The Performativity of the Global Future: Denaturalizing the Imperative of STEM for Solving Common Problems

• In Event: Paradoxes of Inclusion in STEM Education: Making Up Cultural Others Through “Natural” and “Neutral” Spaces

Abstract

STEM education reforms are often given as an imperative in response to a process of globalization that is characterized by technoscientific improvement (see e.g., NGA, 2011; CCNY & IAS, 2009). This notion of globalization is highly contested in existing educational literature regarding whether it merely represents the changes occurring or instead expresses a neoliberal ideology and its social imaginary in educational policies and practices (Czarniawska-Joerges & Sevón, 2005; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Embodied in these interpretative approaches is the givenness of the “global” as a geographical scale that links technosciences with questions of future development. This paper denaturalizes this normative link by looking at how technoscientific designs of the “global future” circulate in educational and socio-economic planning in the U.S., Europe, and China to enact distinctions and control of both populational quality and quantity. It traces the performative making and enacting of the “global future” to produce desired citizens during and after the Cold War era, rather than treating it as an immobile space-time where technoscientific expertise and socioeconomic changes are located.

Drawing upon actor-network theories (Latour, 1987; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010), my discussion examines further “what is an actor” in education as a field that produces, circulates, and transforms relations of knowledge and power. The argument relies on data sources from the archives and publications of international institutes (e.g., OECD, UNESCO, IIASA, and the Club of Rome) that have been interested in applying technoscientific methods such as systematic modeling to solve long-term, global issues since the Cold War era. This set of documents helps to reveal the debates of the relationship between the technosciences, the “global,” and the “future.” I consider how a group of experts departed from a concern with the problems of allegedly “advanced societies” to design the “global future,” and how other societies given as “less developed” were included albeit abjected as systematic burdens in designs to solve what were upheld as “common problems.”

The analysis focuses on how the “global” emerges to act performatively through inscription devices (e.g., protocols, images, techniques, logics, maps, and models). I consider how such transnational practices, which aim to design the “future” in order to solve common world problems, become assembled with mutual constructions of technoscientific expertise and societal anxiety. Important also is how the “future” operates as a historical constellation of anticipatory actions that carry notions of the “global” with fellow travelers such as “risks,” “growth,” “innovation,” and “cooperation” from the late 1960s on. The paper contends that a contingent link of STEM expertise with the global future is naturalized as both the objective and the language of many current education reforms. Its contribution is to interrogate how distinctions and control are generated through the traveling discourses of technosciences and the “global future” in educational planning. By tracing the historical links and functions of STEM expertise within curriculum reforms, it aims to make visible the limitations of the current paradigm of reform in promoting equity and justice.

Author

• Lei Zheng, University of Wisconsin - Madison