Towards an Understanding of Diffractive Readings of Narratives in the Field of Science Education

Abstract

In this chapter we seek to challenge positivist and traditional ways of conducting research in the field of science education by turning to post-human approaches in order to analyse the data. Feeling trapped when completing research where objects are regarded as having inherent boundaries and fixed properties, we have read data with and through a feminist materialist lens. We are curious to understand how post-human approaches can be mobilised using Karen Barad’s and Donna Haraway’s theories of diffractive reading. Our aim has been to open up the data to diffract for new images and thereby to trouble the human-centred and objective perspectives of carrying out research. Instead of taking a distance from our objects of research, this diffractive reading approach has meant that we have infiltrated the data, a student text and an excerpt from a classroom observation. We have allowed the data to influence us as well as the other way around and thus regarded the research objects as equivalent to ourselves in terms of agency. What resulted from this way of working with the research material is partly a different view of ourselves as scientists and the realisation that research objects can have agency, as well as a more intrinsic, emotionally influenced, ethical and embodied view. The research process in this chapter troubles the human-centred perspective, as well as the view of research process as something objective, logical and rational. A perspective that is based on binary thinking and a dichotomous framework.