Page 367 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

342 L. Carter and N. Walker

the legitimising of all knowledge, particularly science, under the messy complexities
of contemporaneity, only occurs when communally agreed (including non-expert)
procedures and criteria produce constantly revisable, reflexive and practical knowl-
edge that distinguishes better solutions from worse. Clearly, Beck et al.’s (2003) view
differs to those who would legitimise knowledge on solely epistemological grounds.
Hence, Beck et al. (2003), and Bauman (2001) view contemporary “boundaries … as
fluid as the power balances whose projections they are” (p. 141).
The second significant idea to emerge from the border studies research is the
reconceptualisation of the spatiality of borders and boundaries. In this view, borders
become zones or interfaces (also called hybrid, liminal and interstitial spaces)
where potentially contradictory discourses overlap and discrepant kinds of meaning-
making converge, encoding unpredictability at the edges of stability. The border
“reveals that it is a sort of virtual and semiotic force field, which translates, con-
necting and disconnecting the codes of adjacent systems and forms willy-nilly”
(Shields 2006, p. 229). In these zones, all types of paradoxes, incommensurabilities,
incoherencies and contradictions can be tolerated or held in tension. It includes
ideas about situated, localised or placed-based knowledge that acknowledge their
traditional origins as well as the ways historical and contemporary conditions have
altered that traditional knowledge into hybrid forms.
Shields (2006) discusses this internal dynamism and flux with border spaces both
material and abstract, concluding that it is the productive performance within the
space that is generative of many possibilities. Hence, borders he argues are active
translation technologies, which mediate between the adjacent fields. “In other
words, interfacial boundaries have their own specific rules and semiotic orders,
distinct from the fields or systems which they lie between (p. 230).”
This idea of a dynamic border zone has been postulated by others, most notably
by postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha with his idea of hybridity and hybrid spaces
(see Bhabha 1994). Bhabha, also a literary scholar, has drawn on an astonishing
breadth of theoretical, philosophical, literary and art texts to advance his thesis on
hybridity. Historically derived from the crossing of biological species, the term
was used during colonial times to discourage miscegenation. As part of the recent
cultural lexicon, hybridity can mean anything from the uncritical celebration of cultural
syncretism to more politically transgressive interpretations. Bhabha argues the trans-
gressive view as an emergent “interstitial perspective” that is at “once a vision and
a construction” that allows for difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy
(Bhabha 1994, p. 7). For Bhabha (1994), hybridity is a required concept to convey
the complexity and messiness of cultural difference. Interestingly, Nederveen Pieterse
(2001) describes the historically usual state of hybridity, by which he means, the
common practices of mixing that have always existed in all human knowledge
and practices.
Like Shields (2006), Bhabha (1994, p. 7) views border situations as “not part of
the continuum of past and present,” but where identities are performed and “create
a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation.” Those who live border
lives are empowered argues Bhabha (1994), to actively intervene and transform
their knowledge and practices into new and unexpected hybrids that are never total