Toward an Unsettling Hauntology of Science Education

• In Event: Beyond the Modern: The Ethical Need to Make Matter Matter for Truth in Science Education

Abstract

Science education continues to be haunted by the (re)apparition of the question of where to “begin” with Indigenous ways-of-living-with-nature. This question often materializes, conjured into being in ways that work to dispel and dismiss responsibility toward the ways in which the science education is always already in relation to Indigeneity as a result of settler colonialism. Drawing inspiration from decolonizing theories of haunting, hauntologies of teaching and learning, and deconstructive approaches to the spectral, this paper pursues an unsettling hauntology of science education. Through this practice of addressing ghosts of settler colonial injustice past which linger and lurk in the present moment of science education, not to repair the past but to (re)imagine a future justice-to-come, we are visited by three ghostly explorations.

First, the spectrality and specters of the question of where to “begin”. Where masking power with innocence speaks to the ways in which the question of beginning is ritually expulsed, it does not and cannot account for its (re)apparition. To take haunting seriously is to invert the habitual and dominant structure of responsibility and agency: instead of settler colonial disciplinary spaces and individual actors taking up responsibility, haunting works to prevent the (re)assertion of an innocent or reconcilatory settler subjectivity that has assuaged its own fears and anxieties.

The second ghostly exploration: ghosts of/as settler horror in science education. Extending the notion of settler horror – not only conceptualized as the horror inflected by settler colonialism but also the horror experienced through settler subjectivities which must be managed – science education is considered as scéance, more specifically an exorcism.

The third ghostly exploration: hauntological inheritances(s). Considering scientific praxis as conjuration and exorcism begins to reveal hauntological inheritances that are warded away at the altar of science: significantly, those in relation to Indigenous ways-of- living-with-nature, the relation to place, its other-than- and more-than- human agency, and the politics of place that have haunted Western modern science since its very “beginning”... it’s ghosts all the way down. In turn, science education is called upon to learn to speak to the ghosts of pasts passed over which continue to haunt its present as this has bearing on what science education was, is, and is becoming toward a justice-to-come – being and becoming answerable to the question of what ghosts might science education be chasing away?

Author

• Marc R. Higgins, University of Alberta
  Presenting Author