STORIES ABOUT HAMMERS: ANALYZING BELONGING AND IDENTITY IN EARTH SCIENCE THROUGH FEMINIST MATERIALITIES

In this presentation, I tell different stories of hammers, their interaction with student learning and becoming while being in the field. Using a feminist materiality lens, I explore how and what students learn with and while using tools and instruments. Tools are often taken for granted in fieldwork, understood to be a bodily act, leading to embodied knowledge, which is hard to convey in oral or even visual instruction. While we see students use them in ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ ways, we rarely problematize how their use influences their users. This work aims to add a specific critique of a scientific tradition and culture that continues to separate minds from bodies and materialities from knowledges and learnings, resulting in subtle exclusions of certain people. Critical voices are becoming more visible in the educational literature concurrent with a growing awareness of social injustices in science. Fieldwork cultures are particularly problematized as practices that systematically exclude specific students along axes of oppression of for instance ability and gender. I focus on one intersection between humans (their doings and identities) and non-humans (the hammer) in fieldwork settings, and argue that these entities cannot be separated. Rather, they are entangled and with this work, I discuss how this influences students’ negotiations of science identities and belonging in Earth science. The feminist lens helps question a rather unchallenged practice such as fieldwork, and by exploring materialities, uses and impact of the hammer, I show further entanglements of learning and identity processes in the field.