"Language has been granted too much power" (Barad, 2003, p. 801).

(No, technically I shouldn't use a quote as a title. You got me there. However, I'm right about the next thing:)

Writing HDR theses means reading a large number of texts. It’s easy to find oneself swamped by ideas and drowning in words. When this happens to me in my writing work, I like to find ways to make connections that don’t rely on words alone. After all, as Barad goes on to observe in her essay,

What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility? (Barad, 2003, p. 801)

Today, my answer to this dazzling question is blank paper, a brevity of language (you will need some words, but be as strict with yourself as you can), coloured pencils, a ruler, scissors, glue, perhaps a highlighter, and a determination to look differently at your thesis work.

The following pictures describe the process (which is also elucidated in words, below).

Compel yourself to set aside the granularity of your ideas and think globally. Compile a list of your main authors and ideas; cut the paper (and curve it into a bowl); then, connect authors and ideas together. Even if you draw so many coloured pencil lines that you can no longer distinguish them, you will be thinking about the connections as you draw the lines; it is this activity of body and matter that I am advocating. In this process, allow thought to border comprehension, and hope for a moment of cascade.

Time to grab your pencils. Have a beautiful day.

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28(3), 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321