Issues of equity, access, and justice have long been of paramount interest in education research, as a means of illuminating, challenging, and changing long-established relations of power. On the one hand, the field has utilised quantitative approaches to map inequalities in student distributions (related to e.g. gender and social class) across disciplines and institutions. On the other hand, there is also an abundance of small-scale qualitative studies, seeking to understand educational trajectories of individuals or groups of individuals and their positions of (dis)advantage in the generation of relationships with educational contexts. Typically, such studies utilise narrative, discursive and performative approaches to identity formation.

In contrast to the extensive research on discourse and identity, the role of materiality in processes of identity formation in scientific practices has received less attention (de Freitas & Curinga 2015). Theoretical stances that recognize the agentic force of materiality offer new avenues to investigate the students’ engagement with institutions and disciplines. The focus on materiality has been productive in exploring the significance of space in learning to be a scientist (Acton 2017); the gender performativity in science (e.g. Scantlebury et al. 2019); the ways in which diverse objects such as instruments (e.g. Milne 2019) are inscription devices in the scientific work in classrooms; and how space, bodies and objects interact in classrooms (Taylor 2013). In this symposium we are interested in exploring the entanglement of socio-material-discursive practices and subjectification processes, in the context of higher education. In particular, we focus on the methodological challenges of making appropriate empirical and analytical cuts in order to capture how subjectification processes are interlinked with both broader societal contexts, disciplinary cultures and concrete social-material practices, while allowing for both analytical clarity and contextual complexity.

The symposium brings together studies from different national contexts and of different educational contexts, in order to showcase a diversity of novel methodological approaches. 

The first presentation will engage with different creative data experimentations (collaging, painting with data, and string figuring), in which researchers collectively become entangled with the data. The second presentation explores slow education research in the context of chemistry education research, foregrounding matters of care. This will be followed by a presentation focused on relationality in the co-design of spaces that are socially and culturally relevant to youth, adding embodiment, affect and more-than-human characteristics to the conceptualisation of science identity. The final presentation will zoom in on higher education spaces of physics and mathematics, using walking ethnographies to explore how assemblages of practice connecting bodies, spaces and materials come to be produced. 

All presentations experiment with methodologies that seek to include the more-than-human in the research practices and avoid creating dichotomies between researchers and participants. But there are also multiple different ways in which the presentations link up, concepts that can be traced through two or more of the presentations include care, assemblage, multiplicities, apparatus, and knowledge/knowledge-ing. The discussant will highlight such entanglements between the presentations, but also challenge the presenters to explore how the theoretical richness in the symposium at large can provide new avenues for engaging with multifaceted qualitative data.

Acton, R. (2017). Place-people-practice-process: Using sociomateriality in university physical spaces research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(14), 1441-1451. De Freitas, E., & Curinga, M. X. (2015). New materialist approaches to the study of language and identity: Assembling the posthuman subject. Curriculum Inquiry, 45(3), 249-265. Milne, C. (2019). The Materiality of Scientific Instruments and Why It Might Matter to Science Education. In Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education (pp. 9-23). Springer International Publishing. Scantlebury, K., Danielsson, A. T., Hussénius, A., Gullberg, A., & Andersson, K. (2019). Using Spacetimemattering to Engage Science Education with Matter and Material Feminism. In Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education (pp. 39-50). Springer International Publishing. Taylor, C. A. (2013). Objects, bodies and space: gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom. Gender and Education, 25(6), 688-703.