Wonder(ing) has a habit of entering into and fleeting across encounters, popping up, or perhaps mediating the popping up, of little shocks of semi-awareness (Byers, 2021 Massumi, 2015). Wonder does move through and can be felt by human bodies, and even linger there for a little while, but this affect, like all affects, tends to behave more like a fleshy ghost (Stewart, 2007) sometimes appearing, moving through, between, and across bodies (Brennan, 2004), and then quickly vanishing again. It resists enclosure, capture, and narrow or flat representation as it emerges in and through encounters (or perhaps it is always already there) and moves around and across “things” or “bodies” in a trans- (and transformational) manner. In coming to think of wonder(ing) as an opening-up and enlivening vitality affect, I have noticed that the phenomenon, as experienced, is never quite containable within human bodies or singular categories or disciplines. The concept of vitality affects has also been taken up by Felix Guattari as central to his ethico-aesthetic paradigm in his text, Chaosmosis ( 1995). Rosi Braidotti, in her intellectually rigorous work mapping the proliferation of posthuman knowledges and scholarship, discusses an ethics of joy embedded in feminist posthuman thinking, related to vitality and increased capacities of bodies to affect in her many works, including Posthuman Knowledge (2019) and the co-edited volume Posthuman Glossary ( 2018, pp. In a similar vein of thinking with movement and felt aliveness, biologist, philosopher, and biosemiotician Andreas Weber has developed the concept of enlivenment, a feeling of aliveness experienced in reciprocal relationships with other feeling beings in his books Enlivenment: A Poetics for the Anthropocene (2019), The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science (2016), and Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology (2017). Further, I have been wondering about the relationship of wonder with what psychologist Daniel Stern ( 2004, 2010) has termed “vitality affects”-affects we feel and sense in others, that permeate our everyday lives, and “are felt experiences of force, in movement – that have a temporal contour, and a sense of aliveness, of going somewhere” (Stern, 2010, p. Through a slow and transdisciplinary study, I have come to think-feel wonder(ing) Footnote 1 as a dynamic, multidimensional, multimodal, and somewhat sensitive and slippery affect (Byers, 2021) a common, ubiquitous, and catalytic force that works to open up possibilities and make felt potential in and through everyday events and encounters. I will share here an overview of some of my theorizing about the concept thus far as a means of providing context for engaging with the meta-assemblage that follows. KeywordsĪs an emerging science education researcher and long-time elementary science teacher in the United States, I have been thinking about and dwelling with the phenomenon of wonder for many years. A more wonder-filled approach to science education may be necessary now more than ever. These co-movements suggest how “traditional” science and school science education are not only complicit with, but also may be directly implicated as primary protagonists in the violent anti-Black racism and planet-wide suffering happening today. The intention of this meta-assemblage research-creation is to explore the affective flows of the phenomenon of wonder, while also inviting consideration of how the multiple forces and co-components of the body(ies) assembled here move together in an uneasy and historically traceable tension. What might wonder have to do with critiquing science (as the hegemonic and “neutral” discipline it has become) and living out a more life-affirming and anti-racist vision of science education? In this chapter I share a meta-assemblage research-creation: a researcher-created experimental exhibit of found poetic data assemblages about wonder, joy, Black life, neurodiversity, love, science, and science education. Wonder is an elusive yet ever-present dynamic phenomenon that deserves more attention in (science) education.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |