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e-mail: skayumova@umassd.edu ... e-mail: cmcguire@umassd.edu .... home? Assuming that many of the socio-spatial and environmental issues stem from the ...... education is addressing the need for science-in-the-making and beginning to.
This is a preprint version of the article. The final version of record (published version) is available at the following link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11422-018-9861-5 From empowerment to response-ability: rethinking socio-spatial, environmental justice, and nature-culture binaries in the context of STEM education Shakhnoza Kayumova Chad J. McGuire Suzanne Cardello Keywords science education · feminist new materialisms · environmental justice · socio-spatial justice · material-discursive practices Abstract In this conceptual paper, we draw upon the insights of Feminist Science Studies, in particular Karen Barad's concept of agential realism, as a critical analytical tool to re-think nature and culture binaries in dominant science knowledge making practices and explanatory accounts, and their possible implications for science education in the context of socio-spatial and environmental injustices. Barad’s framework proposes a relational and more expansive approach to justice, which takes into account consequential effects of nature-culture practices on humans, non-humans, and more than human vitalities. In efforts to understand potentialities of Barad’s theory of agential realism, we situate our argument in the “story” of local children who encounter a bottle of cyanide in a former manufacturing building. The story takes place in a post-industrial urban city located in the U.S., caught up in an inverse relationship between the technological and scientific advances observed “globally” and the deteriorating environmental and living conditions experienced “locally” as the result of erstwhile industrial activity. Based on agential realist readings of the story and taking into consideration children’s developing subjectivities, we argue that equity-oriented scholarship in science education might not be able to achieve justice devoid of understanding of the relatedness to plurality of life forms. We invite our readers to consider (re)configuring socio-spatial and environmental issues as an ethical response-ability that is constituted through relationships of care, recognition, openness, and responsiveness to vitalities of humans and nonhumans equally, one which cannot be conceptualized from a priori and distant calculations, but rather continuous entangled relations. S. Kayumova STEM Education & Teacher Development, College of Arts & Sciences of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, 285 Old Westport Road, Dartmouth, MA 02747, USA e-mail: [email protected] C.J. McGuire Public Policy, College of Arts & Sciences of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, 285 Old Westport Road, Dartmouth, MA 02747, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Cardello STEM Education & Teacher Development, College of Arts & Sciences of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, 285 Old Westport Road, Dartmouth, MA 02747, USA e-mail: [email protected]

Vignette: the story of cyanide Two children ride their bicycles to a favorite playground: an old, abandoned factory building in their neighborhood. They navigate over the dilapidated fences to enter a large dark brown brick structure with broken vertical windows and large open doors. Once the building bustled with manufacturing activity; it was a source of economic pride for the local community. Now, the deserted factory hosts only the imaginations of local children. It is the castle ruined by a devastating dragon attack. It is the disposed haunted mansion. But in a very real moment not made by their imagination, one of the children finds a bottle filled with a liquid. She remembers her science teacher mentioning the old factory being a place where dangerous things lurked. The children take the bottle to their teacher who decides to use it as a learning opportunity for the students. During the class, the science teacher does an elemental chemical analysis of the contents of the bottle. To the teacher's surprise, they find that the bottle contains cyanide. Now the place for imagination and play becomes dangerous. Grownups are contacted. Strangers known as “experts” come in and say the factory and land around it are dangerous. No one can come near the building anymore. The fence is rebuilt. “No Trespassing” signs are erected. The building is torn down. The children wonder: is life better now that their playground is gone? No one has an answer. Over the past several decades, rapid and significant developments in modern science, engineering, and technology have transformed the spatial, temporal, and cultural orderings of social life. Advancements in the production and proliferation of mobile devices, computerintegrated manufacturing, and digital communication – to name a few – have rendered an instant flow of information and resources of symbolic and economic value. However, despite the many positive affordances of scientific and technological innovation, the resulting benefits to wealth and human advancement have had little bearing on existing social (e.g. poverty, homelessness, racisms, displacements and etc.) and environmental degradations (e.g. climate change, air pollutions, land and water contaminations, loss of biodiversity, and etc.) (Benson 2015). In many cases, the impacted populations and environments, both humans and non-humans, are left with a limited recourse for either challenging or responding to dominant technoscientific views, practices, and decisions being deployed on their behalf (Tzou, Scalone, and Bell 2010). This is cause for concern as research shows that socio-cultural biases embedded in the vast majority of algorithms and knowledge-practices of technoscience might potentially (re)inscribe racial, gender, and class, discriminations and geographical hierarchies into the current “smart” systems, and perhaps, further spatial and social hegemonies present at the global and local scales (O’Neil 2016). In examining the impacts of modern technoscientific projects on nature-culture relations and discussing ways of co-evolving future sustainability, Richard Norgaard (2006) argues the conceptions of progress reduced to material development might have latent qualities that not only “betray” and “deceive” us, but also perhaps (re)create a dialectic of socio-economic inequalities and environmental disparities: what Edward Soja (2009) called socio-spatial injustices. In the context of the U.S., most of the “spatial patterns in environmental injustice and inequality” are disproportionately concentrated in the urban areas where low-income and nonwhite children live, play, and go to school (Clark, Millet, and Marshall 2014, p. 201). Due to unprecedented socioeconomic, scientific and environmental challenges, along with ethical

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questions introduced by science and technology (Bazzul and Kayumova 2016), STEM education is being emphasized as “a panacea to prepare the next generation of an informed citizenry” (Zeidler 2016, p. 11). Despite the plethora of divergent views and related meanings of STEM discourse prevalent in current education debates, the consensus seems to be that broadening participation, access, and critical engagement with knowledge-practices of sciences and technologies is important for all, and particularly for communities and youth who have been traditionally underrepresented in STEM disciplines and whose lives are directly implicated in socio-spatial injustices (Calabrese-Barton and Upadhyay 2010). As educators committed to science education as well as socio-spatial and environmental justice, we acknowledge and emphasize the importance of robust science education initiatives; but nonetheless, we also note that mere access to technoscientific knowledge and skills might be inadequate to redress the pernicious sociopolitical and environmental problems humans and nonhumans currently face. We argue that ascribing agency to “solve” socio-spatial and environmental issues to those who possess dominant epistemologies of technoscience prioritizes a top-down, hierarchical approach to knowing and knowledge-production. Furthermore, it risks normalizing prevalent deficit discourses about urban communities’ ways of knowing and being and perpetuates “othering” discourses that increasingly represent, position, and essentialize individual and collective identities of people and children who are living in these communities as culturally distinct, arguably “less,” than the mainstream (Tzou, Scalone and Bell 2010). In the context of science education, when STEM knowledge-practices are contextualized as the hallowed episteme of more knowing “others,” the science classroom risks becoming a place that distances “students from the lived socio-scientific challenges their communities face and often fail to position youth as contributors and participants in the pursuit of possible and desperately needed solutions” (Bang and Marin 2015, p. 302). The socio-spatial and environmental challenges are constantly co-evolving, scientifically socio-economically complex and deeply political and ethical problems, for which conventionally straight-forward explanations and technically responses are no longer adequate, requiring heterogeneous, multidimensional, and systematic approaches located in bottom-up and context-oriented solutions (Cole 2007). Thus, we posit that equity and justice efforts limited to notions of broadening participation, achievement, and access, might be insufficient to transform systems of domination and to understand complexities inherent in socio-spatial and environmental issues. We underline the importance of expanding the notions of justice by examining the dominant epistemological and ontological assumptions in the cultural and curricular organization of science education (e.g., how the notion of environment is taken up in the current science standards), which if left unexamined risks perpetuating the very inequities that equity-oriented scholarship seeks to transform. To this end, the conceptual question that we explore in this study derives from the vignette presented in the opening of the paper. In the context of this vignette, we set ourselves the task of analyzing questions concerning positioning of environment in contemporary science education (Hufnagel, Kelly and Henderson 2017), and how they bring conventional nature-culture binary perspectives and explanations to bear on the issues of socio-spatial and environmental degradations in ways that might organize, and/or perhaps disorganize, children’s and communities’ subjectivities and experiences with respect to local specificities and dominant technoscientific practices. For instance, how science and environment are conceptualized and understood in learning settings might be consequential for children’s growing relationship and subjectivities with science, and including the questions of: what is science, what it means to do

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science, what is nature, what is the relationship of science to nature, etc. Instead of asking what happens when top-down solutions are sought to “fix” environmental and socio-spatial issues in local spaces, or how do we empower students and local communities, we ask, who gets to decide for and on behalf of local specificities and on what grounds? As a result, what kinds of social, political, and environmental commons are stabilized and/or destabilized, alignments enabled and/or disabled for these localities and specificities? What possibilities for action and/or inaction is being opened up and/or closed off as a result of these decisions? What kinds of subjectivities are made possible/impossible for local children and communities about the places they call home? Assuming that many of the socio-spatial and environmental issues stem from the very structure of socio-economic hegemonies, and often taken-for-granted technoscientific and developmental assumptions (Bencze and Carter 2011), we ask, how can we re-imagine the role of science education and science curriculum in light of the above questions, and prepare children to respond to injustices and contribute for justice in this constantly changing and evolving naturalcultural world. To think through these questions in the larger context of science, technology, and environmental studies, we begin our paper by juxtaposing the debates about progressivist and instrumentalist ideologies that invoke technoscientific innovations as an ultimate “solution” to current socio-spatial and environmental challenges, with ones that caution us of the Western materialistic and humanistic tendencies driving technoscience, which might be perhaps, at the heart of the problems that many marginalized communities, including humans and non-humans, and more than human environments have been left to endure today. To do this, we draw upon the insights of scholars of Feminist Science Studies, specifically Karen Barad's concept of agential realism, as a critical analytical tool which allows us to re-think nature and culture binaries in dominant science practices, and propose for a relational approach of justice in science education which takes into consideration humans, non-humans, and more than human vitalities for understanding socio-spatial and environmental issues. We situate our argument in the story of local children who encounter a bottle of cyanide in a former manufacturing building. The story is situated in one of the post-industrial urban cities located in the U.S., caught up in an inverse relationship between the technological and scientific advances observed “globally” and the deteriorating environmental and living conditions “locally” as the result of erstwhile industrial activity. Based on agential realist readings of the story presented in the vignette, and taking into consideration children’s developing subjectivities, we argue that equity-oriented scholarship in science education might not be able to achieve justice devoid of our understanding of relatedness to plurality of life forms. We invite our readers to consider the role of science education in (re)configuring socio-spatial and environmental issues as an ethical response-ability that is constituted through relationships of care, recognition, openness, and responsiveness to vitalities of humans and nonhumans equally, one which cannot be conceptualized from a priori and distant calculations, but rather continuous entangled relations. Environmental issues, science education and feminist critique Issues of socio-spatial and environmental justice

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Where did we ever get the strange idea that nature—as opposed to culture—is ahistorical and timeless? We are far too impressed by our own cleverness and self-consciousness. . . . We need to stop telling ourselves the same old anthropocentric bedtime stories. — Steve Shaviro 1997 (as cited in Barad 2003, p. 801) The concept of justice in education draws on multiple understandings of equity and equality; it is one of the most ubiquitous and undertheorized concepts in science education (Dimick 2012). Most often, the notions of justice in science education are conceived around questions of distribution, access, opportunity, empowerment, and broadening participation in the disciplinary fields (Calabrese-Barton and Upadhyay 2010). The vast majority of these studies emphasize the importance of inspiring children from traditionally nondominant communities to do science, providing them with opportunities to be a scientist, encouraging them to realize the relationship between science and wider world, and showing them the transformative potentials of science knowledge-practices to fight the socio-spatial and environmental challenges (Basil & Lopez 2015). For instance, it is widely documented that “environmental degradation is not experienced by all populations equally; hazardous and toxic waste sites, resource contamination (e.g., exposure to pesticides), air pollution, and numerous other forms of environmental degradation disproportionately affect low income and minority communities” in urban areas (Teixeira and Krings 2015, p. 513). In the recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan, a cost-saving measure by the city caused over a hundred thousand people, many of them children, to be imperiled by drinking water containing high levels of lead. The majority of those impacted by this preventable occurrence were communities of color who reside in socioeconomically and environmentally struggling urban areas (Butler, Scammell and Benson 2016). The events in Flint invoked renewed interest in place-based science education and the need to “empower” citizen scientists who can observe, identify, mobilize to act, and combat local socio-spatial and environmental issues. Thus, environmental justice efforts are also consistent with goals of social justice-oriented research in science and mathematics education to empower children/youth with disciplinary knowledge and tools with which they can perform a critical reading and writing of the world (Gutstein 2006). Gutiérrez (2009), takes up the notion of equity and justice along four interrelated dimensions of the concept: access, achievement, identity, and power; arguing that issues of access and opportunity might not be merely enough to support children’s unfolding identities. This research underlines the importance of examining issues of power in the structural, cultural, and curricular organizations of learning, which might be consequential, if not complicit, in maintaining inequities at the societal and individual levels. Thus, Gutiérrez (2017) argues that the view of equity and justice, limited to notions of access and opportunity, fails to recognize the ways in which the dominant STEM tools and epistemologies are entangled with colonizing and marginalizing traditions, and therefore cannot be sufficient to redress the existing systems of domination. Instead, Gutiérrez maintains that to achieve an envisioned positive change, there needs to be a radical re-thinking of dominant assumptions and tools, not merely the reusing and/or repurposing of them. Gutiérrez’s perspectives are similar to and align with increasing calls among feminist and anticolonialist scholars which we attempt to take up and outline in the next sections. Feminist science studies and critiques in the contexts of socio-spatial and environmental degradations

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Questions of epistemology, ontology, power, justice, and ethics have always been at the forefront of feminist science scholars’ critiques (e.g., Haraway 1988). Although there is no one feminism with a capital F, feminist science studies and feminist epistemologies provide a lens through which one can examine dominant and normative notions of science, technology, knowledge, and human development, their modern conceptualization and genealogy, and applications toward certain societal ends (Nystrom 2007). In general, feminist scholarship is grounded in the commitment to make visible the political nature of knowledge, knowledge-making tools/practices, and knowledge production (Harding 1994). According to feminist science studies, knowledge making and production of knowledge are inherently value-laden practices, they are not “views from nowhere,” but rather are situated in the knowledge makers assumptions, views, vision, sociocultural location and context, and are always consequential (Haraway 1994). To this end, feminist research engages itself with asking “power-sensitive” questions (Haraway 1988) such as whose knowledge, perspective, and tools are we using, and what purposes do the knowledge and tools serve? What modes and modalities of knowing/being/becoming do we use? Who/what is included and excluded in the knowledge production and claims? What is enabled and obstructed as a result? Asking power sensitive questions can be considered to be a political endeavor, one which emphasizes the need to examine the dominant tools/conceptions through which we re-think who is reading, writing the world, on which grounds and benefiting who, for what purposes and deployment. Likewise, when it comes to environmental and socio-spatial issues, feminist science scholars have long argued that Western humanism, anthropocentric views, and binary thinking have been consequential in the historical domination over and dehumanization of women, children, people of color, and nature; and that the failure to recognize these mimetic isomorphisms results in “inadequate feminisms, environmentalism, and environmental philosophy” (Warren 1996). Western humanist assumptions and binary thinking Although the notions of human and humanism seem to be familiar ones, they are highly elusive, slippery, and historically contested terms, “constructed differently at different historical moments, by biology, philosophy, political theory, and educational institutions” (Snaza et al 2014, p. 42). Perhaps the version of liberal humanism, and image of human, invoked in the contemporary Western thought and ideals has its genealogical roots in the 18th century Enlightenment Era. Also known as Age of Reason, in this tradition, we see the emergence of the idea of the rational “man” who pulls himself up by his bootstraps and uses his reason to author his destiny. In Kantian terms, the Enlightenment was “man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage.” In this image, an ideal humankind was defined in terms of the Cartesian rational subject (I think, therefore I am); a sovereign thinking individual whose reason and agency are sufficient to seek and achieve truth and progress. Essentially, the privilege and virtue can only be attributed to agentic, rational, and knowledge-seeking “mankind,” who occupies the superior position among all other beings, and represents what it means to be human. While Enlightenment ideas were important for scientific, technological, and economic advancements, these views were not immune from exclusionary and hierarchical tendencies. In the name of humanism, colonial, racialized, and hegemonic thinking and practices were rendered possible resulting in the “dehumanization” and objectification of anyone and anything deemed “less-than human” often in the name of knowledge production, science, and progress (e.g.

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constitution of the human zoos at fairs in mock villages) (Arnaut, 2011). Snaza et al (2014), effectively describes this process in the following manner: For if one had rights simply by virtue of being human, then not being recognized as human—something that women, black slaves, and colonized natives faced with horrifying regularity—was enough to relegate these in humans to the status of things, objects to be used by humans. Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Kant returned to Plato to insist that the human is not simply a being that is, but something that some beings can become through education. (p. 42) Likewise, this hegemonic thinking is also reflected in nature-culture binaries that permeate our current conceptualization of environmental issues, where culture and society belongs to people, while “nature” is understood as external to human society, the “other.” Feminist science scholars would locate approaches of this ilk as rooted in the inextricable junction of Western humanism and anthropocentric views that “regards humans as separate from and superior to nature and holds that human life has intrinsic value while other entities (including animals, machines, plants, mineral resources, and so on) are resources that may be justifiably exploited for the benefit of humankind” (Boslaugh 2013, p. 2). This duality between “humankind” and “less-than-humans” further reflects itself in the construction of “nature” as an object of scientific inquiry (Haraway 1998), a resource (e.g. water), or a form of capital (e.g. land). According to feminist scientist scholars, this hegemonic positioning of humans, or more precisely certain kinds of humans, in the hierarchical network of other beings became implicated in the domination and control of nature, animals, women, Blacks, and other minorities. These human-centered assumptions manifested themselves in sciences’ ability to control nature and devaluation of women scientists as legitimate knowledge producers, which implied men’s dominance over other beings (Warren 1996). It is often against these sociocultural, historically and politically situated assumptions and backdrops that contemporary scientific and technological research practices take place (Jeong, Tippins and Kayumova 2017). Accordingly, when dominant human groups are unfettered by concerns for the plurality of life forms, all means are justifiable if the ends serve “human” needs and the social, political, and environmental consequences of this rationality can be observed throughout history in the form of colonization, human exploitations and incarcerations, industrialization projects; permeating society in different forms of dominations such as racisms, ableism, classism, sexism, and etc. (Warren 1996). Bronwyn Davies (1990) explains this as “the goals-means-ends model of human action” where agency is assumed to be given to an individual, who “conceives of a line of action, knows how to achieve it and has the power and authority and right to execute it” (p. 343). In a similar vein, Donna Haraway (1988) argues that most of the unjust and hierarchical constitutions of modernity are associated with dominant forms of knowledge conception and production situated in the Eurocentric dualisms that reduce “the bodies” and experiences of people to passive rationalities. Science education and need for alternative frameworks As educators committed to science education, socio-spatial and environmental justice, these concerns raised by feminist science scholars, including women of color and anticolonial scholars, prompt us to rethink how we understand and engage with nature-culture relations, recasting science education in a new role focused on providing attuned accounts of the world as entangled

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in human-nonhuman vitalities. We would argue, given the increasing prominence and intimacy of technologies and science in our lives, along with mounting complexities of socio-spatial and environmental challenges, that there is much more at stake for the science education community in refusing to engage with posthumanist epistemologies and ontologies and in not recognizing humans’ entangled relations with non-humans, and more-than humans (Bazzul and Kayumova 2018). This is not to say that we need to invent something new. Rather, we might need to have a willingness to look beyond our traditional and common-sense knowledge-practices, and to recognize that “things have relations to one another independent of human thought and perception” (Snaza et al 2014, p. 47). For example, the studies of phenomena at the quantum scale are fundamentally changing classical science’s traditional understanding and conceptualization of time, space, and matter, including dominant perspectives about what we term “reality.” Quantum mechanics has made tremendous headway in micro-scale understanding of the world and matter, and nanoscale science and technologies are changing the world as we know it. What appears to be a “reality” at the macro-scales – scientific explanations about the nature of the phenomena in classical physics – are shown to be obsolete at the micro levels (Feynman 1995). Therefore, quantum understanding of matter is challenging the nature of knowing in traditional science; how we know what we know, the process of creating that knowledge, and pointing to the “subtle and nonintuitive” aspects of matter (Susskind and Friedman 2014, p. 3). It seems timely and important, then, to fundamentally re-think science education’s taken-forgranted assumptions in understanding and explaining humans, non-humans, more-than-humans and their entangled vitalities. There is no shortage of epistemologies and ontologies (e.g., feminist, indigenous, African, anticolonial, etc.) which have called attention to and critiqued Western humanism and nature-culture binary thinking; nonetheless, there is a shortage of collective organizing, reconfiguring, and reimagining of science curriculum in light of these calls. To make science education more relevant, response-able, and reflexive in its efforts to be equitable, inclusive, and robust requires an integration of “new” and alternative frameworks, or, in Snaza’s words, we need a science education that is open and: that is not afraid of remembering the cultural-political-historical construction of science within humanist networks, a science that will go beyond science as we know it toward helping us think the meaning of the disavowed relations in which we are always already entangled. These relations involve humans, animals, machines, and things (p.52). In the next section, feminist science studies, posthumanistic inquiry, new materialisms, and particularly the work of Karen Barad helps us to sustain our critical engagement with these entanglements. Drawing on the insights of Barad’s agential realism we consider the affordances of new ways of (re)configuring socio-spatial and environmental issues, and alternative responses that science education might provide to local children and communities whose lives and subjectivities are caught up in these macro and micro relations. Barad’s work allows us to connect macro-level issues, nature of knowing and knowledge making technoscience, to microlevel examples of the story of cyanide presented in the opening vignette. Potentialities and provocations of feminist science studies and new (neo) materialisms for science education

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The ontological vision of the material turn is the picture of a world of inter-connected dynamics. It is a real—concrete, material—posthumanist picture, in which different forms and sources of agency feed each other, resulting in constellations of things, lives, events, and concepts. From this picture, a different image of the human emerges, more similar to a process than to an accomplished reality. — Serenella Iovino, 2012, p. 65 What is new about feminist new (neo) materialisms Feminist new materialisms is aligned with the posthumanist movement in allowing for the possibility of thinking and re-thinking of natureculture relations as historically, geographically, and socio-politically specific practices without fetishizing the Western Enlightenment image of human, most likely a “rational man,” as the summum bonum. Framed as an ontological turn in social and feminist sciences, new or neo-materialism is described by Rosi Braidotti (2012) as “a conceptual frame, and a political stand, which refuses the linguistic paradigm, stressing instead the concrete yet complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power” (p. 21). Accounts of the relationship between materiality, power, and politics, as they appear in the history, are not new and were already articulated by Marx and his theory of capital. The question is how new materialisms is new or different from the Marxist thought. Barad’s views on matter and agency can be seen as the concrescence of the influences and ideas of Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler. Barad builds on Foucault’s notions that discourse and knowledge practices have material consequences, but for her, “the point is not merely that knowledge practices have material consequences, but that practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world,” (Barad 2007, p. 91). That which is neglected in knowledge-discourse-power practices is as much a constitutive element as that which is acknowledged, "exclusion matter both to bodies that come to matter and those excluded from mattering," (Barad 2007, p.53). Foucault reacted to what he saw as the insufficiency of Marxist conceptions of materialism, still based on traditional Western humanism, failed to recognize the complexity of ontological, epistemological, and ethics involved as it conceptualized matter as an end product of an economic activity along which a myriad of social and material stratifications are formed. Foucault was not alone in his criticism and counter-arguments to structuralist Marxist thought. Historically, the confluence of more egalitarian and revolutionary forces came to a head in May of 1968 resulting in an ethos filled with movements championing equal rights for women, gays, and people of all colors, along with strong anti-nuclear and pro-ecological sentiments represents one such counter-argument, making it evident that Marxist materialism and its reduction of these complexities to class struggles was no longer sufficient to understand myriad issues of environmental, gender, and race based oppressions (Rodrigues, Camillo and Mattos 2014). Manuel Delanda (2012) argues “Marx’s theory of value was indeed anthropocentric: only human labor was a source of value, not steam engines, coal, industrial organization, et cetera” (p.41). Barad (2003) considers this conception of materiality as a part of “thingification—the turning of relations into ‘things,’” similar to nature-culture binary thinking which “infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it” (p. 812, italics in original). Agential realism and material-discursive practices

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Feminist scientist Karen Barad (2007) argues that contemporary examinations of power and domination have been overly reliant upon linguistic and cultural mediums and as such, have not adequately accounted for the vitalities of matter and materiality: “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter,” (Barad 2007, p. 132). Barad’s agential realism “advances a new materialist understanding of naturalcultural practices that cuts across these well-worn divide,” (Barad 2007, p. 226) between traditional and post-Marxist conceptions of matter and materiality. As a counter to the notions of human agency in Western humanisms, and subject-object binaries, Barad (2007) works with Neil Bohr’s readings of quantum epistemology and develops the perspective of agential realism. Barad’s notion of “agential realism rests on the perspective that “natural” and “social” and “cultural” are inseparable, mutually, and dynamically co-constitutive of each other. According to agential realism, phenomena intra-actively emerge from material and discursive practices and as such, no entity can have a precedence on “agency” as no entity exists independently of other entities. Barad argues “agency cannot be designated as an attribute of ‘subjects’ or ‘objects’” (as they do not preexist as such). An agency is not a characteristic that someone possesses; it is rather “a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment,” and therefore cannot be conceived as an intentionality to act (p. 826). However, configurations of “new” or “yet-tobe-known” phenomena are filtered through our pre-existing discursive, hence epistemic understandings. Many of the dominant conceptions of modern science are predicated on Newtonian physics, an assumption that everything is governed and predetermined by the set laws, which also makes predictability possible (Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983). In this model of science, the phenomenon unfolds itself in relation to pre-determined laws and cause-effect relations. In principle, the role and goal of scientists and science are to be able to precisely define the characteristics of the phenomenon and to determine correct measurements (e.g. epistemological in/certainty). Quantum mechanics rests on assumption that accepts ontological indeterminacy as a given and figures events in their probabilistic potential. Barad relies on quantum understanding of phenomenon and posits that the over-reliance on reason and epistemology precludes the fact that our measurements (e.g., tools and technologies) are relational to our understandings. Ultimately, the ability to perceive the physical world is bounded by the affordances of the body, human and non-human, or other tools and technologies. Thus, knowledge production is not about putting together facts, but rather producing “specific world configurations” as we materially engage with the world, which give meaning to specific material formations (Barad 2007). Observations and measurements are an integral part of the material and discursive practices that constitute how we assign meaning to “matter” and yet they operate through a self-reinforcing loop dictated by the structures, cultures, and tools of our particular place (both literally and figuratively) in space and time. How we identify “things,” measure, and/or differentiate them is interwoven and entangled with their being/becoming–hence “(re)configuring ...of what was/ is/ to-come” (Barad 2010, p. 264). This radical thought challenges the heavily anthropocentric tendencies of social and scientific research and provides affordances for viewing and interpreting/measuring the world and phenomenon as a part of ethics of response-ability, rather than as a part of human-centered agency, values, perspectives, and experiences. Agential realism moves us away from deterministic and universalistic notions of entities, and instead, matter is theorized as active, complex, and emerging. It embraces a presumption that the scientific, social, cultural, economic, and intellectual are constituted in local and entangled relations and material-discursive intra-

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actions with one another (Barad 2003). Moreover, agential realism brings to the fore an ethical question that our material and discursive intra-actions simultaneously impact what “matters” and possible and also what is beyond the bounds of possibility, “as some things come to matter and others are excluded, as possibilities are opened up and others are foreclosed” (Barad, 2007, p. 200). The ontological shift and emphasis on material-discursive production of power make it possible to re-conceptualize socio-spatial materializations and agency as relational and entangled rather than individual. It is a “robust account of the materialization of all bodies – ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’- and the material-discursive practices by which their differential constitutions are marked” (Barad 2007, p. 810). This perspective invokes ethics and responsibility for re-thinking notions of justice in the case of socio-spatial issues as “always already threaded through the very fabric of the world” (Barad 2012, p. 69). To concretize Barad’s notion of agentic realism, consider a “human” eye, one of the most complex systems in human anatomy. Typically, a human eye can only “see” the surface; we do not expect our eyes to act like an x-ray or an ultrasound. Moreover, “human” eyes operate along with the brain discriminating what is deemed important versus what is not. There are animals, chameleons are one example, who have an ability to see ultraviolet light and small insects at a distance. Some animals possess night vision. Goats can view a panorama between 320-340 degrees without moving their eyes. Hence, humans are by far not perfect beings in the nature. In fact, many of our “capabilities” are considered much more limited compared to others. Consider what happens if human vision changes, if we could penetrate through objects and observe their tiniest details? The anatomy of human eye might not be changing; however, by intra-acting with technological advances, humans can be afforded the ability to see and hear from thousands of miles away (e.g., intel-drone technologies). This is the kind of project that current technoscience, in the example of nanoscience and technology, is engaged with to understand the matter at the micro-scales so that they can manipulated in ways that can serve new advances and innovations in healthcare, textile, storage of data, computing, solar transportations, alternative energy sources and etc. Barad’s agential realism provokes us to reconsider the ways science is advancing the discourse of progress and how it accounts for ethical considerations for humans, non-humans, and more than humans. In the context of the environment, sustainability discourse and technoscientific can provide one example for such ethics. To give a “simple” example, new lightbulb technologies are showing promise in terms of sustainability and energy preservation. Nonetheless, the research shows that while new lighting technologies such as compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and light-emitting diode (LED) lightbulbs are lauded for their cost and energy savings, in comparison to predecessor incandescent bulbs, they contain higher amounts of potentially toxic materials viz. antimony, lead, mercury, copper, aluminum, copper and iron (Lim et al 2012). It seems like manufacturing businesses are quick to make profit of new technoscientific tools by putting them into the market, while communities and environments are left with the responsibility for sustaining the proper disposal of these items. Energy policies, such as those that encourage the use of CFLs and LEDs, without the infrastructure to properly dispose of these items, raise questions and concerns about the consequences of the ways complex environment issues are being tackled. Hence, technoscience is not a neutral –it is not simply intellectual and material domain –it is also a part of thick web of power relations with broad implications. Today more than ever, we are witnessing the “power” and “agencies” of technoscience. Examples might include: unprecedented growth in the use and influence of technological tools and software (e.g., Smart Boards, clickers, tablets, virtual labs, and software technologies and

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etc. used in teaching and learning of science); social networking through social-media (e.g. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter); more sophisticated versions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and humanoid robots (e.g. Sophia); increased ubiquity of automated processes of complex, constant, and immense data collection (e.g. through the World Wide Web and mobile devices); predictive analytics used in social, health, environmental, judicial decision making (e.g. Big Data). Despite these progressions, more than half of the world continues to experience hunger, genocide (e.g. recent humanitarian crises in Syria and Myanmar), environmental crises, and socio-spatial degradations. New advances of science and technology are not only employed towards helping people and environments, they are also produced and used to enable mass killings. We continue to operate from nature-culture binaries, and despite all the advances, in Bruno Latour’s (2012) terms, “we have never been modern.” Thus, material-discursive practices of “scientists” are not simply scientific endeavors, but inextricably connected and dynamic causal mechanisms with material and ethical consequences. Barad’s agential realism allows us to conceive these issues from a different kind of ethical perspective, one in which response-ability cannot be figured from a priori calculations, but rather as an on-going relation and responsiveness to humans and nonhumans. Agential realism and science education What is the role of science education in supporting students’ understanding of these complex sociopolitical, technoscientific, and ethical issues? Traditionally, science education has been aligned with, what we would call, a strand of science which attempts to explain the world and phenomenon by reducing complexity and taming the uncertainty, presenting consensus around the complex issues (e.g. uniform definition of sustainability) when there is, arguably, no consensus. The Baradian approach is one way to configure another aspect of science which embraces complexity and uncertainty as given, and challenges the classical understanding of nature of knowing indexing inherent limitations of its explanatory accounts. In agentic realism, agency is not an attribute of “subjects” or “objects” which do not pre-exist as such, but rather the interaction between “subjects” and “objects” is more like ‘intra-action’ in an assemblage, comprised of those emerging relational properties. The concept of intra-action is aimed at “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” among subjects and objects (p. 33). There is a shift in focus from choosing “either human or nonhuman” to a “whole association” of both. This ontological shift of the view makes it possible to re-conceptualize agency as relational, instead of “human” centered, in the sense “reality” is performative and natural-cultural, subject-object, material-ideational constituted in relation to one another (Barad, 2003). As Snaza et al (2014), explains: [t]his “new” way of thinking, which is only new in the sense that it puts humans back into the thick ontological and political relations in which they have always already been networked, is going to necessitate wide-ranging and radical changes in how we conceive of educational practices and institutions (e.g., focusing on how cybernetics, biotechnologies, prosthetics, and computerized communications devices are re-shaping human cognition, embodied experience, and relations with the wider world) (p.47). When applied to issues of justice in science education, this perspective allows us to move beyond notions of empowerment of the subject, socio-politically conscious and engaged citizens

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who can access and activate their knowledges/skills to tackle socio-spatial issues, including all the different ways by which we understand ourselves, the world, and our relations with and to others (Bazzul and Kayumova 2018). We would even go so far to say that the very de rigueur of empowerment, which despite “sounding” desirable can inevitably become intertwined with depoliticized conceptions of justice, is intrinsically opposed to changing and transforming systematic and structural conditions. Constantly saying that we need to empower traditionally minoritized students, such as ethno-linguistically diverse Black and Brown children, also means that these children need our empowerment. The perspective of “need” amplifies already prevalent deficit discourses. Moreover, “empowerment” perspectives are also reminiscent of colonizer discourses in that they assume a position of dominance where power is given or bestowed to those who they have subjugated in the first place. Communities caught up in sociospatial injustices should not then be considered as lacking in “agency” or “power;” rather, they are entangled in a self-recursive web, dealing with the effects of the systems and structures of domination which rip away their rights and agencies to speak and act on behalf of justice (Kayumova et al 2015). To understand and examine contemporary forms and manifestations of patriarchy, colonialism, racial and socio-spatial injustice, we need “other ways of knowing, other ontologies and epistemologies that enable the subject's relation to the world, to space and to time, to be conceptualized in different terms” (Grosz, 2002, p.173). In the following section, we utilize Feminist Science Studies, and Barad’s notion of agential realism and material-discursive framework in an attempt to (re)configure the socio-spatial narrative presented in our opening vignette and explicitly draw links between the macro issues we have discussed earlier and the micro points as exemplified in our vignette. The context of gateway cities and mattered story of the vignette People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does. — Michel Foucault Gateway cities are mid-sized post-industrial urban cities located in the Northeastern United States characterized by high poverty and crime, income inequality, and limited occupational opportunities. Despite persistent patterns of socio-spatial injustices in their demographic, environmental, and socio-economic makeup, these areas exhibit the natural beauty and charm of coastal settings framed by dark blue oceans, stone walls, and enjoying a moderate climate with cool summers and warm winters. Historically, Gateway cities were among the first and oldest European settlements, relics of a burgeoning economy before and during the Industrial Revolution. During the Industrial Revolution, Gateway cities housed and successfully operated over 70 mills and factories in the region (Harris 1952). However, a remnant of this former “prosperity” was the creation of “process waste,” the byproducts of manufacturing and industrial processes, in which wastes were either buried under land or disposed in local area waterways. Gateway cities contain disproportionate numbers of hazardous waste sites, often referred as a “Superfund” site or “Brownfields” depending on the potential for “human health” harm. Beginning in the 1960s, a national awareness of the human health and environmental consequences of these wastes emerged resulting in the major national reforms of the 1970s that led to a suite of federal environmental legislation including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). These laws were mainly aimed at

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developing standards to protect the environment in the future. Another federal law, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), passed in 1980 to be retrospective, responding to historical hazardous waste deposited through past activities. CERCLA has worked in concert with RCRA, to “ensure” current and future hazardous wastes are no longer discarded into the environment but rather accounted for and disposed of responsibly under a “cradle-to-grave” accounting system (Lazarus 2004). The story we presented in the opening vignette (certain details have been changed to protect the identities of people involved) is an example of how one of the Superfund sites (hereinafter “Superfund”) came into being as a result, and consequence, of technoscientific practices and understandings of the past. The Map Tack site (pseudonym), an actual Superfund site that inspired this story, sits along a bay of one of the Gateway cities. As told in the story, local children at play found a bottle with a liquid, took it to their science teacher, and the “discovery” of cyanide in the content of the bottle started the chain of events leading to formation of this particular Superfund. The factory had long been shuttered, but for decades it manufactured metal tacks. During the process, metal shavings were removed from the factory and placed into a nearby pit where acid was applied to break down the metal. Ultimately, the pit was covered, but over time the mix of acid and heavy metals leaked into groundwater and adjacent wetlands. This leak prompted federal action and the area was identified as a Superfund site in 1990, with cleanup occurring between 2005 and 2007 removing approximately 108,000 tons of contaminated soil and sediment. When local authorities contacted the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), they took charge of the site to “clean it up” and, in the process, placed restrictions on how the local community could interact with the area, both immediately and in the indefinite future. Under the current legal conditions, the area cannot be developed in any meaningful way. It remains fenced off from “human” interaction. This historical event is one example of how nature-culture binaries played themselves out in the context of Gateways Cities. Despite the recent efforts of questioning human superiority over the nature (Warren 2005), the representation of nature as “other” in relation to human culture and society prevails in the contemporary thought, including some prevailing environmental policies (Dobscha and Ozanne 2001), academic frameworks (Latour 2012), and science curriculum (Bang, Warren, Rosebery and Medin 2012). Similarly, in science education, environmental concerns are often contextualized as problems to be “solved” through technoscientific innovation, while neglecting the exigent need for a fundamental reconceptualization of the understanding of the world, environment, justice, and ethics. The context of Gateways cities presents an example of technoscientific development and socio-spatial and environmental degradations. It is an example, how the history of technoscientific practices and knowledge production are closely intertwined with the nature-culture relations and socio-political ideals of the time, and hence, science is not a neutral domain of research and practice. However, mainstream science education, even when it focuses on “science-in-the-making,” often neglects the social constructs (e.g., race, gender, class, sexuality, nature, and etc.) that are constitutive of dominant knowledge making practices – overlooking the questions of the nature-culture relations – and therefore failing to ask power-sensitive questions, such as: why it matters who is producing the knowledge and what kinds of knowledge making practices are used, whose and which epistemologies and ontologies are privileged, why these particular knowledge making practices dominate, and also how and for whom they matter (Barad 2007). These concerns are also reflective of the general position that emanates from the work of scholars of colors and indigenous and aboriginal women (Gutiérrez 2017), who are increasingly

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calling for more expansive and epistemologically pluralistic views of science and mathematics curriculum, teaching, and learning, ones that go beyond the settled expectations of Western and Eurocentric dichotomous/binary thinking of the nature-culture divide to a landscape that values equally human and nonhuman bodies right to exist and respond (e.g. see Bang and Marin 2015). We join these scholars, and argue that communities and children caught up in socio-spatial injustices are not without “knowledge” and “agency.” If anything, perhaps, it is science education that needs to embrace different frameworks to understand and explain the natureculture practices of science. After all, the reason these communities and environments find themselves in the midst of these challenges is not due to their lack of knowledge, but rather, that they are enduring the outcomes of the systems and structures of domination which ripped away their rights and agencies to act on behalf of their knowledge, land, and “nature.” In questioning tradition notions empowerment as having the potential to perpetuate deficitthinking, we frame the concept of response-ability as one in which communities and students what can be conceived of in a roadway metaphor as a “right of way.” They have the ability to respond instead of having to “yield” to “others” and are positioned as authorities on their own spaces and ways of being. Instead of science and technology related issues and knowledges being presented to students as abstract and ready-made “natural” facts (Kelly and Chen 1999), like in the story of Superfund, a response-ability framework frames the voices of local communities at the forefront and seeks to eliminate the false image of both “nature” and “science” as if they are separate and sterile entities independent of each other. This is the view which permeates the current science curriculum (Hufnagel, Kelly, and Henderson 2017), and becomes consequential in maintaining binary assumptions about nature-culture relations (Hodson 2003). In the following section, we draw on Barad’s notion of agential realism and material-discursive practices, to re-think the story of Superfund and to examine the affordances of this framework for science education. Mattered story of the vignette: youth, education, and ethics Knowledge, once it is defined, taught and used as a “thing made,” is dead. It has been forced to give up that which “really exists”: its nature when it is a thing in the making, continuously evolving through our understanding of the world and our own bodies’ experience of and participation in that world. — Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of Learning In her book, Places of Learning, Ellsworth (2005) argues that learning and knowledge construction about ourselves, others, and the world goes beyond limits of schooling. In fact, Ellsworth argues that when knowledge is presented as a “thing-made,” it “becomes nothing more than the decomposed by-product of something that has already happened to us” (p. 1). She instead calls to re-conceptualize knowledge and learning as evolving through ones’ understanding and bodily experiences of and participation in the world. Historical and policy documents contextualize the vignette by focusing on “experts” and their “knowledge” as intervening and managing a “legacy” environmental issue. However, configuring the story through this “linear,” “tidy,” “fact-oriented,” subject-object and nature-culture binaries belies the complex intra-activity of material and discursive practices of past, present, and future, that constitute dynamic and entangled relations between local community, children, and more-thanhuman world. What is not taken into consideration in this story are the material and physical

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affordances and agencies of these places, spaces, and the matter itself entangled with discursive construction on larger socio-spatial injustices: importantly their effects on children's subjectivities and growing sense-of-self and place. Serenella Iovino (2012) argues that “the dimension we materially (and semiotically) share with nonhuman beings, is a cohabitation of stories, and that an awareness of this shared dimension can be enhanced by way of conceiving nature, culture, social, and material entanglements” (p. 135). In the story of the Superfund, material entities include human and non-human bodies such as buildings, old factories, schools, the geographical and architectural organization of the city, children, teachers, adults, soil, chemicals, and more. Discursive practices constitute social, cultural, political, and "scientific" knowledge and epistemologies that "represent" these material entities and bodies, including the grounds on which they are understood/interpreted/measured. Similarly, the notions of “nature” and “environment” are also constructed through the kinds of definitions and qualities we attach and act on; in Baradian terms: the way we know nature and environment become entangled in our practices of making the phenomena, emergence of it in the physical and ideational levels, embedded within cultural, social, historical, and ontological understandings and relations. Similarly, socio-spatial environments are cultural, social, and political constructs, where the struggle for meaning and definitions of place and entities determine human interventions and ways of engaging with those places (McDowell 1999 cited in Cole 2007, p. 36). It is impossible to untangle or separate material from the discursive, the natural, the spatial, the social: “neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other" (Barad 2007, p. 153). Similarly, Ellsworth (2005) posits: Our experiences of a building arise not only out of our cognitive interpretations of the building’s allusions to historical or aesthetic meanings, but also out of the corporeality of the body’s time/ space as it exists in relation to the building. (p.3) Spaces, places, and the environment are intricately and mutually connected to one’s childhood memories and sense of self and belonging. Local people and children “trace narratives of matter not only as they are re-created by literature and other cultural forms, but also as they emerge in physical configurations: those “viscously porous” interlacements of flesh and symbolic imaginaries” (Iovino 2012, p. 136). However, decades-old research shows that in many urban spaces, “nature” and “environments” are constructed as “things,” “threatening places,” and/or “threatened commodities” impacting how local youth and adolescents come to perceive and experience the places they call their “homes” (e.g., for more see Wals 1994). Local buildings and materialities that children are intra-acting with are not just “a fixed substance…not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency” (Barad 2003, p.822). These material-discursive (re)configurations not only impact individual and group perceptions, but also might influence institutional definitions and responses that are deployed on their behalf. For instance, research on urbanism shows that contemporary meanings of urban schools and communities have come to mean something of “less than,” substituting notions of race (mainly Black and Brown), class (i.e., Poverty), high crime and environmental denigration (Dance 2002). Somewhere else, we have argued the ways in which diverse communities and children are socially positioned (e.g. in terms of race, language, gender, and etc.) and perceived (e.g. deficit perceptions and stereotypes) have impacts on the kinds of roles and educational opportunities they are afforded, hence yielding constitutive effects on their science learning, being, and becoming, and identity development (Kayumova et al 2015).

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The material-discursive narrative of Superfund containing a bottle with cyanide is a “storied matter.” Barad’s agential realism framework helps us analyze how nature and spaces – be they organic or inorganic compounds, buildings, cities, playgrounds, and schools – are also a part of the material and discursive intra-actions; where one's experience and relations to self, other, and the world are configured and constituted. As exemplified in the vignette, the environment, places, and spaces are not merely externalities, passive stages upon which children live and grow. These places, spaces, and environments are also effects of historical dominant natureculture binary ways of knowing, technoscientific knowledge making practices. Today these environment, people, and places are imbued with socio-spatial issues of power struggles, imaginations, and fantasies of children–local material and discursive practices of “knowing in being” conflated with the dominate ones--through which the community defines its sense of self, relations to each other, others, and the world (Barad 2007, p. 185). In the context of science education, Megan Bang and Ananda Marin (2015) posit that these perceptions turn to settled expectations of nature-culture in science learning in which: the very constructions of subject matter, to focal content, to the configurations of practice, engaged in science learning environments are often deeply unreflective of the most pressing scientific questions – rather they focus on ‘‘settled’’ phenomena as well as ‘‘settled’’ perspectives and relations to phenomena. (p.531) In our example, students from socio-economically, ethnically, and racially minoritized communities are constantly negotiating the macro-level knowledge making practices of technoscience and micro level socio-spatial issues related to the environment, social-cultural discrimination, poverty, and other unjust conditions (Atweh 2011). For instance, the “story” about the elimination of cyanide is an example how a chemical was configured as a “toxic” and “lethal” as the result of material-discursive practices of science and technology. Chemicals such as cyanide are toxic and poisonous not because of their inherent qualities, but because of the ways in which they have used and utilized in large quantities and interaction with other chemicals; much of the “toxicity” stems from an anthropogenic human and industrial usage. Cyanide in smaller quantities naturally occurs in food (e.g., kernels, seeds, fruits, spinach etc.) and therefore can be present in blood plasma ranging from 0 to 10 mg. On the other hand, cyanide represents one of the most dangerous chemicals present in cigarette smoke causing neurological, respiratory, and cardiovascular issues (Mahernia et al. 2015). Smoking socially was commonplace in the United States, especially during the culture of the 1950s and 1960s, and even allowed on some airplanes up until the late 1990s. It was discovered that cyanide could be used as a deadly chemical weapon during World War I; it also represented a frequently relied upon mystery novel trope: the untraceable cyanide pill. This cursory consideration of the ways a simple chemical substance has been treated culturally and historically highlights the pedagogical potential for teachers and students to engage in conversations that emerges through the application of the new materialist analytic lens to the seemingly simple vignette incident. Examining the ways in which science, ethics, culture and matter entangle encourages us to re-think the assumptions of our current knowledge and to tread carefully and humbly on the entangled and evolving tapestry of human understanding. It reminds us that science is “a very human activity whose focus of interest and theoretical dispositions in any historical period were, and are, very much a part of and not apart from the dominant cultural and political issues of the day.” (Lemke 2001, p. 298).

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What is the purpose of “telling” these “mattered” stories and how are they related to education? When it comes to “injustices,” to date, the analysis of power and equity has been predicated upon “language,” “discourse,” and “ideational” constructs as the means through which injustices are produced and deployed. The story of cyanide is one example of how the matter matters, knowledge matters, and ethics matters in the configuration of socio-spatial and material constructs. It is impossible to disregard the vitality of matter and its potentialities “with other physical and physiological bodies” to “make big things happen” (Bennett 2010, p. 107). Subsequently, Barad (2012) argues that if we want to re-think how science is done, we also need to re-think what we conceive as scientific literacy in education, which has to include these onto-epistemological and ethical questions in relation to implications of new sciences and technologies. It is often the case that the implications of material and discursive practices are examined post factum. However, as Barad (2012) argues, “asking after potential consequences is too little, too late, because ethics of course, is being done right at the lab bench” (p. 54). To be able to ask “power sensitive” questions “we need a much broader sense of literacy and we need all kinds of people around the lab bench, so that scientific literacy should no longer be seen as being solely the responsibility of the Sciences” (Barad 2012, p. 54). This reminds us of Bang and Marin’s (2015) argument that much of the disparities in science (and STEM) education evolves from binary thinking and settled expectations, including natureculture relations and settled underlying theories of dominant science and science education that organizes learning in ways that constrain multitude of experiences, relations, and various forms of agency and identities. Furthermore, Bang and Marin argue that these expectations “distance students from the lived socio-scientific challenges their communities face and often fail to position youth as contributors and participants in the pursuit of possible and desperately needed solutions” (p. 531). While no framework currently exists for teaching science through the diffractive lens of new materialism, we argue for the importance of supporting students to develop understandings about how decisions are made, including their ethical grounds, and allowing youth and communities to make their own “minds” about issues, allowing us (researchers and educators) to move away from the construction and reproduction of binaries of good/bad, nature/culture, subject/object. In this way, STEM education can approach issues, such as those raised by socio-spatial injustice as an inquiry which takes into consideration “politically sensitive questions” such as identifying the assumptions under which we are operating, the grounds on which decisions are made, who is making those decisions, whose view and whose vision, and who/what benefits from it (Haraway 1988). Mattered story of the vignette: response-ability vs. empowerment It is not enough to educate us anymore, Mrs. Walters. You have got to tell us why you are doing it. — Jenny Mellor, In a Movie, “An Education” Many of the children who live in marginalized communities already face a myriad of sociospatial issues and injustices. Moreover, these issues do not stop at the school door. Imagine what happens when the larger society continuously tells these children that there is something wrong with their neighborhoods? Their water? Their land? The very air they breathe? Where do they find hope, imagination, strength? How will they envision justice and equity in inequitable and

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unjust conditions? By contextualizing these issues through a deeper understanding of sociospatial and environmental justice – and further utilizing broader understandings of history, assumptions, and ethical grounds on which advancements and progress of STEM is envisioned – students, teachers, and community members can help to transform science learning into a more in-depth discussion of socio-spatial conditions in which they find themselves (Rosser 2014). Viewed only through the lens of top-down solutions, claims, analyses, and what Haraway terms the "conquesting gaze from nowhere" (Haraway 1988, p. 281), we risk omitting the true breadth of these issues by limiting our perspective to dominant perspectives. This sense of responseability and answerability (Barad 2007) cannot just belong to people who possess technoscientific or otherwise some sort of “higher order of knowledge and skills, it needs to be perceived as a right of all, including “others,” human and non-human, who must possess a fundamental right to respond. This danger was presaged by French philosopher Jacques Ellul (1990) who said: Technicians are no longer talking as technicians who in the presence of given technical problems provide technical solutions, but as technocrats who say: “Here is the solution. There is no other. You will have to adopt it (p. 24). To date, the absence of response-ability also includes the underrepresentation of people and youth from these communities in STEM disciplines, which perpetuates injustices not only in economic terms, but also constrains their ability to become involved in critical issues directly implicating their work, health, socio-cultural, spatial and political conditions. As Basil and Murray (2015) argue: Especially in our segregated society, it can be difficult for a collective of white middle-class scientists to understand the lives, experiences, needs, and desires of peoples of color. ...that this inability to see might in turn lead to scientific knowledge or applications of that scientific knowledge that are unjust … when we do not include diverse voices in the project of generating scientific knowledge and deciding how we ought to put that knowledge to use in our society. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that low-income and Latino communities of central and southern California, plagued by birth defects, would be home to the only toxic waste sites in the state… if scientists originating from those communities were involved in the scientific community (p. 257). Studies in science and mathematics education have shown that while policy and education documents promoting STEM education claim prosperity for all, “only those with the most wealth have received any financial benefit from these endeavors” (Basile and Lopez 2015, p. 521). Similar disparities in STEM education in the U.S. have been documented for decades. The evidence demonstrates inequalities persist for many (e.g. girls, students from low-income backgrounds, students of color, Indigenous people, Latinx, Black and Brown people, and English language learners) from the outset of their STEM educational experiences to choosing and staying in their career paths (Basile and Murray 2015). Although we support broadening participation initiatives in STEM disciplines, we also caution that these projects should not turn our attention from structural and systematic problems at the heart of the issue. For instance, today, the dominant policy discourse configures the sociospatial issues of Gateway cities in terms of the need for economic revitalization due to demands

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of the new knowledge economy. Inherent in these seemingly benevolent efforts are depoliticized notions of “progress,” i.e. the knowledge and skills possessed by these communities were not fast enough to keep pace with the global economy as compared to neighboring cities, such as the “Technology Highway,” which is located within one hour or less of Gateway cities. The assumption is that once the residents of Gateway cities acquire STEM skills they will be empowered to “improve” and redress socio-spatial and economic issues that their communities face. While we agree that there needs to be emphasis for a more robust learning experiences and broadening participation in STEM disciplines, we hesitate to reduce the “empowerment” and “agency” for change only to the knowledge and skills of individuals. That is, to be cognizant that these STEM educational initiatives require more systematic reforms, ones which go beyond locating agency in residents who must be “trained” and “educated” so they can revitalize local economies, to include larger structural and discursive issues such as a lack of available local jobs that reproduce the phenomenon known as the “brain drain,” which forces individuals to leave their childhood homes to find employment elsewhere. Discourses about empowerment of community and children through education or other means might become another “feels good talk” that in reality “disables” communities by subjugating them to accept top-down and hierarchical epistemologies and tools (Apple 2008). We would even go so far to say that the very de rigueur of empowerment, which despite “sounding” desirable, is inevitably entwined with depoliticized conceptions of justice – ones opposed to changing and transforming systematic and structural conditions – adds to “you can do it” discourse and amplifies the deficit perspective. Furthermore, we caution that “empowerment” discourses are reminiscent of a colonizer narrative that assumes for a dominant to be in a position to “give” and bestow the “power” to those who they have subjugated in the first place. These discourses also latch themselves to narratives about individual agency which are framed as indispensable to achieve individual, if not a societal, success (Matusov, von Duyke and Kayumova 2016) and to overcome all social-spatial and economic issues and ultimately ends up constructing deficit perspectives about individuals and communities who are fighting with injustices every day. Therefore, an inquiry into justice cannot be merely reduced to distributive notions of power and instrumentalist discourse. If anything, empowerment must be about supporting and legitimizing local communities’ knowledge base, skills and power to contribute to decision making and their right to respond, response-ability, to the issues. Concluding remarks Today more than ever, in the field of science education research, there is an increased spotlight on “at-risk” populations, distressed socio-spatial and environmental conditions, and unprecedented advances in science and technology (Bencze and Carter 2011). These intricate factors make the analysis of socio-spatial and environmental issues in the context of science education very complex. To date, a great deal of equity and justice-oriented studies have focused on the importance of broadening participation, increasing knowledge and skills in STEM fields, dismantling unequal access, creating opportunities to robust learning, and increasing material and economic resources. In this paper, we began with a critique of narrow conceptualizations of equity and justice, and argued that an emphasis on technoscientific tools, knowledge, and skills as a panacea to enduring socio-spatial and environmental issues might take the form of marginalization rather than empowerment. As Patel (2014) argues while the material needs of historically non-dominant communities are real and important, however “acritical and ahistorical

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educational research is complicit in the maintenance of these realties by consistently justifying its work through the lens of the achievement gap, rather than being grounded in the political, economic, and historical infrastructure of inequity” (p. 266). To counter these deficit-oriented viewpoints, we worked with the insights of feminist ontoepistemologies to argue that as critical educators we must take into consideration the conceptual and ethical grounds on which science education understands, configures, and explains the constitutions of socio-spatial and environmental injustices to children who live, play, and grow in these local communities. In doing so, we situated our analysis in the context of Gateway city and “The Story of the Cyanide” as presented in the opening vignette. We argued that although mainstream science education is addressing the need for science-in-the-making and beginning to turn toward the importance of culture (including cultural meaning of science and what it means to do science), it has seldom adjusted its procedures and interpretations of the nature-culture divide and appropriated agency beyond the narrow purview of those “humans” who are “in” the technoscientific know. We worked with feminist new materialisms and Barad’ s notion of agential realism as an alternative framework to re-think the ways in which we can reconfigure the issues of socio-spatial and environmental justice and discussed the potentialities of this rethinking for science education. We suggested that feminist new materialisms offer different starting points and multi-faceted springboards for new educational research that embrace more expansive approaches than those afforded by strictures of Western humanist and anthropocentric paradigms. Feminist new materialisms and post-humanistic inquiry give pause for thought of the “essentializing binaries between the human and nonhuman” upon which Western humanism and anthropocentrism is predicated (Taylor and Hughes 2013). In arguing for a shift away from divisive hierarchical thinking, we have advocated for the research practices of feminist new materialisms as one possibility and perspective among many that may lead toward approaches better suited to address the complexities of the educational experience. The entelechy of the complex and entangled relations between humans, nonhumans and the more than human world requires a re-thinking of the “epistemological presumptions about the forms of knowing that produce valuable knowledge about educational experiences, and in different ontological presumptions about the modes of being through which humans and nonhumans inhabit the world” (Taylor and Ivinson 2013 p. 5). From this perspective, the communities of Gateway cities who are caught up in socio-spatial injustices are not in that position accorded to lack of “agency” or “power” on their part; if anything, it is due to the enduring effects of the very systems and structures of domination, which de-empowered them by taking away their rights and agencies to speak, act on behalf of their knowledges, relations, and understanding of the world. Moreover, we argued that empowerment discourse used in equity circles might become another deficit oriented and depoliticized form of knowledge production about minoritized children and communities. Children and communities living under socio-spatial and environmental challenges are powerful individuals and collective, we do not need to empower them, but what we might need powerful frameworks, which takes into consideration the diverse ways of knowing, being, describing the naturalculutral, world among diverse socio-cultural groups that are different from the dominant ways in which conventional science education understands and explains it (Kayumova and Tippins 2016). For instance, aboriginal and indigenous communities’ ways of relating to the nature and culture defy traditional nature-culture binaries by which classical science operates. Utilizing indigenous and aboriginal theories in understanding diverse students’ and their families’ relations to dominant science perspectives, can help science education to be more

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inclusive and make bridges to the cultures and groups traditionally left out of science. Moreover, it will also help us to overcome a dichotomy of what appears to be a Western and indigenous knowledge systems, and better support the equity efforts. We argued that employing feminist sensitivities to ask power sensitive questions about natureculture practices of STEM within a socio-spatial justice framework, is one possible way out of many, for science education to engage students with the profound vitalities of non-humans and more than-humans, and how each get implicated in the “play of power” and/or afford “modes of resistance to it” (Frost 2011, p. 70). In the words of Barad (2007): there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in each meeting. (p. X). This quote reminds us that response-ability and account-ability is required “not only for what we know, how we know, and what we do but, in part, for what exists” (Barad 2003, p. 243). Attending to “what exists,” including human and non-human vitalities might allow us to analyze multiple and dynamic processes of naturalcultural relations. When applied to notions of justice in education, ethical response-ability invokes the right to epistemological and ontological heterogeneities, all the different ways by which we, the people of different nations, ethnicities, locations, and origins, understand ourselves, our relations, and the world around us. References Apple, M. W. (2008). Can schooling contribute to a more just society? Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 3(3), 239-261. doi: 10.1177/1746197908095134 Arnaut, K. (2011). The human zoo after Abu Ghraib: performance and subalternity in the 'cam era'. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 11. Atweh, B. (2011). Reflections on social justice, race, ethnicity and identity from an ethical perspective. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 6, 33-47. doi: 10.1007/s11422-010-93053 Bang, M., & Marin, A. (2015). Nature–culture constructs in science learning: human/non-human agency and intentionality. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 52(4), 530-544. doi: 10.1002/tea.21204 Bang, M., Warren, B., Rosebery, A. S., & Medin, D. (2012). Desettling expectations in science education. Human Development, 55(5-6), 302-318. doi: 10.1159/000345322 Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801-831. doi: 10.1086/345321 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., ... & Weaver, J. (2014). Toward a posthumanist education. JCT (Online), 30(2), 39. Soja, E. W. (2009). Taking space personally. In B. Warf, & S. Arias (Eds.), The spatial turn: interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 11-35). New York: Routledge. Susskind, L., & Friedman, A. (2014). Quantum mechanics: The theoretical minimum. Philadelphia: Basic Books Taylor, C. A., & Hughes, C. (2016). Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthumanist research practices for education. In Posthuman research practices in education. Palgrave Macmillan UK. doi: 10.1057/9781137453082 Teixeira, S., & Krings, A. (2015). Sustainable social work: an environmental justice framework for social work education. Social Work Education, 34, 513-527. doi: 10.1080/02615479.2015.1063601 Tzou, C., Scalone, G., & Bell, P. (2010). The role of environmental narratives and social positioning in how place gets constructed for and by youth. Equity & Excellence in Education, 43(1), 105-119. doi: 10.1080/10665680903489338 U.S. Census Bureau (U.S. Census). (2017). Retrieved from: http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF Wals, A. E. (1994). Nobody planted it, it just grew! young adolescents' perceptions and experiences of nature in the context of urban environmental education. Children, Youth and Environments, 11(3), 1-27. Warren, K. (1996). Ecological feminist philosophies: an overview of the issues. In K. J. Warren (Ed.), Ecological feminist philosophies (pp. ix–xxvi). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zeidler, D.L. (2016). STEM education: a deficit framework for the twenty first century? A sociocultural socioscientific response. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 11, 11-26. doi: 10.1007/s11422-014-9578-z Author Biographies Shakhnoza Kayumova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of STEM Education & Teacher Development at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Research Scientist at the Kaput Center for Research & Innovation in STEM Education. Shakhnoza’s research is grounded in the nuanced understanding of the conditions of possibility for the inclusion of culturally and linguistically diverse students and their families in science education through transformative research and pedagogy embedded in social justice. The role of social constructs (such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, and language), power relations, and identity development in science education, are recurring themes in her scholarship. She has published and co-authored

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in peer-reviewed journals including Democracy & Education and Journal of Science Teacher Education. Chad J. McGuire is an associate professor of environmental policy in the Department of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His research focuses on understanding environmental issues that lie at the intersection of science, policy, and law. Recent published work examines the impact of existing policies on the public’s perceptions of risk relative to climate change. Suzanne Cardello is a doctoral student and research assistant at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her interests include ecofeminism, equitable practices, and authentic inquiry.

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