Constructing Relations Between STEM Researchers and Publics: A Case Study of Empathy in Action

Abstract

How academic researchers engage with non-researchers is critical to supporting the public’s understanding of complex socio-scientific and sociotechnical challenges. In this paper, we examine the learning of one scientist, Murphy, in the STEM Liaison Program (SLP), a project that trained university STEM researchers to design public engagement events. Focusing on the ways “empathy” was represented in trainings and enacted by Murphy as a kind of emotional configuration (Vea, 2020), we track accompanying shifts in how Murphy saw youth in a residential treatment facility and his own role in conducting public engagement efforts with them. We argue that tracing the co-constitution of emotional configurations with “relationship schemas” (Polletta, 2020), cognitive and cultural representations of the nature of relationships and what obligations they entail, can expand the learning sciences’ understandings of relationships as a learning outcome with important societal implications.