This presentation explores the production of affective spaces for science identity work among girls in an afterschool program called the Convoclub. Drawing on conversations we had with the program coordinator of the club, and artifact and interview data from a digital storytelling exercise we conducted with the girls in Convoclub (Author et al., 2013; Author and Author, 2023), we describe stories of assemblages—affectively charged associations of people, places and things (Ehret and Leander, 2019). In doing so, we propose a broadened vision of the construct of “science identity” to centre relationships, and a necessary focus on the embodied, affective and more-than-human characteristics of identity. We will share a series of vignettes that highlight considerations for the co-design of spaces that are socially and culturally relevant, and meaningful to youth in ways that contribute to their ‘becoming’ in science education. Our analysis of the vignettes is guided by Ehret and Leander’s (2019) discussion of assemblages which they describe as producing “affective affinities” that are not just experienced by one individual in ways that we can describe (e.g., happiness, sadness, anger). Rather Ehret and Leander suggest affective affinities are “experienced as the warp and woof of movements involving multiple actors—the everyday movements of people and things approaching and pushing against one another coming alongside, making a dance-like turn, pulling apart” (p. 6). The three vignettes we present will address concerns that arose in the design of the Convoclub, and our hope that the research itself would “become a transformative act” (Steinberg, 2014, p. xiii), implying “a methodological symbiosis of praxis and care” (Ali & McCarthy, 2020, p. 5). We will describe our dialogues with the program coordinator that led to the co-design of a learning space that centred critical reflexivity and affect; how the digital storytelling activity created an open door into which the girls were invited to engage with us, and through which we have considered the many ways that the girls moved through that door (e.g., Smith et al., 2022); and we will finally describe how these actions enabled a kind of deep relationality in the group supportive of “becomings”—the empowerment of identities in the making that brought to life a new way of being and moving with science. These vignettes challenge static views of science identities and highlight the entanglements and dynamic processes of becoming alongside science across space and time.

Ali, A. I., & McCarty, T. L. (2020). Centering critical youth research methodologies of praxis and care. In A. I. Alis & T. L. McCarty (Eds.), Critical youth research in education (pp. 3-20). Routledge. Ehret, C., and Leander, K. (2019) Introduction. In: Leander K and Ehret C (eds) Affect in Literacy Learning and Teaching: Pedagogies, Politics and Coming to Know. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Author and Author. (2023). Author et al., (2013). Smith, T., Avraamidou, L., López López, M., and Adams, J. (2022). Exploring the Space: Border Crossing in a Community-based Science Engagement Programme. Science Educators for Equity, Diversity and Social Justice (SEEDS), Virtual Conference, January 29, 2022. Steinberg, S. R. (2014). Foreword. Criticalizing youth, youth criticalizing. In A. Ibrahim, & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Critical youth studies reader (pp. xiii-xiv). Peter Lang.