Conference Agenda

In this symposium we explore how new materialisms including feminist materialism, new materialism, neomaterialism, and posthumanism provide inclusive and diverse ways of engaging with knowledge production brought to the fore by material and epistemic practices which are interdependent. This symposium provides space to engage with other approaches to knowledge generation that argue for the entanglement of reality and knowing which provides alternative ethical positioning for producing truths for a world in which culture and nature are entangled. Our responsibility is not to propose an idealized reality from which humans are removed but a vision of truth which imposes a responsibility to take the material world seriously because, if we do not, our empirical accounts will always be inaccurate.

In this symposium we seek to

1. Explore the nature of truth in research and how the idea that the world is composed of individuals awaiting representation undermines the consequential nature of research.
2. Argue for a relational ontology that challenges the presentation of truth endorsed by a correspondence theory of truth challenging scholars to think differently.
3. Invite participants and presenters to rethink the nature of knowledge production by looking beyond correspondence theories that dominate research approaches to truth.

The symposium will consist of four presentations that bring a unique perspective to educational research informed by new materialisms. This diversity serves to illustrate differential approaches to research and knowledge building that decenter humans and highlight the entangled relationships involving living and non-living that provide the possibility for consequential and ethical truth of world production.

This symposium focuses on interrogating consequential education research in pursuit of a diversity of apparatus to knowledge production. For example, education research using randomized control trials as the only basis for truth are underpinned by a correspondence theory of truth which is based on dichotomies, such as subject-object, researcher-researched, culture-nature and world-word (Barad, 2007, p. 125). These dichotomies or dualisms reinforce the separation of reality and knowing, which has ethical and moral consequences for how humans engage with the world in which they live. Correspondence theory assumes language is transparent and there is a direct relationship between the real actual experienced world and the knowing mind. One consequence of this belief for education is that observation is benign and acts as an open pane to the world leading to discovery. We challenge this classical notion of knowledge as representational, existing in the human mind with the object, what is known, separated from the (human) knower. This classical separation raises questions such as: how accurately do representations represent the known or how accurately does language represent the know? Correspondence theory is based on the false notion that knowledge in the form of concepts, graphs, photographic images mediate our access to the material world but new materialisms challenge the belief that we should trust our thoughts more than the material world. At the same time, we grapple with practices, such as randomized trials that have garnered traction that are presented as absolutely the truth even though they originated from people’s beliefs.

“Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions, rather individuals emerge through, and as part of their entangled intra-acting.” Karen Barad, 2007, p. ix The quote from Barad captures the key idea that informs our presentation. One issue for educational research is the premise that the world is composed of individuals awaiting representation. Representationalism is accepted in Western societies as the natural way knowledge is constructed. Many forms of educational research begin with the assumption that humans are individual participants possessed of inherent attributes, political, linguistic and epistemological, that exist prior to representation. Consequentially, a researcher assumes a dualism that separates the researcher and the researched in order to conduct a controlled experiment with the goal of a knower or knowers showing their knowledge and beliefs, which are mediated by representations. Subjects are defined and regulated by such representation (Butler, 1999) which positions knowledge as the product of social action (culture) representing things in the world as they really are (nature) subscribing to a correspondence theory of truth (Barad, 2007). Hacking (1983), and Barad argue that the idea that things and individuals have separate properties and exist before relations began with Greek philosophers. Democritus, his mentor Leucippus and student Epicurus, proponents of atomism, a theory that proposed everything was composed of small, indivisible, indestructible atoms. Leucippus is claimed to have said, “two things exist; atoms and the void” (Author 1, 2013, p. 23). Today, educational and scientific theories are beholden to the atomic theory of matter which postulates the prior existence of entities that have preexisting characteristics. Representationalism, and its associated mechanistic worldview, established a belief where language and all the other things in human minds came to be valued more than the very world in which all humans live. A healthy skepticism provides a space for scholars to consider alternatives that deny representations and an origin of separate discrete participants. We ask, what would educational research be like if we began instead with relations through practices that provide a basis of inter-actions in phenomena? Focusing on practice engenders a performative approach to scholarship that begins with relations not individuals reinforcing the need for direct material engagement for producing knowing. Performativity also opens human appreciation for the agency of other living things and the material world. Indeed, performativity challenges all researchers to rebuild fundamental constructs including agency, causation, identity, learning and teaching.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. Routledge. Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and intervening: introductory topics in the philosophy of natural science. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814563

The reproducibility of experiments and their results is one of the most powerful cornerstones in natural science research. Undoubtedly, such experimental activities have produced significant progress in a variety of fields. The link between, on the one hand, technological advances and, on the other hand, their origin from knowledge obtained through reproducible experiments, has contributed to objectivity and truth claims of natural science. However, already 100 years ago Niels Bohr stated that ‘we are part of that nature we seek to understand’ (quoted in Barad 2007: p. 26), and thus highlights that the researcher and her interpretation of what is observed cannot be separated from the 'phenomenon' that constitutes the result. Similarly, Sandra Harding (1992) argues for, what she calls, strong objectivity within which researcher’s bias are included, in contrast to a supposed value-neutral objectivity. In qualitative research in general, the researcher's inherent bias is usually handled in no other way than based on a positioning in the theoretical framework of the conducted research. But, that is not enough. In an ongoing research project, we investigate how high school and university students, teachers and their intra-actions (Barad 2007) with each other and material equipment are understood in relation to gender and moreover, how emotions affect handling during experimental activities. Empirical collection includes observations and interviews. In order for us researchers to be made aware of our pre-understandings and values in relation to our research object and how this might affect our interpretations, we have interviewed each other about our experiences of laboratory work from school to higher studies and what feelings such activities gave rise to. We have analyzed the interviews using the theoretical framework diffractive reading (Barad 2007, 2014). The analysis contribute s to making our respective subject positions visible, whose similarities and differences become important knowledge when analyzing and interpreting our data material. The approach during the diffractive analysis and some of the results will be presented during the symposium.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. doi:10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Harding, S. (1992). Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is strong objectivity? The Centennial Review, Vol. 36, No. 3 (FALL 1992), pp. 437-470

The EU-Erasmus project ‘Ocean Connections’ project aimed to develop approaches to teaching Ocean Literacy through combining key ideas and practices from research streams in creative pedagogies and in the use of digital technologies, namely Augmented and Virtual Realities (AR and VR). The project identified some core, research-based, educative principles which were then explored in practice within 6 pilot projects, 2 each in England, Spain and Denmark. At the heart of the Ocean Connections project is a material-dialogic theoretical perspective (Hetherington et al, 2019) that draws on new materialist theory to understand learning about the Ocean as a relational, emergent process. We present this theoretical framework and our rationale for its use, before going on to explain two distinct analytical approaches taken in the analysis of our data in order to explore a second order research question: what new knowledge – new matter-meaning (Barad, 2007) emerges when ‘data’ is analysed or explored in two distinctive ways. The first of these is a standard thematic analysis of the qualitative data gathered during the project in order to illuminate how the educative principles manifested across the projects. The second uses a diffractive analytical approach (Barad, 2007; Chappell et al, 2019; Uprichard & Dawney, 2019), to respond and create new insights based on the data. Data was collected through mixed methods, including photography, observation, interviews and questionnaires. Rooted in the material-dialogic theoretical perspective we draw on, qualitative tools were deliberately designed to ensure that attention is not solely focused on the human participants but on the relationality between materials, environment, human participants etc. Findings from our analysis projects shows that some key practices such as modelling, and student-led learning/production of and with technology can aid the enactment of a combination of creative and digital approaches for teaching ocean literacy. It also showed the potentially important role of creative pedagogies in fostering ethical, activist dimensions of ocean literacy. The diffractive analysis opened questions about how learning in these projects occurs across natural-cultural-digital spaces and through time, and how these connect, again, with environmental care, responsibility and activism. Outcomes from the two approaches are framed in terms of the similarities and differences in insights offered as well as the nature of the outcomes themselves (written reports, charts, tables, VR spaces, poems, reflections). As such, this paper offers interesting new insights into how we learn with and through data when it is analysed differently.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Duke University Press. Chappell, K., Hetherington, L., Ruck Keene, H., Wren, H., Alexopolous, A., Ben-Horin, O., Nikolopoulos, K., Robberstad, J., Sotiriou, S., & Bogner, F., X., (2019). Dialogue and materiality/embodiment in science|arts creative pedagogy: Their role and manifestation. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 31, pp 296-322 Hetherington, L., Hardman, M.A., Noakes, J. & Wegerif, R. (2018) Making the case for a material-dialogic approach to science education, Studies in Science Education, 54:2, 141-176, DOI: 10.1080/03057267.2019.1598036 Uprichard E., Dawney L. (2019) Data Diffraction: Challenging Data Integration in Mixed Methods Research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research. 13(1),19-32. doi:10.1177/1558689816674650

How educational research is conducted has material consequences, particularly for historically marginalized communities, and we therefore have an ethical responsibility to interrogate the ways in which we construct and present truth in research. One way in which educational research can progress in its efforts to find truths with the power to disrupt multiple forms of oppression is by adopting research frameworks and practices that attend to the lingering impacts of past violence (as well as of past formulations of what is true), even or especially when such episodes appear “over-and-done-with” (Gordon, 1997/2008, p. xvi) and the lines running from past to present are obscured. Multiple scholars have turned to the idea of hauntings and the spectral or ghostly as one way of conceptualizing these oft-overlooked traces of what was. In this presentation, I demonstrate how key tenets of hauntology, as a theoretical framework first developed by Derrida (1993) and later extended by Barad (2010), might be applied to research on science curricula and teaching in order to aid researchers and educators in uncovering how forgotten or disavowed ideas and figures from the history of science can appear as simultaneously overlooked and actively impacting what students learn. Hauntology extends beyond other new materialist theories is in its use of the spectral to trouble the notion of materiality itself. Where new materialism argues for a need to take the material world seriously, hauntology suggests that often it is figures about which it is difficult to say with certainty if they are materially present or not that exert the greatest influence, precisely because their ghostly nature makes their influence difficult to detect and address. Given the underutilization of science history in teaching students the nature of science as a human practice (Milne, 2013), hauntology can help researchers in science education re-conceptualize science history not simply as an absence in much of the K-12 science curriculum, but as an absent-presence that effects what students learn about science not only by not being explicitly included, but also by the way in which this history lurks, barely detectable, behind the tools and ideas that are taught. I use the example of the eugenics movement’s spectral influence on scientific tools typically used in teaching heredity to explore both how problematic episodes from history may be exerting an unseen influence in science classrooms and what ethical obligations might emerge from recognizing these ghosts.

Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/ continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today 3(2), 240-268. Derrida, J. (1993/1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. London: Routledge. Gordon, A. & Radway, J. (1997/2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Milne, C. (2013) Creating stories from history of science to problematize scientific practice: A case study of boiling points, air pressure, and thermometers.