How Infrastructural Transformation Took Root in a Regional Science Center (Poster 9)

• In Event: Advancing Understanding of Infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Introduction & Framework
We explore how one Midwestern Science Center (“Center”) engaged in infrastructural transformation over years as they sought to “reclaim” the Center from its colonial, white, and heteropatriarchal histories.

Social innovation without transformation of existing structures leads to bounded justice (Creary, 2021). Justice-oriented infrastructuring redresses injustice by creating new conditions to support innovative and political organizations, resistances, and systemic transformations (Bang, 2020). Questions of when and what are infrastructures (Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013) extend to who, expanding attention from materials, tools and ideas to histories of practice/people who live within, sustain and benefit/get hurt from infrastructures. We frame this work as infrastructural transformation to center the dynamic and generative social-spatial-material-cultural constellations of practice that shape/propel the transformation processes as they move across space and time (Bødker et al., 2017).

Method
Researchers, informal educators and youth, working in an RPP, formed a Youth Action Council (YAC) in 2016, to guide the design of a new makerspace. The YAC’s role expanded to co-design partners with the aim of ‘reclaiming’ the Center. Using participatory critical ethnography we co-generated data: Video/audio recordings and notes from YAC and RPP sessions, YAC artifacts, and interviews with educators/youth. Analysis involved multiple stages/levels of coding based on methods of constant comparison.

Findings
First, we describe a set of successive projects (2016-2022) to illustrate how the YAC’s reclaiming efforts led to emergent discourses, practices and material representations of inclusivity and justice, in how youth/educators critiqued, reimagined and transformed the realities and relationalities of/at the Center. Such discourses, practices and representations uncovered specific, material, historicized, and embodied ways coloniality and whiteness are enacted in/across the center, opening up opportunities to collectively disrupt enactments.

Second, we zoom into the youth-led redesign of the Big Mouth exhibit to illustrate these points. The 8-foot, three-dimensional face sculpture (constructed in 1982), was originally painted to depict a pale white skin tone. Youth spent hours researching, prototyping designs, and ultimately sanding, priming, and painting, a new multi-representation through pixelation with members explaining:
“Kids will look at the pixelated mouth and say, ‘Look!That's my color!’ They will feel welcomed and happy.”
“It shows how a big part of life is our racial identities.”
To better represent the lives, histories and experiences of a broader community, youth produced an alternative infrastructure that gave witness to rather than elided the lives of youth from multiple racial identities. Youth explain, “The pattern means that everyone can do science. You are not alone in this world.”


The YAC’s design-based research uncovered specific, material, historicized, and embodied ways coloniality and whiteness are enacted in/across the center. It contributed to new justice-oriented infrastructures that give just witness to youth lives and communities, transforming the realities and relationalities of/at the science center.

Significance
Youth-led design research, when integral to the daily work of science centers, can contribute to justice-oriented infrastructural transformation. However, it requires political allyship of people in power, such as center directors and key community stakeholders.

Authors

• Angela Calabrese, University of Michigan

• Wisam Sedawi, University of Michigan

• Day W. Greenberg, Indiana University

• Micaela Balzer, Impression 5 Science Center