Science Education in Barbaric Times

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Crafting Science Educations for Justice: Entangled Global Tales of Teaching and Activism

Abstract

This paper is a critical program evaluation of the social justice praxis of my science education in the light of these “barbaric” times, as I find them here in the U.S. Socialism or Barbarism were once the alternatives posed by Rosa Luxemburg. We are exposed to constant fantasies of barbarism, helping us adjust to post apocalyptic socioscape. And truly the U.S. state has become barbaric. This paper first theorizes the present barbarity and reflects on how the rise of reactionary forces have shifted the social justice problematic (while noting how continuities with the previous neoliberal administrations). The paper traces shifting regimes of truth, that now appear as post-Truth discourse in the media (and AERA’s theme). It looks at Hayek’s (the father figure of neoliberalism) rationale of markets over science, which basically was the bridge to the current regime’s embrace of “alternative facts” and outright lies, using Mirowsky’s (2011) analysis of neoliberalism and science and Harvey’s (2005) of reactionary nationalism as the telos of neoliberal governmentalism. The core of the paper, however, examines how this rise of reactionary policy, marked by explicit biological racism cum 19th C ethno-nationalism, open embrace of a variety forms of violence at the borders, explicit misogyny, and disruption/termination of science and environmental projects at a variety of levels, requires a “new” politics of resistance: analysis (research) and praxis—and what is an education program but a praxis? These shifts valorize a new/old configuration of power. Because discourses of equity are now anathema (those who resist are “snow flakes”), the core politics of progressive science education is challenged. In this main section, I consider our science education program, crafted as a reaction to neoliberal capitalism, has been obsoleted by this shift. For example the paper explores STEM discourse as contested, on the one hand being about pipelines, labor shortages, and, on the other hand, focused on equity and multiculturalism. These two are not necessarily opposed, but in the hegemony of reaction, only one has serious traction with the state. Our program refigured STEM to make sociological analysis central in what we called STEAMD (science, technology, engineering, arts, math, and democracy). While this democratic recasting of STEM—for instance through Sclove’s (1995) critiques of technologies—seemed relevant in the era of Hayekian market fundamentalism, it seems less relevant when minorities are being rounded up, separated, and isolated from families. While vampire capitalism is at work here, this reflects more than a corporate logic. In the conclusion, I start to retheorize our praxis, weaving Sylvia Wynter’s post-colonialism (McKittrick, 2015), contemporary analysis of reaction (Robin, 2013), and Foucault’s notes on security and the state (Foucault, Senellart, Ewald, & Fontana, 2007). The conclusion explores the need for the program to engage in aggressive resistance, and maps out groups and thinking that are shaping such practices, e.g., Wayne Au’s call for explicit resistance to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids at schools, as the basis of a science education needed to resist this reactionary order

Author

• Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington - Tacoma