This session invites participants into a collective exploration of feminist epistemic disobedience through reflective writing, deep listening in triads, and collaborative poetic weaving. It centers affective listening and community-building as practices for reimagining science education. The focus is on opening space for new ways of knowing, relating, and imagining educational futures.
Grounded in the manifesto “A Manifesto for Critical-Feminist Science Education” (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sce.70016), this emergent MYFest session invites participants into a collective exploration of epistemic disobedience, feminist community-building, and affective listening as practices of educational transformation. We hope to actualize the manifesto’s call for structures for connection, community, and care, as well as for pedagogical practices that challenge dominant epistemologies and promote epistemic disobedience in science education.
We will begin with a reflective writing practice as an invitation to orient ourselves toward the tensions, entanglements, refusals, and desires that shape our educational lives and practices. We will ask questions such as: What is your epistemic disobedience? How does it live in your teaching, learning, research, or community work? What voices, struggles, and ways of knowing remain un-captured within dominant educational spaces? With an emphasis on learning from and with the margins instead of studying the margins, participants will be encouraged to move beyond polished academic responses and instead engage vulnerability, emergence, and lived experience.
Following the writing activity, participants will gather in triads to practice attentive listening as a feminist community-building practice of care. These small-group conversations are intended not as debate or consensus-building, but as opportunities to cultivate a deeper understanding for each other, build solidarity across lived experiences, and engage with forms of relational and epistemically disobedient dialogue. With an intention to create caring spaces and engage in transnational feminist kin-making, the session centers collectivity, reciprocity, and the co-construction of meaning.
The gathering concludes with a collective poem, weaving together fragments and resonances emerging from the conversations. Rather than offering definitive answers, this session seeks to open space for imagining what feminist educational futures could become when we listen deeply, speak courageously, and create knowledge together.
