Through the investigation of controversies over the regulation of international pharmaceutical companies by Health Canada, and hydraulic fracturing in the Western provinces, I am building on the developing infra-physical apparatus that was initiated by Karen Barad in her seminal works on Agential Realism. The character of this ‘apparatus’ is constituted by intra-actions within phenomena (or subject-objects), which allows for the separation of component parts from within (Barad, 2007). Using these two cases as specific phenomena, I am conducting an investigation into the ontological ‘cuts’ (Barad, 2007) that are made between crime and harm by the agents involved. To enable further development, this apparatus is also informed by a ‘diffractive reading’ of texts concerning infra-physics such as Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad, 2007) and Bruno Latour’s (2005) work on the sociology of association (which specifically focuses on tracing relations between entities of all varieties), as well as substantive texts within the criminological discipline, including green criminology, regulatory and corporate crime literature. This ‘diffractive reading’ involves a reading through texts that enables an intra-action between ideas or perspectives that is not simply additive, but mutually constitutive (Barad, 2007). Although various critical epistemological frameworks like critical realism have attempted to overcome substantial ontological and epistemological concerns such as the distinctions between micro- and macro- level phenomena (Benton & Craib, 2011) and human versus non-human actors (Murphy, 2007), they have been unsuccessful in completely surpassing these concerns and tend only to ‘debunk’ previous perspectives (see Latour, 1991/1993). The current project, therefore, builds upon this apparatus and establishes its particular relevance for criminology, while attending to these fierce dualisms that plague the field.

 

 

Works Cited

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning [E-book]. Durham: Duke University.

Benton, T., & Craib, I. (2011). Philosophy of social science: The philosophical foundations of social thought (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

 Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University. (Original work published in 1991)

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Murphy, R. (2007). Thinking across the culture/nature divide: An empirical study of issues for critical realism and social constructionism. In J. Frauley & F. Pierce (Eds.), Critical realism and the social sciences: heterodox elaborations (pp. 142-161).Toronto: University of Toronto Press.