Against Neoliberal Pedagogies of Surplus Life: Bioprospecting in the Field and Classroom

• In Event: The Intersection of Neoliberalism and Our Everyday Lives: Studies From the Global to the Classroom

Abstract

1.) Objectives/Purpose:

In this article I examine the nature of neoliberal governing practices aimed at optimizing the value of life in the GE crop field and in classrooms that have emerged over the past 30 years (Hursh 2007; Peters 2005; Pierce 2013; Simons 2006;). I argue that environmental education should be in the forefront of charting the ways vitality within nature and society are increasingly involved in productive projects of capital. Given this biopolitical landscape, I suggest that “ecological literacy” (Greenwood 2008; Kahn 2010; Orr 1991; Stone and Barlow 2005;) must include a dimension that focuses on the ways life is increasingly implicated in biocapitalist enterprises such as the GE food industry and their various educational projects.

2.) Theoretical Framework:

The theoretical framework of this paper draws upon theorists and researchers who have studied the practice of bioprospecting, drawing upon Hayden’s (2003), Cooper’s (2008) and Harry’s (2006) research on bioprospecting. I use these theorists to understand the ways subjects within productive spaces of biocapital are governed through specific discourses and practices connected to the salvationary and promissory ethos that drives the bioindustries.

3.) Mode of Inquiry:

I focus on two units of analysis in this paper. First, I analyze the discourses and rationalities embedded in examples of the genetic food industries’ educational projects. Here I look at how biocapitalist actors’ educational campaigns (such as Monsanto) advance notions for privatizing nature through genetic enclosure. Drawing on these discourses, I chart a model of neoliberal governmentality that teaches subjects an ethical relation with nature and nonhumans as one based on potential economic value and genetic reservoirs for new marketable commodities.

4.) Evidence/Data Source:

I draw upon two primary sources of evidence: The Council for Biotechnology Information’s (CBI) children’s activity book and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s pedagogical efforts through their funding of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) promoting the genetic wonder crop Golden Rice. Both of these data sources provide evidence of how biocapitalist actors construct educational material for K-12 settings and the broader public. I also draw upon my own work and research in school learning gardens as a site for developing counter-practices to corporate driven ones.

5.) Warrants for Arguments:

In a “postgenomic” age (Franklin and Lock, 2007), the field of environmental education needs to be at the leading edge of developing responses to new assemblages of nature and culture brought into existence through advances in biotechnology. This paper provides one point of departure for developing such a response by delineating the similar pedagogies of surplus life that have emerged in neoliberal spaces of food and education production.

6.) Scholarly Significance of Work:

To date no one has looked at and compared the models of governmentality organizing conduct in bioprospecting and educational spaces. Further, there has been little research that has looked at how environmental education might think about neoliberal governing structures over life that have emerged in the high stakes classroom of the 21st century and the GE crop field.

Author

• Clayton Todd Pierce, University of Utah