Research on science teaching and learning commonly makes use of reductionism to specify conditions of science learning. In my studies of academics’-of-science-teaching-&-learning (academics’-of-st&l) research practices and values, I discuss how philosophic inquiry shifted my research practices from reductionism to critical (or, “new”) materialism, where critical materialism is a research approach attuned to the materiality of social practices. Reading materiality as affectual, intellectual, and spatial components of practices turns my attention toward the logics informing academics’-of-st&l research practices as well as the comfortable and dangerous effects of particular practices on our connectible landscape. In this forum response, I briefly explore multiple logics informing academics’-of-st&l conference attendance choices, in addition to these choices’ alignment to communal definition rendered by governmental and conference entities. I also explore other modes of communal boundary-marking experienced by academics-of-st&l that do not make use of formal definitions, but suggest that it is in the minutiae of conference relating that academics-of-st&l construct their sensing of communal un/boundedness. With these explorations, I hope to generate awareness of the small shifts that re-configuring practices can make possible in academics’-of-st&l connectivity.
