Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.
Karen Barad

One of the most astonishing formulations of quantum physics is the idea that electrons only exist when they are observed, or better, when they are interacting with something else. They become ‘real’ by relating with another element which is indiscernible to their visibility and existence with respect to our perception of that phenomenon. This conception questions our position in the act of observing by revealing a relational ontology of matter. It remarks how the centrality of our position and gaze as subject and observer limits our reading of ‘reality’.
Quantum entanglements and the philosophy-physics of Niels Bohr, one of the main contributors to quantum theory, call into question an entire tradition in the history of Western metaphysics: “the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own independent sets of determinate properties.”
Karen Barad offers a posthuman account of quantum physics with her agential realism theory, reworking Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway. Bohr’s intuition is central to it: we are a part of that nature that we seek to understand. That is what brings Barat to formulate the notion of “intra-action (in contrast to the usual interaction, which presumes the prior existence of independent entities or relata)”: a profound conceptual shift that places us within a world in constant reconfiguration and becoming that entails no intrinsic boundaries and an “ongoing ebb and flow of agency”. It reminds us of our place as part of the “world-body space in its dynamic structuration”, introducing a new notion of causality which faces us with our responsibilities of living through interactions that bond us - human and non human. This dynamism reconfigures the real and the possible, calling into question “the dualism of object-subject, knower-known, nature-culture, and word-world” - even of outside and inside, where the exteriority is within.
Agential realism is a realism not defined by the conception and “representation of an independent reality but about the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within and as part of the world.” “A world of happenings, not of things” as Carlo Rovelli says.
By reviewing the change of perspective offered by quantum physics, Barad reminds us how epistemology, ontology and ethics necessarily intertwine.
“Justice, which entails acknowledgment, recognition, and loving attention, is not a state that can be achieved once and for all. There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breath life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in each meeting.” Karen Barad
Image credit: Derek MF Di Fabio.

Neoliberalism has seen the incremental breakdown and erosion of a state supported welfare system, forcing new networks of care to emerge.
Networks of care can exist in multiple forms, and in their manifesto, The Care Collective use the term 'caring kinships' to refer to all kinds of relationships where acts of care can be shared, exchanged and experienced. These include non-traditional arrangements of care that look beyond the nuclear family model to more diverse and experimental approaches to care that are founded within friendships, social groups, communities and organisations. It is within these expanded networks, that we see acts of care happening at every level, both directly and indirectly, between those who know one another and those who don't; where the responsibility is shared, so that no single person is burdened by the often exhausting physical and emotional duties that acts of care require.
These 'caring kinships' must also overcome the derogatory ways in which care is seen within the contemporary Western world, where it has been devalued and delegated to women and those of lower economic means and status. The Care Collective explain how notions of dependency have gotten in the way of our ability to care properly. That the feminisation of care has either condemned us to a life of domestic duties and carework, or has alienated us from the ability to give care or ask for care.
Although an incredible network has been forged, we cannot see this as a direct replacement to the care services that have been lost at the hands of a neoliberal agenda. Already so many people suffering from invisible conditions, such as mental health disorders, and particularly those in lower and working class categories who are reliant on state support i.e. housing benefit, have been victim to the continual and gradual erosion of the welfare state. These people have been disempowered and sequestered, left without the resources to be able to fight back or complain. Therefore, we must all do what we can to put pressure on those in power to reinvest in a social welfare system designed to not only protect and provide for those that need care but also fairly and evenly support those who give it.
Image courtesy: Rosie Carr, Jemma Cullen, and Lisa and Essie from the East Kent Mencap GOLD Group and the Adult Education Centre in Margate.
Image description: a video still shows two people sitting on a sofa which is covered with a blanket depicting a seal. Above the image a quote by The Care Collective says: "To put care centre-stage means recognising and embracing our interdependencies."

Drawing ourselves into the pockets of relative safety and care that surround us, we look for support in the non-human objects and environments that surround us. Shifting in scale, we build new paths for our imagination, and are drawn to small moments of beauty. For, many, nature continues to be a refuge, even in the landscape of a window ledge or sidewalk. But the wonder of nature is more than a balm of distraction. As plant ecologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, "paying attention to the more-than-human world doesn’t lead only to amazement; it leads also to acknowledgment of pain."
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer writes about her Ojibwe tradition of approaching the world in terms of reciprocity, and their belief that each being has a gift, which is also their responsibility. Asking what our response should be to the generosity of the more-than-human world, she calls on us to develop relationships with this world that “see and feel equally the beauty and the wounds, the old growth and the clear-cut, the mountain and the mine.”
Human beings have the gift of forming relationships through language. We can call other beings by their names, commit ourselves to knowing them. And we can also question the names we use for the world around us. We pledge to protect our nations, our fellow citizens, our families from harm. Could we echo the words to protect our more-than-human companions, who give us so much?
Image description: the marks of old cuts look like eyes on the bark of a group of trees. A quote by Robin Wall Kimmerer reads: "Paying attention is an ongoing act of reciprocity, the gift that keeps on giving"

“Precarity is a state of acknowledgement of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. […] It is an unselfconscious privilege that allows us to fantasize — counter-factually — that we each survive alone” (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015).
In the last century, human and more-than-human life has been the main target of industrialisation, which has caused the increasing division and separation of its reproductive conditions. Capitalist interests have put forward such alienating process in order to gain profit, with the effect of bringing ruin rather than the promised progress. Livelihoods and environments have been cut from one another and turned into scalable and homogeneous resources for the reproduction, instead, of capitalism.
With COVID-19 having intensified many of the crises and contradictions that we — as inhabitants of the Capitalocene era — were going through, we are confronted with the question of which alternatives we have in order to move the reproduction of life outside capitalist accumulation and its structural inequalities, especially when existential precariousness is turned into a governmental tool for the administration of death.
Paying attention to the many different livelihoods which depend upon matsutake mushrooms — from red pine forests to foragers, traders, buyers, and scientists — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing suggests that alienation is also responsible for obscuring those possibilities of collaborative survival and flourishing which emerge in the multiple species and temporalities their encounters are embedded in. Her book The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) has been helpful in re-thinking livelihoods through precarity as that condition which manifests them as heterogeneous and shifting assemblages of unfinished bodies, bonds, places and times.
Image description: A perspex display holds an object from the 6th century B.C. It is a bronze rod bent in the middle to get a U-shape, and at the ends to get two small spirals. Its sides are pierced with small ivory statuettes representing women and men.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic took force and upended our lives across the globe, there have been repeated calls for life to ‘return to normal’.
‘Going back to normality’ means returning to a world struggling with the continued collapse of social welfare systems through insidious modes of privatisation, of social housing, healthcare and care in the community, through the withdrawal of subsidised childcare and care for the elderly; through unrelenting land enclosures and the devastation and depletion of the earth’s natural resources; through denying we are in a climate emergency; through the ongoing disinvestment from our education system; through the exploitation and oppression of workers in the Global South by wealthier nations.
Is this the normality that we want to go back to?
The pandemic has laid bare that the world was already in a crisis. These pre-existing crises are a large part of why many nations were not properly prepared for such an event and have been under extreme strain to cope with the virus.
Covid-19 has upended many aspects of our lives in negative ways, but perhaps it is possible to use this disruption for something positive. Already we see new forms of solidarity emerging both in terms of our local communities in forms such as mutual aid and the proliferation of the consumption of locally grown and manufactured produce, as well as across national and international spectrums in regards to the growth and intensification of the Black Lives Matters movement. We must safeguard these actions and connections and continue to harness the rupture caused by the virus, using it as a catalyst for revolution, acting as a collective subject to fight for social change.
Photo courtesy: Jess Mai Walker.
Image description: A quote by Silvia Federici reads: "There is no 'going back to normality', normality was a crisis". In the background is a photo of a smashed car windscreen surrounded by other detritus, all left discarded on a sidewalk.

"The theorising of resistance intermingles in the spatiality of the street [...] Eating posole may be a resistant activity; sleeping by oneself may be resistant activity; carrying one’s keys in one’s hands can be a resistant activity; talking to strangers can be a resistant activity. This is the insight of the callejera".
This is also the insight that María Lugones (1944-2020) shared with us, when she wrote about the streetwalker's strategic tactics, their ability to hang out at the margins, to appreciate the lives of "the outlaw, the despised, the useless, the insane, the hustlers, the poachers, the pickers of garbage, the urban nomads of the reconstituted spatiality of the cityscapes".
In this time of social distancing, we all have the ability to become streetwalker theorists, to unmask the 'common' sense understandings of who belongs to our internal and external landscapes. We sense that the borders between public and private space start to become destabilised as every touch, every encounter becomes infused with an awareness of risky relations.
We might also find that, yearning for a change of scenery or unbound by the strictures of a working day, we are sharing the streets in the company of those marked as socially unacceptable. We might feel that we have more in common with the states of homelessness, of drifting, of unproductiveness and disobedience than we thought. We might want to hang out in this feeling of possibility for a while, to defy, disrupt and reroute the terrain of common sense in the company of others on the move.
Lugones warned us that this is difficult, and the temptations of (again) becoming 'productive members of society', of authority and value, are seductive. "There is no common language, no common expectations, no reason to assume trust or trust worthiness, no comfortable womb-warm sense of safety and of having come home. What prompts one is a risk-full sense of opportunities, of possibilities, to be rendered artfully."
These risks are no less in the contemporary moment. And still there are the potential rewards of the illegitimate smile in passage, the burst of laughter or tears, and the sudden extra-familial touch. Can we continue the path of the streetwalker, and sustain hang-outs for our digital and physical companions?
Thank you María.
Quotes from Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions.
Image description: A quote by María Lugones reads ‘The theorising of resistance intermingles in the spatiality of the street.’ It overlaps an image of a pile of fallen and crushed red Brachychiton, or bottletree, flowers on the pavement of a street in Palermo. The tree is native to Australia and New Guinea, and is known as kurrajong in the Dharuk language of the Darug and Eora Aboriginal Australian peoples.

Solidarity is hard work and is never easy. It is about caring for ourselves and for others at the same time, not at their expense. Others that are different because of sex, race, gender, class, sexual orientation, disability; others, yet ultimately equal.
Solidarity is thus a challenge and a tool to break up the borders which obscure the current and historical machineries of exploitation.
That neoliberal states protect those borders over people while pushing many outside that category through carceral systems is no news. But with Corona capitalism shedding light on the state-decided disposability of a massive number of bodies, it becomes necessary to question the ideological austerity which let it happen in the first place. It becomes necessary to question those same ideologies that are used to justify that public resources and services are insufficient and unequally distributed; that precarity, whether it is social, economic, or political, unavoidably constitutes the lives of so many people; that our more than human siblings exist for extraction only.
How to recognise and undo the inequalities we are both subjected to and complicit with?
What does a world with no inequalities look like?
Lola Olufemi’s book 'Feminism, Interrupted. Disrupting Power (2020)' has helped us thinking these concerns through solidarity. “At the core of solidarity”, Olufemi writes, “is mutual aid: the idea that we give our platforms, resources, legitimacy, voices, skills to one another to try and defeat oppressive conditions”. In this sense, solidarity is a radical tactic that can help us engage with the often overlapping roots of those oppressive conditions, without shying away from their complexities nor from their constant shifts, in order to try and get closer to a more just world for all, because no personal liberation is possible without collective liberation.
Photo courtesy: Jess Mai Walker.
Image description: A pile of rubble occupies the centre of the image. It seems the result of the partial demolition of the building behind it. Within and around the pile there are plants and other weeds, which found life among the destruction.

'I’ve always found solace in the fact that the words caregiver and caretaker mean the same thing. We take care, we give care, and it can be contagious, it can spread.' Johanna Hedva, 2020
Capitalist society relies on instinctive and altruistic acts of care that take place through various forms of unwaged domestic, reproductive and emotional labour e.g., childcare, care of the elderly, care of the disabled, and care for those with mental health conditions, – but it goes mostly unseen and unvalued.
The pandemic has forced us to readdress the way we think of care, therefore the importance we place on it within our society must also be re-evaluated, revalued and restructured.
Giving and taking care are radical acts. Caring for someone, or receiving care is intimate, it requires trust and the capacity to show one’s vulnerability. Care cannot be automated. Sometimes acts of care are almost invisible but at other times exchanges of care are more demanding, requiring intense periods of physical and emotional investment and labour. At different points in our lives, we will be the ones giving care, and at others, the ones receiving it.
Care has the ability to self-propagate. It thrives in an environment where it can be shared and exchanged, but it cannot survive as a singular entity: it is a system that can be taken from, but must also be fed. In all circumstances, it requires an interdependent network of support. In creating and sustaining these networks we must reach out beyond our closest family and friends into our local community, our natural environment, the animal world and the planet as a whole.
During the pandemic, isolation has been forced upon us. Covid-19 has atomised society. When we are kept apart how do we build and maintain networks of care? How can we be better at both providing and receiving support?
Image description: In the image is a quote by Johanna Hedva that says ‘We take care, we give care, and it can be contagious, it can spread.’ In the background is a photograph showing a baby's hand pressed against an elderly person's hand, with a window in between as a barrier. In the background of the photo, you can see the face of an old woman smiling. The window reflects an inner-city terraced house from the other side of the road and a car.

The pandemic forced us to redefine our personal and private sphere, questioning and regulating the proximity and inclusion of others, of any external entity and subject, even of our loved ones, the members of our communities and families. The virus brought border control politics adopted to restore national integrity and sovereignty into everyone's lives, not only of the ones of migrants and refugees. Exclusion, separation, stigmatization are extended to the whole of the population. Circulating democratically with its dead threat, the virus marks and operates through social inequalities. ‘The management of epidemics stages an idea of community, reveals a society’s immunitary fantasies, and exposes sovereignty’s dreams of omnipotence—and its impotence.’
Upcoming online reading group: July 23rd, 7pm (GMT+1).
Image description: A quote by Paul B. Preciado says ‘The new frontier is your epidermis. The new Lampedusa is your skin.’ In the background a detail of an old oil painting depicts a wave overflowing the shore. A person is covering their face with a veil, running away and putting their arms around another person.

Photo courtesy: Virginia Ariu. Graphic design: Christel Martinod.
A text which says 'Care, Community, Ecology' is overlaid on the image detail of a Swiss banknote. The image detail shows a blue, digital drawing of two cupped hands holding a liquid. The hands are drawn as if made by drops.