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Well, there certainly is a lot in the Barad articles, as always. While reading the first piece, I felt (ha!) a constant sense of betrayal. When people ask me why I left physics, my canned answer is usually something along the lines of: "I was dealing with personal and family issues at the time and my coursework wasn't speaking to that." It was precisely attitudes like the one Barad quoted Feynman as saying about Von Neumann at the beginning of the piece "...you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility... It's made me a very happy man ever since" that I was reacting against. Her summary of students being slaves to calculations has come up a lot in the course and it rang true. Especially the sentences "Eventually, even the most tenacious student will give in to the mysticism, or leave." (46) "rather than submit to some form of brainwashing" (59) I felt betrayed because I felt this way for nothing. Bohr, someone I had studied, was concerned with meaning all along and I didn't know! As Pais writes "Bohr's considerations are extremely relavant, however, to the scientist who occasionally likes to reflect on the meaning of what he or she is doing." (64)

I was also interested in her idea of the social construction of ignorance. And while I found her theories on science pedagogy interesting, I think I would have understood how her course differed from a "coating course" more if she had included a syllabus instead of abstractly discussing it.

Flora