Black Feminist Thought, Creativity, and Science

• In Event: The Intellectual Struggle to Be Human: Reading Wynter for Rethinking/Reimagining Equitable Educational Opportunity in STEM

Abstract

each clump of grass or stone holds heat
(like) every imprint of my wide foot
smiling broadly at no one
look up; look up at the view
from there is vast
and you do not know more than any stone.

-Rosamond King

Poet Rosamond King describes knowledge that is formed and disseminated as she walks the Earth. It is a creative text that also describes kinaesthetic observations/sensations and the tacit knowledge that is produced at the point of intersection of the human and nonhuman. In this paper, using Wynter and McKittrick’s notions of scientia as a starting point, I will describe a rethinking of the relationship between creativity and science that centers the postcolonial project of being human.
With a recent trend to center creativity in science, it is important to critically examine both notions of creativity and science in ways that broaden conceptualizations of both terms. A salient starting point for this project is Wynter’s science of being human (scientia); one that “unsettles our familiar (Darwinian, objective, racist, sexist) governing cores of scientific thought…and seeks to locate [scientific] knowledge-making as connected to the human lived experience and “the recoding of science through representational and biological feelings; the interdisciplinary and collaborative task that allows us to think about how the creative narrative can and does contribute to what is otherwise understood as ‘the laws of nature…’” (McKittrick 2014 p. 154). Wynters project of decolonial scientia centers the lived experience of being human or a reclaiming of humanness (for people who have been historically excluded from this term) and reclaims knowledge generation for the benefit of healthy communities where “life had priority over economic gains, growth and development…it subjects economic growth to human needs rather than the other way around” (p. 118).
The creative narrative allows our cultural practices to determine how we learn and practice science (Medin et al., 2014). For, it is neither the concept of science nor creativity that decides what is “genius” or even “smart” but rather the institutional structures within which it is situated (Glavineau, 2010). STEM and creative texts are simultaneously lived and assembled and allows think about how humanness might be reimagined thus challenging the very foundation of colonial STEM teaching, learning and research contexts. For example, African-diasporic dance scholar Yvonne Daniels notes, “Dancing bodies accumulate spirit, display power and enact as well as disseminate knowledge” thus allowing us to think about learning and knowledge production in different ways thus opening up they ways that science might be considered and practiced. Where STEM and creativity intersect we might find the “scientific poetics of our future” rewriting science as “necessarily a human project.” (McKittrick 2014, p. 160).

Author

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary