The Emerging Politics of STEM Education: Policy, Discourse, and Governance

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This panel interrogates the emerging politics of STEM education within a context of neoliberal policy, discourse, and political-economic governance. Drawing on a wide range of analytical traditions including critical sociology of education, curriculum theory, heterodox political economy, Foucauldian discourse analysis, theories of biocapitalism, critical race studies, and poststructural critiques of science, the papers set out to examine STEM as a category that is embedded within and reflects prevailing social and institutional rationalities, interests, and concrete practices. What emerges is a complex set of perspectives regarding the empirical and theoretical relationship between STEM education today and its potential role in the realization of social justice and environmental sustainability.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 4: People and Politics (The Who of Curriculum)

Chair

• Alexander Means, SUNY - Buffalo State

Papers

• Toward Eco-Justice Through STEM Education Dispositifs - John Lawrence Bencze, OISE/University of Toronto; Chantal Pouliot, Université Laval

• Manufacturing a STEM Reserve Army Through Racial Capitalist Schooling - Clayton Todd Pierce, University of Utah

• The Royal Science of STEM - Lyn Catherine Carter, Australian Catholic University

• STEM Education as Discourse: Affordances, Limits, and Governance - Jesse Bazzul, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth; Beste Gucler, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Rereading Science Standards: Exploring and Exploiting Contradictions in STEM Policy - Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington - Tacoma