Transition states: Chemistry educators engaging with and being challenged by matter, materiality and what may come to be

• For several decades, feminist scholars have critiqued science and challenged its premises especially those that separate the researcher from the researched in a search for objectivity or that seek to write out women from the historical development of science (Stengers, 2018). Yet most of these critiques have focused on the disciplines of biology and physics with few offering a feminist critique of chemistry’s underlying principles and assumptions. Rather, studies in the construction of chemistry are often atheoretical with regards to gender and race, rarely offering any examination of power structures or any critical examination of the sociocultural aspects of learning chemistry and the gendered construction of the discipline. In the late 1980s and 1990s feminist scholars critiqued the gendered nature of science (Schiebinger, 1999; Tuana, 1989). Haraway (1988) challenged feminists to engage with the material because the discourse that built science and technology produced a matrix of domination. More recently, Barad (2007) building upon Haraway’s theories, and using Bohr’s epistemological framework, published a ground-breaking, field defining text, challenging us and the rest of humanity to ‘meet the universe halfway’ by becoming entangled with matter and materiality. Taken together, these authors present us with the question of whether there are transdisciplinary ways to explore the nature of chemistry and chemistry education that undermine the gendered nature of the discipline, while also remaining true to the tenets of feminist materiality. Lykke (2010) noted that transdisciplinary research poses and explores research questions that do not belong within existing disciplines and as such have the potential to generate new knowledge and areas of inquiry not accessible to a traditional discipline such as chemistry. This chapter responds to these provocations in ways which speak into feminism’s critique of the power structures that facilitate/cause inequities, especially as they pertain towards women and girls. In it, we explore the use of research|practices, such as cogenerative dialogues (cogens), snaplogs, and shadowing as feminist strategies to illustrate transdisciplinary material feminist research, and how these research strategies entangle humans with images, instruments, matter and material in the construction of chemical phenomena, knowledge, ontology and epistemology. We discuss how cogens, snaplogs, and shadowing are research|practices that challenge the current power structures and problematize the hierarchy in teaching chemistry, while generating research questions not yet asked within the discipline. Our scholarly ‘location’ within science education/science as feminist researchers places us in a transdisciplinary ‘transition state’ that produces unsettled feelings. A transition state, in a chemical sense, is explained further below but it represents an unstable ‘condition’ where it is impossible to halt/remain – you either return back from where you came or move to a new position. Our research identities as chemists/chemistry educators may invoke certain ‘scientific’ practices in conducting, reporting and teaching in our discipline yet those ‘scientific practices’ can be in conflict with material feminism practices – and vice versa. These different practices are grounded in different perceptions of knowledge, where ‘pure’ chemistry and traditional chemistry teaching has not embraced, or is even aware of, Barad’s agential realism. Thus, located in a chemistry department surrounded by chemists who are ignorant of material feminism causes tensions that put us in an unstable ‘condition’. And gender studies scholars often are uninformed about natural sciences practices and perceptions of knowledge. Regardless, when we are in an unstable transition state connected with unsettled feelings, forced by pressure from the surrounding or our own ‘inner’ experience of being uncomfortable, we may adjust back within the borders of the local setting/discourse. But transition states have the potential to generate opportunities for something new that would be impossible within a traditional discipline, and thus may constitute a mountain pass (see below) for feminist transdisciplinary change.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Genusstudier (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Gender Studies (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Annan naturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Other Natural Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

material feminist theory

chemistry education

cogens

snaplogs

shadowing

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)