Aesthetics, string figures, and the politics of the visible in science and education

Abstract

This paper positions Aesthetics, specifically the politics of Aesthetics, as a frame for approaching traditionally conservative subfields of education, such as science education. Drawing primarily from Jacques Rancière’s work on Aesthetics and Politics, and Donna Haraway’s work with String Figures (SF), we outline the political stakes of engaging, transforming, and ‘playing-with’ the aesthetic dimensions of what science education (and education more broadly) might look like. In the first part of the article, we highlight the political potentiality of a turn toward aesthetics in (science) education, which includes a discussion of theory that supports this shift. We aim to, in part, disrupt the current distribution of the sensible to more deeply, and visibly, entangle science education with multi-species justice and a politics of equality writ large. In the second part of this article, we present our own string figure, an example of what we mean by a radical aesthetic shift in terms of what it allows students to see as visible, possible, and sensible in the world through science and education. We weave a string figure/SF story about our bee companions, who are/have been deeply affected by the Anthropocene, while simultaneously world-making in the Chthulucene. In concluding, we revisit our primary goal which is to open up new forms of political engagement in science education toward the goal of multi-species justice.

Keywords:

• Aesthetics
• string figures
• science education
• dissensus
• politics
• transdisciplinary education
• bees

Contributors

Sara Tolbert is Associate professor of Science and Environmental Education at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/The University of Canterbury in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work focuses on re-imagining science and environmental education as/for a more just, caring, and sustainable world.

Jesse Bazzul is Associate Professor of Science and Environmental Education at the University of Regina. He believes imaginative work in education is needed more than ever to find new collective ways of living together.

Notes

Notes

1 While the word politics is an open signifier, we think of politics here in Rancière’s terms: Disrupting the domain of the sensible in order to include those who have been excluded (that part of no part) in the name of radical equality.

2 The Science Wars of the 1990’s can be thought of as a debate over the aesthetics/politics of knowledge, rather than epistemology: the stakes for scientific realists being a loss of a hierarchal and representational regime of thought that kept things (and certain people) in a specific place.