Do You Know the Vibes?: A Case for Vibes as Invisibilized Care

• In Event: It’s a Whole Vibe!: Exploring Agency, Labor, and Power in the Felt Dimensions of Learning

Abstract

Critical educational research cites relationality, embodied knowledge, and spirit as important referents for learning environments (hooks, 1994; Love, 2019; Patel, 2016), key aspects that support the creation of vibes – a somatically and aesthetically rich environment that must be felt and experienced. However, vibes cannot be measured through traditional metrics and are often invisibilized labor such as care work that is gendered and racialized. This paper explores what we might learn when we attune, document, and account for vibes through the lens of care.

We conceptualize vibes through nepantla (Anzaldúa, 1987), a space between multiple spaces but nowhere fully all at once (Author 4, 2019). Because of this in-betweenness, vibes have blurred contours that are textured but hard to account for. Throughout this paper, we focus on somatics and the spatial form, and how both the planning and negotiating of their experiences reflect the often invisibilized labor of care. Building with theories that attend to learners as multidimensional, and learning as connected to cultural, social, and emotional facets of the human experience (Nasir et al., 2021) we see vibes living within interactions of politicized care (McKinney de Royston et al., 2017) that are authored amongst and between youth and educators (Author 4 et al., 2023).

Data comes from 1.) preliminary fieldnotes from an informal science afterschool program for middle schoolers held in collaboration with a university labspace a few blocks from their community center and, 2.) autoethnographic memos and pláticas, informal conversations rooted in oral traditions (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016). Our personal political commitments as critical researchers of color acknowledge the histories, both violent and built through communal knowledge, that shape the vibes of these spaces. Our analysis is grounded in decolonial practices and disrupts traditional academic research by privileging trans-ontologies (Bang, 2016), cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998) and el conocimento del cuerpo (Juarez Mendoza & Aponte, 2021) encouraging us to be guided by and forefront the knowledges of spirit and body. We traced our fieldnotes for in-betweeness and vibes through somatics and interactions of care initiated by youth and adults, and scanned our bodies through pláticas and memos looking for vibes through contours of nepantla: spiritual, historical-mythical, and liminal (Anzaldúa, & Keating, 2015). Emergent findings position 1.) vibes as spaces of possibility and transformation through micro moments of care (hair braiding, using oximeters as “press-on” nails) that are youth initiated bids for rightful presence (Tan & Calabrese Barton, 2023) and 2.) pláticas as a critical methodology documenting the many layers of vibes as care across space and time.

This preliminary study promotes vibes as important units of analysis by repositioning the somatic as an imperative aspect for more just learning environments. We recenter relationality and care as an attempt to upend quantitative metrics that cannot capture the depth of vibes rooted in care. As we account for vibes, we resist the hegemonic tools of research to measure, quantify, and extract, and instead shift our research to include that which must be felt and experienced — that which cannot be fully measured (Restler, 2023).

Authors

• Wendy Barrales, New York University

• Olivia Ortiz, New York University