Ghostly Mattering: Reconceptualizing the Absent-Presence of History in the Science Classroom and Its Ethical Implications

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

Abstract

As the explanation for this year’s conference theme makes clear, how educational research is conducted has material consequences, particularly for historically marginalized communities, and we therefore have an ethical responsibility to interrogate the ways in which we construct and present truth in research. I contend that one way in which educational research can progress in its efforts to find truths with the power to disrupt multiple forms of discrimination and oppression is by adopting research frameworks and practices that attend to the lingering impacts of past violence and trauma (as well as of past formulations of what is true), even or especially when such episodes appear “over-and-done-with” (Gordon, 1997/2008, p. xvi) and the lines running from past to present seem absent or obscured. Multiple scholars have turned to the idea of hauntings and the spectral or ghostly as one way of conceptualizing these oft-overlooked traces of what was. In this presentation, I intend to demonstrate how key tenets of hauntology, as a theoretical framework first developed by Derrida (1993) and later extended by Barad (2010), might be applied to research on science curricula and teaching in order to aid researchers and educators in uncovering how forgotten or disavowed ideas and figures from the history of science can appear as simultaneously overlooked and actively impacting what students learn.

As a theoretical framework, hauntology shares new materialism’s challenge to the traditional dichotomies (between subject/object, epistemology/ontology, materiality/discourse) that undergird much of current research, both in the natural sciences and in education. Further, hauntological perspectives, like those of many new materialists, tend to argue that our deep entanglement with the phenomena of concern means that questions of knowing can never be divorced from questions of ethical obligation. One way in which hauntology perhaps extends beyond other new materialist theories is in its use of the spectral to trouble the notion of materiality itself. Where new materialism argues for a need to take the material world seriously, hauntology suggests that often it is figures about which it is difficult to say with certainty if they are materially present or not that exert the greatest influence on us, precisely because their ghostly nature makes their influence difficult to detect and address.

Given the underutilization of science history in teaching students the nature of science as a human practice (Milne, 2013), hauntology therefore may be especially powerful in helping researchers in science education re-conceptualize science history not simply as an absence in much of the K-12 science curriculum, but as an absent-presence that effects what students learn about science not only by not being explicitly included, but also by the way in which this history lurks, barely detectable, behind the tools and ideas that are taught. I use the example of the eugenics movement’s spectral influence on scientific tools typically used in teaching heredity to explore both how problematic episodes from science’s history may be exerting an unseen influence in current science classrooms (and with what consequences) and what ethical obligations might emerge from recognizing these ghosts.

Author

• Anna Skorupa, New York University
  Presenting Author