Connecting Material Feminism With Science Education

• In Event: 73.041 - Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education Research and Practice?

Abstract

In this theoretical paper, we explore how material feminism may offer a framework for science education researchers to engage with the material and materiality through the concepts of agential realism, agential cuts and apparatus. Research in gender and education has evolved from a focus on issues of equity and access, to difference and intersectionality, and more recently subjectivity and identity. While science education research has continued its focus on access, difference, and identity, gender research within the field has become fused, and possibly lost, within other social categories. Material feminism could engage science education researchers in re-examining their practice from different perspectives and approaches through firstly considering how the material influences and impacts science teaching and learning. Secondly, material feminism also provides a framework for structuring research questions, data analysis and interpretation and a re-visioning of how the material influences those engaged with research.
Building upon feminist theory, and combined with Bohr’ theory of the atom, Barad (2007) re-engaged the material as a critical aspect of feminist theory. In this theoretical framework, matter is agentic and intra-acts with the human to produce phenomena that are co-constituted and emergent (Taylor & Ivinson, 2013). Barad (2007) introduced several concepts in arguing the need for ‘making matter matter’, these include intra-actions, agential realism, and apparatus.
Intra-actions position matter as agentic and as important as discourse. Humans’ engagement of, and with matter, occurs through intra-actions which generates material-discursive practices. The implications for science education research could be in reframing studies to consider how the material, such as the physical arrangement of laboratories, laboratory equipment, and the body/embodiment of who is a scientist influence the teaching and learning of science produces material-discursive practices.
Agential realism examined intra-actions between human and non-human entities in particular contexts (Barad, 2007). Within science education research, this engagement of material with discursive practices promotes the opportunity for agential cuts. Barad (2007) argued that the researcher and subject are not bounded, nor is there separation between knower and subject. Rather knower and subject are part of the same reality (Lykke, 2011). Within agential realism the researcher subject and the object of the research are defined and contextualized. The defined relationship between the researcher subject and the object of the research establishes a boundary that is not fixed but instead a momentary phenomena. An agential cut occurs when the boundary is defined and used.
Apparatus are the means for agential cuts to occur. They emerge from the specific material-discursive practices and can construct researcher subject and the object of the research. Thus, when involved in/with/by research, material feminism would assume that a researcher clearly articulate her practices because those are evidence of what comes to matter, and also give direction to the agential cuts that establish temporary boundaries which generate phenomena.
Material feminism is producing new knowledge about humans engage with the natural and physical world. By making matter matter, science educators could consider how technology, history, physical space, apparatus and other phenomena influence their research and the interpretation of that research.

Authors

• Kathryn Scantlebury, University of Delaware

• Anita Hussenius, Uppsala University

• Kristina Andersson, Uppsala University

• Annica Gullberg, University of Gävle

• Anna T. Danielsson, Uppsala University