To Affect and Be Affected by Data: Intensifying Difficult Experiences in STEM Education Through Poetic Prose (Poster 8)

• In Event: Reengaging (With) Care in Equity-Based STEM Research

Abstract

Theoretical Background. Often, equity-based issues in STEM are reported and discussed in ways that separate the researcher from their participants or keep the emotions of either party at bay. This occurs in moments when the emotional aspects of the research are dismissed and/or when diluting emotional experiences of participants into codified meanings and themes (Viruru & Rios, 2021). Dickson-Swift et al. (2009) argue for the need to centre emotions as part of the research process, recognizing emotions as a ‘way of knowing’. Activating emotions as a way of knowing is an invitation to see how researchers affect data and are affected by data (see Byers & Wallace, 2021), challenging a purely cognitivist orientation to data analysis. Data is not raw, waiting to be extracted from participants and later subjected to the researcher’s detached gaze (see Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). Rather, it is generated in (affective) entanglements between the researcher, research participants and research contexts. In that sense, Taylor (2017) argues for a need to “move away from a consciousness-based, cognitive, interiorized, phenomenological view of experience to a materialist, relational, co-constitutive, affective, vitalist, corporeal, notion of experience that foregrounds entanglement” (p. 313). Similarly, Springgay and Truman (2018) advocate for a shift “from thinking about methods as processes of gathering data toward methods as becoming entangled in relations” (p. 204).

Purpose. Aligned with the move towards more authentic, lived engagement with data, this presentation explores the affordances and new ethical dilemmas that emerge when using poetic prose as a way to intensify experiences of discrimination and micro-aggressions in STEM education.

Methodology. Using a case study approach (Stake, 2008) to closely attend to the affective experiences of “Jessica’ a graduate student in the geoscience department at a postsecondary Canadian institution, we turned transcripts of two semi-structured interviews conducted with Jessica into a poetic prose. Poetry as an analytical practice helps see ‘living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with’ rather than ‘a problem to be solved’ (Lorde, 1984), an inherited orientation from western colonial thought.

Results and Significance. The poster will feature the resulting poetic prose and how it entangled Sana’s (first author) own disorientation and wonderings as a researcher ‘in the moment’ of the interview with Jessica’s difficult experiences with sexual harassment. We propose that this method helps to intensify experiences of discrimination and marginalization in STEM, foregrounding the emotionality of the research, while prompting readers to be moved/affected into action. At the same time, we explore the new ethical tensions that might arise when intensifying such experiences: How might such a method accentuate emotions felt/experienced and what’s our responsibility as researchers when our participants come to re-live such difficult moments through our research? How much can we arrange and re-arrange data poetically and towards what affects/effects? And how might art-based methodologies become more accountable to the visceral while moving us and our readers into ‘thick solidarity’ (Liu & Shange, 2018) with people whose lives we will never be able to share?

Authors

• Sarah Halwany, Université de l'Ontario Français (UOF)
  Presenting Author

• Maryam Taheri
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary
  Non-Presenting Author