Feminist New Materialist Figurations as Affective Networks of Agency

Abstract

In response to the diagnosis of the ineffectiveness of traditional scientific discourse in the face of contemporary crises such as the climate catastrophe, in this article examines the potential of the concept of “figuration,” developed within the feminist new materialism movement, as a tool for changing the ways in which knowledge is produced and academic practice is conducted. The works of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Astrid Neimanis, and Anna Tsing are analyzed, presenting key figurations – the nomad, the cyborg, bodies of water, fungi – as affirmative responses to the crisis of the classical humanistic subject. It is argued that in this current, form is inextricably linked to method: rhizomatic mapping (Deleuze, Guattari, Braidotti) and diffractive methodology (Barad, Haraway) replace traditional representationalism, emphasizing the relational, intra-active, and performative nature of cognition. The text shows how a polyphonic, embodied, and deliberately non-linear style of writing becomes a research practice that co-creates reality rather than merely describing it. The article is an invitation to experiment with post-qualitative, nomadic research practice, in which figurations become a strategy for intervening in socio-climatic reality, promoting the ethics of “becoming-with.”