Methodological Intervention: Attuning Cultural Humility to the
social-material contingencies of the clinical encounter:
The complexity of knowing demanded by the emergence of a technologies
driven and supported, distributed, and information fueled health
decision making system requires a renewed sensibility towards cultural
humility. The methodological framework for cultural humility that we
propose below to address these challenges repurposes the methodology of
”diffraction” introduced by feminist, neo-materialist scholar Karen
Barad. We also draw insights from education, science and technology and
social science researchers who have adapted a diffractive analysis to
expand understandings of their own research and educational
contexts25,26,27. We suggest that a neo-materialist
diffractive approach re-orients the practices of cultural humility away
from reflexive modalities of evaluation and assessment towards a more
relational and implicated way of engaging the material and cultural
(discursive) contingencies of contemporary clinical care.