Politics, Aesthetics, and (In)Visibilities in Science Education

• In Event: Equity and Agency in Climate Change Education

Abstract

Scholars in social justice and science education have argued that science education must abandon its neoliberal commitments and move toward a primary focus on issues of sociopolitical and ecological urgency such as climate justice (Author, 2015b; Authors, 2017d; Carter, 2016, Sharma, 2012). We uphold that climate justice is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and recognize that those who are most violently affected by climate change have contributed least to the phenomenon. Furthermore, we feel the term climate justice over climate change more accurately represents “views of climate change as an ethical issue, linking it to global equality, human [and more than human] rights and historical responsibility” (p. 39, Roosvall & Tegelberg, 2015).
The push toward a more justice-oriented science and education requires a disruption of what is currently visible/possible in our field(s) by engaging in acts of dissensus (Ranciere, 2015). We can look to movements such as NoDAPL, Apache Stronghold, Black Lives Matter, the International Women’s Movement, Zapatista autonomous education, etc., for ways in which solidaristic acts of dissensus work to recast the domain of the sensible. Taking inspiration from Haraway’s (2016) string figures, we can also see how assemblages as string figures form unique interconnected webs of multispecies engagement across differences to manifest, or make visible, possibilities for surviving and thriving in a dying world. We view these efforts to politicize and “re/world” science and education as both necessary for our collective survival as well as ethically imperative.
In this paper/poster, we illustrate how these struggles to repair and create new worlds require a disruption of both the political and aesthetic spheres of science education as a “field.” We describe examples from artistic and social movements (such as those mentioned above) as well as our own scholarly and pedagogical efforts to reveal lines of flight and fugitive spaces (e..g, facilitating youth/teacher participatory action research, building partnerships with tribal colleges, being involved in activist projects, diagramming assemblages with students, reimagining disciplinary boundaries, etc.) while reflecting on how science education can re/center toward climate change and climate justice through similar acts of dissensus and string figuring. We discuss how dissensual scholarship, such as taking on a militant research stance within our respective field(s), can “exploit the few remaining ‘cracks’” (p. 227) within increasingly neoliberal university contexts--disrupting, dismantling, and repairing what is sensible in those field(s), toward the critical transformation of the multiple worlds we inhabit (Russell, 2015).

Authors

• Sara E. Tolbert, The University of Arizona

• Jesse Bazzul, University of Regina