14. Within science education (Aikenhead, 2006a; Barad, 2000; Erickson, 2000), as well as within science (Barad, 2007, 2010; Latour, 1993, 2004b), the two predominant frames through which scientific phenomena are explained, explainable, and taught are those of naturalization and socialization. In other words, science education is explained through frames in which nature and culture are the predominant and respective (but not exclusive) factors through which knowledge comes to be known (see Aikenhead, 2006a; Barad, 2000, 2007; Erickson, 2000). As Barad (2007) explains, both naturalization and socialization are almost always premised within a nature/culture binary in which the constitutive other is treated as a passive surface upon which the dominant term is (re)presented (i.e., claims about Nature as complex are framed against a passive Culture; claims about Culture are framed against a passive Nature; see also Apffel-Marglin, 2011).

With respect to deconstruction's position (see Derrida, 1976) within the space of science, Barad (2011) mentions,

Invoking Derrida—the 'poster boy' for social constructivism gone wild (a misguided attribution if ever there was one, but so it is), the one theorist nearly everyone but deconstructionists and poststructuralists loves to use as a foil for their own supposed reasonableness, the science warriors' darling stand-in for all that is wrong with the humanities—undercuts any pretense of a convincing straight performance. (p. 448)

In other words, because deconstruction subverts often taken-for-granted assumptions about mediated access to *an* external natural *or* cultural reality (and, more recently subverts the binary distinction between the two; see Barad, 2010, 2012b; Kirby, 2011) by subverting their stability, it is often unwelcome within science or science education (Barad, 2000, 2011).

are unverifiable through empiricism, a *fairy* might as well be a *fiction* (i.e., a non-*fact*).Furthermore, as explored in the next Chapters (5 and 6), to decry the metaphysical as *fairy* in science and science education effectively masks the ways in which both are always already metaphysical (i.e., through Cartesianism; see Barad, 2000, 2007). In turn, this obscures the workings of power that occur through the enactment of this taken-for-granted and naturalized metaphysics (see Apffel-Marglin, 2011).

vocabulary of colonialism which can be assembled around three concepts: (1) the line, (2) the centre, and (3) the outside" (p. 55). Not only do these three concepts that are almost always at play in (neo-)colonial logics produce notions of hierarchy through proposing a center and a margin, the drawing of the line between them signals an oppositional difference. In science education, we often see these logics atplay when the case for WMS' centrality is (increasingly implicitly) made: it is heralded as the way of knowing nature because it is framed as not being the orientations that it is defined against, such as TEK and IWLN.This is further complicated by the ways in which (neo-)colonial logics and the metaphysics of clôture simultaneously work "to make the ends coincide with the means" (Spivak, 1976, p. xx), as explored within the first chapter. Stated otherwise, the practice of distancing which precedes hierarchizing is often naturalized and normalized as being one and the same as its resulting knowledge claim of distance. Such coalesced claims inevitably suture over the relations and processes irreducibly enfolded within them. The desire to make the ends coincide with the means results in the production of cultural difference without needing to account for or be accountable to the ways in which this difference is produced (e.g., Western modern metaphysics) or what this produces in turn (e.g., Eurocentrism).

two primary research programs within science education (i.e., cognitivism and socio-constructivism; see Aikenhead, 2006b, Erickson, 2000), poststructural approaches are often un-welcome(d) (see Barad, 2000, 2011) and, accordingly, under-explored.

come to produce and be produced by the subject of critique (i.e., the critic) and the object of critique.

asks if critique can be *super*-critical, in that critique would take one idea and produces more than one rather than less than one.

## References

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## Tinkering with Ontology with/in the Multicultural Science Education Debate

## Tinkering with/in the Multicultural Science Education Debate: Towards Positing *An*(Other) Ontology

The purpose of this chapter1 is to continue working within and against the stratified and sedimented spaces of the multicultural science education debate by sustaining the deconstructive play of (re)signification of science education, labouring between what it *is, is not*, and *could be(come)*. This extends upon the previous chapters' work of (re)opening this debate by engaging in the play of (re)signification between the two predominant positions (i.e., cross-culturalist and universalist) as well as the modes through which the debate operates (e.g., dialectic, debate, critique as mirroring). Putting to work the alternative optical metaphors of the previous chapter (i.e., prism and diffraction grating), I consider how these common occurrences which present themselves with/in the multicultural science education debate are co-constituted by the uncommon and usually absent (see Derrida, 1976). This, in turn, allows for an exploration of the absent yet present2 co-constitutive elements of the multicultural science education debate that produces the ways in which Indigenous science is to-come, deferring and differing its arrival.

Particularly, this chapter engages the *ontological* homework of response-ability: addressing the ways in which ontology, as absent presence, is *always already* (re)shaping science education. As signalled in Chapter 3, Cobern and Loving (2008) remind that attention to ontology is uncommon within the multicultural science education debate. Where Cobern and Loving (2008) conclude that knowing nature through WMS

183

is universal and "common sense", I latch onto the binary co-constitution of common and uncommon, and moments in which they vacillate, as a lever to (re)open spaces of science education to other meanings (e.g., Indigenous science to-come). Drawing from an ethic of deconstructive *tinkering* (Derrida, 1976) by using concepts, categories, and constructs that are uncommon to the context of science education to explore that which is common,3 I tinker with/in Cobern and Loving's (2008) criteria of ontological alignment to unsettle and (re)situate their claim of "common sense" towards (re)opening the logics of the multicultural science education debate.

As tinkering is central to this arc, (i.e., Chapters 5 and 6), I begin this chapter by quickly touching on what it means to engage with this process before moving to the task of tinkering with/in the multicultural science education debate.

## A Preamble on Tinkering: Derrida on the Porous Dichotomy Between Bricolage and Engineering

To frame the process of tinkering within this section, I turn to Derrida's (1976) (mis)reading of Lévi-Strauss' *La pensée sauvage* in which he both separates and blurs the distinctiveness between *engineering* and *bricolage*. In short, both engineering and bricolage are processes of and for generating knowledge claims. Engineering is the movement from the ends to the means, whereby the engineer makes appropriate selections from "the discourses of formal logic, and the pure sciences" (Spivak, 1976, p. xix), picking concepts, categories, and constructs already purposed for their process. In contrast, "the bricoleur makes do with things that were meant perhaps for other ends" (Spivak, 1976, p. xix). Through tinkering, bricolage reverses the ends/means hierarchy by privileging the means over the ends or the process over the product, even if this entails the very possibility of not achieving the specified goals.4 Significantly, as Derrida (1976) argues, the ends (i.e., knowledge, truth) and the means of knowledge production (i.e., methodology) never come to coincide. The goal of (fully) achieving knowledge is not only empirically impossible, as Lévi-Strauss posited, but also theoretically so. Thus, for Derrida (1976), "the engineer should always be a sort of bricoleur" (p. 139) while coming to recognize the very limitation of bricolage:

The only weakness of bricolage – but, seen as a weakness is it not irremediable? – is a total inability to justify itself in its own discourse. The already-there-ness of instruments and of concepts cannot be undone or re-invented. (pp. 138–139)

Just as the goals of engineering never come to be, Derrida cautions against treating the bricoleur's tools as if they themselves always *were* (i.e., having reached the classical ontological status of Being). Instead, he invites consideration of the tools themselves as the productive enactments of bricolages past and to-come (see also Barad, 2010). There is always a need for "simultaneously troubling and using the concepts [and conceptual lines] we think we cannot think without…, keeping [them] as both limit and resource" (Lather, 2007, pp. 167–168). Furthermore, because engineering/bricolage is always already a porous binary, this invites a critical consideration of bricolage vis-à-vis its ends, or what it produces: "all bricolages are not equally worthwhile. Bricolage criticizes itself" (Derrida, 1976, p. 139).

## Having and Being Had by "Common Sense" During a Science Education Project in Nunavut

Because we must "begin" some-where and some-time, let's "begin" (once again)5 in Iqualuit, Nunavut in July of 2009.6 During the delivery of a curriculum in the Canadian arctic in which Indigenous (i.e., Inuit) and non-Indigenous youth explored differential cultural constructions of science through videography (see Higgins, 2011, 2014), I took up the call to examine and challenge the ways in which Eurocentrism "insidiously … maintain[s] the status quo" (Sammel, 2009, p. 651; see also Belczewski, 2009; McKinley, 2001, 2007) through involving youth in revealing, (re)structuring, and (re)directing the multiple ways in which dominance is maintained. I worked towards disrupting the concepts and categories that tend to create, and are utilized to uphold, inequality within science education, as well as the systems under which these inequalities become possible. Through this project, the youth involved learned and enhanced their movie-making skills and practices in order to explore, define, and document the diverse ways-of-knowing-Nature (i.e., science) that were enacted in their community of Iqaluit, Nunavut. This participant-directed videography work took various shapes: documentarystyle interviews with community members within science and technology fields, as well as their own short movies which were a form of digital storytelling. Given that such an examination must also include the many bodies that occupy and uphold these systems within science education, I decided to engage simultaneously with the oft-cited "solution" of self-reflexivity through video diaries to analyse my/self as decolonizing pedagogue. Guiding this examination were questions into the ways in which I was participating in, (re)producing, and (re)produced by the culture of power.

This was useful in creating partial and side-long glances rather than penetrating gazes, producing complex and contradictory accounts of self. I was able to reveal/learn from some of the ways in which I was produced by and producing the culture of power within science education, and inadvertently pivoting rather than "transforming" my pedagogies and self as pedagogue. Nonetheless, through revisiting this data, it became apparent that I was reifying Eurocentrism through the very process of working against it. But then, as Battiste (2005) states, we cannot treat Eurocentrism as a mere individually held prejudice that we can easily cast aside with enough knowledge as its pervasiveness renders it *common sensical*. As briefly mentioned in previous chapters, within this major research endeavour the decolonizing curriculum (e.g., border crossing) and "teacher-as-researcher" identities (e.g., culture broker) available worked both within and against a problematic centre. As such, curriculum, pedagogy, and pedagogue were exceeded in pedagogical practice by the very coloniality the approach worked against, thus becoming de/colonizing (Higgins, 2014; see also Carter, 2004, 2010). One could say that the common pervaded the uncommon; I *held* but was also *being held* by "common sense".

As stated earlier, the very concepts we hold are always already exceeded by lived experience; lived experience provides deconstructive openings to think and act otherwise (Bohm, 1996; Wildcat, 2005). More than a niggling doubt about the porosity of that which earlier seemed solid, this double(d) pattern of *holding* and *being held* by "common sense" would become a location in which I would come to tinker. On *being held* by "common sense," Battiste (2005) reminds that Eurocentrism is a "consciousness in which *all* of us have been marinated" (p. 124, emphasis mine). This similarity is pronounced by difference in intensity, degree, and duration such that it comes to produce us as de/colonizing subjects differently. If how we think is part of the problem, as Lather (2007) quizzically questions us, how do we, and can we, think about how we think without using the thing with which we think? It is a project framed by at once by necessity and im/possibility: an impossibility that when creatively strived towards reconfigures what critical possibilities are possible (see Barad, 2007, 2010; Spivak, 1993/2009).

In attempting to think about how I think, one of the most significant observations that I made through this analysis was that the continued appearance of Cartesianism as a common thread. At the time, I understood Cartesianism as "both the *belief* that various meanings and materialities are discrete quantities (e.g., mind/body) as well as the process through which they are separated from that which co-constitutes them" (Higgins, 2014, p. 164, emphasis added). Like others (e.g., Pillow, 2003), I saw Cartesianism as a belief relegated to the realm of epistemology (i.e., knowledge about ontology, rather than or in addition to an enactment of ontology).

However, these qualities come to describe *ways*-*of* -*being* (i.e., ontology) instead of, or in addition to, *ways*-*of* -*knowing* (i.e., epistemology). Thus, what might it mean to take insights from the previous chapter (e.g., epistemology and ontology as co-constitutive and not pre-existing practice) and come to see Cartesianism not (only) as an epistemological facet of science education but (also) as one that is ontological? While questions of epistemology often take primacy due to uneven inter-cultural interfaces (i.e., dialectic rather than dialogue), it is often productive to tinker with/in windy, indirect, and side-long approaches when the most direct path seems over-travelled without yielding the desired outcomes. Responding to Lather's (2007) question, it might be one approach to thinking without using the very thing with which you think (when the thing with which you think is part of the problem), recognizing that such is never (fully) achieved. Thus, what might it mean to (re)consider the multicultural science education debate with ontology in mind?

## Tinkering with/in "Common Sense," Ontology and the Multicultural Science Education Debate

Science and justice, matter and meaning are not separate elements that intersect now and again. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder. (Barad, 2010, p. 242)

If we take seriously that "science and justice… are inextricably fused together" (Barad, 2010, p. 242), the ferocity with which the multicultural science education debate rattles taken-for-granted assumptions can be, to some, surprising (see van Eijck & Roth, 2007). At the epicentre of this debate are questions of "what counts" as science within schoolbased curriculum. Largely at stake is the inclusion or exclusion of TEK and IWLN alongside WMS, as well as the norms through which they are included, excluded, and juxtaposed. This unresolved and unresolvable debate often presents science educators with diverse and difficult queries regarding what it means to respect students and the diverse waysof-knowing-nature that they bring with them: can science (i.e., knowing nature) and justice (i.e., respecting diverse cultural knowledges) co-exist within the science education classroom?

Between science educators who champion the inclusion of TEK and IWLN as equally valid7 ways of knowing nature (i.e., cross-culturalists; for example, Snively & Corsiglia, 2001; Stanley & Brickhouse, 2001) and those who do not consider these ways-of-knowing-nature as *equally valid* to the "universal" standard of WMS (i.e., universalists; for example, Cobern & Loving, 2001; Siegel, 2001), this aforementioned question (and false dichotomy; see Chapters 3 and 4) continues to produce friction that is not always generative. As there continues to be an ongoing and ever-present need to respond to the conflicting and potentially incommensurable demands between epistemological validity and ethical responsiveness in science education, there have been multiple attempts to resolve the debate (see Chapter 3), by working towards producing modest intermediary positions that attempt to develop and enhance potential points of agreement between positions (Alsop & Fawcett, 2010; Cobern & Loving, 2008; van Eijck & Roth, 2007). An example of such a point of agreement is that while universalists and cross-culturalists generally do not agree whether or not science education *is* or *is not* a frequent site of scientism, indoctrination, or imposition, they both agree that it should not be. In the last few years, attempts to labour from shared assumptions towards intermediary positions have included: (a) positing an ethics of incommensurability or co-existence (e.g. El-Hani & de Ferreira Bandeira, 2008; El-Hani & Mortimer, 2007; van Eijck & Roth, 2007), (b) considering diverse and competing scientific knowledges as (re-)contextualized processes rather than inert knowledges (van Eijck & Roth, 2007), and (c) pedagogically enacting an ethics framed by the vulnerability of *not* knowing (Alsop & Fawcett, 2010).

However, in this section, I take up the possible pathway put forth by Cobern and Loving (2008). In short, Cobern and Loving (2008) posit that most proposed and partial responses to the multicultural science education debate largely centre upon questions of epistemology. Given the predominantly socio-cultural characteristics of the debate, this is not without cause. However, Cobern and Loving come at the debate sideways by tinkering with that which remains uncommon to questions of and in science education: ontology. In response to epistemic primacy, to explore how scientific knowledges might have "characteristics of verisimilitude, vis-à-vis the real world" (p. 440), Cobern and Loving suggest that the "real world" too must be seriously considered in the equation. Thus, instead, or in addition to strictly epistemological undertakings, Cobern and Loving (2008) propose that this debate be addressed through a (re)consideration of how the subject of scientific knowledge aligns with its object, or how epistemology (i.e., Culture) aligns with ontology (i.e., Nature). Through an exploration of ontological situatedness, and within the context of the multicultural science debate, the conclusion that Cobern and Loving (2008) reach is that "epistemological realism [i.e., epistemology of WMS] is literally the common ground—the common sense—we all share" (p. 443).

Drawing from insights from the previous chapters, the purpose of this chapter is not to deny the claim made by Cobern and Loving (2008) that "Epistemological Realism Really is Common Sense" (p. 425) by presenting it through a metaphorical mirror as either *fact* or *fairy* (see Latour, 2004a). Rather, it is to tinker with this uncommon approach to justify common sense; there are productive insights to be gained through using and troubling the notion that they put forth. In particular, drawing from the Chapter 4's optical metaphors, what would it mean to treat the statement as more than true or a false reflection of reality? What insights could be gained by (re)situating a "mirroring" statement (i.e., "characteristics of verisimilitude, vis-à-vis the real world" [Cobern & Loving, 2008, p. 440]) by thinking prismatically and diffractively with and about it? In particular, what would it mean to focus on how epistemological realism as "common sense" inflects and is inflected, how it is produced and what it produces? If epistemological realism is "common sense", to whom is it common (e.g., is the "we" in the "common sense – we all share" [Cobern & Loving, 2008, p. 440] in fact *all* of us or but a particular group)? For epistemic realism to be "common sense", what epistemological and ontological criteria need to be in place? How did this "common sense" come to be (made) common (i.e., through dialectic rather than dialogue)?8 What does this "common sense" produce? Is "common sense" something we have, are had by, or a combination of both? Lastly, as "science and justice, matter and meaning are not separate elements that intersect now and again" (Barad, 2010, p. 242),9 what does it mean to consider ethics and justice as co-constitutive elements of ontologically situated scientific epistemologies?

## Epistemic Realism and/as "Common Sense?" Ontological Situatedness and/in the Multicultural Science Education Debate

Cobern and Loving (2008) state in "Epistemic Realism is Common Sense" (p. 425) that a collusion of forces have made it such that there seems to be less discussion within science education with respect to how epistemological frameworks align with the ontological reality that they attempt to represent. These factors include, but are not limited to: the move towards constructionism and socio-constructionism in science education as well as education writ large, a growing doubt towards WMS following a series of public opinion altering watershed moments (e.g., Agent Orange, napalm, Hiroshima), as well as a Kuhn's introduction of paradigms and the sudden appearance of a plenary of competing paradigms due to an increasingly multicultural social reality. The argument made is that the move to make space for what Cobern and Loving (2008) refer to "ideas that heretofore would have been called ethnoscience and folklore, pseudoscience, and even quackery" (p. 435) has meant that the focus of science education has shifted towards epistemological pluralism as a means of attempting to account for these diversely positioned ways-of-knowing-nature. While Cobern and Loving (2008) might bemoan the impact that these diverse educational and social shifts have had, and how they have reshaped science education as it is today, others have seen these as deeply productive locations and levers to pry open the spaces of science and science education (e.g., Haraway, 1997; Latour, 1993; Snively & Corsiglia, 2001). While I stand with the latter and disagree with the premise that Cobern and Loving (2008) put forth, there is nonetheless some merit in exploring their argument: not necessarily to prove it right or wrong, but rather to explore how it is produced, producible, and what it produces with/in discursive spaces of science education.

Cobern and Loving (2001, 2008) argue that questions of crosscultural integration, interfacing, and understanding often neglect asking questions about how these meanings necessarily interface with the nature of Nature. They state, given the plurality of epistemic frameworks, that there needs to be pragmatic criteria through which systems of knowing nature (i.e., science) are deemed valid and valuable:

Interpretations of experience are *all* one can know… One accepts the validity of interpretations in so far as they are pragmatically viable… Historically we [Western modern scientists and science educators] have believed in the ontological reality of the world and trust our epistemological efforts to describe that reality and yet always do our epistemologies fail to demonstrate that what we think we know really is what is. (Cobern & Loving, 2008, p. 433, emphasis in original)

For Cobern and Loving (2001, 2008), among many other science educators, that criterion is experience: a statement that both universalists (e.g., Matthews, 1994; Siegel, 1997, 2001) and cross-culturalists (e.g., Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005, 2008; Cajete, 1999; Snively & Corsiglia, 2001) would agree with. However, there is a significant point of deviation in how experience is both understood and enacted (e.g., experience as Truth, experience as situated and partial, having and being had by experience,10 experience as relationality). Whether intentional or unintentional, Cobern and Loving (2008) utilize this conceptual plurality and undecidability as location to present a false dichotomy:

It is true that we cannot know with certainty that perceptual and experiential experiences are significantly grounded in ontological reality. However, it is equally true that we cannot know for certain that perceptual and experiential experiences are not significantly grounded in ontological reality. (p. 441)

The false dichotomy presented here is either one in which epistemology is ontologically situated within "ontological reality" by utilizing an "*ontological* realism that very few educators would reject" (Cobern & Loving, 2008, p. 437, emphasis in original) or the meaning made is anti-ontological and not grounded in reality in as meaningful a way or at all. This (false) dichotomy relies upon the absent yet present a *common* *sense* assumption that "ontological reality" precedes meaning making, is singular, unified, and is the ontological reality defined and enacted by WMS (see Chapter 3). Thus, by (re)presenting and casting approaches that don't fall into the classical cannon of epistemic realism into (absolute) relativism, a "a pejorative as far as [they] are concerned" (p. 437), the alternative they present is but a strawman or a trick of smoke and mirrors as discussed within the previous chapter.

Further, it can be argued that the approach presented by Cobern and Loving (2008) does not bring us closer to resolving the multicultural science education debate: it simply displaces the terms of the debate elsewhere (i.e., ontology rather than epistemology). Such a displacement (re)produces a similar but different argument whose goal is to dialectically negate, subsume, or suture over the opposing view rather than create something else, something in-between through dialogue. In other words, the ontological situatedness that Cobern and Loving (2008) call for is but another means of reaffirming science, or WMS to be specific, as universal.

However, considering the notion of ontological situatedness can still bear fruit in the context of science education: what if epistemic realism best aligned with *an* ontology rather than simply "ontology"?

#### From Ontological Alignment to Positing anOntology in Science Education

How *reality* is understood matters. There are risks entailed in putting forward an ontology: making metaphysical assumptions explicit exposes the exclusions on which any given conception of reality is based. But the political potential of deconstructive analysis lies not in simply recognizing the inevitability of exclusions but in insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted and in taking the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundaries. (Barad, 2007, p. 205, emphasis in original)

Cobern and Loving (2008) highlight that "we face a metaphysical choice" (p. 441) in science education: a choice bearing significance if "how *reality* is understood matters" (Barad, 2007, p. 205, emphasis in original). This choice is situated within the realm of metaphysics as it asks us to consider the relationship between epistemology (i.e., Culture) and ontology (i.e., Nature). Within science and science education, this relationship between epistemology and ontology has been understood through competing claims of weak and strong forms of relativism and realism. In other words, the way in which this has primarily been taken up by science and science education scholars is through the critical and metaphysical questioning of the extent to which epistemology aligns with ontology.

Within the context of science, as Latour (1993) posits, most scientists reject absolute relativism (i.e., everything is cultural) as it requires the bracketing out of Nature. Similarly, scientists often also reject absolute realism (i.e., everything is natural) as it wholly brackets out Culture. Thus, as scientists generally agree that scientific knowledge is shaped by both natural and cultural factors, scientists more frequently adopt a weaker form of relativism or realism. While Nature and Culture are kept separate for both realists and relativists, there is always a relationship between Culture and Nature such that diverse cultures have different modes of accessing Nature. What is contested between the two approaches is whether knowledge about nature can be explained primarily but not exclusively through natural factors (i.e., weak realism) or through cultural factors (i.e., weak relativism). Within science education, similar discussions of realism and relativism take place (see Chapter 3) and are often included in curricula through exploration of the nature of science (NOS). In short, NOS addresses how the culture of science epistemologically understands and comes-to-know the nature of Nature, or ontology (e.g., Holbrook & Rannikmae, 2007; Plakitsi, 2010; Rudolph, 2000).

However, "as soon as Nature comes into play without being attached to a culture, a third model is always secretly used" (Latour, 1993, p. 104). Latour (1993) refers to this as "particular universalism": a framework in which Nature is stable and outside of Culture and diverse cultural positionings mediate access to knowledge about Nature. The caveat, and mean through which WMS maintains primacy, is that "one society - and it is always the Western one - defines the general framework of Nature with respect to which the others are situated" (p. 105). In other words, defining how Nature operates11 is established as and establishes epistemic privilege for WMS. Again, as Barad (2007) states, "how *reality* is understood matters" (Barad, 2007, p. 205, emphasis in original); importantly, not only in terms of significance but also in terms of the materialization of its consequences.

Furthermore, for reasons that include but go beyond the troubling of this epistemic privilege, many critical science scholars (e.g., Barad, 2007; Kirby, 2011; Latour, 1993) have begun to examine and cast doubt upon the framework(s) through which questions of relativism and realism come to be argued. Under critical examination is the oft takenfor-granted assumption that many realist and relativist frameworks rely upon: Nature as a stable backdrop upon which Culture plays out. Critical science scholars, such as Haraway (1997) and Latour (1993), have long challenged the oft-accepted notion that "epistemology models ontology" (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 304 in Cobern & Loving, 2008, p. 442). Returning to the metaphors explored in the previous chapter, it could be stated that the notion of epistemology *mirroring* ontology is suspended. As Barad (2007) reminds, critical science scholarship has been labouring to displace these arguments by reading them through cultural lenses to explore what it means to inflect ontology prismatically through epistemology. By showing how the culture of science has an active role in producing scientific knowledge, this opened up rich lines of questioning regarding epistemology as always situated and partial, as well as the development of an ethics that might go alongside (e.g., Harding, 1986, 1993/2004; Latour, 1993). However, as discussed in Chapter 4, what if the nature of Nature, or ontology, were not stable and passive (i.e., the condition required for both the *mirror* and the *prism*) but rather dynamic, agentic, self-differentiated, and in an ongoing state of becoming (see Barad, 2007, 2010)?12

Within what is being referred to as the "ontological turn," Barad (2007) draws from Neils Bohr's philosophy-physics to posit that ontology is not something that exists a priori. This is to say that scientific phenomena under observation do not pre-exist their observation, rather, they are enacted with and through observation. Ontology is not separate or separable from epistemology, but rather is always entangled, superpositioned, and diffracted. Matter comes to matter in both senses of word: it is at once important and worthy of consideration; as well as something that comes into being rather than remaining inert, static, and unagentic (see also Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Barad, 2000, 2010; Kirby, 2011).13

While the realm of matter and materiality (i.e., Nature) has always been the primary focus and domain of science education, a (re)consideration of how matter comes to materialize has important consequences for science education in terms of epistemology, ontology, as well as ethics (see Bang & Marin, 2015; Bazzul & Kayumova, 2016; Higgins, 2016; Kayumova, McGuire, & Cardello, 2019; Milne & Scantlebury, 2019). Of particular importance, and a focus in this chapter, is that problem and possibility that ontology is not, and has never been, a singular affair (Barad, 2007). Rather, it is always already plural and becoming differential through the working and reworking of metaphysical cuts (e.g., the norms of bodily production—subjects and objects).

To situate science and science education ontologically requires one to posit *an* ontology, as opposed to simply situating within "ontology" (read: singular). *An* ontology is an ever-partial (i.e., having exclusions) but never relativistic accounting for an always shifting Nature. Barad (2007) reminds us that part of the positing of *an* ontology goes beyond naming *which* ontology is at work: the "accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted" through our metaphysical choices includes "taking the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundaries" (p. 205).

To posit *an* ontology thus requires, as Barad (2010) states, to consider how "science and justice" as well "matter and meaning are not separate elements that intersect now and again" (p. 242). If competing ways-ofknowing-nature are separated from their co-constitutive ontology and required to align with *an* ontology, specifically the ontology of WMS, then what does it mean to account for and being ethically accountable to this new entanglement? What is produced and what is producible?

#### Why Positing an Ontology Matters: Towards Accountability for How Reality Is Understood

The positing of *an* ontology and striving towards accountability for ontological enactments is of importance for scholars working within science education, as well as those which continue to inherit its legacies. To take up the call to posit of *an* ontology would necessarily require moving from questions of epistemology to questions of epistemology *and* ontology, or even onto-epistemology (i.e., the co-constitutive entanglement of knowing and being; see Barad, 2007, 2010)14 to ask the question of how epistemology and ontology come to co-constitute one another.

Thus, returning to the "metaphysical choice" that Cobern and Loving (2008) present, one that asks which scientific epistemology best aligns and correlates with "ontology" (read: singular), it is fair to state that no choice is offered at all. They put forth, "there is simply no other rational way to account for human ability to increase instrumental epistemological power other than that knowledge has the characteristics of verisimilitude, vis-à-vis the real world" (p. 440). Here, because *an* enactment of the "real world" is already chosen by and/or for them, the "rational way" that Cobern and Loving's (2008) "common sense" metaphysical choice suggests is, again, WMS. Rather than present a modest intermediary position, I suggest that Cobern and Loving (2008) simply displace the terms of the multicultural science education debate by (re)presenting them anew, albeit elsewhere (see van Eijck & Roth, 2007).15 However, what occurs to ways-of-knowing-nature that are not WMS when they are asked to "mirror" a Cartesian ontology?

While there have been invitations to position diverse ways-of-knowingnature ontologically, their alignment with the ontology of WMS produces a problematic configuration. It explicitly enunciates and upholds the often-implicit message that approaches other than WMS are lesser means of knowing nature by continuing to not only centre this ontology but also failing to acknowledge that it is but one possible ontological possibility among many. Take for example Siegel's (1997) positioning of diverse ways-of-knowing-nature other than those of WMS:

Science education must … treat members of minority, dominated cultures with respect. And it must treat the scientific ideas of these cultures with respect. But so treating these cultures and their scientific beliefs and ideas does not require those ideas be treated as correct or *as* correct as the scientific ideas of the dominant, hegemonic culture. (p. 101)

Such often unacknowledged and taken-for-granted ontological positioning and posturing continues to have adverse effects on if, and how, TEK and IWLN are included within science education (see Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Sammel, 2009). In short, when TEK and IWLN are articulated within and/or in relation to WMS's ontology, they are not only fragmented but also potentially produced as lesser means of knowing Nature through Cartesianism.

The ontology through which WMS comes to be, Cartesianism, is the classical Western modern ontological process through which meaning and matter are individuated through separation from that which coconstitutes them (e.g., mind/body dualism). TEK and IWLN, due to their particular relational entanglements of matter and meaning, fail to (fully) fit the constructs, categories, and concepts enacted by such an ontology; making Cartesian cuts renders many aspects of TEK and IWLN absent presences (e.g., Nature as agentic; see Cajete, 2006). While many science educators have argued that TEK and IWLN stand up to the terms of WMS (e.g., validity, reliability, empirical observation, repeatability), they never stand up as well as WMS on WMS' terms (Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Cajete, 1994, 2000). Furthermore, such a deficit-based framing (i.e., how it fails to fit WMS's epistemological and ontological enactments) obscures the importance distinctions, as well as rich contributions that TEK and IWLN have to offer from that which exceeds WMS (e.g., ethics of regeneration, spirituality; see Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Cajete, 1994, 2000).

TEK and IWLN's alignment with Cartesianism will always result in theories that are viewed as not "*as* correct as the scientific ideas of the dominant, hegemonic culture" (Siegel, 1997, p. 101, emphasis in original). They fail to cleanly fit the separate and mutually exclusive ontological and epistemological categories established by WMS because TEK and IWLN do not make such clean and clear cuts between epistemology and ontology and their constitutive domains. This is not to state that it is inherently wrong in an absolute sense to centre Cartesianism,16 and that there are not moments in which it is an appropriate ontology to posit (e.g., when considering WMS).17 However, to posit *an* ontology is to be held accountable to the patterns of difference, the lines of inclusion/exclusion that are produced through the "metaphysical choice[s]" that we make. Thus, to posit *an* ontology invites a differential consideration and an ongoing accounting for and ethical accountability to the ontological norms through which TEK and IWLN have been included or excluded from science education. To posit *an* ontology also invites a curricular investigation of how diverse knowledges are ontologically situated and produced, without needing to resort to relativism (see McKinley, 2007).

#### Positing An(Other-Than-Cartesian) Ontology: Towards Ontological Pluralism in Science Education

One does not make the subject matter relevant by starting with an unchanged traditional curriculum and coating scientific facts with "relevant examples" to make them go down easier. *In teaching for agential literacy, science is understood (not "in context") but in complex intra*-*action with other practices*. (Barad, 2000, p. 238, emphasis in original)

To posit *an* ontology within science education is to recognize that diverse ways-of-knowing-nature are not simply different ways of reaching the same ontological goal within the oft taken-for-granted or unacknowledged ontology of Cartesianism. Teaching a culturally pluralistic science classroom must go beyond the "candy coating" of the standard ontological account, "starting with an unchanged traditional curriculum and coating scientific facts with 'relevant examples' to make them go down easier" (Barad, 2000, p. 238). Rather, thinking with Barad (2000), if we are to teach in a way that encourages students to understand waysof-knowing-nature as the enacted entanglement of epistemology and ontology, then we must come to understand them as complex and coconstituted practices. In part, this entails pedagogical exploration of diverse ways-of-knowing alongside the ways-of-being that co-constitute them (e.g., Barad, 2000).

To posit *an* ontology is significant within the multicultural science education debate, and beyond, because it can be said that, using the language of the ontological turn, matter has *always* mattered to Indigenous peoples in the ways in which they come to know Nature (i.e., TEK and IWLN). In other words, Indigenous peoples have never fully enacted the nature/culture binary (i.e., the mutually exclusive bracketing of nature and culture) that is commonly accepted as a defining characteristic of Western modernity, its ontology of Cartesianism, and WMS (see Bang & Marin, 2015; Cajete, 1994, 1999, 2000; Peat, 2002). For example, Cajete (2000) highlights the ways in which animal-human relationships conventionally map onto Nature/Culture breaks down within Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being:

Most Native languages do not have a specific word for 'animals.' Rather, when animals are referred to they are called by their specific names. That fact that there are no specific generic words for animals underlines the extent to which animals were considered to interpenetrate with human life. (p. 152)

Beings that are often considered within the realm of Nature (e.g., animals, plants, mountains) have always been agents within the realm of Culture (see Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Bang & Marin, 2015; Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005; Cajete, 1994, 2000). Thus, to posit *an* ontology rather than presenting ontology as singular, universal, and pre-supposed invites a differential consideration of and an ongoing accounting for, and ethical accountability to, the ontological norms through which TEK and IWLN have been included or excluded from science education.

To consider ontological plurality is not a renewed commitment to relativism. Rather, there are multiple and meaningful "points of resonance" (Peat, 2002) between WMS, TEK, and IWLN. Despite these points of resonance between ways-of-knowing-in-being, this is not to suggest that there is *an* external reality that we can differentially access through diverse cultural frames (see Latour, 1993). Again, plurality need not be though and enacted as relativism (see McKinley, 2007). Rather than relativism, to account for and to be accountable to ontological situatedness (i.e., the coconstitutive relation between *an* epistemology and *an* ontology) might be a way of enacting what Barad (2007) asks of a re(con)figured objectivity – an accounting of and for the diverse network of agents, forces, and flows which locally and globally come to produce the scientific phenomena that we seek to explore within science and science education (see also Barad, 2000).

It is nonetheless important to note that science education will be at its most fruitful when it works to engage with spaces of difference between diverse ways-of-knowing-nature to work against the ever-present risk of conflating diverse systems into sameness. This includes, but should not be limited to, the ways in which ontological sameness produces dialectic negation as discussed herein. Accounting for and being accountable to ontological difference is not only ethically significant, but epistemically generative as well: the distinctions within this plurality can help (re)shape rich and robust knowledge traditions, as well as foster the possibility of inter-cultural hybrids that bring with them the best of both worlds (e.g., Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005).

#### Conclusion: Positing an Ontology as an Ethical Call

It is not possible to extricate oneself from ethical concerns and correctly discern what science tells us about the world. Realism, then, is not about representations of an independent reality but about the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within and as part of the world. (Barad, 2007, p. 37)

While it is not "it is not possible to extricate oneself from ethical concerns and correctly discern what science tells us about the world" (Barad, 2007, p. 37), the relationship between science (i.e., knowing nature) and justice (i.e., respecting diverse cultural knowledges) often continues to be dichotomized within the context of science education. This make it such that the debate between the pre-dominant universalist and crossculturalist positions rarely produces productive intermediary positions from which to fully take up both of these competing claims in the ways in which they are articulated. While there is a responsibility to be simultaneously accountable to both *how we know* and *who we teach* in science education, such should not foreclose the ability to respond. However, the entangled binary framings between Nature and Culture, epistemology and ontology, realism and ethics are notably framings: configurations open to being reconfigured.18 As Barad (2007) invites, *realism* need not strictly be an epistemological question but can also be about the "real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities" (p. 37) that come with teaching and learning within science education.

Here, part of this ontological homework of response-ability is learning to account for and being accountable to the "incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness" (Barad, 2010, p. 265) that many science educators inherit: Cartesianism and the Nature/Culture cut that it enacts. Given that the Nature/Culture binary makes science and cultural politics incommensurable (see Latour, 2004b), response-ability requires "an iterative (re)opening up to, an enabling of responsiveness" towards other-than-Cartesian possibilities. Thankfully, as Latour (1993) reminds, the Nature/Culture binary is never fully achieved or achievable. "We Have Never Been Modern", as the eponymous title of Latour's (1993) book proclaims, there is always already the possibility for knowing-in-being otherwise.

Towards this end within this chapter, I tinkered with Cobern and Loving's (2008) suggestion that the primary and almost exclusive focus on epistemologies within the multicultural science debate has detracted from considerations of how epistemology aligns with ontology. As is demonstrated herein, Cobern and Loving use this (re)signified naturalcultural interplay to make a stronger case for universalism (i.e., "Epistemic Realism Really is Common Sense" [p. 425]). However, in using and troubling their claim, there is the possibility for something else to emerge from this insight by differentially engaging with it, particularly if we also take seriously the notion that ontology is not a singular affair. Such differential arrangement can support us to recognize plurality can be achieved not by refuting Cobern and Loving's claim but rather by (re)situating it within *a* context: *an* epistemology of epistemic realism (i.e., the epistemology of WMS) really does align best with *an* ontology of Cartesianism (i.e., the ontology of WMS). To recognize that Cartesianism is but *an* ontology creates space in which WMS achieves "distinction not privilege" (Cobern & Loving, 2008, p. 444), not requiring universalists' claims of onto-epistemic alignment to be refuted.

Notably, this potential for science without scientism requires science educators' response-ability towards positing *an* ontology, accounting for, as well as being accountable towards how it is produced and what it produces. Given science education's norms and history of inclusion/exclusion around traditional ecological knowledges and Indigenous ways-of-living-with-nature, positing *an* ontology invites a (re)consideration of science education's complimentary and supplementary spaces of knowing nature. Specifically, this calls for a renewed engagement with TEK and IWLN: they have their own distinct ontoepistemological alignments or entanglements, positing *an* ontology calls for an ethical response-ability to account for the relational ontologies which come to constitute them rather than requiring them to align with Cartesianism. To engage in such ontological pluralism need not rely on ontological or epistemological relativism as there continue to be meaningful patterns of differentiation and similarity that can be productively engaged with (see McKinley, 2007).

I conclude this chapter with further questions about the space of ethical response-ability offered by positing *an* ontology: if how we think (e.g., Nature/Culture binary) is the very thing preventing forward momentum within the multicultural science education debate, how do we think about how we think without using the very thing with which we think? How might science educators move towards ethical responseability when responsibility is not something that we simply *have* that pre-exists our engagements but rather is also something by which *we are had*, that is produced in its complex flow through and by us? What further *home*work might allow us to be accountable to how we are always already (re)produced by science education as educators? Similarly, how can we foster response-ability to what we produce within the everchanging field of possible possibilities of science education (as part of the world's ongoing becoming)? Lastly, what types of theory-practices might facilitate the im/possible but necessary accounting for what our onto-epistemological enactments produce within science education?19 Response-ability, as Barad (2010) reminds, is not achieved "through the realization of some existing possibility, but through the iterative reworking of im/possibility" (p. 265). While there is no singular solution to such questions, positing *an* ontology paves pathways to engage with the im/possibility of being wholly accountable and ethically responsive. To reiterate, situating science education ontologically by positing *an* ontology is not about who is right or who is wrong, nor is it about a renewed commitment to relativism. Rather, it is about coming-torecognize a plurality of possibilities, and in turn, it means being accountable to how scientific knowledge is produced, produce-able, and what it produces in turn within and beyond the science education classroom. Because "how reality is understood matters" (Barad, 2007, p. 205), the (re)working of lines of inclusion/exclusion that such understandings and enactments produce are always already becoming something else, and this (re)working towards positing *an* ontology is an ethical call which we must all heed, albeit differently.

## Notes

education, but refusing to use them in intended ways; or, (b) putting to work tools and techniques not intended for use within science education (see Higgins, Wallace, & Bazzul, 2018 for exemplars of this in STEM education).

Further, the invitation within this chapter signals the ways in which metaphysics of Western modernity makes itself common, to the extent that it is often, and (too) simply, referred to as common sense. For example, the (neo-)colonial desire for and production of *origins* (see TallBear, 2013). Within the metaphysics of clôture, the process is rendered one and the same as its product (see Derrida, 1976). This is to say that origins are treated as if they were and could only singular in nature: this is their ontological status (where ontology here is to be read exclusively as the Being of beings). To say the least, this makes it difficult to account for and be accountable to the agencies that are active in the production of *an* origin. For example, TallBear's (2013) research complicates the common sensical notion that who Indigenous people *are* (Being) originates in their DNA. She does this not only by offering an Indigenous conception of Being that is (ontologically) relational, but calling into question the ways in which this "common" (read: made common through colonialism) sense shapes problematic extractivist genetic practices (i.e., taking genetic samples from Indigenous peoples to save them, rooted in an image of "vanishing Indian" that is disassociated from Western modernity's complicity in the production of this image, or the genocides which may have come to inform it).

Which is to say, yet again, that we, who identify and are identifiable as science educators, are already within relation with Indigeneity, even if most of us are not Indigenous; that deferring and differing *an* origin is not strictly a theoretical move for theory's sake, but one that has effects that come to matter, in both senses of the word.

7. Reminder from the previous chapter that *equally valid* does not signify that TEK and IWLN achieve equivalence or sameness with WMS, and particularly not necessarily on the same terms. Rather that they offer something that is of differently significant and productive (see Aikenhead & Ogawa, 2007).

8. Latour (2004b) reminds that *common sense* and *good sense* are often opposed rather than one and the same. However, he goes on to suggest that if the "good-ness" of sense is pre-supposed, the possibility of meaning being made through *common understanding* (i.e., dialogue) rather than *made common* through dialectic is (fore)closed.

Also, the question of how this particular "common sense" is produced and what it produces in turn is taken up in far greater detail in the latter, and more substantive, half of this section (i.e., Chapter 6).

9. This is to be differentiated from the taken-for-granted relationship that Barad (2000) alerts us to: one in which scientific literacy is perceived as always already ethical. As she states, it is often assumed that:

[There is an] equivalence relation between the possession of scientific knowledge and being socially responsible [that] is often implicit in discussions about scientific literacy: this is the notion that familiarity with the facts and the methods of science is all that is required for socially responsible decision-making concerning science- and technology-related issues. (Barad, 2000, p. 227)

This ontological pre-determination of ethicality masks the ways in which the (im)possibility of ethics is never fully achieved or achievable as well as how science and science education must always remain ethically on the move and vigilant to respond to an ever-evolving set of ethical problems and possibilities (see also Roth, 2003).

10. With experience being a central concept here, as well as the larger field of education, it is important to recognize that we may not all be referring to the same understanding and enactment of the concept: experience comes to take many forms (above and beyond its doubly settled meaning).

For example, *being had* by experience might signal at once the ways in which experience "gets the best of us," as well as the ways in which we might not "have" experiences (as possession). Rather, due to not "having" a static body of meaning or matter (i.e., the meaning and matter which makes us is never fully ours; distributed agency; see Barad, 2007; Butler, 2005; Chapter 2 on moving beyond the "I" as subject of ethics and inquiry). What remains from experiences (e.g., learnings), when we are had by them, are the marks left on our body (of meaning and matter) from the intensities and flows within the multiple assemblages we find ourselves in and the affective movement of meaning, matter, spirit with/in/around the re(con)figured body we are part of (see Apffel-Marglin, 2011).

11. Notably, particular universalism dictates how Nature operates without Nature's consent (see Barad, 2007, 2012). As Latour (1993) and Cajete (1994, 2000) state, this double(d) othering of Nature and of other-than-Western cultures are not separate nor separable enactments but rather differential enactments of the same, intertwined through a practice of cultural "transcendence" in which WMS sees itself as neither having a culture nor being part of Nature.

At the same time, a significant part of the homework of responseability is work to within and against the language that we inherit, here it is that of science (e.g., here, drawing from critical science studies), as a means of simultaneously coming-to-know the location from which knowledge is constructed and (re)opening the ability to respond. Further, as Kuokkanen (2007) invites, including the work of (relatively) wellknown scholars into the conversation can "summon" connections and connectivities that might otherwise dismiss questions and considerations of Indigeneity. Lastly, as Spivak (1994) reminds, to denegate a particular theory or approach based on its cultural location alone can create habits in which we too simply dismiss what a particular theory might offer (particularly in terms of undoing its own situationality) while simultaneously uncritically embrace theories from the "correct" location. This has the likely unintended, but not unproblematic effect, of leaving many off-thehook if the implicit message that they are inherently incapable of escaping their own positionality: this is not insignificant considering that the field of science education is mostly based in a Western training in science and that there are many who are white (and/or are complicit in whiteness).

14. Onto-epistemology can neither be adequately referred to as both ontology *and* epistemology, nor the two as one, but rather a state of superposition and co-constitution (see Barad, 2007, 2010).

## References

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 It remains before us just unquestionably as we are heirs…, even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we are in mourning… *To be*, this word… means, …to inherit. All of the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance. (Derrida, 1994/2006, p. 76, emphasis in original)

Before getting on to the work of positing *an*(other) ontology that might be more commensurate with Indigenous science (to-come) in the next chapter of this book, the purpose of this chapter is to continue the task undertaken in the previous chapter: tinkering with/in the multicultural science education debate using ontology towards a more response-able science education. As "all of the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance" (Derrida, 1994/2006, p. 76), the task of this chapter is to engage in the *historical* homework of response-ability by archaeologically digging into the historicity and operationalization of our ontological inheritance: Cartesianism. In order to investigate the question of *what might it mean to account for and be accountable to* an *ontology of Cartesianism?*, we must also ask productively entangled questions such as: *How, where, and when*

© The Author(s) 2021 M. Higgins, *Unsettling Responsibility in Science Education*, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61299-3\_6 211 *did Cartesianism as "common sense" become common? How was Cartesianism produced?, How did we come to inherit Cartesianism?,* and *What does it make producible?* These questions bear significance as Cartesianism is not only the ontology of WMS, but also deeply shapes the ways in which science education *attempts* to engage with the very ways-ofknowing-in-being that it continues to Other. We are its inheritors in science education, "even before wanting or refusing to be" (Derrida, 1994/2006, p. 76)—our relation to this ontology is irreducible, whether we acknowledge it or not, desire it or not. To account for and be accountable to Cartesianism is part and parcel of science education's homework of response-ability: this ontology lingers and lurks even as we attempt to move within, against, and beyond it. To leave Cartesianism unaddressed risks rendering decolonizing moves, de/colonizing.1

Thus, in order to continue this tinkering (i.e., using that which might be intended for other uses) with ontological absent presences, I trace our ontological *inheritance*. Specifically, how multiple *there*-*thens* of Cartesian "origins"2 are haunt the *here*-*now* of science education: passed over pasts which constitute our inheritance. However, inheritance and responsibility are irreducibly related: "there is no inheritance without a call to responsibility" (Derrida, 1994/2006, p. 114). It is call to engage in "creative archeology, a performative reinvention, of the received wisdoms that constitute our cultural inheritance" (Kirby, 2012, p. 198) which (re)produces who science educators *are* and *can be*. It is to engage in the homework of response-ability with attentiveness to our history; particularly, the ways in which past is not yet past and should not be passed over.

Significantly, "inheritance is never *given*, it is always a task" (Derrida, 1994/2006, p. 67, emphasis in original): the task of inheritance is not one that is straightforward when our onto-epistemic inheritances present themselves as absent presences, normalized and naturalized through centuries of Eurocentric thought and colonial practice (such as is the case in science education; see Higgins & Tolbert, 2018).3 Thus, to engage with the task of (re)opening the norms of responsiveness towards Indigenous science to-come, attention is brought to how Cartesianism plays, has played, and will play an active role in the (fore)closure of response-ability: the task of inheritance. To undertake this ontological homework of response-ability, I draw from a series of expert interviews with Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin's that unpack the historical, geographical, political, economic, and religious forces of the "birth of modernity" and reveal the ways in which this "common sense" went from being uncommon to common and continues to persist. In turn, these insights are read, or more specifically diffracted, through the multicultural science education debate in order to (re)open the space for responsiveness therein. In thinking with Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, I make the argument that the *making common* of Cartesianism not only (fore)closes the possible possibilities for responding to Indigenous science to-come, but also to account for and be accountable to the ontology of WMS and what it produces.

Before this diffractive reading, I present a positional vignette to both introduce the work to come and my (co-constitutive) relation to the work herein. A methodological section on (re)thinking expert interview diffractively follows.

## Pathways of Chance: Encountering Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin

What if we leave room in our lives for chance and the unexpected?…. Instead of seeing' one's life planned out into the future like a vast highway, life only makes sense to us when we look back to the past and see the path we have taken with all its diversion, U-turns and side roads. There may have been no fixed plan for the future but looking back at the map of one's life journey it almost seems as if there had indeed been a goal all along, but a goal that had been concealed at every step of the way. (Peat, 2007, pp. 15–16)

Because we must "begin" some-where and some-time, let's "begin" in Lamas, Peru in June of 2013.4 Then and there, I would have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Frédérique Appfel-Marglin on her work around deconstructing the metaphysics of modernity as well as what can be learned through attending to ritualized action. For me, this would be what Peat (2007) refers to as a "pathway of chance".

As Peat (2007) elaborates in his "little" autobiography, our lived experiences cannot be mapped so easily: we are always walking along pathways of chance. A probabilistic approach might see us treading common paths more often than those uncommon. However, when we encounter the uncommon "do we compensate as best we can in an attempt to remain on our predetermined track?" (p. 15). Peat suggests that if "we leave room in our lives for chance and the unexpected" (p. 15), we may come to encounter new relationships as well as old relations anew. Such encounters can gently inflect our life's journey or throw into new directions altogether, into unanticipated spaces and places that we may only be able to make sense of in retrospect, if at all. Just as Peat's life was thrown into another orbit altogether through meeting his mentor-to-be David Bohm, as well as the Blackfoot peoples (and Blackfoot scholars like Leroy Little Bear), my encountering Dr. Frédérique Appfel-Marglin was a meeting of the latter pivotal type.

I first textually encountered the work of Dr. Apffel-Marglin in the fall of 2010 during an assigned reading in a graduate class on Indigenous education within her edited collection *The Spirit of Regeneration*. This opened my eyes to the incredibly useful potential of thinking about questions of (neo-)coloniality and Indigeneity anew by considering the global South and those working with the global South when thinking about and with questions of de/colonizing education. I would not meet her in person until the spring of 2012, during an invited talk at the University of British Columbia. During this talk, she was showcasing her (then recently released) book *Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World* that, as she states, was "the fruit of a lifetime of anthropological practice" (Apffel-Marglin, 2011, p. 7). Centring the pedagogical potentiality of ritual enactments, the purpose of the talk and of her book, as she states:

is an effort to articulate the nature of the kinds of beings I spoke with and gave gifts to in rituals. Here I attempt to articulate for people like myself what my new manner of practicing rituals has revealed to me about our (i.e., the modernist) way of representing reality. (Apffel-Marglin, 2011, p. 8)

Her life's work has not only focused on understanding ritual enactments, but also what ritual enactments reveal about Western modern ways-ofknowing-in-being (e.g., how Western modernity produces matter and meaning and what these in turn produce). Thus, during this talk, she spoke of "twin journeys" which are highly commensurate with Battiste's (2013a, 2013b) conception of decolonizing as deconstruction and reconstruction: a double(d) reversal which she referred to as "reverse anthropology":

By "reverse anthropology," I do not mean [strictly] engaging in ethnographic research on some aspect of American or European culture or society. Rather, I mean an understanding of the processes that have brought about our way of seeing reality – all of it, not just a single, particular aspect. By "our way of seeing reality," I mean what we take for granted; by "we" I mean people like me, educated in the modern educational system that by now is hegemonic and thus no longer tied to any specific region or ethnic group; by "reality" I mean things as fundamental as time, space, and nature as opposed to culture, the human person, and so forth. (Apffel-Marglin, 2011, p. 11)

In other words, this double(d) reversal entails both the literal reversal of studying those who do the studying (i.e., in order to reverse the direction of the ethnographic gaze), as well as the study of the way in which those who do the studying study (i.e., in order to reverse the way in which the ethnographic gaze is produced). It is a differential means of working towards thinking without the thing with which we cannot think without (Lather, 2007). Furthermore, this double(d) reversal is not without significance: to make rituals and the insights they provide "understandable and credible requires nothing less than a deconstruction of the modernist onto-epistemology" (Apffel-Marglin, 2011, p. 14) which render ritual *Other*. These include addressing a constellation of interconnected concepts enacted through practice, including the separation of Church and State in most Western modern contexts as well as the multiplicitous ways in which most non-Western, non-modern ritualized spiritual enactments are often exoticized and branded as "irrational animism" (see also Cajete, 1994, 2000; Marker, 2006). In order to make space for spirituality, she delivered a rich and robust critique of modernity, its teleology of progress, and its narrative of development by coming at modernity via multiple angles: social, political, religious, military, historical, and economic. From here, she laboured within, against, and beyond modernity by employing a reconstructive frame that interfaced quantum ontologies (to work within and against modernity) and Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being (to work within and beyond modernity). This framework was primarily offered as a way to think and enact the world otherwise through ritualized action.

Turning towards Dr. Apffel-Marglin's work around ritualized actions that "enact the world in concert with its humans, non-humans, and otherthan-humans" (Apffel-Marglin, 2011, p. 15) might seem uncommon for a science educator or within science education. Apffel-Marglin (2011), like Peat (2002, 2007), reminds that it is always important to remain open to knowledge outside of one's particular disciplinary pathway. She highlights the importance of being inter- or trans-disciplinary as "it has the distinct advantage of being less prey to the tacit knowledge hidden in entrenched fields and subfields of European studies and in particular in the boundaries creating such fields and subfields" (p. 14). However, there were far more spaces of potential connection and commonality than I had or could envision at the time of first encountering her work. For one, ritualized action has many connections to how IWLN are articulated:

Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating, creating, and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind the humans that the world is not for humans' exclusive use. It is the other-than-humans who make clear to the humans that human desires are not the only ones. In other words, they make clear that humans are not the masters of this world, and in turn that this world is not agency-less and voiceless, a sum of natural resources to be indefinitely mined to feed the supposedly infinite desires of human beings. (Apffel-Marglin, 2011, p. 6)

These formalized processes and protocols of and for communal (inter- )being have the aim of (re)generating and the sustaining of "the iterations of the cycles of life" (p. 41), reminding that we are not passive observers outside of the world but rather active participants within. Similarly, with respect to Indigenous science, Cajete (1994) states that:

Scientists study the tracks of subatomic particles that exist only a millionth of a second. They find the human observer influences the energy relationships and even the nature of existence of these subatomic particles. Humans do participate with everything else even at this level of natural reality. Indigenous people understood this relationship of human activity as concentric rings that extend into the spirit realm. (Cajete, 1994, p. 55)

As Cajete articulates further, "it is no accident that learning and teaching unfolded in the context of spirituality in practically every aspect of traditional American Indian [Indigenous] education" (Cajete, 1994, p. 41). If I found many productive points of resonance with Frédérique Apffel-Marglin's work, and could learn much form her, it is because the degrees of separation between the spaces we, respectively, attempt to foster were far smaller than disciplinary borders presented at first. Furthermore, and of equal importance, the locations that Dr. Apffel-Marglin laboured within and against in order to make space for Indigenous ritualized enactments were even closer: as this involved critically inhabiting and tinkering within the spaces of and related to WMS. There was much I could and can still learn from her life's labour in this arena.

Encountering Dr. Apffel-Marglin was an unexpected turn along my own personal pathways of chance; it was an encounter that subverted the very ways in which I could be in the world, I could not (not) take up what she had offered. This (re)ignited my own interest in metaphysics, the cross-cultural space between Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being and quantum ontologies, as well as the importance in coming-to-know the very space that I am operating within and against to allow for a possible possibility of there being a beyond. This encounter also sparked my imagination with respect to the educational possibilities laying therein, which come to inform the later chapters of the book. It so happened that Drs. Peter Cole and Pat O'Riley were hosting a University of British Columbia summer institute in Peru the summer after which Dr. Apffel-Marglin visited the University of British Columbia to give her talk. This would be located at the Sachamama Center that she ran, located in the San Martin Department of Peru and on the ancestral territories of the Kichwa-Lamista peoples. Attending this summer institute meant that there would be a possibility to engage with Dr. Apffel-Marglin in person but also a possibility of holding an expert interview.5 Sensing an opportunity that should not be missed, I had a desire to document to allow for these rich teachings to disperse: I would interview Frédérique as part of a tinkering process in which I did and would not know the end result. In turn, I sent out an invitation to do so; the same day, she replied: "I would be delighted to participate in a dialogue or interview with you and very much look forward to it" (Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marlin, personal communication, February 14th 2013).

## Tinkering with/in Expert Interview: De/Signing Research Methodology

Wanting to recognize Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marlin's "lifetime of anthropological practice" (Apffel-Marglin, 2011, p. 7), the methodological structure with which I sought to tinker was that of expert interview. As Bogner, Littig, and Menz (2009) state, "there is no such thing as *the* expert interview" (p. 6, emphasis in original). Rather, they are differential inflections on more general interview practices that predominantly hinge upon conceptual considerations of "what counts" as "expert", "expert knowledge", as well as what the aims and purposes of an expert interviews might be. Thus, expert interview presents itself as a methodological structure that is constituted by the ways in which the key concepts are understood and enacted. As Bogner et al. (2009) frame, a topology of expert interviews would primarily include, but would not be limited to: (a) expert interview as exploratory, to provide orientation into further inquiry; (b) expert interview as systematic retrieval, to acquire "expert knowledge" from an "expert", and; (c) expert interview as theory-generating interactive exchange.

Working towards the third type entails working within and against the second type: where notions of *fact* and *fairy* come to haunt accounts as adequately or inadequately *mirroring* reality (see Chapter 4), putting into question the status of and possibility of ever achieving "expert" and "expert knowledge".

Regardless of what might be myth and what is reality, the anticipated promise of rapid and unproblematic access to objective data makes expert interviews an extremely appealing option for empirical social researchers. But is the expert interview method really quite so simple and uncomplicated? If so, does this then render methodological considerations superfluous? Or are expert interviews in some ways just too tempting? Do they not – in their naïve belief in the totality of expert knowledge – harbour the danger of advocating a pre-reflexive definition of what constitutes an expert? (Bogner et al., p. 2)

In turn, the practice of methodological tinkering continues to bear importance and relevance6: methodology is always already a space with/in which to tinker with purpose but without guarantee.

Expert interview as methodology would require tinkering with so that it was not presented as *the* truth, but rather a truth with which to think; a truth through which could be productively inflected or with which others could be diffracted (see Chapter 4). As such, I worked towards achieving this through three interconnected rounds of tinkering: before, during, and after. Before, I tinkered with the content of the expert interview. During, the expert interview tinkered with itself in its enactment. After, I tinker with the (re)presentation of the expert interview by pulling from insights generated through the theory-generating exchange.

#### *Before: Tinkering with/in Expert Interview Content*

When designing the series of expert interview questions, the original intent was to create a three-part expert interview series that would differentially represent three major themes or threads that were being pulled through Dr. Apffel-Marglin's 2011 book *Subversive Spiritualities.* Namely, these themes were: (a) her methodology of reverse anthropology; (b) working within and against Cartesianism, and lastly; (c) working beyond Cartesianism by considering the spaces of ritualized enactments. In other words, the interviews as designed were not to repeat that which was already there, but rather tinker within the already existing narratives in Frédérique's book to connect differently, more loosely, to allow for the possibility of something else to emerge.

This began with the notion that despite the cohesive and complete appearance of the narratives within her book, like any and every text, they were and continue to be open to being tinkered with/in.7 Consisting of loosely assembled partial, situated, and relational meanings, *any* and *every* narrative is but a series of meanings that are held together by "scandalous sutures" (Derrida, 1976): what Spivak refers to as the "rage for unity" (Spivak, 1976, p. xvi). Thus, narratives are always already open to being irrupted, ruptured, and torn asunder in order to differentially sequence its frayed and fraught meanings to produce new narratives which, in turn, never achieve unity. Thus, when I was developing the questions for the interview that is featured within this chapter, I centred her work on the entangled political, economic, religious, scientific, and military practices that led to the birth and operationalization of Modernity within Western Europe. I gripped and pulled at these threads from her book *Subversive Spiritualities* to (re)constitute a narrative around this theme. However, in practice, this narrative was never fully achieved either, as the very practice of expert interview exceeds itself to produce something that is within and beyond the narrative framework available to it.

#### *During: Expert Interview Tinkering with/in Itself*

In practice, expert interviews come to be an enactment or practice that *is* and *is not* its research design: both the expected and the unexpected come into proximal relation to de/sign any possible expert interview methodology design. The arguments that scholars make in interviews are always situated within a real and/or imagined scene of address: what is said, what can be said, and how it is said is always in part produced and producible in relation to the audience to which it is intended as well as the constellation of concepts which are entangled with/in (see Chapter 4 on the prism; see also Butler, 2005; Kirby, 2011). To elaborate upon this point, Judith Butler in an interview with Vicky Kirby speaks to how possibilities of ever shifting cultural and natural norms dis/allow modes of being critical:

I think perhaps mainly in gender Trouble I overemphasize the priority of culture over nature… At the time of Gender Trouble, … it seemed to me that there was a cultural use of 'natural' arguments to provide legitimacy for natural genders or natural heterosexuality. But that criticism did not take into account of a nature that might be, as it were, beyond the nature/cultural divide, one that is not immediately harnessed for the aims of certain kinds of cultural legitimation practices. (Butler in Kirby, 2011, p. 93)8

Expert interviews are then a site for things to be thought *anew*, albeit not for the first time, within a differing web of relationships that comes to bear with differing intensities.

At the Sachamama Center in Peru, where the three interviews of roughly two hours with Frédérique occurred, each interview became an opportunity for something that *was* and *was not* her book *Subversive Spiritualities*: no two "readings" are ever the (self-)same (see Spivak, 1976). Dr. Apffel-Marglin and I, but her more so than I, narratively pulled at the anticipated threads differently in order to make new meanings: that which was already came to be in new relations by differentially centring how they were included or excluded, and to which degree. While the questions generated were derived from her book, this did not constrain the interviews, especially towards the end of the interviews. The expert interview alternated from being within the script, to being exceeded by the script, from being an expert interview to a dialogue in which I was also a participant: what Bogner and colleagues (2009) refer to as a "quasi-expert". This participation was nonetheless shaped by the relational *elsewheres* and *elsewhens* that exist within and beyond the interview (e.g., Frédérique's reading recommendations might be an inflection of a teacher–student relation held in other spaces). Furthermore, comfortably seated outside her modest abode within the Sachamama centre, Frédérique and I were also often audibly joined by other members of the ecology of relationships that shaped that place: the birds chirping, the dogs barking at one another through the nearby fence, the traditional Peruvian three-piece band practising down the road, the wind, among other things. These other-than-human beings that she refers to so often in her book *Subversive Spiritualities* were not simply metaphorically signified and absent, but were rather physically present and active agents in the production of the interview (Higgins & Madden, 2019; see also Barad, 2007, 2010; Cajete, 1994, 2000).

#### *After: Tinkering with/in Expert Interview (Re)Presentation*

As the interview with Dr. Apffel-Marglin presents a partial, situated, yet rich and nuanced account of how Cartesianism is produced and producible, the interview itself invites other ways of being (re)presented within, against, and beyond Cartesianism. Accordingly, I turn to Barad (2007)'s post-Cartesian extension of diffraction as metaphor for methodology to inform how I work with Frédérique's interview.

Recall that for Barad (2007), diffraction asks us to consider where the agencies of observation begin and where they end, what is included, what is excluded, what matters, and what comes to materialize. Important to note here is that, for Barad (2007), the experimental apparatus through which any phenomena manifests is never simply a material tool or a discursive concept, but also includes multiple material and discursive agencies of observation, and extends to include each of their respective material and discursive historicities. This network of bodies of meaning and matter become the experimental apparatus through a differential enactment of the norms of bodily production. As such, these bodies do not simply interact between one another, but rather *intra*-*act* within this re(con)figured body which is the experimental apparatus. Lastly, through intra-action, materiality and discourse, the domains of ontology and epistemology, are not mutually exclusive but rather co-constitutive. Or, as Barad (2007) states "phenomena are differential patterns of mattering ('diffraction patterns') produced through complex agential intra-actions of multiple material-discursive practices or apparatuses of bodily production" (p. 140).

Diffractive methodology is thus a practice of knowing-in-being with/in the production of patterns of difference that emerge when two or more phenomena, or entangled bodies of matter-meaning, are read through one another (Barad, 2007). This is in stark contrast to the optical metaphor of the mirror that operationalizes the production and reproduction of sameness through representationalism. Diffractive methodology is a process of producing, and being responsive and accountable to non-negligible patterns of difference that come to matter when two or more entangled material-discursive phenomena are diffracted through one another. This requires however that "we learn to tune our analytical instruments (that is our diffractive instruments) in a way that is sufficiently attentive to the details of the phenomenon we want to understand" (p. 73) and to pay attention to the fine details that would otherwise be considered negligible with/in conventional scientific and social scientific research methods. Barad (2007) poses diffractive methodology as an engaged and enacted ethico-onto-epistemological research stance that takes seriously the entanglement of ethics, materiality, and discourse as well as the patterns of difference that emerge through their ongoing diffractive intra-action.

Here, diffractive methodology comes to inform the ways in which the ways in which Dr. Apffel-Marglin's interview is read through the multicultural education debate to produce patterns of difference that might come to inform how science education might be thought otherwise. Particularly, as diffraction is about producing differences that matter, there is an emphasis on what it means to be accountable to and for ontologically positioning science with/in Cartesianism. With/in any diffractive methodology, Barad (2007) reminds that:

We are responsible for the cuts that we help enact not because we do the choosing (neither do we escape responsibility because "we" are "chosen" by them), but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe. (p. 178)

One such set of cuts enacted herein are the editorial cuts which come to produce the textual presentation of the work *as* expert interview. In producing the text as an articulation of (quasi-)expertise (e.g., expert as rational subject), many agential engagements have been excised. These include, but are not limited to, the now-absent presences of other-thanhumans (e.g., dogs, wind), other humans (e.g., those labouring at the Sachamama Center), human-other-than-human hybrids (e.g., Peruvian three-piece band, blaring radio), as well as moments in which speech is interrupted by thoughtful pauses, stuttering, stammering, *ums* and *ahs*. Both Frédérique and I have engaged in this act of narrative "cleaning" in order to produce a text that might be more cohesive, and intelligible as expert interview, to an audience to-come.9

Furthermore, the interview that follows is split into four parts. The cuts enacted here are emergent (i.e., a "choice" that emerges with/in relations that extend beyond me; see Barad, 2007), producing rich patterns of resonance and divergence when read through the multicultural science education debate. There is nonetheless a cautionary note that different cuts produce and make possible a different set of meaningmaking phenomena, this is but one possible possibility or configuration. Each cut is divided into two smaller parts: the interview with Frédérique always preceding the later diffractive analysis.

To give a quick overview of content addressed by Dr. Apffel-Marglin, the first cut, *Nature/ Culture*, addresses how she understands this dichotomy with respect to her own field of anthropology as well as how she strategically goes about addressing it. The second cut, *Descartes, Boyle, and Newton*, speaks to three important figureheads not only in the development of Cartesianism, but also the ways in which they operationalize it. The third cut, *The enclosure, the double*-*sided ledger, and the laboratory*, situates Cartesianism with/in the material practices of Western Modern Europe with which it could not be disentangled and which lead to its operationalization. The fourth and final cut, *The modest witness, when One Truth becomes two, and the Thirty Years' War*, positions the practices of the individual within the scientific laboratory within a larger and uneasy socio-political context.

## Diffracting an Interview with Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin: On the (Re)Production and Operationalization of Cartesianism and What It Produces

#### *First Cut: Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin on Nature/Culture*

*M. HIGGINS*: Within your 2011 book *Subversive Spiritualities*, you speak to the multiple dichotomies (e.g., mind/body, male/female, colonizer/colonized) that you are working within and against in order to enact a double(d) reversal of anthropology (i.e., subverting the gaze as well as the concepts, categories, and constructs through which the anthropological gaze operates). Recognizing that to disrupt one binary is to disrupt others that are related to it (see Barad, 2010; Lather, 2007; St. Pierre, 2011a), one of the key dichotomies that you center in your work is that of Nature/Culture. Could you quickly describe how you understand Culture and Nature within this binary pairing?

*F. APFFEL-MARGLIN*: I have to preface what I'm going to say by saying that my understanding is totally coloured by training as an anthropologist; so what you are getting is the view that currently still, I could say, operates within anthropology. Anthropology has really made the term Culture what it is, so I should begin with that. Before anthropology defined the term Culture as we know it today during the turn from the nineteenth to twentieth century, culture was something held by a "cultured person". This usually entailed people going to the symphony, to the fine arts museum, to classical plays; that is what having culture meant. It is still used like that by people who are not reading anthropology; it is still used vernacularly like that. However, anthropology has democratized the term such that it means that everyone, anywhere in the world, has culture and that anthropologized meaning of "culture" has deeply penetrated our vernacular language. There are no people in the world that do not have culture. It is human to have culture, just as it is human to have language and to speak. Furthermore, language and culture are totally integral to one another.

Anthropology, as a discipline, takes as its object of study Culture. Studying "culture" is what anthropologists do, and the discipline has developed an understanding of Culture as an exclusive dichotomy. By exclusive dichotomy, I mean the following: that Nature is what Culture is not and Culture is what Nature is not. They determine each other negatively. It is very important to understand what that means and why it is significant. Exclusivity means that there is an absolute boundary between the two terms. While there are a plethora of dichotomies that enact a tension between two poles in which things move from one pole to the other relating to each other as a continuum, that is not the case with an exclusive dichotomy. That is a very different kettle of fish. I call the former polarities, or sometimes simply dichotomies, and the latter exclusive dichotomies. While there are exclusive dichotomies as well as plain dichotomies or polarities I reserve the term dualism to refer to exclusive dichotomies. The Nature/Culture exclusive dichotomy can be said to have dominated the field of anthropology.

*M. HIGGINS*: Within your book, you address the notion that the first term of any dichotomy is dominant over the latter, and that this is achieved and upheld, as you mention through a metaphysics of mutual exclusivity and separation. Usually this entails that the first term is constructed in opposition to the second, making the latter its abject other or its object of lack. What consequence does this bear upon Nature as well as those who are considered "natured" (i.e., rather than "cultured")? Furthermore, how has this been troubled?

*F. APFFEL-MARGLIN*: The troubling of the Nature/Culture dichotomy has always been important within the second wave of feminism and beyond. Feminism is an important site for this troubling because women in the Western traditions, such as Christianity and Judaism (except for the mystical traditions), have been associated with Nature (i.e., defined in opposition to Culture).

Within anthropology, this exclusive dichotomy has started to be troubled around the notion of gender, especially by a wonderful British woman anthropologist, Marylin Strathern. She does this work in her book *The Gender of the Gift* on her fieldwork within Melanesia. That was an early book that really is brilliant in troubling the relationship between gender, Culture, and Nature. Following this, more and more scholars in anthropology have troubled this exclusive dichotomy. Interestingly enough, in feminist approaches to anthropology, there is, from my point of view, a sharp divide between those who reject the troubling of that dualism and those who trouble it. The most well-known of those who reject the troubling of the Nature/Culture dichotomy is Sherry Ortner. Ortner maps the relations of male/female onto Nature/Culture. In her widely influential essay "Is Female to Male as Nature to Culture?", she simply takes it for granted that the Nature/Culture dualism is of the same kind as the female/male one; she assumes that there is such a division and that you can map gender on it.

This gender mapping has been crucial in exploring the Cartesian-Boylian-Newtonian paradigm. This is the work of Donna Haraway and, also extremely importantly, of Shapin and Schaffer on Hobbes and the air pump. So the whole Nature/Culture dualism is completely entangled with gender issues, and debates in feminism. That's why I was, from day one, deeply and personally involved.

#### *F. APFFEL-MARGLIN*: Exactly.

#### *First Cut—Nature/Culture and the Multicultural Science Education Debate*

As Dr. Apffel-Marglin's segmented interview is diffracted with the multicultural science education debate, it comes to produce particular patterns of dynamic resonance and dissonance with one another around three key nodes: (a) Nature/Culture as mutually exclusive dichotomy; (b) problematic natural-cultural hybrids (e.g., "naturalized facts") and, (c) productively using natural-cultural hybrids.

The notion of Nature/Culture as mutually exclusive has much bearing on both the fields of anthropology and science. It is the "foundational" cut of Western modernity that puts both fields into dynamic and resonating relationality (Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Barad, 2007; Kirby, 2011; Latour, 1993, 2004). As Dr. Apffel-Marglin articulates, the mutually exclusive dichotomy between Nature and Culture can be enunciated such: "Nature is what Culture is not and Culture is what Nature is not" which is further qualified by "an absolute boundary between the two terms". As mentioned earlier within this chapter, this is deeply entangled with/in the practices of validating what one might consider valid or worthwhile (i.e., "what counts" as science) in terms of meaningmaking practices with/in Nature; within this framework, all knowledge of Nature must be made from a mutually exclusively cultural position (see Barad, 2007; Latour, 1993, 2004). Through patterns of similar differences and different similarities, as Frédérique articulates, meaning-making practices within the social sciences (such as anthropology) are similarly but differently entangled with/in the Nature/Culture exclusive dichotomy. Through the capillary circulation of scientificity, meaning-making practices within the social sciences are often (re)shaped such that knowledge of Culture must be made from a mutually exclusive cultural position (see Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Lather, 2007; St. Pierre, 2011a, 2011b).

Recall that Smith (Smith 1999/2012) posits that distance is a key organizing concept for understanding how Western modernity is enacted. She expands upon this by stating that distance becomes the enactment of the "specific spatial vocabulary of colonialism which can be assembled around three concepts: (1) the line, (2) the centre, and (3) the outside" (Smith, 1999/2012, p. 55). The dividing line of mutual exclusivity is a (supposed) hermetic safeguard which masks the ways in which the outside and the inside are always already in proximal relation. Within the sciences as well as the social sciences, one consequence of such a mutual exclusivity is the inability to account for the ways in which Nature comes to bear upon Culture, how Culture comes to bear upon Nature, and an extreme difficulty in occupying both spaces simultaneously (Barad, 2007, 2010; Kirby, 2011; Latour, 1993, 2004). Through scientificity, the mutual exclusion of Nature and Culture translated into research practices in which cultural locations of observer and observed could be conceptualized and enacted as separate and separable: discounting the ways in which there is no outside of Culture.10

With/in the multicultural science education debate, such mutual exclusivity makes difficult even the task of engaging in the question *can science (i.e., knowing nature) and justice (i.e., respecting diverse cultural knowledges) co*-*exist within the science education classroom?* As Latour (2004) reminds us, "the notions of nature and [cultural] politics had been developed over centuries in such a way as to make any juxtaposition, any synthesis, any combination of the two terms *impossible*" (p. 3, emphasis in original). As explored within Chapter 3, such a dichotomized relationship makes it such that one can ask ethical questions of science or scientific questions of ethics, but never fully arriving at something that effectively straddles and occupies both spaces simultaneously within the terms articulated by both: the production of an *ethical science* that is the product of both yet still retains sameness. Such is, as Spivak (1976) refers, an infinite dream of plenitude (as the concept of an ethical science would productively exceed conceptions of both ethics and science), it is an impossibility that is nonetheless worth striving for.

The goal of ethical justice-to-come within science education, or a way of knowing nature that can account for or be accountable to its cultural politics, is all the more prescient when considering what Latour (1993) refers to as particular universalism. Recall, as Latour (1993) states, one cultural location always comes to be deemed as *the* valid location from which to make meaning of nature: that of Man ("the masculine European, Western European male" as Frédérique states).11 It has been and continues to be articulated both within the sciences and the social sciences that the Nature/Culture binary has and upholds a Eurocentric legacy (Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Latour, 1993). As an in-between space, the same has been argued many times over that the multicultural science education debate is one that, at its very roots, operates within and against the bounds of Eurocentrism (Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Lewis & Aikenhead, 2001; McKinley, 2000; Sammel, 2009); an entangled part of the whole that even some scientists are beginning to comment on (e.g., Mazzocchi, 2006, 2008). Lewis and Aikenhead (2001) summarize Eurocentrism as "the idea that the people, places, and events of Western European cultures are superior and a standard against which other cultures should be judged" (p. 53). Within this debate and similar others in which epistemological claims are being made across cultural contexts, it is important to consider both the relationships, and the processes of translating, between cultural spaces. This becomes all the more pressing when the West is included within this act of translations as:

Eurocentrism is the colonizer's model of the world in a very literal sense: it is not merely a set of beliefs, a bundle of beliefs. It has evolved, through time, into a finely sculpted model, a structured whole; in fact a single theory, a general framework for many smaller theories, historical, geographical, psychological, sociological, and philosophical. This supertheory is diffusionism. (Blaut, 1993, pp. 10–11)

As James Blaut (1993) explains, through this diffusionist12 model of dissemination, Eurocentric modes of thought centre themselves and propagate, all the while subjecting, assimilating, and subsuming other modes of thought (see also Battiste, 2005). "Universalism", which is one of the many faces or applied strategies of Eurocentrism, is achieved through diffusionism and the ways in which Western knowledge comes to be positioned against other systems of knowledge as *the* norm. Within the multicultural science education debate this relational positioning produces "the implicit curriculum message… that the *only* science is [W]estern science" (Hodson, 1993, p. 686, emphasis in original).

This becomes all the more complex when considering that Nature/Culture as a mutually exclusive dichotomy that is but one ontological configuration among many, as explored earlier with this chapter. As Latour (1993) reminds, the Nature/Culture binary is never fully achieved or achievable. "We Have Never Been Modern" as the eponymous title of his book proclaims. There have always been natural-cultural hybrids existing in the space(s) between Nature and Culture as the result of the ways in which Nature and Culture always already flow into one another: we are always already in a space of account-ability towards and for the ways in which ontological configurations (e.g., Nature/Culture binary) coalesce with epistemology and ethics (e.g., particular universalism). Science and science educational spaces are not exempt from this occurrence. While some are problematic and some offer productive possibilities, when the world is conceived of and enacted through a mutually exclusive binary, ways-of-knowing nature cannot account for or be accountable to natural-cultural hybrids.

As Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin spoke, one of the greatest consequences of the *particular universalism* (Latour, 1993) through which science endeavours to mirror Nature from its cultural location is that some bodies are proclaimed as being "closer to Nature". Such "naturalized facts" come to be double(d) diminishing: the ways of knowing articulated from these positions are denied validity (see Chapter 3), such as TEK and IWLN, as they fail to achieve the normative and "necessary" criteria of distance through which a mirroring of nature is achievable (see Chapter 4); but furthermore, it is to deny the humanity of Man's "abject other" (e.g., Indigenous peoples, women, etc.) as it relies upon a conception of Nature (i.e., ontology) as static, uniform, and unflinching such that Man's "abject other" become but uni-dimensional people (see Higgins, Wallace, & Bazzul, 2019; McKinley, 2000, 2007).

Within other fields, responses to "naturalized facts" have been to reverse the Nature/Culture binary or to abandon Nature altogether. However, such anti-ontological stances that circulated with the social sciences with a bit more ease (e.g., "too simple" readings of Butler's [1990] *Gender Trouble*)13 would not find a welcome, frequent, or widespread home within the sciences and science education despite their overlapping spaces of meaning-making (see Barad, 2000, 2011). The reversal of the resident hierarchy between Nature and Culture would not suffice or be viable to many within science education. This can be attributed to the holding and being held by knowledge of nature as separate and separable from cultural politics, often times antagonistically; they are most commonly defined and enacted through a mutually exclusive Nature/Culture dichotomy (Latour, 2004). For many scientists and science educators, the false binary choice of renouncing science to strive for ethics produces an unintelligible scientific subject (see Chapters 3 and 5). These continue to complicate questions of accounting for and being accountable to Culture (or even culture) in the process of meaning-making with Nature.

However, as Frédérique Apffel-Marglin posits within the interview, and as explored within the Chapter 3, not all positions need to be antagonistic. There are productive intermediary positions that can operate simultaneously within and against such that it productively retains a degree of intelligibility and desirability. Thus, speaking to productive naturalcultural hybrids, recall that deconstruction is a two-part process which must necessarily begin with the reversal of the hierarchy but must then undo the hierarchy altogether by paying attention to the moments in which the hierarchy altogether vacillates between its constitutive terms. Dr. Apffel-Marglin's quick but incisive pointing towards her work, (see Apffel-Marglin, 2011) and that of others, with regards to anthropogenic (or cultural) landscapes opens up productive natural-cultural locations on terms that act as an invitation to dialogue rather than a dismissal. In other words, as anthropogenic landscapes are within the realm of scientific discovery, they cannot be so easily dismissed as being "antagonistic" cultural politics (e.g., in the case of the critical reversal of critiques of "naturalized facts"; e.g., Siegel, 2001), and furthermore act as an invitation to reconsider the very terms under which science operate within the very linguistic practices that science utilizes: it is a critical inhabitation.

Continuing this critical inhabitation, Dr. Apffel-Marglin begins to articulate in the following sections, the way in which the Nature/Culture mutually exclusive dichotomy (i.e., what is traditionally referred to simply as "ontology") is not something that strictly *is* or *is not* but rather in a state of *ongoing becoming* by highlighting processes and peoples involved in its operationalization.

### *Second Cut: Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin on Descartes, Boyle, and Newton*

operationalized through representation], I go all the way back to Plato and the Greek alphabet. So there are deep roots that are entangled within the Cartesian-Boylian-Newtonian paradigm, even if you stick with the birth of modernity. Not as deep as Plato, but certainly a few centuries preceding the scientific revolution. Of course this is simplifying it. Nevertheless, there is something very special and key about these three. They might not have created it whole cloth [i.e., entirely responsible for its fabrication] but it would not have had the power, particularly the persuasive power, were it not for those three because at the time it was a highly debated and contested new paradigm.

Descartes was the first philosopher of materialism. He was very systematic in his approach to establishing *res cogitans* [i.e., epistemology] and, by extension through separation and mutual exclusivity, *res extensa* [i.e., ontology]. So Descartes is writing in the early 1600s, and most of his writing is around 1620–1630 and he died in 1650. Descartes was a philosopher, so he is making a thought structure; he systematized this philosophy before Boyle comes along.

Boyle is mid seventeenth century (i.e., 1650s). He is doing his experiments with the air pump but he probably only started in the 1640s; for him the key period are the 1650s. Why is Boyle important? Boyle operationalizes Descartes. How did Boyle do this? He creates the laboratory, the modest witnesses, and a literary technology, as Shapin and Schaffer have brilliantly shown. He is important because he invents these practices that constitute the scientific experimental method. How key can you be? He is operationalizing Descartes' systematization of thought by making it work in action. Boyle was an actor in the creation of *The President, Council, and Fellows of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge*, also known as the *Royal Society*. He did this because he had to. At the time, universities were a monopoly of the church; this new knowledge had to happen outside. At the same time as the Royal Society, there was also an Italian academy, as well as *l'Académie Française* started by Mersenne and Descartes. However, within a few decades, the Royal Society quickly became the dominant academy of science as the king of England was funding it. To open up a new academic space outside of the church was absolutely key when it came to operationalizing Cartesian materialism.

Why Newton is so important is because he brought together Descartes and Boyle by establishing the mathematical relationship between Descartes' philosophy and Boyle's practice [i.e., through what is commonly referred to as Newtonian physics today]. Canonically, the age of the scientific revolution is seen as starting with Copernicus midsixteenth century with his *On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres* that was published posthumously in 1543. Newton, with his *Principia Mathematica* in 1687, just clinched it. He was absolutely brilliant, and also very powerful. He was lionized. He is buried where the kings are buried in England. He was the most famous man of his time. He had advised the king and he had enormous power, power that he nurtured very carefully. He knew perfectly well, that there were certain things he could not make public, such as his engagement in practices of hermeticism [i.e., non-Cartesian Western ways-of-knowing-Nature which blended scientific practices with "magical" ones such as alchemy and astrology].14

### *Second Cut: Descartes, Boyle, Newton, and the Multicultural Science Education Debate*

From Dr. Apffel-Marglin's critical inhabitation of *a* historical narrative of modernity, what we begin to see emerge here is that Cartesianism is not something that *is* but is rather *becoming*. As van Eijck and Roth (2007) remind within the context of the multicultural science education debate, it is important to consider science not as knowledge but as knowledge-processes that are highly contextualized and situated. One such consideration for Cartesianism as *becoming* rather than *being* is to refuse its frequent positioning as naturalized within an ahistorical present (see Spivak, 1999). However, even if we trace its historicity, it cannot simply be referred to as knowledge originating from and obtained by René Descartes that, as *the* truth, mirrors metaphysics. Rather, it is a knowledge-process that is without *an* origin (e.g., Plato): its meaning and matter are always deferred and differing such that it forms an ongoing citational chain (see Barad, 2007, 2010; Derrida, 1976). Cartesianism, as Dr. Apffel-Marglin explains, is not created "whole cloth" by René Descartes, nor by Thomas Boyle, or Isaac Newton: Cartesianism is something that precedes, lives alongside, and outlives all three through its circulation and differential enactments across a multiplicity of spaces. Nonetheless, these three do come to be key actors in the operationalization of Cartesianism such that it is widespread, commonplace, and "common sense"; something one has and by which one is had (see Barad, 2007; Higgins, 2014).

Diffracting Frédérique's account of Descartes, Boyle, and Newton with and through the multicultural science education debate again reinforces the notion that the Nature/Culture mutually exclusive dichotomy is but a configuration among many and that it is an onto-epistemological enactment that we are responsible for; even if, as Barad (2007) states, we choose and are chosen by such configurations (see also Butler, 2005). However, what significantly begins to resonate with this vignette is that Cartesianism, when considered through distributed agency (Barad, 2007), can be considered as a "regime of truth" (Foucault, 1977, 1979). In other words, through their respective metaphysical framework, laboratory practice, and mathematics, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton implicitly enact theory-practices that implicitly come to support one another. As Foucault (1979) explains, "'truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it" (p. 47). The example at the beginning of this chapter could be stated as a singular application of such a regime of truth: Cobern and Loving (2008), in their argument for (re)considering and supporting an epistemology of "epistemic realism", pivot and side-step to "ontology" (read: singular; i.e., Cartesianism) without being accountable to or for the ways in which the two share a co-constitutive onto-epistemic relationship. This is often the case when and where it comes to the defence of WMS as *the* way of knowing nature: these diverse knowledge claims which come to reinforce WMS almost always operate through the differing similarity through an implicit assumption that Cartesianism is *the* (only) ontology. It is no surprise, as Dr. Apffel-Marglin continues to expand upon this, that Cartesianism comes to be (re)presented as "common sense" (as Cobern & Loving (2008) define it), holding the ahistorical appearance of stability, neutrality, and normality.

Furthermore, as indicated here and expanded upon within the next section, knowledge and power share a co-constitutive relationship and important role in the dispersal of such knowledge-practices (Foucault, 1977, 1979). For example, the earlier footnote regarding Newton's dual positioning with respect to modern science and hermeticism reveals Newton to having, and being had, by power. He is being produced as a scientific subject that simultaneously upholds and is upheld by systems of power.15 However, as discussed in the following section, such a dispersal of knowledge-practices comes to bear at a larger scale when considering the technologies which operationalize this way of knowing-in-being (e.g., the enclosure, the double-sided ledger, and the laboratory).

### *Third Cut: Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin on the Enclosure, the Double-Sided Ledger, and the Laboratory*

Another way to answer this question is to go historical and speak to the history of the fall of the manorial system, sometimes called the feudal system, and all the conflicts that emerge. I have to preface this by saying that I owe a serious intellectual debt to my ex-husband Stephen Marglin's work, as he's done a huge amount of historical work on the birth of capitalism. Drawing from literature on economic anthropology, historical economics, and such works, I have come to the view that the enclosure movement is associated with the birth of Cartesian dualism. What I argue is that it is that economic context of the emergence of mercantilism, which isn't yet capitalism, but rather proto-capitalism. It is a proto-market economy that comes to replace the manorial system that begins with the enclosure of the commons. The enclosing of the commons started in Western Europe, continued through colonialization, and now persists through globalization. It is incredibly relevant when you're dealing with Indigenous peoples, places, and protocols as this enclosure movement has continued. The enclosure of the commons is for me the key thing that gives the social, political, and religious context that gives credit and credence to Descartes', Boyle's and, Newton's intellectual work and makes it stick.

This plays out similarly today: governments in the global South are currently signing the Free Trade agreement with the United States in which the small print says that you have to make land available to businesses, that land being the commons for Indigenous peoples. Because Indigenous peoples don't have title to it, the governments can say "no, we're giving it to the oil companies, the mining companies, the timbering companies, the agri-chemical companies, etc.". That is currently what is going on, and it is going on everywhere in the global South.

This is what happened, first in England, France, and a few other countries in Western Europe. The rich powerful merchants simply bullied others to get their way through the local courts. Because they had money and connections, they could make it stick. They gained title to the land, and then they actually put up a fence: that's what enclosure means. So you put a fence, and say: "this is mine". Then you use the land as you see fit. At the beginning, it was because the price of wool cloth went up and the world was trading wool cloth, so they wanted to get into that trade by raising and pasturing sheep. So they simply bullied everybody with the support of the aristocracy because many merchants were aristocrats. They made it stick legally through the courts but also through direct violence.

The first banks emerged in the great merchant cities of Italy. The Latin word *ratio*, while I didn't do the philology [i.e., the study of language in written historical sources located between history and linguistics] of it, I understand it to mean double-entry book-keeping from its use at the time. It also bears a relationship to rationality. Ratio becomes rationality: that's the way it is born. The double-entry ratio-based calculation [e.g., quantifiable equivalencies], that's what makes rationality possible.

To calculate one's advantage, you have to remove yourself. Remove yourself from the land and the community. The people and the land are no longer one thing, belonging to each other sharing and living together. If you go into Indigenous communities, people usually do not calculate like that, even among small farmers in India. That's where I first encountered it. In the Indigenous communities here (Peruvian High Amazon), it's glaring: no one calculates in these ways.

It goes together with my argument about the *Burning Times* when they exterminated hylozoism, hermeticism, alchemy, and various other ways-of-knowing and -being. The peasants, the so-called witches, and the so-called magicians were very close with each other and constantly sharing knowledge through contact with each other. Therefore, calculating the encloser's advantage has political, economic, social, and spiritual consequences. They are all entangled.

The mutually exclusive Nature/Culture dichotomy has its birth in removing the people from the land, and using the land as an economic asset. Land becomes a thing, an object on or through which, depending what you do with it, one generates an economic profit based on and derived through calculations of an advantage accruing to a single (male) owner and along with it excluding the other members of the land, the non-humans, the other humans in the community and the other-thanhumans, namely the earth beings. Advantage was the term that they used at the time. This is the beginning of the end.

At the time the process of enclosing the commons was going on hylozoist experimenters and Cartesian-Boylian experimenters were having debates. When discussing enclosures, you had those who were criticizing and those who were defending this practice. Critics and defenders could be from the same class; it depended on one's politics. But not unlike today, those who defended the enclosure tended to be landowners: wealthy merchants and aristocrats. While there was this tendency, you cannot say 'always' here because people did not always act according to their class.

It is not unlike what's going on today in the Global South in general. Recently, in Bagua, Peru, a similar debate was public. It was amazing to see that everyone who was criticizing the enclosure of land professed that everyone has a right to the commons. That is the meaning of a commons, belonging to everyone. The vulnerable, the old, the widows, those who are unlucky, and etc. are assured of their daily bread; they can live because they have access to the commons. The calculation of the encloser's advantage begins with the enclosure of land and thereby making land an exclusive property of the encloser.

I'm now writing for an encyclopedia of Hinduism on how food was seen in pre-colonial times in India. Everyone has a right to life by virtue of being born: that is how the polity [i.e., local government] was organized, and how people behaved. If you are alive, you deserve to eat. What emerges through the enclosure of the commons is that you eat only if you work earning wages with which to purchase food which implies the associated need of creating labour as a commodity.  Selling one's labour requires a previous transformation which consists in owning your individual body whose labour power is something that you can sell because you are its exclusive owner. Before the enclosure movement, and in today's Indigenous and small peasant societies, your labour is not something for which you get paid. Instead, your neighbours and your relatives get together everyday and work on your land and tomorrow you're going to work on their land—that kind of principle. You can extend it to other and bigger things, but that is how people do things; labour is not a commodity or something you sell.

If you insist on the biological boundedness of bodies and you teach that to kids, you implicitly reproduce the capitalist mode of production. This entails a devalorizing of the commons and what I call the cosmocentric economy, the exchange of gifts within the human, non-human and other-than-human communities and everything that these represent. Accordingly, it is a statement that Indigenous and rural peasant people are backwards and superstitious, while simultaneously opening a wide space for the entrance of a profit-motivated market economy. This closes the door to non-modern ways of life in which the commons are central. Not only commons as land but its web of interconnected commons: food as commons (i.e., one person starves, everyone starves; one person eats, everybody eats), water as commons, air as commons, knowledge as a commons.

Accordingly, there are important ties between labour as commodity and land as commodity. Through the enclosure of land, land emerges as a commodity. Becoming private property, you can buy and sell land because it belongs to somebody. It is the same thing with labour as a commodity. It makes the body a form of property.

It's a profound transformation. However, it took a long time to change the habits of people, to make people develop the habits necessary to create labour as a commodity within these new norms. Nonetheless, because labour as a commodity is an abstraction, this profoundly transformed the sense of what a person is and can be.

Schooling plays an important and ongoing role with this. It was and is through schooling, especially early nineteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century during the period when schooling became obligatory, that you learn the disciplines necessary to sell your labour power. In many Indigenous communities, you typically did not or do not do this. The transitions that occurred during the modernization of Western Europe continue to be relevant today, even if these transitions happened in other parts of the world at another time.

Directly related to this is the question of Boyle's laboratory. While Descartes is often attributed dualistic thought (i.e., cogito ergo sum), you state that it was Boyle who operationalized it through his "technologies" of the scientific laboratory. What did these entail and how did this work towards the operationalization of the Nature/Culture binary?

*F. APFFEL-MARGLIN*: I have to preface this by stating that Boyle used to be an alchemist, which is a form of hylozoism. But, in the transition to the laboratory, he shifted from a hylozoist practice to a dualist one. The work of Elizabeth Potter is key here because she shows that he was a big landowner. He was politically motivated by the possibility of losing his land. That's the beauty of this kind of work. It shows that the scientific method and the experimental scientific method had everything to do with politics, economics, and religions of the time and place.