Conference Agenda

Issues of equity, access, and justice have long been of paramount interest in education research, as a means of illuminating, challenging, and changing long-established relations of power. On the one hand, the field has utilised quantitative approaches to map inequalities in student distributions (related to e.g. gender and social class) across disciplines and institutions. On the other hand, there is also an abundance of small-scale qualitative studies, seeking to understand educational trajectories of individuals or groups of individuals and their positions of (dis)advantage in the generation of relationships with educational contexts. Typically, such studies utilise narrative, discursive and performative approaches to identity formation.

In contrast to the extensive research on discourse and identity, the role of materiality in processes of identity formation in scientific practices has received less attention (de Freitas & Curinga 2015). Theoretical stances that recognize the agentic force of materiality offer new avenues to investigate the students’ engagement with institutions and disciplines. The focus on materiality has been productive in exploring the significance of space in learning to be a scientist (Acton 2017); the gender performativity in science (e.g. Scantlebury et al. 2019); the ways in which diverse objects such as instruments (e.g. Milne 2019) are inscription devices in the scientific work in classrooms; and how space, bodies and objects interact in classrooms (Taylor 2013). In this symposium we are interested in exploring the entanglement of socio-material-discursive practices and subjectification processes, in the context of higher education. In particular, we focus on the methodological challenges of making appropriate empirical and analytical cuts in order to capture how subjectification processes are interlinked with both broader societal contexts, disciplinary cultures and concrete social-material practices, while allowing for both analytical clarity and contextual complexity.

The symposium brings together studies from different national contexts and of different educational contexts, in order to showcase a diversity of novel methodological approaches.

The first presentation will engage with different creative data experimentations (collaging, painting with data, and string figuring), in which researchers collectively become entangled with the data. The second presentation explores slow education research in the context of chemistry education research, foregrounding matters of care. This will be followed by a presentation focused on relationality in the co-design of spaces that are socially and culturally relevant to youth, adding embodiment, affect and more-than-human characteristics to the conceptualisation of science identity. The final presentation will zoom in on higher education spaces of physics and mathematics, using walking ethnographies to explore how assemblages of practice connecting bodies, spaces and materials come to be produced.

All presentations experiment with methodologies that seek to include the more-than-human in the research practices and avoid creating dichotomies between researchers and participants. But there are also multiple different ways in which the presentations link up, concepts that can be traced through two or more of the presentations include care, assemblage, multiplicities, apparatus, and knowledge/knowledge-ing. The discussant will highlight such entanglements between the presentations, but also challenge the presenters to explore how the theoretical richness in the symposium at large can provide new avenues for engaging with multifaceted qualitative data.

Karen Barad’s agential realism (2007) helps us attend differently to mattering and materiality in feminist educational research. In particular, in expanding the notion of who/what possesses agency to the nonhuman, Barad questions the usual alignment of human as agentic subject. Our paper is motivated by the question: what happens to researcher subjectivity in agential realist educational research? This is a compelling question that opens fresh avenues for research. In Cartesian logics, the subject is split from the object; whereas in agential realism, cuts are a cutting-together-apart: a separation that is also an entanglement. What, then, happens to subject-object-researcher-researched? We explore this knotty problem through empirical materials collectively produced as part of a collaborative research project entitled Get up and Move!, where a group of academics in education came together to explore walking methodologies (Bastos et al., 2022) as posthumanist, feminist materialist research practices. We devised experimentations that enabled intra-actions with the data including collaging (Fairchild et al., 2022), painting with data (Balmer, 2021) and string figuring (Haraway, 2016). These research-creation practices provided opportunities to attend to, and respond to, the ‘specificity of material entanglements in their agential becoming’ (Barad, 2007, p.91). In this paper we share the ways in which our specific socio-material-discursive practices opened us up to new possibilities, producing phenomena that we were always, are always, entangled within. As we cut together/apart meanings emerged and proliferated in rhizomatic and unforeseen ways illuminating what came to matter. These processual practices are a form of ‘knowledge-ing’ (Taylor, 2021), and enabled multiple and unexpected happenings to occur. The apparatuses, which as Barad reminds us, are phenomena themselves, are also part of the phenomena they produce. What began with an openness to enact different data experimentations illuminated how, ‘the object and the measuring agencies emerge from rather than precede the intra-actions that produces them’ (Barad 2007, p. 128). Collectively we became entangled with the data and each other and our collaborative enactments became a marbling of experiences like drops of colours on a liquid surface, swirling together into moving, changing unexpected assemblages. We resisted the material-discursive practice of boundary production between disciplines, opening up to transdisciplinary knowledge-making and unexpected kinships. Collaborative collaging, string figuring and data creations are relational, generative processes of slow scholarship. These approaches have the potential to be utilised in multiple educational contexts - offering ways for more just, creative and ethical research and practice.

Balmer A. (2021). Painting with data: Alternative aesthetics of qualitative research. The Sociological Review, 696, 1143–1161. Barad K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bastos E., Hogarth H., Taylor C. A., Barr K., Barratt Hacking E., Cranham J., Hewlett S. (2022). Walking together-apart: How the use of mobile material methods during the pandemic can help us think towards better educational futures. EERA Blog. Fairchild N., Taylor C. A., Benozzo A., Carey N., Koro M., Elmenhorst C. (2022). Knowledge production in material spaces: Disturbing conferences and composing events. Routledge. Haraway D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Taylor C. A. (2021). Knowledge matters: Five propositions concerning the reconceptualization of knowledge in feminist new materialist, posthumanist and post-qualitative research. In Murris K. (Ed.), Navigating the postqualitative, new materialist, and critical posthumanist terrain across disciplines, an introductory guide. Routledge. Taylor C. A., Hogarth H., Cranham J., Hewlett S., Bastos E., Barratt Hacking E., Barr K. (in press) Concept-ing with the gift: Walking method/ologies in posthumanist research. Journal of Posthumanism.

As feminist chemistry educators engaged as (ill)disciplined researchers, scholars and teachers we position ourselves as reliable witnesses to the research and pedagogical practices in science education that undermine and counteract calls for equity and diversity. To this end we propose, by making a fuss, enacting matters of care and implementing slow education (Stengers, 2018; Stengers & Despret, 2014), are key steps in challenging the status quo in science education’s fast pedagogical and research practices. We illustrate how we are making a fuss through an examination of chemistry education research practices, the entanglement of emotions, the material and perspectives of undergraduate students in laboratory settings and education systems bogged down by beliefs of learning as a product to be consumed. We are looking to disrupt different aspects of science education and science by exploring "interstitial spaces where meaning resides" (Barad, 1995, p. 65) and that requires a slowing down. Slow education provides a space to re-think and re-examine practices with the intent of “opening up the possibility of new questions, new experimental settings and new puzzles” (Stengers 2018, p. 91-92). Our current slow science education research foregrounds matter and its entanglement with laboratory science and its research practices, undergraduate students’ laboratory experiences – the physical, emotional, and the socio-cultural. Through matters of care we identify the forms of exclusion, power and domination in science and science education, noting that care is an ethically and politically charged practice which allows us to engage in research that is outside the main and actively opening up opportunities for younger scholars in science education and science to have the space in research labs, undergraduate labs and when teaching science to pursue new theory, practices and method in science education. Using socially acute questions (Harraway, 2008) and socio-scientific issues as a basis provides the space and time to address wicked, ill-structured problems where context is key. For example, using a USA case study such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, USA where politically, racialized decisions on managing the town’s drinking water, combined with a series of chemical reactions caused major health problems for the populace (Authors, 2021a). We can enact slow education through asking students to make connections to the everyday through materials such as snaplogs (Authors, 2021b) which value students’ identifying diffraction and difference rather than an expectation that they would reflect back known facts.

Authors, 2021a; b Barad, K. (1995). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs, 28 (3), 801-831. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science. Cambridge, Polity Press. Stengers, I. & Despret, V. (2014). Women who make a fuss: The unfaithful daughters of Virginia Woolf. University of Minnesota Press.

This presentation explores the production of affective spaces for science identity work among girls in an afterschool program called the Convoclub. Drawing on conversations we had with the program coordinator of the club, and artifact and interview data from a digital storytelling exercise we conducted with the girls in Convoclub (Author et al., 2013; Author and Author, 2023), we describe stories of assemblages—affectively charged associations of people, places and things (Ehret and Leander, 2019). In doing so, we propose a broadened vision of the construct of “science identity” to centre relationships, and a necessary focus on the embodied, affective and more-than-human characteristics of identity. We will share a series of vignettes that highlight considerations for the co-design of spaces that are socially and culturally relevant, and meaningful to youth in ways that contribute to their ‘becoming’ in science education. Our analysis of the vignettes is guided by Ehret and Leander’s (2019) discussion of assemblages which they describe as producing “affective affinities” that are not just experienced by one individual in ways that we can describe (e.g., happiness, sadness, anger). Rather Ehret and Leander suggest affective affinities are “experienced as the warp and woof of movements involving multiple actors—the everyday movements of people and things approaching and pushing against one another coming alongside, making a dance-like turn, pulling apart” (p. 6). The three vignettes we present will address concerns that arose in the design of the Convoclub, and our hope that the research itself would “become a transformative act” (Steinberg, 2014, p. xiii), implying “a methodological symbiosis of praxis and care” (Ali & McCarthy, 2020, p. 5). We will describe our dialogues with the program coordinator that led to the co-design of a learning space that centred critical reflexivity and affect; how the digital storytelling activity created an open door into which the girls were invited to engage with us, and through which we have considered the many ways that the girls moved through that door (e.g., Smith et al., 2022); and we will finally describe how these actions enabled a kind of deep relationality in the group supportive of “becomings”—the empowerment of identities in the making that brought to life a new way of being and moving with science. These vignettes challenge static views of science identities and highlight the entanglements and dynamic processes of becoming alongside science across space and time.

Ali, A. I., & McCarty, T. L. (2020). Centering critical youth research methodologies of praxis and care. In A. I. Alis & T. L. McCarty (Eds.), Critical youth research in education (pp. 3-20). Routledge. Ehret, C., and Leander, K. (2019) Introduction. In: Leander K and Ehret C (eds) Affect in Literacy Learning and Teaching: Pedagogies, Politics and Coming to Know. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Author and Author. (2023). Author et al., (2013). Smith, T., Avraamidou, L., López López, M., and Adams, J. (2022). Exploring the Space: Border Crossing in a Community-based Science Engagement Programme. Science Educators for Equity, Diversity and Social Justice (SEEDS), Virtual Conference, January 29, 2022. Steinberg, S. R. (2014). Foreword. Criticalizing youth, youth criticalizing. In A. Ibrahim, & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Critical youth studies reader (pp. xiii-xiv). Peter Lang.

This presentation draws on the methodological pilot from a new research project focused on in/exclusion in higher education physics and mathematics (PI: last author), illustrating the reciprocal process of theoretical and methodological fine-tuning as the project literally takes its first empirical steps during walking ethnographies in higher education settings. The project explores the paths of students from under-represented groups into the fields of physics and mathematics, and the identities that they build as they engage with these disciplinary areas. We are inspired by socio-material perspectives that consider humans and nonhumans as constantly performed and enacted (de Freitas & Curinga, 2015). In their engagement with the disciplines of physics and mathematics, the students link into socio-historic practices and virtues, learning those through participation (Daston & Gallison 2007). From such a perspective, scientific knowledge can not be separated from the knower. More specifically, Mol (2002) argues that objects and subjects need to be understood as enacted inseparably in the multiple materialized relations of scientific practice. As such, human actors, scientific practices, materialities are all entangled in distributed networks of materialization of practice. Identity can be studied by tracing the assemblages of practice in which bodies, spaces and materials —objects, instruments, artefacts, matter— as well as language as materialities come to be connected (Acton 2017). In order to trace the reciprocity of student identities and scientific materialities we use walking ethnographies to identify configurations of identity that promote students’ successful engagement. In the walking ethnographies students are invited to take the researcher around places of importance to them as physics or mathematics students (e.g. laboratories, lecture halls, social areas, study spaces), focusing on the use of materials in the places (e.g. which objects, materials, instruments are used how and where), how the students experience the places (e.g. as contributing to a sense of belonging or competence, safety and/or insecurity) and their engagement with the room distribution, instruments and other artefacts in these spaces. As such, our methodological pilot seeks to sharpen our ethnographic gaze and our analytical apparatus. In the conference presentation we focus on how the data generated during the walking ethnographies is entangled with our theoretical vantage points, both in the generation and the analysis of the data.

Acton, R. (2017). Place-people-practice-process: Using sociomateriality in university physical spaces research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(14), 1441-1451. Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. Zone Books, Distributed by the MIT Press. De Freitas, E., & Curinga, M. X. (2015). New materialist approaches to the study of language and identity: Assembling the posthuman subject. Curriculum Inquiry, 45(3), 249-265. Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press.