Flooding lagoons, melting mountains: exploring diffractive analysis for a communicative engagement with extra/linguistic materializations

Purpose This article proposes diffractive vignettes as a new analytical approach that can sensitize organizational communication research to extra/linguistic forces in the communicative constitution of major societal challenges such as the climate crisis. The critical feminist concept of diffraction examines how diverse forces interact, interfere and produce new patterns of meaning and difference through entangled, performative relations. Design/methodology/approach Diffraction as an analytical tool is illustrated based on fieldwork on organizing the climate crisis in the tourist destinations in the Tyrolean Alps and Venice. We analytically attune to how extra/linguistic forces move and resonate with us, how we read them through each other in a diffractive experiment and how they allow us to attend to materialization differently through crafting diffractive vignettes. Findings We account for how the analytical work required us to experiment with juxtaposing, weaving, dividing and melting data and theories together through non-representational, post-qualitative ways of analyzing. Through a diffractive vignette, we then unfold how the extra/linguistic forces became agentic for the constitution of the climate crisis. Originality/value Through diffractive vignettes, we extend a fast-developing body of work on materialization within organizational communication to analytically exploit communication’s performativity, including its extra/linguistic forces in a post-qualitative, non-representational sense. With diffraction, we expand the analytical potential of organizational communication scholarship with a sensitivity to difference in materialization.