Point of Beginning Mx. Science

Estimated time to follow this cut: 10 minutes

This is one of three tracks alongside which you can thread your way alongside my explorative account on how ethical knowledge conciliation may come to matter within community-based polar bear research through aesthetic action. The aesthetic action traced here are the affective encounters around the physical presence of "Mx. Science": a figure performed by myself.

This particular aesthetic action was informed by the practices and insights that emerged from the other two tracks: community-based co-creative filmmaking, and the organization of the final BearWatch (pre-)workshops. Its performance practice diffractively cuts across two events: the final BearWatch (pre-)workshop in Gjoa Haven, and the Annual Science Meeting (ASM), a large conference gathering that connects researchers and scientists from across the Circumpolar Arctic.

Mx. Science

Concept sketch Mx. Science in research diary (de Wildt, 2022)

Mx. Science associative mindmap in research diary (de Wildt, 2022)

"Mx. Science", is a situated, playful figure, that invites us to reimagine how we make space for "difference" within "scientific" context, like conferences, meetings or the laboratory.

Mx. Science is performed by me, a non-Inuit researcher conducting research from a western educational institute and as part of the BearWatch team. In the context of BearWatch workshops, or the Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) conference, 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 neither from the inside, nor the outside.

Acting from such a liminal space, I made sure to receive permission from the ASM organizers, as well as explicit sanction and input from community-partners, representatives and participants, and the BearWatch PI's for the Gjoa Haven, BearWatch project workshops.

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First introductions

As a pilot experience, I had first introduced Mx. Science to the school in Coral Harbour. This was initiated by invite of the grade four teacher and with permission from the school principal. 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 principal 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, yet potentially unsettling 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 hbe present at the final gathering as Mx. Science.

Mx. Science visiting fourth grade in Coral Harbour school

Mx. Science at Gjoa Haven pre-workshop

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

Mx. Science defies normative categorization and conventional performances of cis-gendered or professional presentation, nor is Mx. Science determinately human (blue-skinned, pink-furred and horned). Some elements of Mx. Science's appearance, nevertheless, mark them as an "insider" to the sciences (wearing a laboratory-coat, and safety glasses, referring to sciences that conduct laboratory experiments, or as an anthropologist or geographer, wearing various lenses and recording devices like a clipboard for notes).

These marks, in combination with the observations that I am wearing a "costume" or "mask" make it impossible to fully externalize Mx. Science as fully "other" to scientists in the room. 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.

Re-orientations

"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.

Portrait Mx. Science, photographed by co-PI van Coeverden-de Groot in Coral Harbour, 2022

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.

You have spotted a wrecksite.

Check out the "wrecksite" of "Arctic Masculinities"

or,

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Wrecksite: Arctic Masculinities

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.

Mx. Science at ASM I (photographed by Andrew Bateman 2022)

Mx. Science at ASM II (photographed by Andrew Bateman 2022)

The Liminal and the Ethical Space

How do we determine who is a scientist, and who is not? How do we meet each other in "scientific" spaces? What are the markers of inclusion, where lie the boundaries, and how do we recognize each other?

At the Annual Science Meeting in Toronto in December 2022, I was not often immediately recognized as a researcher or a scientist. Some attendees thought I was a performing some kind of mythical creature. Other associated me with the "smurfs". The lack of determinable signifiers prompted explorative questions like: are you wearing a costume? Is this a mask? Others were more explicit with their uncertainty: "I feel like I am walking into a minefield, how do I refer to you? Are you a persona? A character? I haven't kept up...", as if my presence was meant to perform a test of their use of language.

For others, there was some relief, when they could mark me as an "insider" through my official conference nametag (One side displayed my name and institutional affiliation in print, the other side displayed "Mx. Science in my own handwriting). Such marking as an "insider", was often immediately followed up with questions of my underlying research, my methodology or "what" my presence was supposed to represent. When the request for a re-presentative answer, or pre-determined message about science or scientists, remained unaccommodated, the moment of relief was replaced with various degrees of discomfort.

Explaining that Mx. Science becomes meaningful within encounters like the one we were engaging in then sparked for some a curiosity to explore - often facilitated through the form of a follow-up interview after the conference.

Each of these interviews was semi-structured around three questions, how did Mx. Science affect you? Do you think Mx. Science was representative of something? What do you think Mx. Science was practicing at the conference? The ensuing conversations indicated that Mx. Science performed a very different material-discursive practice for each person that engaged with them. Whether this practice related to how we engage with the "other" during our research, how we take up space in settler-Indigenous context, or what (unexamined) standards of representability we uphold in scientific spaces.

You have encountered the presence of a "Great White Beast". Check out the landmark to consider how this figure haunts this Knowledge-Land-Scape.

Landmark: "The Great White Beast"

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 possibilities this persona performs to re-configuratively imagine scientific spaces as a phenomena with determinate boundaries and properties which materialize in different possibilities for different humans and non-humans. As a method, it is one that has most explicitly required me to implicate my body into the explorative research that I have been conducting. Keep going to explore how Mx. Science has continued to perform beyond this cut.

Beyond the Cut

Through my situated performances as Mx. Science I have gained an extended understanding of what shapes self-directed work of un-learning, decentering- and decolonizing can take within the institutional spaces of western "science".

To explore the future performative possibilities of drag to 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 their 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