Caring for Research: A Collective Collage (Poster 12)

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

Abstract

Theoretical Background. Scholarship in STEM education research demonstrates a growing need to address issues of equity, inclusion, and social justice, urging that education researchers articulate the “How,” the “For What,” the “For Whom,” and the “With Whom” of their research (Philip, et al., 2018). Thinking with care, when doing research with marginalized communities in STEM education, is an entry point into those questions. Care is seen as an affective state, an ethical obligation and a material vital doing (de la Bellacasa, 2012). When seen as an affective state, care allows researchers to attune to the ‘neglected’ (de la Bellacasa, 2012) affects of their research and research participants. As an ethical obligation, care enables the researcher to respond to power differentials inherent to research contexts. Recognizing the world-making effects of care enable researchers to constantly ‘unsettle care’ (Murphy, 2015), seeing how it reproduces/disrupts dominant values and approaches to research.

Purpose. The general aims of this poster are to: 1) highlight possibilities and complicities of care in equity- based STEM research and 2) use art-based approaches to elevate embodied knowledge as a resource for reflecting on power-relations inherent to research.

Methodology. We will present an interactive poster that engages the audience in collaging practices around the visible and invisible dimensions of caring with their research, research colleagues, and research participants. Collage (Butler-Kisber & Poldma, 2010) is seen as an “experiential way of doing/knowing that can help to get at tacit aspects of both understanding and process and to make these more explicit to the researcher and more accessible to audiences” (p. 1). The participants in the poster session will be invited to tune into their embodied sensations through imagery with other co-participants, guided by the following questions: how does it feel to care about your research? Where is care present and absent? What are some hidden realities of care that (re)arrange your work?

Emergent/anticipated outcomes. Given the speculative nature of this presentation, the typical ‘findings’ will emerge through the collage interactive practice. The poster seeks to intensify “our own involvements [as researchers] in perpetuating dominant values, rather than retreating into the secure position of an enlightened outsider who knows better” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, p. 197). By allowing the visible and invisible dimensions of care in research to surface, the poster will playfully invite reflections on researcher’s positionality and the mundane/conflicting practices of care to generate and provoke new considerations for doing ethical research and practice with different STEM communities.

Significance. Researchers must consider how they are positioned in relation to their participants and research contexts, in ways that do not reduce statements of positionality to a ‘hollow claim’ (Tuck & Yang, 2012). By proposing an interactive poster as part of the theme for this session, we hope to expand what counts as an academic poster as a way to ‘walk the talk’ of challenging institutional norms for driving more just practices in STEM education, while disrupting the textual (and colonial) dominance of academic research (Viruru & Rios, 2021).

Authors

• Sophia Marlow, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author

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

• Kristal Turner
  Presenting Author

• Nadia Qureshi, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Rachael Edino, University of Calgary
  Presenting Author

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