Developing Research Personas

Wicked Scientist. Excella. Miss Calculation. These are prototype personas for three PhD students at FNUG. They emerged during a PhD-seminar, where each of the six participating PhD-students worked on developing their research persona and knowledge performances.

The guiding pedagogical principle for this arts-based PhD-education activity is that performance playfully and collectively can address the ambiguity and open-endedness of becoming a researcher and a research community, and it can help overcome art-versus-science dichotomous juxtaposition. Through performance, participants may engage in shared playful activities that highlight the fluidity and interconnectedness of knowledge production. This blurs the rigid distinction between the two domains.

Drawing inspiration from creative research methods and the fields of art, science and technology studies, the seminar builds on my previous work with research and performance. The exploration and development of personas within research processes have been integral to my scholarly journey, for instance in the development of my 'performative schizoid' approach (one can be multiple research personae!), and through participation in the activist performance pedagogical project ‘Sister’s Academy’ (embracing performativity in research).

Becoming a Researcher

For PhD students, the trajectory of a research project is intertwined with the emergent process of becoming: what kind of researcher am I?
Creatively and collectively exploring this space of ‘becoming’ holds potential for transformative learning – learning that makes a deep and personal difference. This is a central focus in my PhD supervision and research leadership activities. How might we design environing conditions that mediate learning and are conducive to the emergence of research communities? How can we create an environment that is supportive of learning?

At present, one of my favorite metaphors for this kind of organized learning and working is ‘swarming’. This metaphor acts as a nice summary of how collectives can act as self organized and open ended systems – moving in somewhat the same direction, coordinated through strategic and dialogic processes, a continuously emergent and changing learning and sensemaking environment.

Performing Research: Dilemma Performances and Research Personas (SKY seminar)

Physicist and science and technology scholar Andrew Pickering provocatively suggests replacing knowledge with performance at the center of research. He says: “if there is a sun around which all else revolves, it is performance, not knowledge...”. Pickering disturbs and resettles the position of knowledge at the center of the philosophical universe: “- knowledge is a planet or maybe a comet that sometimes participates in the dynamics of practice and sometimes does not.” (Pickering 2010, 380)
On the basis of science and technology studies and interrogations of science in the making - where knowledge is produced - Pickering argues that knowledge indeed is practiced and performed.
In such a performative idiom, science is regarded as a field of powers, capacities, and situated performances, involving also machinic captures of material agency. Science includes representation and conceptual dimensions (production of scientific knowledge), and science also includes material, social and temporal dimensions. (Pickering 1995, 380 -390 passim.). Science is practiced and performed.

The FNUG PhD seminar can be seen as a micro-situation, building on these insights and responding to the calls for new aesthetic practices and performances in science education and research.

The seminar program took place from 10 am to 6 pm, August 15, 2023, at a location called ‘SKY’, a conference room with a panoramic view overlooking the Odense campus of the University of Southern Denmark (see image).

The PhD seminar program consisted of various interactive exercises and activities and was developed and facilitated by the main supervisor of the PhD candidates (me), in collaboration with PhD candidate Amalie Thorup Eich-Høy.

PROGRAM

In the program invitation, each participant was asked to bring an artefact that relates to what they experience as the pedagogy and approach of our research center, FNUG. They were also invited to bring any kind of props, clothing, wigs, or other artefacts that ‘held energy’ for them in relation to developing a research persona. They received some potential background reading about stage personas. We had furthermore prepared a sortiment of clothing, props and make-up to work with.

Arts-Based Science Education Research

The Ph.D.-seminar for emerging science education researchers was an arts-based shared-learning activity in the way it highlighted process and staged open-ended situations of exploration. It connects to a growing orientation towards experience, affect and aesthetics in science education. As pointed out by Per-Olof Wickman, Vaughan Prain and Russell Tytler in their introduction to a special issue on affect and aesthetics in science education, aesthetics offers a rich and actionable insight into the relation between affect, emotion and learning (2022, p. 718).

Arts-based research incorporates aesthetic methods and practices into research and can be used to explore and understand educational phenomena. The approach can involve the use of various aesthetic forms, including performance, narrative, poetic expression, visual arts, and literature.

It allows emerging researchers to embrace many voices and multiple personae in their exploration of science education research. They connect with their identities as science or humanities graduates and rework this personal experience in becoming science education researchers. This contributes to the transformative aspects of PhD education and contributes to our understanding of science and pedagogy.

For an accessible introduction to how work with performance, poetry and other art practice as research, see Patricia Leavy’s ‘Art Meets Method’. For an impression of my work with performativity and research, check out the research article ‘Performative Schizoid Method’ – which has just been chosen for a celebratory issue of the journal ParTAKE – Performance as Research, where it was published five years ago. A version of the same piece has also been commissioned for publication in Danish under the title ‘Improvisatoriske videns-performances’ in an edited volume by Pløger, Førde & Sand from 2021.