Karen Barad’s agential realism (2007) helps us attend differently to mattering and materiality in feminist educational research. In particular, in expanding the notion of who/what possesses agency to the nonhuman, Barad questions the usual alignment of human as agentic subject. Our paper is motivated by the question: what happens to researcher subjectivity in agential realist educational research? This is a compelling question that opens fresh avenues for research. In Cartesian logics, the subject is split from the object; whereas in agential realism, cuts are a cutting-together-apart: a separation that is also an entanglement. What, then, happens to subject-object-researcher-researched? We explore this knotty problem through empirical materials collectively produced as part of a collaborative research project entitled Get up and Move!, where a group of academics in education came together to explore walking methodologies (Bastos et al., 2022) as posthumanist, feminist materialist research practices. We devised experimentations that enabled intra-actions with the data including collaging (Fairchild et al., 2022), painting with data (Balmer, 2021) and string figuring (Haraway, 2016). These research-creation practices provided opportunities to attend to, and respond to, the ‘specificity of material entanglements in their agential becoming’ (Barad, 2007, p.91). In this paper we share the ways in which our specific socio-material-discursive practices opened us up to new possibilities, producing phenomena that we were always, are always, entangled within. As we cut together/apart meanings emerged and proliferated in rhizomatic and unforeseen ways illuminating what came to matter. These processual practices are a form of ‘knowledge-ing’ (Taylor, 2021), and enabled multiple and unexpected happenings to occur. The apparatuses, which as Barad reminds us, are phenomena themselves, are also part of the phenomena they produce. What began with an openness to enact different data experimentations illuminated how, ‘the object and the measuring agencies emerge from rather than precede the intra-actions that produces them’ (Barad 2007, p. 128). Collectively we became entangled with the data and each other and our collaborative enactments became a marbling of experiences like drops of colours on a liquid surface, swirling together into moving, changing unexpected assemblages. We resisted the material-discursive practice of boundary production between disciplines, opening up to transdisciplinary knowledge-making and unexpected kinships. Collaborative collaging, string figuring and data creations are relational, generative processes of slow scholarship. These approaches have the potential to be utilised in multiple educational contexts - offering ways for more just, creative and ethical research and practice.

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