Possibilities in physics: Students’ retrospective narratives about safe spaces, beautiful boundaries, and emancipation

Other conference contribution, 2022

The paper aims to explore students’ commitment to science, focusing three existential-orientated narrations about physics trajectories and well-being/ill-being. The paper draws from an on-going interview study with ‘non-traditional’ university physics education entrants, examining the conditions and encounters that made enrolment in selective higher education possible. Previous research on science identity contributes with insights into how interactions in everyday life – in schooling and beyond – promote and hinder young peoples’ science aspirations, accomplishments and persistence. Indeed, the advancement of knowledge about social reproduction, social mobility and strategies for widening participation in higher science education is motivated, in the Nordic countries and elsewhere, by social justice and national economic arguments. While this paper is informed by research on young people’s ‘choice-narratives’ (Holmegaard, 2015), it mainly draws on insights from research on well-being and, in particular, Sayer’s sociological work on suffering and conditions for human flourishing. Hence, we look into experiences of physics as a mediator for self-realization and resilience in hardships, rather than examining the conditions for young people’s physics commitments.

The data comprise twenty timeline interviews (60-120 minutes) with 1st and 2nd year students enrolled in university physics programmes in Sweden. The students were encouraged to give accounts and construct a visual timeline (Sheridan et al, 2011) of their personal trajectory into higher physics education, with special attention to persons, events and conditions that they recognized as important in retrospect. Their accounts covered science commitment and non-commitment from a life-history perspective, delineated supportive encounters and conditions as well as barriers. This paper uses narrative analysis to explore three life-histories that were characterized by an emphasized existential narrative. The interviewees, two men and one woman, were re-entry students with diverse ethnic and social backgrounds.

Findings comprise four elements that shaped the narratives: resilience, safe spaces, beautiful boundaries, and emancipation. 1) The trajectories were structured as stories about overcoming adversity (e.g. bullying, poverty and mental illness), in which attachment to Physics was narrated as vital for cultivating resilience. 2) Furthermore, Physics – not ‘school physics’ – was represented as a safe space in their overall chaotic and distressing childhood and youth, in part related to 3) its universal laws and orientation towards nature instead of man. 4) Undertaking formal higher physics education was narrated as a turning-point in that they had accumulated the resources to choose ‘oneself’ in spite of difficulties and doubts. Concluding, the paper seeks to contribute with insights into ‘under-represented’ students’ engagement in higher science education, bringing forward life-histories about physics as a mediator for well-being.

Holmegaard, H. T. (2015). Performing a choice-narrative: A qualitative study of the patterns in STEM students’ higher education choices. International Journal of Science Education, 37(9), 1454–1477.
Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people: Social science, values and ethical life. New York: Cambridge University Press
Sheridan, J., Chamberlain, K. & Dupuis, A. (2011). ‘Timelining: Visualizing Experience’. Qualitative Research 11 (5): 552–69.