Transmaterial worlding as inquiry

At the core of the chapter is this simple narrative: we live in language and in a material world. When we research human life, we cannot see it or investigate it as separate from all else around us, whether ‘man-made’ and/ or naturally occurring. Social constructionist inquiry studies how we use language to construct stories of self and other, of material and apparently immaterial, of that which is animate and apparently inanimate. The idea that humans alone story the world is anthropocentric. The world also stories humans. We are all involved in a worlding process (Barad, 2007) where the stories we generate have consequences. Inquiry that draws on social constructionist principles is guided by an ethical imperative to address practices of power by asking how stories are generated, how some truths are propagated over others, by whom, to what end. We aim to understand the relational effect of stories and how some stories carry more weight than others in different contexts.