Creating Magical Research: Writing for a Felt Reality in a More-Than-Human World

AbstractWe work in the ruins of a world that has produced those ruins (Sauvé, 2017; Tsing in The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015), this time often referred to as the Anthropocene, science educators and researchers have been called to break with post-positivism, dualisms, and reductionism to settle on new onto-epistemological grounds (Bazzul and Kayumova,.Educational Philosophy and Theory 48:284–299, 2016; Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.; Lather & St. Pierre in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26:629–633, 2013). One promising proposition lies in ontologies of process and epistemologies that expand to encompass affect with new combinations of knowing/experiencing/researching that honor the more-than-human world we need to navigate (Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Duke University Press.; Muraca,.Environmental Values 20:375–396, 2011). In this chapter, I will introduce artful writing as inquiry in science education and explain the elements of magical realism that may contribute to works that reverberate with the-more-than-human world of the Anthropocene (Faris, W. (2004). Ordinary enchantments. Vanderbilt University Press.; Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.; (Richardson & St. Pierre in The Sage handbook of qualitative research. Sage, 2005).