Baradian Ways With Words and Their Ethical Implications for Sociolinguistics

ABSTRACT

My response addresses the relationship between scholarly writing practices (in sociolinguistics) and ethics as response‐ability, approached through Barad's unique ways with words. Barad's work is based on the entanglement of ethics, ontology, and epistemology—ethico‐onto‐epistemology—which aligns with relational views of ontology and ethics long emphasized by Southern, decolonial, and Indigenous scholars. A relational ontology involves too much connection, where response‐ability has to be cobbled together and cultivated in order to render one another capable of responding to the particular connections one is in and of . Ethics is constituted through cultivating response‐ability. Part of how Barad is cultivating response‐ability, I argue, is through their ways with words. Although not focusing on language directly, Barad emphasizes the materiality of words and concepts and, with colleagues such as Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway and Gandorfer, develops a way of writing that employs devices like slashes (/), dashes (–), and parentheses (()), creating new sensory experiences with‐in words (or wor(l)ds). I am intrigued by Barad's felt need to disrupt traditional scholarly expression so drastically and ask: What ethical demands are conveyed through these practices? I argue that Baradian writing implies an ontology of language where words become material (not merely semiotic) non‐human others with which we are entangled and toward whom we must become response‐able. I end by reflecting on what this might imply for an ethical approach to scholarly writing practices, analytical vocabularies, and ontologies of language in sociolinguistics.