Point of Beginning Mx. Science

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This is one of three case studies conducted as part of my research that seeks to explore how ethical knowledge conciliation may come to matter within community-based polar bear research alongside aesthetic action.

This particular case study was informed by the other two cuts of community-based co-creative filmmaking, and the organization of the final BearWatch (pre-)workshops. It diffractively cuts across two events: the final BearWatch (pre-)workshop in Gjoa Haven, and the Annual Science Meeting (ASM), a large conference platform that connects researchers and scientists from across the Circumpolar Arctic. performance-based exploration of how the technicalities of drag may allow for the reconfiguration of what it means to be a community-based researcher.

The aesthetic action that is traced along this cut, is the performative presence of "Mx. Science".

Mx. Science

"Mx. Science", is a situated, playful, reconfigurative invitation to reimagine (a) scien/ce/tist, performed by me.

As Mx. Science, I practice (my) research while displaying various (in)determinate signifiers. Some of these allow me to be categorized- for example as a scientists/researcher (wearing a laboratory-coat, and safety glasses, referring to sciences that conduct laboratory experiments, while also wearing various lenses and a carrying a clipboard for notes, that signal towards disciplines like anthropology, or geography). Other ways of presenting, however, defy categorization. Mx. Science is for example not determinately human (blue-skinned), or cis-gendered (for example, tonal qualities of my voice that are dissonant with gendered presentations like facial hair).

Mx. Science is performed by me, a non-Inuit researcher conducting research from a western educational institute and as part of the BearWatch team. The performance can therefore not be seen as an intervention: a movement from the outside-in. Neither can my use of make-up and choice of clothing and attributes be understood as fitting fully "inside" the social contracts of the spaces within which I have introduced Mx. Science. Mx. science is therefore rather a diffractive event, proposed from the liminal.

Acting from such a liminal space, I made sure to receive explicit sanction and input from the BearWatch PI's, as well as community-partners, representatives and participants.

Keep Going to read more on such community sanction and the liminal.

First introductions

I had first introduced Mx. Science to the school in Coral Harbour, by invitation of the grade four teacher and with permission from the school principle. Mx. Science, being a very colourful and playful character was received positively by the school, students and teachers. Although no formal data was collected, I received informal feedback from the teacher and principle that my presence was very much enjoyed by multiple people in the school, and that there was expressed desire for me to return to the school.

After this brief but positive experience in Coral Harbour, I introduced Mx. Science during the second day of the pre-workshop in Gjoa Haven, to discuss its potential and the desirability of introducing a playful element into an important gathering. Again, the persona was very positively received, and the decision was made with sanction from the Gjoa Haven HTA, the BearWatch PI's and the participants of the pre-workshop to host the final gathering as Mx. Science.

If you arrived at this cross-road after visiting the Coral Harbour school, and wish to continue wayfaring the Bearwatch project, "Return" to Cut 3.

If you arrived here as part of the Mx. Science case-study or the pre-workshop in Gjoa Haven, then go check out the Landmark "Becoming Other".

Return to Cut 3: "Wayfaring the BW Project"

Landmark: Becoming Other

The Liminal Scientist

By presenting a liminal figure of "the scientist", it becomes possible to query science and scientists themselves as a phenomenon that includes boundaries and properties. This in turn makes it possible to explore all the im/possible ways of being "different" within such a phenomena.

"Mx. Science" invites non-indigenous researchers (including myself) to rethink and reflect on their presence and the positions they take up in different contexts. As a figure that can unsettle taken for granted terms of engagements in multiple ways, Mx. Science holds the potential to open up a liminal space within which new relationships can be sensed or "felt" out, and provoke conversations about how we encounter each other across our differences. As a situated performance it is both an exercise in new ways of engaging each other through genuine curiosity, as well as an effective tool to que(e)ry where and when differentiated bodies dis/connect in space.

Drag as a Diffractive Method

The creation of Mx. Science, as a method, draws from my practice as a dragking (classically defined as a male-impersonator). As a performer, I explore non-binary, female, and more-than-human masculinities, and am part of a relatively recent revival of drag’-kings’, ‘-quings’ and ‘-things’ across the "global North". This generation of (club-)performers can be understood to have in common, a politically informed stage, or nightlife practice, that undoes, or "bends" traditional, western categorical understandings of gender, sex and family through queer kinship structures.

The techniques employed within drag to que(e)ry, perform, undo or bend boundaries and categories like the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ can also be directly applied towards questions around the social ecologies of environmental research and management.

Arctic ‘wildernesses’, for example, can be seen as sites for the enactment of a specific hetero masculinity associated with physical strength, roughness, ingenuity, and self-realization (Sandilands & Ericson, 2010). Such sites of enactment (can) extend into scientific spaces, like laboratories or lecture rooms, reproducing hegemonic masculinities and perpetuating racial and gender inequalities and unequal power relations (MacGregor & Seymour, 2017). Drag has the potential to de-naturalize and unsettle such masculinities by embodying its technologies as separable from sex. Such masculinity, as performed through drag then becomes liminal, a place beyond categories – a space of play; ‘the betwixt and between’ through which shape-shifting figures turn things on their heads and pass on their way from one state of being to another (Rosenfeld, 2003). Taking these techniques and applying them not so much towards normative categories of gender, but towards norms upheld within western scientific spaces, opens our understanding of its conventions and social contracts in similar ways. Drag can thus, shift fixed positions, and transform everyday expectations and habits, that allows us to not to conduct transformative research – but also transform the researcher itself.

Annual Scientific Meeting Mx. Science

To better understand the possibilities Mx. Science enables to imagine ethical encounter outside of its conventional institutional structures, I had asked and gained permission from the organizers the Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM), also known as the ArticNet Conference in Toronto, in December 2022 - to attend as Mx. Science, directly after the final workshops in Nunavut.

I had informed the organizers that I would only be present, and did not require a stage or a timeslot as Mx. Science. During the 3-day conference, I attended as Mx. Science, and observed how people responded to me, as I moved through the conference space. Every day I recorded my experiences, at the start and end of the day. In the weeks afterward I followed up with 15 people, who I had conversed with at the conference to conduct a follow-up interview.

Take a closer look at the Landmark, to see how the experiences shared during these interviews eventually configured the haunting presence of a "Great White Beast" in this Knowledge-Land-Scape.

Landmark: "The Great White Beast"

The Liminal and the Ethical Space

This liminal performance of (a) scien/ce/tist, provided several insight on the different im/possibilities for co-creating an ethical space of engagement in the context of the BearWatch workshops and ASM.

Firstly, Mx. Science turned out to function as what I later understood to be a diffractive device. My follow-up interviews were semi-structured conversations, designed to explore the meaning that could be attributed to my presence at the conference. What became apparent after 15 interviews, however, was that such meaning could often not be separated from the meaning-makers own movements through the conference and other scientific spaces.

Another Point of Beginning

You have reached "Another Point of Beginning". These are not conclusive endings to my research, but rather perform at the cusp of emergence: They are a story so-far. Some of these points mark the end of funding cycles or project activities. Or they mark the limitations and scope of this particular PhD dissertation. Others are trails, and tracks that have faded out, as they remained un-revisited. They however always mark one moment along an ongoing animate line of correspondence between multiple agencies, and they usually allow for continuing with another cut.

This is where we take account for our journey so far. This journey is always partial, and so are the insights we have built on our way. You can trace the path you have taken through this Knowledge-Land-Scape by clicking the "trace" bar in the upper left corner of your screen. It will allow you to account for some of the insights that your journey has given you. The map below shows you the full extent of wayfaring possibilities of the scape.

This cut has taken you along the development of Mx. Science and the performative possibilities this persona has enabled to imagine science and scientists as a phenomena outside of it conventional apparatus. In fact you have only been able to find this cut through attentive engagement with others as you have been making your way along other tracks and paths. This case study tracked an approach to explore the meaning of "ethical space" that might have not been immediately intuitive. It is however, an attempt to directly implicate myself into the stakes that are at play when engaging in such trans-cultural boundary work. Keep going to explore how Mx. Science has continued its material agencies beyond this cut.

Beyond the Cut

Through my interventions with Mx. Science I have gained an interest in what can be done through self-directed work of un-learning, decentering- and decolonizing the western scientist in cross-cultural contexts. For transformative practices to come to fruition, such un/learning should happen both by accepting leadership and practicing respectful collaboration with non-western partners, as well as through a self-initiated repositioning.

To explore the future possibilities of drag and performance art to decolonize, and unsettle scientific conventions within its own institutional spaces I have organized a workshop at the Descartes Institute of Science and Technology Studies at Utrecht University in 2024.

In February 2025, I was invited to attend a three-day general assembly meeting of a EU-funded Horizon 2020 research project as Mx. Science.

In April 2025 I will start an eight month fellowship with the Arctic Governance Research Group of the RIFS Institute in Potsdam to explore the diffractive possibilities Mx. Science offers within the scientific institute.

Detour to Cut 1: Cut 1 Voices of Thunder

Detour to Cut 2: Cut 2 Aesthetic (in)action in BearWatch

Detour to Cut 3: Cut 3 Wayfaring the BW project