and epistemological, that exist prior to representation. Consequentially, a researcher assumes a dualism that separates the researcher and the researched in order to conduct a controlled experiment with the goal of a knower or knowers showing their knowledge and beliefs, which are mediated by representations. Subjects are defined and regulated by such representation (Butler, 1999) which positions knowledge as the product of social action (culture) representing things in the world as they really are (nature) subscribing to a correspondence theory of truth (Barad, 2007). Hacking (1983), and Barad argue that the idea that things and individuals have separate properties and exist before relations began with Greek philosophers. Democritus, his mentor Leucippus and student Epicurus, proponents of atomism, a theory that proposed everything was composed of small, indivisible, indestructible atoms. Leucippus is claimed to have said, “two things exist; atoms and the void” (Author 1, 2013, p. 23). Today, educational and scientific theories are beholden to the atomic theory of matter which postulates the prior existence of entities that have preexisting characteristics. Representationalism, and its associated mechanistic worldview, established a belief where language and all the other things in human minds came to be valued more than the very world in which all humans live. A healthy skepticism provides a space for scholars to consider alternatives that deny representations and an origin of separate discrete participants. We ask, what would educational research be like if we began instead with relations through practices that provide a basis of inter-actions in phenomena? Focusing on practice engenders a performative approach to scholarship that begins with relations not individuals reinforcing the need for direct material engagement for producing knowing. Performativity also opens human appreciation for the agency of other living things and the material world. Indeed, performativity challenges all researchers to rebuild fundamental constructs including agency, causation, identity, learning and teaching.

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