Chapter Red Brown: Gestures for Engineering and Medical Education: Drawing on Our Barad Encounter

In June 2017 we met Karen Barad at a posthumanism workshop in Cape Town. The encounter was significant to us and influential in our PhD journeys, providing theoretical inspiration and motivation. In 2022, we re-turn to the intra-actions that intersect with our research and teaching experiences to re-member the entanglements that stay with us and what newness has emerged. In this chapter, we read Barad’s paper “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable” through engagements within our specific disciplinary contexts, namely geomatics and obstetrics.  

We are drawn to two encounters with students in our teaching, and we diffractively analyse artifacts that were produced by them within the context of South African higher education. Our analysis pays attention to silences, hauntings, erasures, violences, movement and gestures across time.