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We investigated the interface between biomedia and humans by inviting participants to interact with biometric devices that measured and visualized their body data. At first, they struggled with the alienating and disembodying nature of the devices and the constrained, reductionist representation of data. Through their bodily interactions with these devices, however, participants reframed the data and inserted their bodies into the process of data collection. Drawing on the ideas of Bergson, Grosz, Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard, we argue that by working with their subjectivity in a mediated process of becoming, participants 'filled in the intervals' of the visual representations of their bodies to interpret them in ways that marked the duration and meaning of their selves. We conclude that even when presented with artificial representations, individuals convert the representation of the data into narratives inspired by their embodied experience, and the 'virtual' pasts of their own lives.

Music education in England has been in a state of flux for a number of years due to the complexities and variability of its delivery. In 2011, the English government supported a national plan for music education which aimed to alter the music education landscape which proposed to join up provision, between schools and music organisations, for all young people. Although the national plan addressed some of the issues of music variability, inconsistency in music education across the country continued. Many of the issues surrounding music education in England are associated with policy and practice in schools, and the complexities of funding and deployment of music activities. This creates contextual, structural and political boundaries, especially on partnership work that seeks to join up provision. This paper presents findings from a four-year longitudinal project that aimed to explore the role of partnership work between schools and out-of-school music providers. It also analyses the impact the project had on young people, schools teachers' and music leaders' working for external music organisations, musical and educational knowledge, development and understanding, and it critiques structural issues and limitations of music education in England, offering new insight and resolutions. Methodologically there has been an emerging interest in diffractive approaches and the intra-actions they produce (Barad 2007; Haraway 2008). An important part of the paper is to outline the importance of these novel methodologies that go beyond reflection and raise important questions regarding the role of diffractive and intra-active processes in education research projects. This is a novel consideration, which is pertinent for music education research internationally. The paper concludes with a reconceptualisation of partnership work, and new theoretical underpinnings for future partnerships. It claims that successful partnerships should be intra-active, and that the process of diffraction can lead to non-hegemonic spaces for meaningful musical learning.

Extensively employed in reproductive science, the term fetal–maternal interface describes how maternal and fetal tissues interact in the womb to produce the transient placenta, purporting a theory of pregnancy where 'mother', 'fetus', and 'placenta' are already-separate entities. However, considerable scientific evidence supports a different theory, which is also elaborated in feminist and new materialist literatures. Informed by interviews with placenta scientists as well as secondary sources on placental immunology and the developmental origins of health and disease, I explore evidence not of interfacing during pregnancy, but of intra-action, or the mutual emergence of entities in simultaneous practices of differentiation and connection. I argue that attending to evidence that can be figured as intra-action enables us to recognize, account for, and attend to diffuse responsibilities for fetal–maternal outcomes that extend beyond mothers to the biosocial milieus of pregnancy. In reimaging the intra-action of placentas, a new understanding of what constitutes a 'healthy pregnancy' becomes possible.

The human body in motion is both a material body and a body inscribed with sociocultural meanings. The new materialist premise of examining phenomena, such as bodies in motion, as hybrids of matter and meaning now offers a pathway to seamlessly bring nature and culture together in a more unified research agenda. Barad's agentic realism, particularly, presents a promising option to analyze physically active bodies as socio-material practices through both natural science and social constructivist insights. This, however, requires rethinking the nature of natural and social scientific research to more fully comprehend the complexity of physical activity. To illustrate what such research might look like, I first present Barad's critiques of realist science and social constructivist representationalism to arrive at their suggestion of meeting the universe halfway, performatively, through a relational ontology of the production of material bodies. I conclude with my attempt to think with Barad's philosophical framework to consider how researchers of the moving human body may meet "halfway" to examine the materiality and mattering of the physically active body.

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray'sElemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language,Elemental Passionscreates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming.

AbstractFarming women have rarely been the focus of scholarly work on drought and/or distress. This article focuses on farming women's lived experience of drought and distress, drawing on a participatory filmmaking project created by a small group of farming women from Southern Australia. Feminist materialism and Barad's (2003) concept of 'intra‐action' provides a useful lens to examine both the film as an artefact as well as the discussions among the women during its creation. Intra‐action enables an exploration of how farming women's bodies come into being as distressed in moments of time through and with drought as a complex constellation of multiple 'matter'. The film and narratives show distressed bodies emerging with dust, wind, objects and the suffering of non‐human animals. For these women, distress emerges from hearing, sensing, seeing and feeling the irritation of dirt splattered against window panes, the emotional pain and economic consequences of topsoil blowing across paddocks and as feed becomes hard to source, the recognition of the suffering of sheep. The power of these animate and inanimate 'things'—windmills, windows, troughs, work boots, animals and soil—were sensorily entangled with women's bodies. For farming women, distress materialises within their bodies through processes of intra‐action in their more‐than‐human worlds.

Since the early 2000s, athleisure (clothing designed for physical activity) has been gaining popularity as both a functional and fashionable clothing trend, particularly among women. Thus far, scholars have explored the gendered nature of athleisure and the neoliberal, postfeminist, and healthism discourses present within this fitness clothing phenomenon. However, the research has yet to account for the materiality of athleisure and its impacts upon women's experiences of fitness and the construction of idealized female bodies. In this article, we use new materialist theory, specifically Karen Barad's agential realism, to explore the material-discursive dimensions of athleisure. Drawing upon a diffractive analysis of interviews conducted with 22 women in Aotearoa New Zealand, in conjunction with social media analyses, we explore two lively intra-actions of women's athleisure-clad moving bodies – the 'muffin top' and the 'big booty' – to reveal what athleisure does to/with women's bodies. We highlight how these athleisure-body intra-actions work to create boundaries around acceptable femininity and give rise to particular constructions and meanings of women's bodies.

15 p. ; The Portuguese version is published by PAHO: https://iris.paho.org/handle/10665.2/54799

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to use the case of York University in Canada to analyze the connection between University Social Responsibility and voluntary disclosure. The authors examine whether the university's voluntary air emissions disclosure is performative by exploring whether York University's espoused commitment to its community stakeholders truly guides its incentive to disclose carbon emissions in the absence of a legal mandate.


Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative exploratory study uses a post-humanistic approach to build on publicly available data on key measures and metrics of air quality and carbon emissions to facilitate our understanding of representational and interventionist uses of measurement models by social actors and their basis for making voluntary disclosures.


Findings
York University linked the logic of capital markets with sustainability disclosures as an incentive for managing the cost of long-term debt. This paper contributes to measurement practice of sustainability disclosure by reinforcing the practice-theoretic conception of measurement that questions the independent nature of objects measured from the measurement methods and reporting tools.


Practical implications
The findings of this study are important to higher education administrators, regulators and policymakers, as they offer a strategic guide for the assessment of reports on an organization's commitment to sustainability and in determining the efficacy of voluntary reporting to community stakeholders in general although they are intended for specific groups.


Originality/value
Using York University as an illustrative case, the authors argue that air emissions per se are not a reality that shapes decisions at the organizations; instead, the intra-action of air emissions measurement, communications and operational investments define the reality where sustainability is advanced. Specifically, the authors find that the performative effects of emissions disclosure may be associated with socially desirable outcomes in terms of social responsibility and concrete financial rewards.