Critical Ontologies and Science Education: Diagramming New Ethical and Political Directions

• In Event: Innovations and New Directions in Methods and Frameworks for Learning

Abstract

The work of New Materialist feminists, and recent scholarship into critical ontologies, offers
much to critical science education researchers who wish to move beyond privileging discursive,
and/or human social entities and incorporate material, non-living, nonhuman, affective forces
into their scholarship. New materialisms, namely the work of Karen Barad (2007; 2012)
introduce ‘mutual becomings through intra-actions’ as a fundamental premise of the ‘nature’ of
reality. New materialist feminist approaches allow social/natural realities to be intertwined,
connected, understood, and even dissolved and merged, as ontological/epistemological
‘assemblages’; and can, I argue, provide a new foundation for ethics and ethical actions related
to science. This paper begins with a sketch of Karen Barad’s (2007; 2012) ethics of
responsibility and what this means for an ethically engaged science education. Barad’s ethical
imperative takes the form of intra-action and response, where ‘ethical being’ rests in the ability
to see entities as mutually constitutive and implicated in the production of the world. More
importantly, it involves allowing organisms, modes/forms of life, opportunities to respond,
become, and be. In other words, ethics as practice, is not only tied to its discursive and
epistemological milieu, but the material and ontological configurations that afford possibilities.
This insight should be of great relevance to science, science education, and science studies; fields
that study, and focus on the study of, the material world. This paper situates science learning communities as human/nonhuman, material/discursive social/natural assemblages, with a particular focus on how these allow educators insight into the ‘situatedness’ of ethical actors (ethical subjects). To demonstrate the concept of an assemblage, we employ a series of ‘diagrammatics’ that bring together aspects of our shared (common) social and natural world. Like Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor networks, assemblage theory focuses on the interconnectivity of human/nonhuman, material/discursive entities, attempting to resist the dominance of anthropocentric, socio-discursive explanations of phenomenon and agency. This paper is intended as a provocation toward new forms of ‘being ethical’ in science and science education through a focus on critical ontologies (virtual or actual). However, for new materialisms, and critical ontologies to contribute to socially and ecologically just futures a political dimension is needed. It argued here that a notion of ‘the commons’, multitude (of singularities), and their (bio)political context (Hardt & Negri, 2009), can push the ethical imperatives outlined by new materialisms, assemblage theory, and critical ontologies
toward more socially and ecologically just ends. In summary, a focus on critical ontologies can help outline the new ways of ‘being ethical’ in the world. Assemblage theory (Delanda, 2006) can help form part of the basis of how a critical ontological view of the world can be made operational. However, a political dimension is needed to help push the new ethical questions opened by new materialisms and critical ontologies toward a more ecologically and socially just world.

Authors

• Jesse Bazzul, University of Regina

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth