Working Toward Justice: Reclaiming Our Science Center

• In Event: STEM Justice: Reenvisioning Science Education/Justice/Place

Abstract

We explore how one Research+Practice Partnership (involving researchers, informal science educators and youth) re-imagined what their Science Center could be in how it represented and valued people’s lives. Drawing upon social-spatial justice and participatory design research, findings explore the co-production of new spatial imaginaries in/for the science center through both what/how we and the youth talked about what science is, who can do science, and where science happens in relation to our lives as it is taken up and represented in the Center (transforming discourses), and the practices collectively taken up to enact these discourses towards altering the spaces of the Center (transforming practices). We share four vignettes to explore the co-production of spatial imaginaries for reclaiming the Center.

Authors

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Micaela Balzer, Impression 5 science museum

• Won Jung Kim, Santa Clara University

• Nik McPherson

• Sinead C Brien, Michigan State University

• Day W Greenberg, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Louise Archer, University College London