Science Education, Subjectivity, and the Reproduction of Labor

• In Event: Rethinking Education, Labor, and Subjectivity

Abstract

Science education, and now STEM education more broadly, is a subfield that tends to be insular and politically conservative (Lemke, 2011). In a time of globalizing neoliberalization, where alternate political possibilities are becoming more constrained, science policy and institutions of education have become aligned with corporate, free-market, and capitalist interests (Morowski & Sent, 2008). In the field of science education, little work, save Clayton Pierce’s (2013) Education in the Age of Biocapitalism has dealt specifically with science education’s relation to the re(production) of subjectivities needed to constitute students as human (bio)capital. Taking such an approach involves viewing science education as a site where subjectivities, and reproduction of students as capital and surplus labour, and are produced and maintained. Such a perspective, according to Hardt and Negri (2000), targets the subjectivities that maintain the production of social reality where scientific knowledge and labour is reproduced. Subjectivities that are constituted in relation to power become something that individuals not only embrace, but even need for their own re-activation.

This paper consists of three parts, beginning with a consideration of how science’s political character, and the visibility of this character, has changed over time, for example science’s long standing relationship with liberalism, which includes its current reliance on market individualism. Understanding science education politically entails recognition of its entanglement in neoliberal forms governance at both the level of policy and classroom practice. Recent (rather heated) questions concerning epistemology that continue to be a source of conflict in science education can also be seen, simultaneously, as ‘the face’ of unsettling and difficult political questions. Seeing science education as one way of governing populations, this paper discusses some of the STEM reforms in the United States to set a context of how policy is working to reproduce students as biocapital. If science education works to constitute humans as capital (Rikowski, 2011) this process must also involve the production of subjectivities required for the maintenance of scientific-immaterial labour (Hardt and Negri, 2000). However, in order for educators to better understand how these subjectivities are produced, both macro and micro-analyses must be undertaken to identify key discourses and practices that maintain this new status quo.

The second part of this paper discusses empirical work from a critical discourse analysis with biology textbooks which outlines how repetitive science activities and discourses concerning work and career can work to constitute a depoliticized subject – or a specific ‘subject of/for labour’ in line with the goals of neoliberalism. The goal here is to demonstrate the linkage of macro-analysis and theoretical discussions with ideologies, practices, and effects of power found in texts (e.g. concerning the specific modalities of career choices and the production of a subject who self-invests). The paper concludes by arguing that science education should be seen as a site of political struggle and outlines pedagogies that can work against particular subjectifying practices and orient science education away from serving the needs of capital, towards forms of life that are sustainable, community-oriented, and socially just.

Author

• Jesse Bazzul, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth