Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice: Provocations and Conversations (Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education, 24) 3031393295, 9783031393297

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Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24

Matthew Weinstein · Chantal Pouliot  Isabel Martins · Ralph Levinson  Lyn Carter · Larry Bencze · Ajay Sharma

Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice Provocations and Conversations

Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education Volume 24

Series Editors Catherine Milne, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University, New York, NY, USA Christina Siry, University of Luxembourg, Ossining, NY, USA

The series is unique in focusing on the publication of scholarly works that employ social and cultural perspectives as foundations for research and other scholarly activities in the three fields implied in its title: science education, education, and social studies of science. The aim of the series is to promote transdisciplinary approaches to scholarship in science education that address important topics in the science education including the teaching and learning of science, social studies of science, public understanding of science, science/technology and human values, science and literacy, ecojustice and science, indigenous studies and science and the role of materiality in science and science education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, the book series explicitly aims at establishing such bridges and at building new communities at the interface of currently distinct discourses. In this way, the current almost exclusive focus on science education on school learning would be expanded becoming instead a focus on science education as a cultural, cross-age, cross-class, and cross-­ disciplinary phenomenon. The book series is conceived as a parallel to the journal Cultural Studies of Science Education, opening up avenues for publishing works that do not fit into the limited amount of space and topics that can be covered within the same text. Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Publishing Editor: Claudia Acuna E-mail: [email protected]

Matthew Weinstein • Chantal Pouliot Isabel Martins • Ralph Levinson • Lyn Carter Larry Bencze • Ajay Sharma

Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice Provocations and Conversations

Matthew Weinstein School of Education University of Washington Tacoma, WA, USA

Chantal Pouliot Faculté des sciences de l’éducation Université Laval Québec, QC, Canada

Isabel Martins Centro de Ciências da Saúde Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ralph Levinson Institute of Education University College London London, UK

Lyn Carter Australian Catholic University Fitzroy, VIC, Australia

Larry Bencze Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada

Ajay Sharma Department of Educational Theory and Practice Francis Mary Early College of Education University of Georgia Athens, Georgia

ISSN 2731-0248     ISSN 2731-0256 (electronic) Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education ISBN 978-3-031-39329-7    ISBN 978-3-031-39330-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1

Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 The Community of Contributors������������������������������������������������������    1

2

Knowing Our Moment: (Neo)Liberalism, Democracy and Science (Education)��������������������������������������������������������������������������    7 2.1 Knowing Your Moment��������������������������������������������������������������������    7 2.2 From Whence I Came ����������������������������������������������������������������������   10 2.3 Liberalism ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   12 2.3.1 Science and Early Liberalism ����������������������������������������������   12 2.4 Early Liberal Education��������������������������������������������������������������������   15 2.5 Liberalism’s Paradoxes and Contingencies��������������������������������������   15 2.6 Twentieth Century Liberalism and Democracy��������������������������������   17 2.6.1 Schmitt and Schumpeter’s Democracy ��������������������������������   18 2.7 Crisis of Capitalism: 1930/1940s: The Great Depression, the Welfare State and Early Neoliberalism ��������������������������������������   20 2.7.1 The Socialist Calculation Debate (SCD) Through the Depression Years����������������������������������������������   20 2.7.2 Post WW2: Social State Welfarism and Early Neoliberalism������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 2.7.3 Truth-Making, Science and Early Neoliberalism ����������������   25 2.7.4 Science and Science Education Under Welfarism����������������   26 2.8 Crisis of Capitalism: 1970s: Globalisation, and the Rise of Neoliberalism����������������������������������������������������������   28 2.8.1 The Financial Shocks of the 1970s ��������������������������������������   28 2.8.2 The Triumph of Neoliberalism ��������������������������������������������   29 2.8.3 Science and Science Education(STEM) Under Neoliberalism’s Golden Age��������������������������������������   31 2.9 Crisis of Capitalism: 2008: The Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism, Post Liberalism and Post Democracy����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   33 2.9.1 The Causes of the GFC ��������������������������������������������������������   33 v

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2.9.2 Right Wing Populist (RWP)��������������������������������������������������   34 2.9.3 Post Liberalism and Post Democracy ����������������������������������   35 2.9.4 Science Under RWP and Authoritarian Neoliberalism��������   38 2.10 Science Education into the Future: The Old Is Dying and the New Is Yet to Be Born����������������������������������������������������������   40 3

Tales of Struggle: Dust, Smoke, Urban Forests and Confidentiality of Research ������������������������������������������������������������   43 3.1 Stories of Environmental and Health Struggle ��������������������������������   45 3.1.1 Dust ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   45 3.1.2 Port’s Expansion Project ������������������������������������������������������   48 3.1.3 Smoke ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   50 3.1.4 Ongoing Mobilisations ��������������������������������������������������������   51 3.2 Two Stories of Requests��������������������������������������������������������������������   54 3.3 Teaching Stories of Struggle������������������������������������������������������������   59 3.4 Collaboration������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 3.4.1 Political Love������������������������������������������������������������������������   64 3.4.2 The Second-Year Class Visit������������������������������������������������   65 3.5 Friday Morning ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   65

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 Science Education and Possible Futures������������������������������������������������   69 4.1 As a Way of Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������   69 4.2 The Beginning: A Very Good Place to Start ������������������������������������   71 4.3 Back to the Present: Challenges for Science Education in Contemporaneity��������������������������������������������������������������������������   73 4.4 A (Brief) History of the Present (as Seen from Brazil)��������������������   74 4.4.1 Globalisation ������������������������������������������������������������������������   74 4.4.2 Neoliberalism������������������������������������������������������������������������   75 4.4.3 Democracy, Social Justice and Inequality����������������������������   78 4.4.4 Education for Citizenship ����������������������������������������������������   81 4.5 Past, Present and Future Challenges for Science Education������������   84 4.5.1 Environmental Vulnerability and Risk����������������������������������   85 4.5.2 Racism and Other No Less Significant -Isms ����������������������   86 4.5.3 Post-truth and Denialism in Science and in Science Education������������������������������������������������������������������������������   87 4.5.4 Blind Spots in the Science-Technology-Society (STS) Debate ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   88 4.5.5 Decolonialities����������������������������������������������������������������������   89 4.5.6 Education as Praxis ��������������������������������������������������������������   89 4.5.7 The Precarisation of the Teaching Profession����������������������   91 4.6 Ways Forward ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   92

Contents

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 Science Education and Social Justice: A Possible Dream��������������������   95 5.1 Preamble ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   95 5.1.1 First Thought������������������������������������������������������������������������   95 5.1.2 Second Thought��������������������������������������������������������������������   97 5.1.3 Third Thought ����������������������������������������������������������������������   98 5.2 Science Education and Crises ����������������������������������������������������������   98 5.3 Visions of Science Education������������������������������������������������������������  100 5.4 Personal History��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  104 5.4.1 Going into Teaching��������������������������������������������������������������  104 5.4.2 The Remedial Anti-racist Instinct ����������������������������������������  105 5.4.3 Second Teaching Post: SSIs��������������������������������������������������  108 5.5 Towards A Resolution ����������������������������������������������������������������������  111 5.6 Critical Realism��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  113 5.7 Chemistry of Aluminium������������������������������������������������������������������  117 5.8 Concluding Points����������������������������������������������������������������������������  121

6

 Towards a Science/Education of Late Neoliberal Bodies ��������������������  123 6.1 Guinea Pig Pedagogy������������������������������������������������������������������������  126 6.2 Red Zone Pedagogy��������������������������������������������������������������������������  129 6.3 STEM to STEAMD��������������������������������������������������������������������������  133 6.4 STEM and the State of My World����������������������������������������������������  139 6.5 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  146 Appendix a List of STEAMD STS Concepts Addressed by Students in Lesson Plans����������������������������������������������������������������������  148

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Growing Pro-ecojustice Dispositifs Through Science and Technology Education����������������������������������������������������������������������  149 7.1 State of Our World����������������������������������������������������������������������������  149 7.2 Imagining Social and Ecological Health and Harmony Everywhere����������������������������������������������������������������  153 7.3 Eco-Social Change Through Science and Technology Education����������������������������������������������������������������  155 7.3.1 Prepare Students for Altruistic Civic Engagement ��������������  159 7.3.2 Encourage and Enable Students to Use Claims from Their Self-Led Primary and Secondary Research to Inform Their Altruistic Actions����������������������������������������  163 7.3.3 Directly Teach Students Important Attitudes, Skills and Knowledge, etc����������������������������������������������������  169 7.3.4 Encourage and Enable Students to Practise Informed Sociopolitical Actions Prior to Self-Directing Them������������  171 7.4 Coda��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  173

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Can We Be Hopeful Yet? ������������������������������������������������������������������������  177 8.1 The Change We Believe In����������������������������������������������������������������  178 8.2 Equilibrium: The Graveyard of Progressive Hopes��������������������������  180 8.3 Punctuation: The Harbinger of Possibilities ������������������������������������  183 8.4 Cultivating Docta Spes����������������������������������������������������������������������  186

Correction to: Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   C1 References ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  189

The original version of the book has been revised. A correction to this book can be found https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_9

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 The Community of Contributors On April 14, 1856, Karl Marx gave a speech on the anniversary of the People’s Chartist paper. This was indeed a time of political and social ferment. While Britain, France and Spain were establishing new colonies in Asia and Africa, there was growing unrest in the German states (1848); the French Revolution, 50 years before had prompted new visions of a social order; and 15 years later the Paris Commune was to rock the European establishment: the seeds of the Russian Revolution were also being sown. There are many analyses which see the rocking of the chains of the Ancien Regime in economic terms. The new mercantilism and global trade arising from colonial exploitation was to lead to unfettered capitalism. Marx and Engels, and many other social historians and economists, foresaw this. This new capitalism was made possible by new technologies, for example steam power and the expansion of the rail and maritime networks, an infra-structure for electrical transmission, telegraphy. Marx delved beneath this and identified its philosophical roots. What he says demands some analysis because even from 170 years ago it pinpoints problems in our neoliberal world at the source of socio-economic eco-justice, schooling, the science curriculum, and ultimately science teachers and learners. At that time, as indeed in ours, ‘everything appear(ed) to be pregnant with its opposite’ (Marx, 1969, p. 500). Machines, Marx noted, are being created which are designed to reduce human drudgery but instead appear to create more misery, overwork and hunger. A prescient view of Chaplin’s Modern Times and robotics or AI in our own times: just to note that people don’t have to fly bombers anymore; drones can do the job so humans are safer and less susceptible to moral qualms. Technology displaces the problems, the ethics. In these times sufficient vaccines can be produced to immunise the world against the COVID pandemic, and yet medical science benefits the wealthy and powerful preferentially. “All our discoveries and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_1

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1 Introduction

progress seem to have had no other consequences than to endow material forces with spiritual life and to brutalise human life into a material force.” (cited in Korsch, 1972, p. 70) This is a damning indictment on the productive forces unleashed by the Enlightenment. How far has Marx’s message influenced those practising and teaching science today? PISA and TIMMS scores, examination results are what is highly prized in education. As Stephen Ball (2003) suggests, teaching has been quickly ‘fabricated’ by ‘productive’ modern capitalism. What has worked so spectacularly in science education in the twentieth and twenty first century is the mendacious but tacit uncoupling of science education from ideology. And in keeping with giving birth to its opposite, this book has come about precisely because its authors have seen themselves as politically marginalised from the broader science education community, and that very marginality has produced friendship, arguments and collaboration. Seven of us have come together to write this book because in our diverse ways, throughout most of our teaching careers, we understand that social justice, eco-­ justice, intersectionalities of neo-colonialism, feminism, anti-racism, post-­ humanism and science knowledge and practice are interwoven. Although the authors have come together through a communality of shared aspirations and beliefs, our professional trajectories have been quite different. One of us (Chantal) has experienced professional struggles and adversity in her open resistance to the environmental threats to her city through exposure of residents to nickel dust. Another (Isabel) works in a contemporary political environment larded with anti-­ intellectual neofascist threats in a country where radical scholarship – for example Paulo Freire and Milton Santos – has historically resisted attacks to democracy. We have all experienced hostility to our philosophies to varying degrees. Within the education community and beyond we are not alone but we have been fortunate enough to bond as a group. An irony is that those symbols of corporate power - Google and Zoom - have provided the technology for us to come together in our resistance, particularly during COVID.  These contacts have enabled us to support each other, to argue, to learn, and to find ways of reforming science education programmes in a critical frame of the larger political context, and hence give purpose – and meaning – to studying science. This book is a reflection and accounting of global encounters between academics working to refashion science education in their own places/spaces. Our conversations and encounters in these chapters are embedded in larger struggles, longer trajectories, and more encompassing questions, engaging in both science education and the larger political context (environmental crises, inequality, etc.) which might give purpose to science education. Our local settings and histories generate their own contradictions. The global itself is a power charged realm; higher education puts us in a global class stratum; that this class stratum is characterized by particular racial, national, and linguistic hegemonies. Though our community has members who speak French and Portuguese, our conversations were in English which conditioned the grammar and often the content of what was spoken. While there were memorable times when whole literatures were opened up to the group, it did not happen as often as it should

1.1  The Community of Contributors

3

have and was limited by our own linguistic capabilities and histories. And, although some Latin American views and voices are present in Isabel’s accounts, work in whole continents – Africa and Asia – has been absent in our discourse. We were not systematic in seeking out discourses and critiques, but grew through the different discourses and literatures each of us brought to the group. Also, implied in that word “refashion” is the acknowledgement that science education as a field has its own imperatives that we were at odds with, a Gramscian hegemony of assumptions. This more than anything brought us together. We have at various times tried to characterize our work as “against the grain” or “against the tide” implying that we were moving in a way that put us against the field, often with cruel consequences: institutional silencing, refusal of tenure, and marginalization in our departments. As one contributor noted in planning this chapter (Chantal), [i]t sheds light on the convictions that animate us now and that animated us at the beginning of our careers. It bears witness to the human side of research, teaching and service to the community. Without overemphasizing the darker side of some of the stories, it will allow the reader to understand that some episodes can be demanding, distressing and bring an uncertainty that we could do without. I hope that other researchers will recognize themselves in this book and feel accompanied in some way.1

This is not to say that we have not also thrived in our various spheres, been privileged to travel and to work with scholars around the world. What is this tide we are standing against? Specifically, we are writing/thinking against any science education model that separates science education, its pedagogy and content – its institutional framing – from socio-political issues. With this comes an embrace of complexity, of an urgency to dig deeper. Isabel notes that we stand against “trivialization of complex concepts such as ‘citizenship’ and social ‘justice’ in current science education discourse, and the way these have become slogans of a ‘politically correct’ version of the [the field].” I do not believe it is possible to address the complex, intricate relationships between science, technology, knowledge, decision making, race, gender, sexuality, power, economics, etc., without fully problematizing their origins and consequences.” Such nuance is necessary, to re-envision science education, as Lyn says, “[to] work towards goals other than elite authoritarian and platform capitalism,” or as framed by Larry, “[to prioritize] social, including socio-economic, justice and environmental vitality.” And, as Ralph notes, “to meet the dire emergencies, but also recognize huge opportunities, facing us. This is urgent.” The urgency should be familiar to readers of this volume. As Lyn observes, “humanity and the planet face converging and conflicting crises.” The climate crisis is predicted to lead to shortage, hunger, and displacement. The economic crisis, in which a small group of people control the wealth, the resources, and media – leading to a strangle hold on politics, the imagination, and material necessities. Science, i.e. reliable knowledge of the world and the social processes that generate that knowledge, is deeply implicated in all of these crises. As a modernist project,

 We will use first names for the contributors to this volume. The quotes do not come from the chapters themselves, but from reflections collected during the late stages of creating this volume. 1

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1 Introduction

science is the epistemic foundation for such varied assemblages implicated in these crises via the chemical and plastics industries as well as engineering in all its guises; but it is also witness to the crises: marking ecological destruction, naming climate change, and struggling for materialities that enable wellbeing (solar cells and the vaccinations for COVID-19, as mere examples). But even this framing posits science as somehow independent of enterprise, i.e., capitalism and the political economy that authorizes and manufactures knowledge. To address these crises, we are all engaged in re-framing science education through ethics, political economy, complexity, and axiology. Furthermore, we cannot be exempt from our own analyses, i.e., our own practices and institutions are part of the tide we swim against. As Chantal notes, “I write against many things [including] the managerial rise in university governance that makes it difficult to defend faculty members who are hassled by outside organizations whose interests diverge from the production of knowledge for the benefit of people.” The various chapters address these issues in distinct ways through autobiography. Ralph charts the contradictions he encountered as a beginning science teacher in the 1980s in diverse London and Thatcherite UK.  The main contradictions he sees are the characterisations of science as reductionist or serving a Third Way neolib economy and flag-waving ethics, and his aspirations for an inclusive socially just science. He frames this as an ontological and epistemological question and goes on to derive solutions with implications for educative pedagogy. Lyn notes that while science and science education might well be aware of their own methodological and epistemological preconditions, they are wilfully oblivious to their political, economic and social ones. Exposing the political economies shaping science education’s enactment not only explodes its mythical apolitical status but works towards re-envisioning a hopeful science education at a moment when humanity and the planet face multiple imbricated crises. As science education remains a liberal democratic project of the mid-twentieth century early neoliberalism, her chapter examines liberalism’s and democracy’s embedded philosophical and political assumptions and their deterioration into the post liberal and post democratic futures consequent to increasing authoritarianisms, platform capitalism, and climate emergencies. In her chapter, Chantal looks back on her career as a researcher in science education while highlighting the ins and outs of local controversies (stories of struggle) that she has documented and that have concerned her directly. The stories discussed are about air quality and urban land development, but also about preserving urban forests and protecting research confidentiality. Chantal’s story shows that citizen mobilizations sometimes lead to substantial gains but, at other times, citizens must maintain high vigilance and efforts if they want to improve the quality of their living environment. For her, stories of local struggle must be addressed in science and science education courses if students and teachers are to be equipped with the ability to act on the world to make it a better place. Larry describes perspectives, practices, successes and struggles of his teaching and learning framework (STEPWISE) that aims to help generate community members willing and able to critically evaluate processes and products of science

1.1  The Community of Contributors

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and technology (apparently heavily-influenced by powerful others) and to develop and carry out research-informed and socially-negotiated sociopolitical actions to overcome harms of their interest/concern in relationships among fields of science and technology and societies and environments. In doing so, he also weaves in contributions to his project from numerous other actants, including authors of this book. Congruent, however, with his view that many of our problems are sustained by power-supporting dispositifs, he stresses needs for action research involving increasingly diverse living, non-living and symbolic actants. Matthew recounts the genesis of his analysis of human objectification as emblematic of the power relations within science. He explores hyperstazing the relationship between the observer/scientist and observed to make this politics subject to student examination in science education. He also updates the theory in the light of neoliberalism and the rise of the blood economy, i.e., the economics of blood and plasma donation, as a way to challenge the discourses of STEM and its vision of science education as vocational training. Isabel delves into her own experiences in crossing linguistic and cultural borders in order to problematise universalising relationships between science education, citizenship, and social justice. Strongly grounded in critical discourse perspectives, she explores relationships between language and society, in order to suggest that the hegemonisation and naturalisation of a pseudo-libertarian stance in science curricula may contribute to practices that both mask and reproduce social injustice. She also problematizes ways through which modern Western science has colonised systems of knowledge in a way that precludes scholars in the Global South to access, to assess and to value explanations and alternative models of social organisation that may be less predatory to nature. She finalizes by calling attention to an emergent agenda for Science Education research and practice in Latin America, which not only potentially challenges established views in our fields but also suggests the role of alterity as key in producing less asymmetrical relationships in society. Ajay’s concluding chapter bookends the reflections by critical scholar-educators in the preceding chapters by positioning their lifelong struggles for change in science education as the much needed visionary work aimed at imagining and building alternative hopeful, equitable and sustainable futures both in and out of science classrooms. Viewing policy and social change from the theoretical perspective of punctuated equilibrium, he makes the case that the long period of policy, curricular and structural stability that characterized science education in advanced capitalist societies underpinned by (progressive) neoliberalism is probably likely to be punctuated in the near future by an interregnum that opens paths for all kinds of utopian and dystopian futures. He identifies the crumbling hegemony of progressive neoliberalism and ongoing ecological crises as the probable causes of this impending period of rapid change. However, resisting “capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009) and left melancholia (Brown, 2002), he argues that we can entertain docta spes (educated hope) (Bloch, 1995) for constructing concrete utopian futures. We need to seize the opportunities offered by the interregnum by building upon the critical and visionary work done by these scholar-educators on the margins.

Chapter 2

Knowing Our Moment: (Neo)Liberalism, Democracy and Science (Education)

How did we end up in a world when a child should govern an old man an imbecile should lead a wise man and a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities? Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Second Discourse (1755, p. 137).

2.1 Knowing Your Moment I came across the award-winning novelist and literary academic Marilynne Robinson during one of the 2020 lockdowns. Known for her studied observations of the human experience, and a desire to understand without judgement, Robinson suggested that for her, education had been a ‘tremendous privilege’ and a great gift to ‘know your moment’ (Robinson, 2020 my italics). Robinson’s appeal for an education that helps us know and understand ‘our moment’ is more critical than ever, as ours is a moment of profound intellectual and moral anxiety, laid bare by a devastating pandemic. It is a time of post truth populism, rampant inequality, the retreat of democracy, the decline of liberalism, accelerating climate change, algorithms, chat bots, and a time when data mining as a new form of colonisation has come to laminate history in a continual moment of coloniality. Somewhat grimly, Steger and James (2020, p. 188) have described our present moment as “the Great Unsettling” – a time where the “intensifying dynamics of instability, disintegration, insecurity, dislocation, relativism, inequality, and degradation … (are) unprecedented in their compounding confluence of events.” How does education – as a conceptual field, as sets of largely liberal inclined discourses and practices, as networks of institutions, policies, learning theories and curricula – navigate this uncertain world even as it is simultaneously reconstructed by Steger and James’ (2020) “unsettling” forces? This is an important question, because it speaks not only to our need to make sense of our changing world, but also to the practical possibilities Robinson’s (2020) writings pursue, of how we are to live and act in ssduch a world. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_2

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It is impossible I believe, to consider education in general, and science education in particular, in isolation from these broader social, cultural, economic and political relationships reconfiguring our moment. As a science educator, I have always positioned my scholarship firmly within the political and the sociocultural because, as Lemke (2001, p. 297) argues, such critiques “seek to elucidate the problems that arise from our limited view of the larger systems we inhabit.” My earlier scholarship sought “to contribute towards the revision of science education’s philosophical frameworks, stimulated by the view that changes to social relations always generate the need for revision in philosophical and political agendas” (Carter, 2002, p. 15). The changed social relations at the time were neoliberalism and globalisation, the meta discourses describing the economic, political and social reconfigurations in the world from the 1970s onwards. Moreover, new intellectual inquiries in postcolonialism/decolonialism exploring historical imperialism and enduring global coloniality were being prompted by accelerating global migratory flows and cultural hybridisation (Nederveen Pieterse, 2020). As science education lagged behind educational philosophy, sociology and policy studies exploring these significant shaping forces, my ongoing project was to review “the discursive regimes of science education, neoliberalism, globalisation, and postcolonialism so as to explore their intersection for analysing science education’s contemporary production” (Carter, 2002, p. 183). Several decades on, these regimes looks somewhat different. For Featherstone (2020, p. 160), “deglobalization could well be occurring on some levels, while reglobalization intensifies on others.” A global pandemic mediated through increased digitisation and connectivity even as nation-state borders have resurged and vaccine nationalism is ascendant, speaks to globalisation’s persistence and pliability. Steger and James (2020, p. 194) argue a shift from the late twentieth century embodied globalisation of human movements, supply chains and commodity exchange to contemporary intangible global processes in the “communication of ideas, words, images, meanings, knowledge, sounds, electronic texts, soft-ware programs and novel cyber-assets such as blockchain-encoded cryptocurrencies.” At the same time, neoliberalism has morphed into its third and latest stage (Davies, 2016). This is apparent in emergent authoritarian politics repudiating liberal democracy, and increasing international multipolarity (re)focusing attention on non-Western civilisational states like China, India and Russia. Decolonisation has become more strident and demands are voiced in former imperial centres as ‘Black Lives begin to Matter.’ Together, these forces, − known collectively as post liberal and post democratic (Barrinha & Renard, 2020; Crouch, 2004), − challenge and undermine the rules of Western-conceived notions of the globalised liberal democratic order. In this chapter, I extend my work into the political and sociocultural forces producing science education within ‘our moment’ of the post liberal and post democratic. Differently formed at previous historical junctures, science, education and science education as we now know them are liberal democratic products of the mid-twentieth century, and first stage neoliberalism. Certainly, origin narratives of Western science and liberalism are entangled (Shapin & Schaffer, 2011), and education is permeated with liberal ideologies and values as far back as Rousseau, John

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Dewey and beyond. While a coherent ideology on some readings, liberalism is also fragile and faulty, rife with severe contradictions, inequalities, fractures, and intolerances, swayed by dynamics of time, space and place. Democracy, both ideology – governing by the demos – and institutional, Dunn (2021) argues, is misunderstood, misrepresented and potentially (and in many iterations) illusory. What are the implications for science education when the fault lines of its taken-for-­granted, embedded liberal and democratic ideologies, institutions, processes and values are exposed? Can science education ever really be a satisfying venture, or indeed, meet its ‘goals’ when its assumed moral purposes are riddled with contingencies in liberalism and democracy’s historicity? What of science education in contexts of governance that never privileged liberalism and democracy? In other words, how does science education meet the challenges of the post liberal and post democratic world? This is critical to consider in light of science education’s role, not only in the production of future professionals, but also in the formation of a decision-making populace facing the most existential emergency of all – climate change. If nothing else, the pandemic has placed scientific expertise at the heart of sociopolitical life, throwing new light on the scientists’ fraught navigation of highly contested political spaces. Moreover, late-phase neoliberalism’s increasing post truth epistemic crisis described below, sees aspirational scientifically literate people attempt to negotiate scientific uncertainty, increasing complexity, and algorithmically polarised digital echo chambers. Rousseau’s questioning above of ‘how did we end here,’ together with Mirowski’s (2011) more recent call to ‘look to the antecedents to understand how our moment may have developed and how it could be otherwise,’ shape my discussion here. This means mapping a somewhat simplified, and necessarily perspectival, genealogy of liberalism and democracy and their permeation of science and science education over time. While science and science education might well be aware of their own methodological and epistemological preconditions, they are wilfully oblivious to their political, economic and social ones. I address that omission with a focus, firstly, on scientist and political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and others of the Scientific Revolution and early Enlightenment, where the intellectual ferment fabricated and melded together science, science education and liberalism. Secondly, I move to democracy’s rise over the past century, highlighting the work of intellectuals like German legal theorist Carl Schmitt and fellow Austrians and political economists Friedrich von Hayek and Joseph A. Schumpeter amongst others chosen for their pertinence for my project here. The coordinates of the Hobbesian focus are at large within the twentieth century, and both structure our contemporary ideological and pragmatic experiences of liberal democracy. As neoliberalism has been the most dominant form of late century/early twenty-first liberalism, much of my narrative concerns its genesis and sedimentation. My discussion is informed by my professional and personal journeys, and enriched by those of my colleagues and friends, some of whose wonderful stories form this book’s other chapters. Science and technology scholar Sherry Turkle (2021) suggests that many academics would like to write their “backstory (as) somebody whose work life has truly been animated by the personal story… but

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daren’t because they think their work life should be pristine, that it should come from a purely cognitive place.” This is not a reservation shared by the authors here as we regard our personal stories and relationships as central to our work. Hence, I begin my discussion with a short account of my own backstory, which describes the origins of the political and sociocultural positioning central to my teaching and scholarship over the past decades.

2.2 From Whence I Came With hindsight, I was always a political animal. I was reminded of this by the memoirs of Australian writer, actress and comedian, Magda Szubanski. Beyond her local celebrity, Magda is internationally known for her roles in the movie Babe (1995) and the animation franchise Happy Feet (2011, 2006). In my first position as a newly minted science teacher about four decades ago, I taught a young Magda in her middle high school years. Noting that she didn’t ‘grow up in a political household,’ Magda writes of her boredom with school science and her quickly fading ambition to study medicine: Maybe Miss Carter would make science interesting; maybe my old dream of becoming a doctor didn’t have to die. … Things were looking up. … Miss Carter galvanised me into political action and via the most unlikely means: the periodic table of elements. I hated the periodic table … Then Miss Carter furtively mentioned the political and social significance of number 92 – uranium. She told us about the dangerous by-products with half-lives of 250,000 years. Seen from this fresh perspective the periodic table, that killer of childhood dreams, acquired meaning and appeal. It was about energy and life and power. … we caught a train into the city to join one of the big marches against uranium mining. It felt like my Woodstock, my 1968 … (In the end however), not even Miss Carter could save chemistry for me … I would do a complete 180 and study humanities in my final year. (Szubanski, 2015, p. 163–165 my italics).

Magda was in many ways typical of students finding the traditional science curriculum marginal to their lives, even if it was ‘required’ for a future career. Magda’s reminiscences remind me that my teaching had always been politically peppered and suggest some impact, even if only for one student! Magda’s activism has remained with her and in 2019, she was awarded an Order of Australia for distinguished service to the performing arts and as a same-sex marriage campaigner. I owe my political consciousness to my mother Cassie. A fiercely intelligent woman, whose moment dictated employment in ‘home duties,’ Cassie was an avid observer of politics and current affairs. My mother understood marginalisation. Raised Catholic during the Great Depression in a widowed family of women, without male advocacy, she experienced the religious prejudice, material hardship and misogyny of that time. This left its mark on her politics, freely shared around the kitchen table. Coming of age, my older sister joined the leftist Australian Labor Party, bringing further political insights into our home. These early domestic influences, for which I am immensely grateful, have been refracted through my later

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teaching and academic life, and clearly found voice in my early interactions with students like Magda, and in my later scholarship as an academic. I was educated at a religious girls school in the 1970s, where the nuns’ social justice agenda permeated all their teaching, even science. A capable student, I was streamed into the science. I lived what Fensham (1992) describes as the spread of mass secondary schooling under the welfare state, and the unbridled confidence in a progressive, technoscientific futures influential in science education’s post-­ Sputnik curriculum of the period. Unlike Magda, I enjoyed the periodic table’s ordered universe. At university, the long laboratory classes were as important for their social interaction as they were for any knowledge gained. On one occasion, chided by a Professor of Microbiology for poor laboratory technique, I dared to suggest that I was ‘not really into practical work.’ If that was the case, he responded, I should probably rethink my future! It is not surprising then that I moved into science teaching. In retrospect, while I clearly enjoyed mastering the descriptive sciences’ theoretical knowledge, I did not really understand the nature of scientific work, nor did I see myself in that role. I was becoming more interested in political, philosophical and cultural questions than in accumulating quantifiable and supposedly objective knowledge. Adult partnerships soon bought me into contact with artists, composers and literary academics. It was here that I first encountered Derrida, Foucault, Boulez, Cage, postmodernism and cultural studies: new horizons opening up a world rich with dynamism, creativity, politics and exciting intellectual possibilities. After a decade of school science teaching, my career as a university science teacher educator began in earnest. Over the subsequent years, I was to count four amazing women as my colleagues: Drs. Caroline Smith, Mellita Jones, Jenny Martin and Carolina Castano Rodriquez. My dear friend and mentor Caroline was a teacher-­ educator in multiple countries, an author of scholarly and other manuscripts, an organic farmer, permaculturalist and a passionately committed environmental activist (see Smith & Dawborn, 2011). Together with Mellita, our work coalesced into a shared vision of science education that would not only enable a deeper understanding of our planetary systems, but also work towards more just, equitable and sustainable world outcomes. Caroline’s retirement in 2010 enabled new colleagues Carolina and Jenny to continue the evolution of our approach even as STEM education was in the ascendency. Carolina’s experience in South America, using empathy with animals as a way of mitigating violence within disadvantaged communities, bought new perspectives, as did Jenny’s interest in environmentalism, student agency and a unique methodological approach from discursive psychology. Our new team was just as like-minded in its desire for science education to promote ecological and social justice and our collective scholarship converged around facilitating sociopolitical activism, both our own and that of our preservice teachers. It was during these years that I was fortunate enough to meet and share intellectual solace, friendship (and lots of fun) with the other authors of this book. I met Larry at the 2005 NARST meeting in Baltimore. Larry and I visited each other’s home institutions, collaborated on manuscripts, conference papers, seminars and student assignment work. I had been acquainted with Ralph’s work from the 1990s

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and later met him at the 2010 Slovenian IOSTE meeting in Ljubljana. Larry introduced me to Chantal in 2013, and Ralph to Isabel in 2013 prior to the ESERA meeting in Cyprus. I had referenced Matthew’s writing since first hearing of him through Noel and Annette Gough in 2001, with a more formal introduction taking place through Larry at NARST. I am as guilty as any in finding great comfort with my group – my tribe – both within and beyond my university. In the somewhat limited STEM-based research and pedagogical agendas available, finding each other has been intellectually and personally enhancing, and I will be forever grateful. Having situated my scholarship, I now begin my discussion on the Western liberal democratic political economies shaping science education’s enactment. As indicated earlier, democracy wasn’t widely disseminated as the dominant political paradigm until the mid to late twentieth century, and is thus considered in a later section. Liberalism, however, has been an ascendant intellectual current since the European Enlightenment, with antecedents in the Renaissance and the Reformation. Complex in its component beliefs and ideas, liberalism encompasses moral philosophy, politics, economics, methodologies and legal and civic infrastructures, that fracture into theoretical critiques from both progressive and reactionary orientations. My purpose in describing liberalism’s early histories, is to argue its embeddedness within science and education complete with its potentially paralysing contradictions and flaws that remain largely unexamined within science education. Certainly, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s classic 1985 book, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, (though arguably more so in their introduction to the 2011 edition), establish a strong confluence in these origin stories of particularly, science and liberalism.

2.3 Liberalism 2.3.1 Science and Early Liberalism Early liberals were by and large, polymaths, as interested in science as they were moral philosophy, politics, religion, history, languages and the classics. Well-­ educated, often aristocrats, leisured or patronised, they were a small elite circulating between Britain and Continental Europe. Indeed, as Thomas Hobbes reputedly declared, ‘leisure is the mother of all philosophy.’ They took from the Renaissance’s intellectual ferment, individual expression, tolerance and a certain notion of human dignity, executed through scepticism, reason and empiricism. From the Reformation, and particularly from the early English Reformation’s intolerant and punitive form, they took a desire to stabilise social chaos (Simpson, 2019). Kraynak (1990), McManus (2020), and Runciman (2020) are amongst those who date early liberalism to Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). While partly a matter of academic choice (The Prince, Machiavelli’s treatise published in 1513, could arguably be the index work of modern political philosophy), Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), written during the political turmoil of the English Civil War, is regarded as

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one of the foundational texts of the Western cannon. Eminent Hobbesian scholar Leo Strauss (1950), called him ‘the father of liberalism.’ Similarly, McManus (2020) and Runciman (2020) believe that Hobbes, more than any later liberal thinker, framed the broad contours of the enduring liberal world view while Kraynak (1990, p. 3) argues that “Hobbes understood himself to be a founder of a new order.” Although he reputedly regarded his profession foremost as a scientist, Hobbes’ was also a classicist and translator, a mathematician and an historian, was friend to Galileo and Francis Bacon, corresponded frequently with Rene Descartes and engaged in heated debates with Robert Boyle. As an empiricist, like Bacon and Boyle, Hobbes understood “all of our ideas are derived, directly or indirectly, from sensation” (Duncan, 2021), and believed in a corpuscular ‘clockwork’ universe, made of matter, always in motion and governed by deterministic natural laws. Hobbes believed his cosmology and theory of motion provided a scientific justification for the structure of government. Reviewing Shapin and Schaffer’s (2011/1986) discussion of Leviathan, Jennings (1988, p. 403), argues that for those authors, Leviathan is more “history of science” than political doctrine. For Runciman (2020), Leviathan remains primarily political: the story of modern subjects and states which persists as “the organising principle and institution of our contemporary politics and world.” Slomp (2008) sees a unitarian interpretation of the Leviathan as more appropriate however, with debates on science or political divisions more a function of nineteenth century disciplinary boundary setting than any disunity in Hobbes’ own thinking. Hobbes begins politics afresh, addressing the natural state of humans before society (the primal state of nature where ‘the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’) in which we are, in a multitude, equal in our fragility to death, desirous of peace but ‘in a war of all against all.’ As individual desires necessarily conflict, a right to life and stability occurs when the multitude empowers a sovereign, the metaphorical Leviathan, to make decisions to which the multitude defers. Representation through law becomes the unity of the collective, without which, Hobbes argues, is political breakdown of war and death. Life away from that governed by law enables humans to pursue their individual interests (engendering the liberal constructs of freedom and individualism), be they religious, economic or something other, in a peaceful unhindered way. This notion heralds the arrival of proto-capitalism and liberalism. Hobbes’ science invented his politics, visualising sovereign and state as a rational, interlocking mechanical assembly, versions of which have endured for nigh on four centuries. Hobbes’ influence extends widely: from classical nineteenth century liberalism to European fascism of the 1920s onwards, from the contemporary rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to authoritarian neoliberalism. For example, Lin and Trevaskes (2019) argue that a Hobbesian lens can provide insight into the current CCP’s world view and its uniquely Chinese authoritarian governmental model. The CCP dictates law-based governance, fusing it to the prescribed socialist values in a morality-law amalgam that is at once, both traditionally Confucian (an harmonious society through hierarchy and merit, and the noble moral citizen), and politically and socially contemporaneous. For Lin and Trevaskes (2019), the CCP and Xi Jinping are the omnipotent sovereign – the ‘virtuous’ Leviathan – providing moral

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legitimacy for representative government, such that the multitude cede their individual rights for protection and governance. At the other end of the scale, Runciman (2021a) argues that global corporations like Amazon, Facebook and so on are also examples of a Hobbesian state, in which the Leviathan is embodied by benevolent, all-powerful CEOs. A generation after Hobbes, medical doctor John Locke (1632–1704) further advanced liberal thinking. A Baconian empiricist, Locke knew Boyle, worked with Robert Hooke and was friends with Isaac Newton, whose Principia (1687) is reputed to have shaped some of Locke’s later work. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689–1690) examined rights (significantly property rights), as well as slavery, freedom of expression, the separation of powers (church and state), and is credited with influencing the US Constitution (1787). For McManus (2020), Locke’s understanding of property rights are an odd mix of his science and theology; Locke believed God’s provision of all creation was available for man’s (sic) appropriation and use. This was justified by ‘a man having property in his own person, he is therefore entitled to his labour and all with which he mixes his labour’ (that is, material entities), which then become his own property. While Locke did not sanction greed per se and saw God’s resources as available to all, his construct of property rights became central to liberalism going forward. Like Hobbes before him, Locke believed his arguments to be ‘scientifically positioned.’ That property rights are complex and require a fine balance as they can easily suppress other rights, has become an enduring problem for contemporary rights-based issues, including contemporaneous Human Rights. Indeed, half a century later in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (also known as the Second Discourse) (1755), Genevan-born, liberal philosopher and educator, Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau, concludes that private property is the basis of all inequality: The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this imposter;… (as) the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody (p. 161).

Rousseau’s disadvantaged background and outsider status (from Geneva rather than Paris), made him fully cognisant of liberalism’s inherent contradictions that primarily served the interests of the cosmopolitan elites of the time. In Hobbes, Locke and others, early liberalism inscribes the State as preserving its citizen’s rights to life, liberty and property, punishing their violation and pursuing the public good. Early liberalism bifurcated into political and economic branches concerned with different societal issues. Economic liberalism emerged with Rousseau’s contemporary, British economist and philosopher Adam Smith and his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations (1776). Heavily influencing many twentieth century economists including Ludwig von Mises and Fredrick von Hayek whom I discuss below, Smith sought to replace mercantilist (preferential contracts) and physiocratic (wealth is land and agriculture) economic theories, which were becoming less relevant with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Smith argued

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that laissez faire markets would self-regulate through competition, supply and demand and self-interest  – the infamous ‘invisible hand’ metaphor. With the contributions of Smith and later liberal economists, the pillars of liberal thought, that is, the political, the economic and the social(ideological), were now in place.

2.4 Early Liberal Education Many early liberals also theorised education. Locke’s Of the Conduct of Human Understanding: Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) followed posthumously by Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706), described the education of children and adults. The earlier tome argues for a three strand approach to education: the development of a healthy body, the formation of a virtuous mind (that is, respecting others’ rights, humanity, industry, thrift, courage, truthfulness, and questioning prejudice, authority and the biases of one’s own self-interest), and an academic curriculum of the newly emerging sciences, as well as mathematics and languages. Locke’s education was considered authoritative, and has clear finger prints on contemporary educational theory and practice. Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762) has also persisted, having been taught in my own educational studies course. Emile’s interaction with his tutor (Sophie representing girls added almost as post script and only as companion to Emile), describes the education of an ideal (male) citizen built upon his Second Discourse and other writings. Emphasising empiricism and reason, Emile explored how the individual might retain their innate human goodness and moral purpose while growing up in an imperfect and potentially corrupting society. Ironically, Rousseau was a poor parent and, as a point of principle, placed all his five children in a foundling hospital, believing he owed them nothing despite Emile containing parenting advice including the benefits of swaddling and breastfeeding!

2.5 Liberalism’s Paradoxes and Contingencies Hobbes’ notion of the State was an artificial construction whose success has become normalised and naturalised such that there is now no other way of organising human affairs. Like all human constructs it is necessarily imperfect, permeated with inconsistencies and flaws. Rousseau’s Second Discourse, for example, argues that political settlements like Hobbes’ State obfuscate their embedded power and hierarchies while providing illusory solutions (Runciman, 2021a). Hobbes was well aware of his State’s own inherit paradox, that is, to be peaceful and free enough from conflict to pursue one’s individual concerns, meant surrendering a great part of that freedom to the State. Thus, liberalism encodes only small perimeters of freedoms that vary with time and circumstance, while Leviathans exercise power to greater or lesser extents. State-mandated lockdowns, masking requirements and compulsory

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vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic would be examples, as are contemporary libertarian’s ideas on their freedoms even as they follow road rules. The legal rights and ideological tolerance espoused by Locke, and the social equity championed by Rousseau are also contingent. Locke’s religious tolerance for example, did not extend beyond Protestantism, nor did legal freedoms extend to women, nonpropertied men, or, in a time of expanding imperialism, to the racial other. Deneen (2018) argues that liberalism’s foundational principles are deeply contradictory and proffer an impasse: liberalism trumpets equal rights while fostering capitalism’s material inequality, and its legitimacy rests on the ostensibly freely-given consent (of the multitude), at the same time it discourages communitarism, and civic commitments in favour of private property and economic individualism. Jahn (2021) extends these points to argue that liberalism’s successes were underpinned by a domestic and international divide, in which expropriation and oppression was externalised into the non-Western international sphere, particularly the colonies, (with some home-front emancipatory problems), along with political conflicts and other costs. The resultant prosperity enabled political freedom and human rights to mature domestically, justifying the civilisational and developmental superiority of the West, embedding racism, nationalism, and imperialism. If colonial and other spaces could not be ‘liberal’ it was due to their own civilisational failures, like poor governance and corruption or just being ‘black’ (Jahn, 2021). Bhambra (2021) agrees, arguing that colonialism provided the material wealth that enabled liberalism to thrive in the metropole. Liberalism’s own absolutism is revealed as a universalising imperialism and authoritarianism, in which liberalism only tolerates liberalism, making it, perversely, ‘anti-liberal’ – another impasse. It does not allow for other ideological positions or governances like communism, some forms of Islam, fascism and so on. In other words, liberalism’s tolerance can be highly intolerant. This reading of liberalism’s hegemony makes it problematic, just as what much of what liberalism eschews (for example, fascism) is also problematic. Liberalism’s absolutism and its other contingencies raise the question of dissent, both domestic and international, which necessarily occurs at the perimeters of perceived rights and freedoms, and civilisational clashes. The West’s outrage at China’s treatment of its Uyghur population while simultaneously tolerating human rights violations in Palestine illustrates these difficulties. Supra-national bodies like the League of Nations (1920–1946), and the twentieth century global liberal rules order of the later United Nations (1946–), along with other multilateral organisations, NGOs, and philanthropic institutes attempt to mediate dissent with mixed success. This has seen the twentieth century be humanity’s most violent era at the same time it has increased social equity, and raised tens of millions out of poverty. And it is to this era that I now turn. Never static, liberalism and its articulation with democracy during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have arguably been shaped by three major crises of the political economic  – the Great Depression (1929–1933), the 1970s recession and oil crisis, and the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Each of these political, economic and social upheavals which form the framework of my discussion, have reinvented liberalism and confronted democracy, with the encoded paradoxes and contingencies jostling, in Zygmunt

2.6  Twentieth Century Liberalism and Democracy

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Bauman’s terms, as they “settle aside each other, clash and mix … in the same space/time” (2001, p. 137). As a child of the second half of the twentieth century, these years have shaped my background story and those of my mother’s and of my children’s. I also consider the confluence with science and science education of each crisis. As neoliberalism has been the most dominant form of twentieth/twenty-first century liberalism and democracy, it is an important focus, and helps explain its preternatural dominance, pliability and persistence that continues to shape our moment. I start then with a discussion of twentieth century democracy before moving to consider each of the crises.

2.6 Twentieth Century Liberalism and Democracy Despite a marked transition from absolutism to limited representative democracies during the nineteenth century, it was not until the first decades of the twentieth century in the West that the suffrage was widened to most adult (white) men and women. With some outliers in female suffrage (France in 1944; Switzerland in 1971), it was the mid-century and beyond before voting rights were extended to other racial groups and indigenous peoples, like Australian First Nations’ people (1962). Nevertheless, many Western and some non-Western nations would identify as liberal democracies for much of the twentieth century, and more strongly so after the Second World War (1939–1945). Over these decades, democracy as a semantic field has bled into liberalism, even though it remains a separate construct. For example, democracy as ideology, that is, government by the many, encodes no moral compass, and can be virtuous in purpose as easily as a ‘mob rule,’ or with nefarious intent (Dunn, 2021). Hitler’s rise to power would be an example of the later. Its modern enactment though, is principally as networks of indigenised institutions, discourses and processes. Scholarship on democracy is overwhelming so in the space available, I have selected two theorists from the early and mid-twentieth century: German legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1920s) and Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter (1940s), as their writings echo uncannily in our current moment. In Continental Europe and Britain at that time – and to a lesser extent the US – a sense of urgency prevailed around several issues. Capitalism was under attack from the nineteenth century’s laissez faire market failures, perceived as partly responsible for the Great War (1914–1918), as well as the onset of the Great Depression (1930s). After the communist revolution in Russia in 1917, the Soviet Union offered an alternative economic model, pitting socialism against capitalism. The Socialist Calculation Debate (SCD) of the 1920s and 1930s compared the scientifically planned socialist economy to the free market system. While both were stable Hobbesian solutions, their underpinning epistemologies were different. Zygmont (2006) believes the SCD was one of the twentieth century’s most consequential debates and its ongoing reiteration helps explain the politics of ‘our moment.’ Filner (1977, p. 303) suggests that many scientists as “men of ideas” were active in lending their “intellectual brilliance and prestige” (p. 316)

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to either side of the SCD. Other intellectuals however, sought a reinvented liberalism for the twentieth century, but there was disagreement how this could be achieved. Fascism in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain, was imposed as an alternative model of social order. Communism and fascism as anti-democratic totalitarianisms of the left and the right threatened the ascendency of a reimagined liberalism; the ultimate manifestation of this conflict was World War 2. Some 90 years on, these tensions resonate anew, with resurgent authoritarianism and the decline of liberalism and certain forms of democracy.

2.6.1 Schmitt and Schumpeter’s Democracy Against the background of the SCD tensions, Schmitt theorised the incompatibilities of liberalism and democracy as well as the nature of sovereignty, authoritarianism, states of exception and cosmopolitanism in his 1932 book, The Concept of the Political (Scheuerman, 2006). As a prominent jurist in the Nazi Party, his ideas on dictatorial power, exclusion and ethnicity are notorious, but interest has endured in his critique of liberalism and democracy. Schmitt describes liberalism’s individualism as a weak politics of difference and heterogeneity, necessarily involving endless debate and compromise, that is ultimately indecisive (Runciman, 2021b). For Schmitt, individualism leads not only to vague and vacuous human rights, but also to undesirable cosmopolitanism and limits on state power. Moreover, Schmitt recognised liberalism’s anti-liberal potential, arguing its totalitarianism to be more dangerous than any doctrine of nationalist state authoritarianism, like national socialism (Nazism). Echoing uncannily in some quarters today, Schmitt’s democracy aimed at a shared homogeneous identity, or in his oft cited dictum, being either ‘friend or enemy,’ (reminiscent of President George Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ rhetoric in 2001), and making decisions without endless attempts at compromise. It tolerates winners and losers, is nation-state focussed (reminiscent of Make America Great Again rhetoric of President Donald Trump), and sees those beyond the nation’s borders as outsiders (reminiscent of contemporary anti-immigration policies) (Runciman, 2021b). As a Hobbesian scholar, Schmitt “saw himself like Hobbes being confronted with political instability … (and) as Hobbes had done … saw the problem as originating in the absence of a strong single authority” (Thomsen, 1997, p. 10). Hence, Schmitt believed that the State was the essential ordering principle. For the public good, the sovereign Leviathan (der Führer Adolph Hilter) could transcend democracy and rule of law (his own ‘state of exception’). Schmittian thought provided legitimacy for the authoritarian fascists, notwithstanding later rifts with Nazi Party leadership. Schmitt’s successful 1947 Nuremberg trial defence argued that he believed Hitler had ‘gone too far’ (Runciman, 2021b). A decade later after Schmitt’s roadmap for the fascist legal order, Schumpeter published Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) in the US. Elliott (1994, p. 280) describes Schumpeter as “seminal thinker and profoundly influential figure”

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whose democracy theory dominated the second half of the twentieth century. Others argue that the neoliberal appropriation of his conception of entrepreneurship was more significant (see for example, Swedberg, 2013). Schumpeter believed socialism would ultimately supplant capitalism, but, in the meantime, he advocated for the ‘creative destruction’ (a term he coined) of technologically driven capitalist innovation and entrepreneurship. For Schumpeter, democracy was a means for arriving at stable supporting polity for capitalism, not an ideal or goal in itself. Politics was a performative show akin to advertising, with politicians hawking their policy wares before an electorate. Forged in his understandings of bureaucratic jockeying and economic self-interest as a politician in 1920s Austria, Schumpeter’s democracy was less about the people and the common good, and more about the decision making of a political elite. As the people could never understand policy complexities, nor be homogenous enough for a truly common will, elite politicians were essential. Schumpeter provided what is now regarded as the minimal definition of democracy: that is, electoral choice between political elites and a peaceful transfer of power (Runciman, 2021c). Schumpeter’s understanding of democracy was similar to that of American public intellectual, Walter Lippmann. In his 1925 book The Phantom Public, Lippmann’s public was a ‘bewildered herd’ in need of control and distraction, whose manufactured consent was appropriately manipulated by the media and propaganda (Chomsky, 1999). Their democratic role was the selection, every electoral cycle, of one or other specialist political class, withdrawing then to become ‘spectators.’ That there was a choice between elites distinguished democracy from totalitarianism. Lippman is important figure as one of the progenitors of neoliberalism, and for his debates with John Dewey on the viability of a modern state ruled by experts or the populace (echoing another strand of today’s discourse). Schumpeter views on science and ideology are also interesting. McAdam (2012) suggests that Schumpeter believed ideology “was a pre-scientific act necessary to conduct science in the first place” (p. 27). He quotes Schumpeter, arguing that “(no) new departure in any science is possible without it… (a)nd so – though we proceed slowly because of our ideologies, we might not proceed at all without them.” I will return to these ideas in a later section of this chapter. Schmitt’s and Schumpeter’s theories of democracy resonate in our time. On the left, critical theorists of the Frankfurt School and post Marxists have been interested in Schmitt’s critiques of liberalism, while on the right, his Hobbesian sovereign perspectives strongly appeal to theorists of modern authoritarian states, like China. Alongside Lin and Trevaskes (2019) noted above, Paris (2020, p. 459) argues that, grounded by Hobbes, Xi Jingpin reiterates Schmitt’s state of exception in the “supreme ruler’s discretionary power to act outside the law whenever they deemed it necessary as it is the “Sovereign … who decides the exception.”” For Chang (2020), this view accounts for Beijing’s recent incursions into Hong Kong. Across the Pacific, Trump’s attacks on the US bureaucracies has clear Schmittian overtones, Scheuerman (2019) argues, as does Trump’s populism, manifest in the extrajudicial assault on the Capitol in January 2021. Unlikely as it seems, Schmitt provides an intersection between Xi Jingpin’s China and Trump’s America.

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Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’ (rebranded as a ‘state of emergency’) was also the defence of George W Bush’s Guantanamo Bay and rendition policies during the War on Terror. For Runciman (2021b), the humanitarian interventions (often war), aimed at forcibly disseminating liberal democracy are definitely Schmittian in nature. More recently, Schmitt’s ‘state of exception/emergency’ has theoretically framed pandemic lockdowns responses, curtailing individual freedoms and suspending rights (see Agamben, 2005). And seen through this lens, Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine is also Schmittian. Schumpeter’s political elites are readily identifiable within many nations, particularly in the West. Democratic states continue to offer electoral choice, even as technological sophistication has taken polling beyond mere ‘advertising’, into microtargeting and deep fakes. Globalisation has exacerbated increasing electoral diversity, and the epistemic (post truth) crisis in the public sphere reinforces Schumpeter’s notion of the impossibility of an informed electorate – Lippmann’s ‘bewildered herd.’ Schumpeter’s minimum test of democracy was proudly on show at the close of the 2020 US election, when Joe Biden’s inaugural presidential address celebrated a ‘peaceful transfer of power’ (Runciman, 2021c), despite fears to the contrary. Having sketched some points about twentieth century democracy, I turn now to the first of the three large political economic or capitalist shocks, in part, responsible for changes to liberalism and democracy in the past century: the years of the Great Depression, and a time when my mother grew towards adulthood.

2.7 Crisis of Capitalism: 1930/1940s: The Great Depression, the Welfare State and Early Neoliberalism 2.7.1 The Socialist Calculation Debate (SCD) Through the Depression Years The prosperity of the 1920s, attributed to sustained economic recovery after the Great War, faltered when international lending and trade saw a sudden drop in demand and higher interest rates, plunging the world into the Depression. Crafts and Fearon (2010) argue that policy responses didn’t counter recessionary impulses resulting in unemployment rising to extremes. Roosevelt’s New Deal policy in the US – a package of public and private initiatives  – significantly raised wages and job opportunities. Roosevelt regulated the banks, encouraged trade unions and, along with other nations, left the gold standard, curtailing the fledging liberal internationalism of the time. While for some the New Deal had mixed success (Griffin et al., 1986), its totemic value has endured till today. Biden’s policy initiatives in response to the COVID-19’s economic damage for example, has been frequently compared to Roosevelt’s celebrated agendas of fiscal stimulation and concern for workers (Rubin, 2021).

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During Schmitt’s tenure as president of the Union of National-Socialist (NAZI) Jurists in the 1930s, Germany’s work-creation schemes and wage control saw Depression unemployment fall over 60 per cent in Hitler’s first 18 months in power (Silverman, 1993). Japan and Italy also provided examples of recovery through totalitarian policies. In the UK, economist, Liberal politician and director of the prestigious London School of Economics (LSE) during the 1930s, William Beveridge, like Roosevelt, was a proponent of economic planning and some form of welfarism. Welfarism is the transfer of anti-poverty material supports to the state from traditionally responsible families and communities; required in response to rapidly industrialising capitalism, and increasing centralisation and urbanisation (Klein, 2020). Lesser known than his sometimes collaborator John Maynard Keynes, Marcuzzo (2010) argues Beveridge and Keynes both distrusted the free market system and considered the stability of liberalism and security tied to planned government intervention of a welfare state. While diagnosing the problem differently, they both foresaw a resultant full and stable employment as reducing social and moral problems and facilitating higher living standards. Interestingly, welfarism had its antecedents with another German – Count Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898). As Chancellor of the newly united German nation (1871), the conservative and authoritarian Bismarck built the first modern proto-­ welfare state with a series of national social insurance laws around health, old age and accident. Several reasons explain Bismarck’s unexpected actions Klein (2020) argues, that speak to broader theorisations of welfarism. The seamless integration between welfare institutions and capitalism regards welfarism as a tool of conservative elites furthering capitalism’s interests. In this reading, welfarism is a counter-revolutionary project of working class pacification, and enlarges state power in face of increasing democratic claims. It compensates for the inadequacies of the market and secures the peoples’ loyalty for the status quo. Bismarck hence, was able to protect the wealthy at the same time he counteracted threats from the highly organised Marxist party of the time  – the Social Democratic Party. Other readings see welfarism though, as opportunities for democratic agency with iterative political settlements in ongoing conflicts, enabling various subordinate or oppressed groups to exert their agendas. Beveridge’s LSE colleague, biologist Lancelot Hogben joined other prominent “men of ideas” like X-ray crystallographer J D Bernal, experimental physicist Patrick Blackett, geneticist JBS Haldane, zoologist Julien Huxley and biochemist Joseph Needham to form the Social Relations of Science (SRS) group to contribute to the SCD  – on the socialist side. Many scientists believed in the political and public policy entanglements of their science (techno-scientific advances were often the cause of unemployment), and embraced socialism as having parallels with science’s collaborative methods and desire to progress the social good. They agreed with Soviet scientists disseminating the belief that science was, in part, the product of the demands for technological results (viewed as intellectual and material property), specific to particular social formations and historical situations (Turner, 2007). Focusing on human dignity while critiquing aspects of freedom, democracy and liberty, the SRS believed in a “fuller integration of society, industry, and science, in

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which the latter, rationally planned and emancipated from capitalism, would fulfil its natural object of serving human welfare” (Beddeleem, 2020, p.  35). Bernal “denounced liberalism as the method of chaos, “spontaneously grown,” hindering the use of knowledge in society because innovation was corrupted by private profiteering” (Beddeleem, 2020, p. 35). Filner (1977, p. 316) quotes C P Snow to reinforce the esteem in which Bernal and the others were held: “through charm, courage, and more learning than anyone else in England, (they) became the most powerful intellectual force on the extreme left; more than anyone else, he (Bernal) made Communism intellectually respectable.” Similarly, across the Atlantic, the American Association of Scientific Worker and other prominent scientists were sympathetic to the left (also Turner, 2007). On the other side of the SCD, Fredrick von Hayek, the Austrian free market economist joined the LSE in 1931, during Beveridge’s tenure. As fellow Viennese, Hayek knew Schumpeter and was economist Ludwig von Mises’ protégé. He was close friends with philosopher of science Karl Popper (also Viennese). Though from a scientific family and with an active interest in botany, neurology, environmentalism and scientific methodologies, Hayek preferred economics. The aristocratic Mises, a staunch antisocialist, was an advocate of private ownership and the market and another progenitor of neoliberalism. He significantly influenced Hayek’s early thinking. In the early 1940s, Beveridge and Hayek both published books that have indelibly shaped politics since then. The Beveridge Report of 1942 was commissioned by the UK Government to identify post war reconstruction possibilities. Followed in 1944 by Full Employment in a Free Society, regarded by some as melding Keynesian economics and democratic socialism, Beveridge was enormously influential in the creation of post war British welfarism, which ultimately shaped systems in the Commonwealth (Australia and Canada), and elsewhere. Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, on the other hand, argued for market based political and social organisation. Fearing the totalitarianisms he had seen first-hand in Germany, Austria and the Soviet Union, and in contrast to the SRS scientists, Hayek believed liberalism’s hallmark was freedom rather than human dignity. Free markets were a better insurance against totalitarianism than government planning, democratic or otherwise. For Hayek, the market was the definitive instrument able to generate the knowledge required to run complex modern societies. This is a critical point and one to which I will return in the next section. Technocrats and experts (state planners, engineers, public health officials, and so on), pejoratively Hayek’s second-hand dealers in ideas, “possess too much power in circulating ideas which, when coupled to the state … believe they know what is in the interests of all, and then set about establishing plans through which to pursue this” (Davis, 2017, p. 236). Hayek was also against laissez-faire approaches as he believed, left to its own devices, the market could ultimately cannibalise itself. Enough state regulation was required (ironically, by experts) to run the market without a regulated economy. What was new in Hayek’s brand of liberalism, a ‘neo’ liberalism, was that it was neither socially inclined nor laissez faire, but as he and his followers believed,

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something completely different (Innset, 2020). Moreover, Jones (2010, p.  153) argues that Hayek depended on Schmitt’s authoritarian statism to neutralise “the pathologies of democracy,” illustrated in Hayek’s belief that the franchise should be available only to those adults of middle age who are most affected by economic decisions. Enormously popular in the US, The Road to Serfdom was used in ideological battles against Roosevelt’s New Deal.

2.7.2 Post WW2: Social State Welfarism and Early Neoliberalism Post Second World War, Keynes and Beveridge’s welfarism prevailed in the UK and the Commonwealth, Europe and elsewhere ostensibly settling the SCD, against the free market. The 1944 allied nations conference at Bretton Woods, determined the economics and governance structure (including a renewed gold exchange standard and an emphasis on rule-based, multilateral internationalism), that was to last – in spirit, though not organisation  – for the next 70  years. The European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, rebuilt war-torn Europe, promoting US-style liberal democracy as a physical and intellectual bastion against Soviet communism. Roosevelt had suggested the name United Nations (UN) to refer to the allies in 1941 and it was ultimately charted in 1945. The UN has sought to implement liberal ideals of international law and peacemaking, multilateralism and economic and social development through an agenda of professed universal truths in relation to human rights, global equity and individual freedoms (that is, gender, racial and religious tolerance, freedom from oppression, etc.), health and education, decolonialisation, humanitarian aid and, more recently, sustainability and climate action. Together were the three pillars of post war modern liberalism in the political, economic and social domains: (i) government regulated capitalism embedded within social welfare democracy, (ii) the pursuit of evidence-based rational truth, civil society with a social contact, and (iii) freedom as self-determination with rights underpinned by responsibilities (Duncombe & Dunne, 2018). Growing up post war, these are ideals that my peers and I have been taught since our earliest days. Still teaching at the LSE in 1947, Hayek organised a meeting in Mont Pèlerin Switzerland with notable attendees Ludwig von Mises, Walter Lippmann, Chicago School economists George Stigler and Milton Friedman, and science philosophers Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi. The meeting was to continue the work of the 1938 Colloque Walter Lippmann (WLC) organised in Paris by science philosopher Louis Rougier, centred on Walter Lippmann’s 1937 book, The Good Society. Michel Foucault’s 1979 Collège de France lectures, published later as The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault, 2008), identified the lesser known WLC as important in neoliberalism’s genesis. Significantly, the WLC believed the State must above all else:

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2  Knowing Our Moment: (Neo)Liberalism, Democracy and Science (Education) protect the price mechanism, … second, put in place and guarantee a legal order to safeguard the market’s development and legally justify any intervention. Third, political liberalism must embrace law as the cornerstone of legitimacy, … Fourth, such a legal regime constitutes the liberal method to “control the social”; and fifth, a liberal state is responsible for continuously providing society with five essential elements, for which taxes could be imposed: national defence, social insurance, social services, education, and scientific research (Schulz-Forberg, 2020, p. 171).

While traditionally liberal, but embryonically neoliberal in its privileging of the free market, the WLC promoted the rule of law (which can include Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’) as the best way to guarantee the inviolability of human person. There is a similarity here with the UN’s liberal rule of law outlined above. Innset (2020) notes that WLC’s progressiveness appeals to contemporary centreleft or progressive neoliberals, compared to the later Mont Pèlerin group’s more right-wing orientation. Significantly, Slobodian and Plehwe (2020) contend that the WLC platform indicates again, that neoliberals didn’t believe in a ‘free’ free market, even as the term had taken root. Neoliberals, as we have already seen, were still government interventionists, but different to welfarists, and are comfortable with authoritarianism when warranted by the neoliberal market programme. The term ‘neoliberalism,’ first proposed at the WLC by Carl Schmitt admirer Alexander Rüstow, was formally adopted at the Mont Pèlerin Society meeting (MPS). Various streams of thought were brought together at MPS, from von Mises and his Austrian School’s more laissez faire market ideologues to the Freiburg School German Ordoliberals interventionists anticipating the Third Way politics of Clinton and Blair 60  years into the future. Also represented was the Chicago School, concerned with the monopolistic tendencies created by unfettered markets. Contemporary neoliberalism’s wide penetration is partly explained by the variability of these strands allowing it to be more attractive to diverse audiences (Mirowski, 2011). Fresh from the War’s devastation, most MPS participants believed in some type of state safety net even as they critiqued Keynesian ideology and welfarism, developed a greatly expanded Schumpeterian notion of entrepreneurship, and promoted competitive markets. Schumpeter was interestingly, very critical of the MPS. Significantly, the MPS’ ideological project never wished to be troubled by the real economic and political world, apparent in their stance on market-inducing inequality. Unlike some of their libertarians who believed inequality virtuously reflected true human nature, Hayek’s consequentialism understood that market conditions produce tolerable inequality as everyone ultimately benefits (McManus, 2020). This ‘trickle down’ economics, often associated with 1980s US President Ronald Reagan’s policies, also influenced UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who is reported to have said, ‘it doesn’t matter if the rich get richer as long as everyone benefits.’ Hayek did believe nevertheless, that humans could be ranked by utility: “The requirement of preserving the maximum number of lives,” he wrote, “is not that all individual lives be regarded as equally important” (Hayek, 1988, p. 132).

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2.7.3 Truth-Making, Science and Early Neoliberalism Economic and political philosophers, Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (2009) in their important book, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (NTC), describe the NTC as an epistemological orientation elaborated through a miscellany of economic and political doctrines. Neoliberalism changes classical liberalism’s idea of the market as resource allocator into an epistemic truth maker “that gathers together the impressions, sentiments, practical-­ know-­how, guesses and expectations of whole societies, and converts them into the only type of empirical data that is really necessary: prices” (Davies, 2018, p. 193). This belief in the markets’ supremacy over human cognition was for Hayek, the critical point. The nature of knowledge and knowledge production thus becomes central, and Hayek’s interest in science and his close friendship with Karl Popper and other MPS science philosophers bought neoliberalism and the philosophy of science into confluence. The SRS, on one side of the SCD, promoted science and socialism (later Marxism), while on the other side, were the epistemological justifications for neoliberalism. Davies (2018) suggests that for the MPS science philosophers, socialism’s dangerous conceit was that human society and economy could be objectively known. Believing science to be humanity’s greatest cultural achievement, Popper applied his work politically in The Open Society and Its Enemies, written in the 1930s but published in 1945. Arguing vigorously that Marx’s theories of knowledge and history were false, his enemies from the title were both communist and fascist totalitarians. Popper’s science promoted trial and error learning, through a continual process of conjecture and refutation, and suggested democracy’s processes to be like an ideal scientific community developing tentative solutions to problems (Shearmur, 1981), just as the socialist scientist Bernal had harnessed socialisms’ similarities to science to the same end. Initially regarding this as a responsibility of government, differing to Hayek’s market responsibility, Popper later recanted moving closer to Hayek’s market-based view of governance. Interestingly, many early neoliberals distanced themselves from rationalism and naturalism, adopting a critical conventionalism where the market’s constant exchange between theories and experience established knowledge and truths in an instrumentalist view of knowledge (Beddeleem, 2020). Beddeleem (2020) argues that Polanyi also sought to defeat the SRS’s scientific socialism which both he and Hayek believed dominated the media (particularly, the BBC regarded as sympathetic to the SRS at the time). Responding to Bernal’s critique of freedom, Polanyi defended sciences’ autonomy and argued that it “flourished only where it operated with spontaneous co-ordination like that of a market” (Turner, 2007, p.  4). This view of the market as truth maker is critical to understanding science’s decline in the contemporary post truth and fake news world discussed later. Significantly, both sides of the SCD regarded science as intrinsically linked and intertwined with the politics of their respective projects, just like the early liberals. Some scholars though, like German sociologists Max Weber and Karl Mannheim,

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argued for a distinction between science and politics, even as they could be correctives for each other. Feeding into the SCD debate, Weber argued in his 1921 posthumously published Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), that science “could make an important contribution to political action by providing factual knowledge (including ‘inconvenient facts’) about the situation in which action must take place” (Hammersley, 2021). Mannheim deplored wars waged by proponents of different ideologies and their ontological and epistemological assumptions. Rather, he believed in learning from diverse perspectives as no one could possibly have the total view. Influenced by Weber and Mannheim, Robert Merton introduced his highly idealised scientific norms in 1942: (i) communism, later communalism  – meaning collective collaboration and eschewing intellectual property rights, (ii) universalism – free access to knowledge avoiding any sociopolitical connection, (iii) disinterestedness – for scientific progress and against personal gain, and (iv) scepticism meaning openness up to critical scrutiny. While putatively free of politics, Turner (2007) argues that Merton’s norms, original conceived in the 1930s, were significantly influenced by Bernal and the others from the SRS group, most notably communism and universalism. Indeed, ‘communism’ was changed to ‘communalism’ in 1952 because of the political and ideological implications of the original term. Sklair (1970, p. 56) goes further arguing that Merton’s norms were faced with contradictions over the production, control and diffusion of scientific knowledge, and were “merely expressing the interests of particular sections of the scientific community in a liberal democratic social order.” The norms persist today in science education and perpetuate a generalised albeit erroneous belief in the separation of science from politics.

2.7.4 Science and Science Education Under Welfarism Despite the early neoliberal incursions of the WLC and the MPS, state regulated liberal democracy increased in the mid twentieth century, with the benefits of welfarism being widely disseminated. Further to Klein’s (2020) view on welfarism noted earlier, Shafik (2021) points to a critical but long held misconception that welfarism as a socialist-inspired redistributive project. Rather, Shafik (2021) argues, welfarism was an intertemporal loan system with government providing childhood education and health care, insurance and aged services, paid back by the taxpayer during their working life. It was a liberal social contract allowing individuals to spread their resources over their lifetime, at the same time it promoted social stability, leaving capitalism and elites untroubled by dissent (Klein, 2020). Such ‘banking’ requires great wealth however, and Bhambra (2021) argues that one source of that wealth, largely under acknowledged in the welfare literature, was extractive and exploitive policies with capital transfer back to the metropole from the colonies. Some rapidly decolonising nations post World War 2 like India were subject to

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large, unjust reparations imposed by their imperial masters. For Piketty (2020, 2015), progressive taxation of the wealthy up until the 1980s also provided some of the income required to fund the welfare state. Those who were recipients of the largesse of welfare state greatly benefitted from the spread of education and health care, regulated work practices and aged care services. Growing up in Australia meant my family and peers were amongst the fortunate. Trust in scientific experts to rationally guide the polity and economy was at an all-time high, as were progress narratives for future prosperity (Mirowski, 2011). Schumpeter’s point about ideology as the ‘pre-scientific act necessary to conduct science’ is relevant as the democratic liberal ideal of the time engendered confidence in techno-scientific problem solving, the benefits of scientific products like vaccines and pesticides, and scientific economies. An illustration of this post war science-based optimism is the British Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a producer of paints, plastics, pharmaceuticals, food ingredients, polymers, electronic materials, and fragrances and so on. At its peak in the 20 years between1950 and 1970, ICI was the bellwether for British industry (Owen & Harrison, 1995), and as part of post war globalisation, expanded beyond Britain and the Commonwealth into Europe and the US. Similarly, the post war fortunes of Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP), colloquially known as ‘the Big Australian,’ grew BHP into the world’s largest global resources and extractive company involved in exploration, production, and processing of coal, iron ore, copper, and manganese ore and refining of hydrocarbons. Australian industrialisation after WW2 saw BHP expand into overseas areas including Chile, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Canada and the US (Blainey, 2010). The optimisms of all these development were yet to be dinted by unremitting march of climate change. Science education, previously part of the elite school curriculum in a limited way from the mid nineteenth century, expanded under the welfare state’s mass secondary schooling and increased tertiary education. Further, science education research emerged as a scholarly discipline in its own right in the 1950s and 1960s. While the launch of the Soviet’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 prompted national security, innovation and economic concerns that argued for increased numbers of scientists and engineers, humanist educational goals continued to coexist. The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, formed in 1948 as part of the Marshall Plan, and the precursor organisation to the 1961 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), encouraged large educational investments without any formal education charter. The purpose was to help expand US-style capitalism within a liberal democratic frame (Ydesen, 2019). This stimulated science curricular reforms in some nations and new tertiary government funding. These school reforms which I experienced, included new approaches of largely teacher-proof curriculum materials, built upon psycho-cognitive and individualistic learning theories, science as inquiry, the mastery of sequential scientific knowledge, and provision of school laboratories, all seeped with the Mertonian norms. Clearly, democracy and liberalism were the Schumpeterian pre-scientific ideologies in science education during these years of welfarism.

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In closing this section, it is important to note that the theorists discussed here as having shaped the Western world of 1920–1970, and significantly, as being foundational for ‘our moment,’ were a hegemony of wealthy, minor aristocracy, landed gentry or upper middle class educated men circulating in the same networks. For example, Innset (2020) reminds us, that amid the austerity of post war Europe, the Mont Pèlerin meeting was an oasis of plenty for men used to living the high life. Their family wealth was largely built in the nineteenth century, and their formative years spent in times of strong class, race and colonial divisions, without institutionalised democracy or universal access to education. Science was practiced by elite ‘men of ideas’ and thrived in the early twentieth century scientific spirit of optimism, valued for both its utilitarian and cultural contributions. Liberalism and democracy for these men were contingent constructs, to be implemented by Lippmann and Schumpeter’s specialists politicians under their intellectual guidance. The elitist patriarchy was entrenched. There is a strong resonance with the sixteenth and seventeenth century elites developing amongst themselves, the early liberal doctrines. Equality under such conditions was always provisional, and science and science education inevitably encoded this elitism. Generational change was imminent however, beginning with financial crises of the 1970s.

2.8 Crisis of Capitalism: 1970s: Globalisation, and the Rise of Neoliberalism 2.8.1 The Financial Shocks of the 1970s Paralleling my time at secondary school and later university, a compounding series of events saw the decline of welfarism during the 1970s and 1980s. The Middle East oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 after the Yom-Kippur War and the Iranian Revolution respectively, exposed capitalism’s energy reliance, although BHP’s post war expansion meant Australia’s oil self-sufficiency insulated it from the worst of the worldwide economic dislocation (Blainey, 2010). For Curtis (2021), the ‘Nixon shocks’ in 1971 were more instrumental. US president Richard Nixon (1969–1974) responded to high domestic inflation caused by increasing competitive industrial output from a war-recovered Europe and Japan, and newly developing former colonies, as well as the Vietnamese war costs, by severing the Bretton Woods financial system and leaving the gold standard. The result was a stagflation recession in much of the Western world with low productivity, high inflation and unemployment. For example, ICI’s British workforce described earlier declined by half due to new competition, overcapacity and falling profits (Coleman, 1987). Coupled to manufacturing’s technological innovation, the newly emerging, mass secondary schooled skilled workforce altered the calculus, meaning less jobs for the lower skilled.

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Furthermore, the wealthy elites were increasingly dissatisfied with their declining profits. The US profit rate from 1950 to the mid-1970s had fallen almost 50 per cent, due to capital invested in technological innovation (Moseley, 1991). Freed from the gold standard, bank regulation from the Great Depression reduced, allowing banks to trade currencies in a growing interpenetrative international climate facilitated by developing technologies. Wealth creation shifted away from higher cost extraction and manufacturing into more profitable financial asset investments on the global market. Deng Xiaoping’s succession after Chairman Mao in 1976 saw China steadily replace the West’s manufacturing capacity. Together with global financialisaton, Deng’s policies developed the cheap consumer commodities, logistics and supply chains that underpinned globalisation. His unique blend of socialism/communism and free enterprise raised millions out of poverty, and he is still regarded as the architecture of Xi Jinping’s China (Curtis, 2021). Breaking stagflation favoured less regulated markets. Now the other side of the SCD to welfarism, neoliberalism (new-liberalism) grew ascendant. Its emerging dominance over welfarism, argues Davies (2016, p.  132), followed a classical “rhythm of crisis in line Thomas Kuhn’s model of a paradigm shift.” The neoliberal age described below is not the neoliberalism of the WLC, or even the more conservative MPS. Since its genesis in the 1930s, neoliberalism evolved significantly, even as its leitmotif of the markets’ supremacy over human cognition, and role as an epistemic knowledge producer, remained constant. This single point, for Mirowski (2011), explains contemporary neoliberalism adaptability and resilience across economic and political terrains, ideology, affect, philosophy, imaginary, epistemology, and any one of a number of other precepts scholars assign (for example, Cooper, 2017; Gilbert, 2013, Peck et al., 2018). Neoliberalism’s epistemological convictions and organisational structures common to a range of schools (Austrian School, Ordoliberals from the Freiburg School, Chicago School, Virginia School, etc.…), Mirowski (2011) goes onto argue, enables it to penetrate various political and cultural orientations that include progressive, socially liberal, right-wing, cosmopolitan, authoritarian, internationalist, democratic and populist forms. Neoliberalism thus, remains the preternatural.

2.8.2 The Triumph of Neoliberalism While scholars believe that describing contemporary neoliberalism is fraught, Steger and Roy (2021) are amongst those suggesting it has various facets and phases. Their first facet, similar to Mirowski’s (2013, also 2009) NTC, is ideology, meaning the development and dissemination of a coherent belief and value system as the only way to know the world. Secondly, neoliberalism is a mode of governmentality (after Foucault), remaking subjectivity around entrepreneurism, competitiveness and self-interest. Governments no longer act for the public good, but for efficiency and profit, modelled on free market corporatisation. The third facet is concrete public policy, promoting economic and institutional deregulation,

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trade liberalism and privatisation of enterprises, which includes union busting, social welfare reduction and tax cuts for the wealthy. Finally, neoliberalism is epoch, that is, following welfarism as the next phase of capitalism in a normative evolutionary sequence. Birch’s (2015) neoliberal categories include Steger and Roy’s (2021), but expand it into seven approaches, paraphrased as: a Foucauldian approach of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, a Marxist approach as a class-based project privileging capital at the expense of labour, an ideological approach from Hayek and others, an epochal history and philosophy of economics approach, an institutional approach expounding the multifarious articulations of restructuring with deregulation and new regulatory regimes and a geographical approach, characterising neoliberalism as always emerging, inherently uneven and variably enacted. (See also Flew, 2014 for his six meanings of neoliberalism). While renderings of neoliberalism may vary, there seems to be more agreement on its temporal phases. Davies (2016) and Steger and Roy (2021) identify three distinct phases from the late 1970s through to ‘our moment.’ The first phase roughly parallels the decade-long term of conservatives Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Regan and Deng Xiaoping to the end of the 1980s. Steger and Roy (2021) see this phase as a reaction against welfarism, whist Davies (2016) argues it was a von Mises influenced, all-out assault on any socialist tendencies left over from the SCD in the first half of the twentieth century. It also parallels a growing right-wing base, particularly in the US, horrified by the civil and gender rights movements of the 1960s, culminating in the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawing racial discrimination (Cooper, 2017). The second phase, known as the progressive or golden age of neoliberalism, dates from the late 1980s through to the first decade of the twenty-­first century. Labour UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in the US presided over a centre left iteration of neoliberalism, dubbed the Third Way, for reintroducing some socially liberal policies back into the free market mix. The Third Way owes much to neoliberalism proposer at the WLC Alexander Rüstow noted earlier, who as an Ordoliberal, believed the state to be an important participant in the organisation of market economics. At the same time, Jiang Zemin (1993–2003) in China continued the liberalising polices began under Deng, including hosting visits from Hayek and other prominent neoliberals. Unlike the shorter and partly rhetorical first phase, much of the real neoliberal reconstruction in privatisation, decentralisation, competitive marketisation and so on, occurred during this second stage. Davies (2016) argues the centre left was spectacularly successful in their interventions, remaking government with greater public spending once the hallmark of welfarism, now used to construct neoliberalism infrastructures. The accelerating financialised markets increased wealth creation with, for example, the financial sector’s GDP share increasing between 1970 and 2007 from 13 to 20 percent and its share of total US corporate profits increasing from 14 to 40 percent between 1981 and 2006 (Morrow, 2010). The wealthy became much happier. The golden age also saw Fukuyama (1992) proclaim a Western triumphal ‘end of history,’ while Chinese-fuelled, embodied globalisation flourished (see Steger & James, 2020).

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Liberalism’s traditional, though rhetorical, questions of equity, fairness, individualism, freedom, and recognition – reflective of John Locke’s virtues – morphed into economic tests of efficiency and comparisons of excellence. Coupled to markets and quasi-market contests, the ideal intensified meritocracy, rewarding successes in competitive systems and entrenching growing inequality. Plehwe (2020, p. 142) argues that the values of individual freedom transform from early liberal’s political construct to the economic, as “freedom of profit-oriented management, and … self-reliance (also means) individual responsibility of those not fortunate enough to forge a liaison with capital.” In other words, Hayek’s tolerance of inequity was re-inscribed as meritocratic individuals’ philanthropic duty to assist others, rather than the liberal state’s responsibility for the common good. The collapse of the three pillars of liberalism – the political, the economic and the social (ideological) – into one, the economic, was complete.

2.8.3 Science and Science Education(STEM) Under Neoliberalism’s Golden Age Liberal and welfarist science and its unsustainable Mertonian norms was remade by the neoliberal ideological project, shaking science to its foundations: neoliberalism provided the justification for the strengthening of intellectual property; neoliberals drove a wedge between state funding of research and state provision of findings of universities for the public good; neoliberal administrators began to fragment the university into “cash cows” and loss-leader disciplines. Finally, neoliberal corporate officers … (favoured) contract research organizations to better control the disclosure or nondisclosure of the data generated. (Mirowski, 2019, p. 38)

Schumpeter’s point about ideology as the ‘pre-scientific act necessary to conduct science’ is again relevant as scientists came to work and understand marketised sciences’ new purpose. Rothman, Glasner and Adams’ (1996, p. 203) study showed that science as a curiosity-driven truth seeking venture significantly diminished, with “the ‘professional’ scientist more likely to hold a dominant understanding of science as market-oriented, competitive or administrative.” Similarly, Varma (2000) identified the customisation of research (reinscribed as innovation and intellectual property) to user concerns, contract funding, flexible and temporary teams of scientists and project managers, increasing accountability, and quality of research judged by non-scientific indicators. Fuller (2000, p. 128) describes the globalised “buyers-market for brains” outsourcing scientific research to areas with high skills and low labour costs ensuring that scientific jobs have become part of the same itinerant, casualised and short-term contract arrangements as other workers. Scientific knowledge as a private good, now belongs in the marketplace to out-do rivals and anticipate future business opportunities. Mirowski (2019, p. 40) argues that scientists must perform in their quasi-market needing to:

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2  Knowing Our Moment: (Neo)Liberalism, Democracy and Science (Education) constantly monitors his or her “net worth” through a range of metrics, scores, and indicators: h-index, impact factors, peer contacts, net-work affiliations, and the like. Regular email notifications keep nagging one to internalize these validations and learn how to game them to one’s advantage. No direct managerial presence is required, because one automatically learns to internalize these seemingly objective market-like valuations

Moreover, communal science is threatened with the assignation of unique ORCHID numbers as the individual become the locus of knowledge production with their specific contribution to knowledge dissected out. Certainly, Bernal and his fellow 1930s SRS scientists’ concerns about capitalist exploitation of science appear to have been realised. At the same time, education has undergone Schumpeter’s ideological precondition with neoliberal’s revision of its discourses and practices. Education including science education, became industrialised, instrumentalised and commodified with students as content consumers, teachers the service providers, and parents the clients. Any humanistic educational goals have been surrendered to the economic. Ydesen (2019) argues that the OECD, an economic organisation without educational charter, has nevertheless normalised its educational influence, becoming the dominant player in global educational policy. For example, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has measured student attainment in mathematics, science knowledge and skills, and reading globally since 2000, uses its comparative data in the production of educational reforms. Science education under neoliberalism has morphed into STEM education (science, technology, engineering and maths), and as I have published elsewhere on STEM (see for example Carter, 2008, 2017a, b, 2018), a few sentences here are sufficient. STEM encodes the competitive national agendas for human capital production and intellectual property in its core areas that underpin late twentieth/twenty-first century global economies, while understanding the inherent linkages between these and other areas that can drive innovation. STEM education promotes national scientific literacy critical for supporting nation state policy agendas in marketised science, and enables some previously excluded from STEM fields to develop capacity for careers thereby increasing the talent pool. Narrow in its focus, STEM’s ‘new’ standards reinscribe the 1950s/1960s curricula seeking mastery of sciences’ traditional principles and generalisations, to be subject to meritocratic testing regimes. Productive of both power and performativity such that students, classes, schools or systems must show quantifiable results, these testing regimes monitor scientific outcomes and position everyone so as improvements can be claimed and deficiencies blamed. John Locke’s property rights that come to us through Adam Smith, and later Hayek and others as individual meritocratic endeavours, are now judged against STEM standards, and reconceived as economically critical intellectual property rights. Such curricula despite rhetoric to the contrary, endemically means inequitable outcomes, because not all have, or are believed to should have, access to meritocracy’s rewards. I experienced all of these changes first hand as I moved from science school teaching to students like Magda and into the tertiary arena.

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But another shift was on the horizon with the 2008 banking crisis ushering in the third great shock in 80 years – the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) – precipitating neoliberalism’s third phase, and yet further challenges to liberal democracy.

2.9 Crisis of Capitalism: 2008: The Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism, Post Liberalism and Post Democracy 2.9.1 The Causes of the GFC The most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, the 2007–2008 GFC, triggered by the growth in US sub-prime mortgage defaults, generated a world downturn, with collapsing international trade and failures of financial institutions. The resultant instability caused US and European banks to reduce their international loan exposures, ultimately producing severe debt crises in other countries. Morrow (2010) argues, that because of low profit rates elsewhere, the wealthy invested in these sub-prime mortgage assets, originally sold to the vulnerable seeking credit as their only recourse against neoliberal policies that had ensured decline in their real wages. Market and regulatory failures like the sub-prime crunch was one reason for the GFC.  Transformed financial systems enabled profit-focussed but faulty financial products, to pass credit risk down through complex and speculative securities. Credit ratings agencies whose own profits depended on their inflated values favourably scored risky products. Regulators trusted private actors to self-regulate after the repeal of Roosevelt’s Great Depression financial regulations (Helleiner, 2011). Clinton had allowed banks to reduce capital reserves, and while there was some bank regulatory oversight, investment banks, insurance companies, and hedge funds sat outside these frameworks. Market-valued risk and assets produced a wealth friendly bubble that ultimately burst. Centre left politicians, Prime minister Gordon Brown in the UK and President Barack Obama in US, oversaw the enormous public sector bail outs, paid to the ‘too big to fail’ wealthy and financial sectors, despite rising unemployment and spiralling household debt. This dispelled any lingering doubt about the left’s collusion with neoliberalism, despite Australian Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, prematurely announcing neoliberalism’s demise (Rudd, 2009). Australia was the only major economy to avoid recession due partly to China’s demand for our natural resources, as well as our, perhaps serendipitously, more regulated financial sector. The GFC justified government cut backs or ‘austerity’ that systematically dismantled any remaining institutional social protections, creating generalised socioeconomic insecurity at the same time corporate profits rose. This is the third phase of neoliberalism – late neoliberalism – or ‘our moment’ (Davies, 2016). This phase

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describes neoliberalism’s renewed intensification even as it perversely, failed and frailed (Peck & Nik, 2019). Third phase neoliberalism is characterised by somewhat incommensurable tendencies: firstly, blaming the emerging precariat’s economic circumstances on their own moral failure – a punitive meritocracy. Secondly, rising profits and anticompetitive regulation leading to oligopolies, and a politics of plutocracy, typified in the all-encompassing reach of global technology companies. Thirdly, the ‘left behinds’ attraction to right wing populist (RWP) movements and a renewed sovereign state nationalism.

2.9.2 Right Wing Populist (RWP) RWP groups helped install politicians like Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Poland’s Andrzej Duda, and Donald Trump into the White House, as well as advance extremist political parties like the French Rassemblement National and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). RWP separates society into two antagonistic groups, − ‘the people’ and ‘the other,’ – where the latter, recapitulating Schmitt’s outsiders or ‘enemies,’ are immigrants, non-heteronormative groups, non-Christians, non-­ whites, as well as specialists and experts. In his 2016 election pitch, Trump championed ‘the people’ promising to ‘drain Washington’s swamp’ of its experts, while in the UK, Michael Gove argued during the BREXIT debate that “the people in this country have had enough of experts…” Given their privilege, Davis and Williams (2017, p. 4) wryly observe: “this blue-collar revolt against elites/experts is being managed and directed by the very same elites.” Fraser (2017) theorises RWP around the twin tropes of ‘distribution’ and ‘recognition,’ where distribution refers to how goods, especially income, are allocated and recognition explores the moral marks of belonging, or human dignity. As the conservatives, the centre right and centre left have all favoured neoliberalism’s net wealth transfer from the majority to a concentrating minority, the debate is really only in ‘recognition.’ ‘Progressive’ recognition retains liberalism’s moral purpose promoting diversity and egalitarianism with leaders like Blair and Brown in the UK, Clinton, Obama, and now Biden, in the US, and Rudd and Gillard in Australia successfully advancing some minorities/ identity groups with the requisite social/intellectual capital. By contrast, ‘regressive’ recognition (RWP) drawn from traditional social conservatism promotes Schmittian outsiders/enemies as risks to an idealised and homogenised ‘friends’ based homeland. RWP reject middle class technocrats/experts as elites, even as they admire the real elites’ wealth and power. They also reject multilateralism and pluralism, in other words, the liberal project. They look to strong charismatic anti-­ establishment leaders offering simple solutions to complex issues. Ganesha’s (2018, p. 149) sees RWP as a crisis of subjectivity, arguing that neoliberalism favours the articulate, the mendacious, and risk-taking personalities, while those who fail “feel humiliated, guilty and ashamed … (and) … are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system.” Poor

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fortune is internalised as their own fault rather than a consequence of structural inequalities. In a similar vein, Salmela and von Scheve (2017) argue that internalised failures transform into anger and resentment directed away from self to alleged enemies such as refugees, women, LGBTQIA+ individuals –particularly recently transgender people, political and cultural elites, and, under Trump, “the m(lame)ainstream” media. Moreover, RWP rhetoric pushes the fear of sinking even further towards erroneously assumed stable social identities like nationality and ethnicity, feeding white supremacy. Belonging to the designated inclusive group even as one misses out on much of the neoliberal pie seems a desirable outcome. RWP bleeds into illiberalism or authoritarian neoliberalism – a neo-illiberalism – while cleverly managing to not look like it, argues Bruff (2014). Authoritarian neoliberalism involves dominant groups excluding others through legally engineered means (state of exceptions) within supposed democratic institutions (see for example, the creation of ‘LGBTQIA+-free’ zones in the ‘liberal democratic’ Poland, the persecution of Muslim’s in Modi’s Hindu India, the nationalist curriculum in Hungary  – the examples go on and on). Havertz’s (2018, p.  3) research on the German RWP party AfD shows how RWP seeks to ensure inequality as society’s organisational principle: “it is authoritarian because it recognises neither the legitimacy of any opposition to its positions nor any interests outside of what it claims to be the interests of “the people.”” The people here are a Schmittian homogenous, market-supporting middle class, and the AfD’s aim of a strong state able to legislate and enforce its exclusions and social differentiations recapitulates Hobbes’s Leviathan. Similarly, Pühringer and Walter (2018) argue that RWP and authoritarian neoliberalism are systematic mechanisms of exclusion, creating apparently objective arguments for an ever (re)newing and altering social hierarchy of groups as superior or inferior. With limited national resources/power to be distributed, the State decides who is in and who is out!

2.9.3 Post Liberalism and Post Democracy What we see here is both post liberal and post democratic. Barrinha and Renard (2020, p. 4) suggest that while scholars differ in nuance, there is general agreement “that the hegemony of the liberal world order is over” which, given previous US dominance, essentially means we are now “post Western.” Liberalism promised general prosperity but produced instead the major economic crises, rising inequality, fewer jobs, the dismantling of safety nets, increasing austerity, and growing privatisation of education, health care and the like. That liberalism’s record has been patchy, and successes extremely partial, is consistent with its innate cleavages and contradictions described earlier. This is apparent in Piketty’s (2021) thorough analyses of wealth distribution. In the nineteenth century, the bottom 50 percent had 2 percent of the wealth that by the end the liberal democratic twentieth century, had increased to 6 percent. By any account, this is not a large improvement. He also showed the significant decline in wealth share of the middle 40 percent during the

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neoliberal decades. Even as mature liberal democracies were unable to solve their own problems, they sought however, to spread liberalism more broadly. For example, The Bush Doctrine referring to US President George W. Bush’s (2001–2009) foreign policies promoted liberal democracy internationally, and by the very ‘antiliberal’ means of force. Moreover, as liberal democracies falter, the world is becoming multipolar, exemplified in China as a powerful non-liberal, but economically neoliberal, state. You don’t need to be liberal to be neoliberal, as the economic has swallowed the social and political pillars of liberalism. China’s share of world GDP in the nineteenth century was around 33 per cent (including suppling the metropole), falling to 5 percent during the Mao years after the 1949 communist revolution, and with Deng and subsequent premiers, rising to its current 19 per cent (the US is about 24 per cent). China’s belief that it is reclaiming its rightful place as a world power after “century of humiliation (1839–1949)” is hardly surprising (Kaufman, 2010, p. 1). Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism demands acknowledgement of different views on social and cultural norms – for example, Xi eschews universal values as Western liberal constructs and privileges instead selective, sanitised and ‘superior’ Confucianism as the Chinese values (Kallio, 2021). Indeed, Kallio (2021) believes one of China great achievements has been to meld traditional Confucianism with radical 20th social thought and neoliberalism. Liberalism’s paradoxes and contingencies have for Jahn (2021) “come home to roost.” Globalisation undermined liberalism’s costs externalisation discussed early, with immigrants and refugees arriving in liberalism’s homelands at the same time the jobs are leaving, precipitating the decolonial political moment. Decolonisation eschews a liberal notion of equity, arguing instead for a Eurocentric decentring. RWP’s desire to ‘taking back control’ is a nostalgic appeal to the time of cost externalisation and before the global was in the local. We also know that post liberalism coincides with deglobalisation or Steger and James’ (2020) disembodied globalisation. ‘Reshoring,’ enabled by innovative manufacturing processes of high-performance computing and robotics, and adaptive manufacturing’s flexible and economical local production, has again reduced the need for jobs as well as global supply chains, at the same time China pivots away from manufacturing into a service economy. Digital globalisation with financial services, online shopping, entertainment, and so on has increased as trade goods decrease marking a change, rather than a decline, to globalisation. Border closures and vaccine stockpiling during COVID-19 has accelerated these pre-existing nationalistic tendencies, exacerbating the post liberal challenges of managing environmental and technological changes (for example, climate change and vaccine production logistics), securitisation, and geo-economic concerns while preserving the cooperation and openness a complex global world requires. A fuller account of post liberalism appears in Carter (2020). Post democracy refers to the power transfer to small circles of politico-economic elites, while the populace exhibits increasing political disaffection, even as democratic institutions still appear to function (Crouch, 2004). In other words, democracy as illusion endures against the recapitulation of early twentieth century

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oligarchies and plutocracies when wealthy ‘men of ideas’ organised politics amongst themselves. Amadeo (2021) sees the US as an oligarchy along others including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and North Korea. That democracy is deteriorating there is no doubt. In their latest report, Freedom House showed democracy had declined for the 15th consecutive year with nearly 75 percent of the world’s population in countries of democratic retreat (Repucci & Slipowitz, 2020). Voter suppression in the US, with restrictive laws to stop alleged ‘electoral fraud,’ gerrymandering on electoral boundaries, and sophisticated misinformation and intimidation strategies, has disenfranchised swaths of people, and led to the US suffering one of the largest declines in democracy over the past 10 years (Repucci & Slipowitz, 2020). Mason (2021) goes further identifying the US Republican Party as the “anti-democracy party … actively campaigning against a multiracial democracy …(and) … aiming to lead the country with an ethnic minority rule.” Similarly, the recent Alliance of Democracies Foundation poll reported democratic declines with nearly half of the 53 national respondents, and identifying the situation in the US as particularly problematic (Wintour, 2021). The single biggest democratic threat ahead of for example, limits on free speech was economic inequality, reiterating the Marxism’s believe that without economic rights, political rights are useless. Social media was also identified as critical. While the rise of the internet was once trumpeted as a major democratising force, manipulation by powerful algorithms, AI, deep fakes and other digital mechanisms have hastened the epistemic crises of fake news and post truth. Neoliberal attitudes to knowledge and truth as contingent and consequential to the market described earlier, are clearly visible. The Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal in which tens of millions of peoples’ data was harvested without permission and sold on to influence political outcomes, is post democratic as it is a system only the plutocrats could afford. More recently, the British Greensill scandal involving ex-Prime Minister David Cameron, attempting to bundle National Health Service (NHS) staffs’ personal data into a tradable assets while leveraging preferential access to government personal, reifies post democracy’s ‘cronyism’ (what the elite West benignly calls its corruption). Political parties are also post democratic as non-­ elected lobbyists and advisers (like Dominic Cummings in the UK), drive policies assisted by opinion research rather than principle. Mirowski (2019) argues it is more sinister than the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s famous book Nineteen Eighty-­ Four where newspeak (post truth) declared, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.” Orwell’s concept of doublethink is mere (Lipmann’s) propaganda. Rather for Mirowski (2019, p. 21), “harvesting through social media the inchoate folderol of the general populace, subsequently feeding it back to the masses through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter … (creates) ... its own special spontaneous disorder.” Such targeted manipulation intensifies Schumpeter and Lippmann’s advertising propaganda characteristic of modern democracies into post democratic performance. Thus if political leaders say economic growth will result from austerity, the speech act’s purpose is performance rather than governance. For Peck and Nik (2019), Trump’s theatre of the absurd captured the headlines, while the business-as-usual

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work of corporate deregulation, environmental plunder, regressive redistribution, privatisation, and dispossession continued unabated, if not accelerated. Appropriating Franz Fanon’s (1963) term from his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth, Trump was a ‘bewilderer,’ a master mediator and performer, obscuring the reality between power and the people. Similarly, Indian novelist and political activist Arundhati Roy describes Prime Minister Modi’s performative costume changes where he has opportunistically mutated himself from Indian shaman, to pinstripe suited business tycoon, to formal Hindu dress or rustic villager and so on (Roy, 2021). Bewildering performances corrals Lippmann’s ‘bewildered herd’ into the cultural wars, or the Schmittian friend-enemy dichotomy leveraged by RWP and opportunistic politicians as the new political totem. Where once political constituencies identified politically and economically with formal political parties, newer identity groups divisibly cut across categories in unpredictable ways. Pitting city against rural, workers against benefits recipients, white against other, men against women, even the aged against the young is part of the ‘divide and conquer,’ obfuscating the raw plutocratic power at large. Curiously, UK and US conservative political parties become ‘champions’ of the working class, while the urban educated support Labour or Greens parties. As it currently stands, it is the future of our polity. The ‘post-’ prefix highlights the uncertainty surrounding liberalism’s and democracy’s current direction, echoing Fraser’s ((2017)) use of Antonio Gramsci’s dictum (1930/1971, p. 276): “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” It’s important to note though, that as I write, new fronts of liberalism and democracy open even as others decline -prodemocracy rallies risking loss of life and incarnation are increasing in Myanmar (against a military coup), Hong Kong (mainland Chinese repression) and Thailand (military-backed government, and monarchy). Claudio (2021) reminds us these nations are fighting for the very democratic and liberal fundamentals secured in the West but at risk from the forces described above.

2.9.4 Science Under RWP and Authoritarian Neoliberalism Third phase neoliberalism’s re-inscription of science as post liberalism amounts to nothing less than a full-throated repudiation of the Enlightenment project argues Mirowski (2019), while Davies (2018) suggests that the current epistemic crises of post truth and fake news is an overdue awakening to the neoliberal attack (beginning with Hayek in the 1930s) on the Scientific Revolutions and Enlightenment ideals of truth. Where once science’s prestigious ‘men of ideas’ produced knowledge (up to mid-century), and later on economised knowledge (first and second phase neoliberalism), late neoliberalism’s belief in the market’s superiority to human cognition as truth and knowledge generator is now ascendant. The culture wars have leveraged RWP attacks on experts/elites with the conferred authority of technical

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knowledge, education, professional regulation and restrictive licensing typified by scientists, doctors, and lawyers. Instead, financial and business entrepreneurs have emerged as alpha elites forging new alliances of bankers and traders innovating digital value extractions able to rapidly make or break fortunes. They utilise technical expert knowledge when required, on a pay per service arrangement, ensuring that downwardly mobile scientists, engineers, medical professionals and others have become just more service providers subject to the vagaries of the market. This is the world of my tertiary educated children and many of their peers. They are “‘diplomatic intermediaries’ whose job is to interpret and communicate the meanings … for public audiences” (Davis, 2017, p. 243). Certainly, the scientists appearing alongside politicians at press conferences throughout the pandemic seem to be just such communicators. The ambivalence of populist leaders like Trump, Johnson, Bolsanaro and Modi towards science helps explain their slow COVID-19 responses. Challenging the advice from his scientific experts, Boris Johnson is reputed to have said. ‘no more f*lockdowns  – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.’ At the intersection of pandemic science and political uncertainties, evidence selections are necessarily ideologically driven (Schumpeter again) favouring the science aligning with politicians’ existing preferences, even as their performances claim to be ‘following the science.’ Lin (2019, p. 254) believes this strategy appeals to simplistic views of science amongst the populace as an objective process that “produces clean yes or no answers” The challenging realities of vaccine production, questions of antibody durability, the efficacy of therapeutic agents, modelling and so on can be spun, if necessary, as the failure of experts and not the failure of politicians. Trump’s extraordinary post truth disinformation – the infamous ‘lysol moment’ and criticisms of the WHO and his own CDC – relentlessly attacked scientists and technocrats. Similarly, Modi’s anti-science stance cost thousands of lives in India. Some government officials suggested COVID-19 panaceas are dipping in the Ganges or drinking cow urine at the same time as public health structures are symmetrically privatised or curtailed, and local vaccine manufactures stand “to make obscene profits” (Roy, 2021). In response to complaints of oxygen shortages for the critically ill, India’s solicitor general said “Let’s try and not be a cry baby” (Roy, 2021). Further, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh declaring there was no shortage of oxygen in any hospital in his state, promised to arrest any dissenters without bail under the National Security Act. Roy (2021) observes “In the India that is, people are expected to vote as Hindus, but die as disposables.” Lin (2019, p. 249) argues Trump systematically undermined science in the US over the past few years: To stifle scientific activity, the Administration proposed deep cuts to research funding on specific topics and ordered scientists not to present unfavorable results. To weaken the role of expertise, the Administration skewed membership on some scientific advisory committees toward industry and dissolved or reduced the role of other committees. And to undermine the use of science in policymaking, the Administration questioned methodologies and truths that are widely accepted by the scientific community.

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2  Knowing Our Moment: (Neo)Liberalism, Democracy and Science (Education)

In the face of the unprecedented 2020 California wildfires, Trump denied the influence of climate change. Not surprisingly, public confidence and trust in experts has declined, allowing Lin (2019, p. 305) to observe, albeit prior to the pandemic, that the “view of scientists is generally soft rather than strong”, and “trust in scientists with respect to certain issues is comparatively low.” That Trump’s behaviour was tolerated Shapiro (2020) believes, speaks not only to Trump’s larger post democratic agenda of expanding executive power and dismantling accountability, but is also a mark of the post liberal world. A future where truth becomes just another site of contestation is a challenging one indeed. Nevertheless, the ever pliable neoliberalism, rethinking policies according to context and showing both a capacity for improvisation and an attitude of flexible response, suggests it will be with us for some time to come.

2.10 Science Education into the Future: The Old Is Dying and the New Is Yet to Be Born Like Marilynne Robinson, I am grateful for my education that helps me ‘know my moment,’ and my genealogy here is just one attempt to answer the opening quote from Rousseau as to ‘how we did we end up in a world where so many go in want of necessities.’ I noted in the introduction that science education remains a liberal democratic project of the mid-twentieth century, and first stage neoliberalism even as liberalism and democracy deteriorate before us. These embedded philosophical and political assumptions to my knowledge, remain largely unexamined in science education although there is now a small literature tackling neoliberalism’s production of science education (see for example Bazzul, 2012; Carter, 2021; Smith, 2011). Clearly, ideology and its economic manifestations have helped shaped the science, and science education, of their times. Without a deeper understanding of the contingencies and contradictions within liberalism and democracy it is difficult to fully grasp science education’s future challenges of the post liberal and post democratic. So how do we proceed forward? Well, if I was a liberal in Schmittian terms, I couldn’t proceed very far: I would be in danger of getting lost in consultation and collaboration towards trying to find resolution consensus that, for Schmitt, would be ultimately unsatisfactory in any case. The issue for our consideration would be – how does science education in third phase neoliberalism prepare young people for post liberal and post democratic ‘moment?’ It is a critical question as science education sits at the crossroads of science and public policy (funding, curriculum setting, credentialing and so on), and public policy can be nothing other than political (see Jasanoff, 2021). Hence, understanding and interrogating some of our taken-forgranted political ideologies has to be a first step, given Schumpeter’s view that “though we proceed slowly because of our ideologies, we might not proceed at all without them” (McAdam, 2012, p. 27). Hopefully, my chapter here is a contribution

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to this discussion. The urge by some pedagogues to view this task as just ‘admiring the problem,’ to borrow Shafik’s (2021) phrase, must be resisted though. After all, Albert Einstein is reputedly to have said that, if given an hour to save the planet, he would spend the first 55 min thinking about the problem! Nevertheless, the pedagogical challenges of such a task can’t be underestimated, and it’s in the cracks and fissures of the neoliberal hegemonic project that optimism an some excellent work exists (see for example Torres-Olave & Bravo González, 2021; Williams & Tolbert, 2021, and many other excellent articles in the journal Cultural Studies in Science Education). Consideration of these remains the work of another analysis to be completed elsewhere. In closing this narrative, perhaps the last word should belong to Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan when he advocates that: To conclude, The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end. (Hobbes, 1996, p. 36)

Chapter 3

Tales of Struggle: Dust, Smoke, Urban Forests and Confidentiality of Research

My father, Gaston, grew up in Limoilou, the area of Québec, Canada, city from which an environmental controversy emerged in 2012. While it was a poor neighbourhood for decades, Limoilou has diversified (and gentrified) but continues to be very densely populated. As we will see in this chapter, it is also a place where air quality is an important concern and where territorial and industrial development projects are objects of constant social mobilization. Gaston passed away on April 19, 2020 (Desmeules, 2020). He died of cancer before this book was published. I know that he would have been delighted to read this chapter, to find many of the topics we have discussed over the years. I spent my summer and Christmas vacations in the countryside on the shore of a lake until I was 16. I scanned the sky at night, hunted bugs by day, walked the fields in the summer and rode the family snowmobile in the winter. My father and I swam around the lake as often as we could. When I was about 12 years old, I started writing in Le Réveil (The awakening), the local newspaper. I drew animals that had to be identified with a riddle. I remember how rewarding it was to walk through the doors of Le Réveil building. I felt like my drawings were eagerly awaited, that I was taking part in the cultural life of the village. This, I realised lately, is how I learned to participate in public conversations. During my high school years, one of my chemistry teachers noticed my interest in science. He subscribed me to my first science magazine. Then, as now, knowledge from fields of science had the mixed flavours of windy countrysides and large libraries. In a natural way, I chose to undertake university studies in biology. For 3 years, I worked in a research laboratory in entomology. From spring to the end of summer, I traveled countrysides of Québec. I spent countless hours in the field, alone or with the research team, following the development of fir tree buds, estimating damages caused by moths to cranberry plants. I talked with growers about their plantings, their needs and the state of the markets.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_3

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Between 1998 and 2002, while working as a biology research professional, I did a master’s degree in French literature on the representation of the female body in novels of Marie Darrieussecq, a young French author. In Pig tales, which was translated into 40 languages, the protagonist undergoes a significant identity and physiological alteration as she metamorphoses into a sow; Darrieussecq, 1998). My literary studies familiarised me with major currents and theoretical tools related to construction of stories and their reporting (narratology). They allowed me to reflect on the social hierarchy of representations (scientific, artistic, literary) and, especially, to read many novels, essays and plays of which several pose a critical glance on the state of the World at various moments of the history and in various geographical places. Following my master’s degree in 2000, I studied to teach at the post-secondary level. In Québec we call the school level between high school and university “cégep”. In October 2000, I became a cégep biology teacher. I had chapters of Camus’ The Plague (1948) read by nursing students,1 I presented paintings from all eras related to anatomy, environment, nutrition or technoscience and I began my classes by talking about current scientific and political news. In 2002, I began my PhD. I studied how young people variously understand the cell phone controversy and talk about their relationships to people they consider to be scientific experts (Pouliot, 2007). In 2006, I was hired as a professor of science education at Laval University. I structured my research goals, as follows: I wanted to better understand how students, teachers and pre-service teachers understand socio-political management of environmental and health controversies and, in particular, how they conceive of the roles and capacities of citizens involved in these issues. At that time, while various aspects of teaching about scientific controversies were documented, ways in which students and teachers view citizen participation in controversy management tended not to be directly addressed (Pouliot, 2008). Time passed and my research program in science education was established in two parts. The first one dealt with socio-political management of local environmental and health controversies. I analyze ways in which different social actors (citizens, politicians, industries, health departments, etc.) describe problematic situations, produce relevant knowledge and identify solutions (e.g. Pouliot & Groleau, 2020; Pouliot, 2015). The second component concerns teaching of these controversies. I work (with other researchers, including the co-authors of this book) on ways to familiarize young people with the issues of the day, to develop their potential for civic action, but also to make teachers confident enough in their abilities to address these issues in the classroom (e.g. Bencze et al., 2020; Groleau et al., 2021a).

 Camus’ The Plague became a highly-popular novel of the Covid-19 pandemic: “In recent weeks, UK sales of the English translation have been up more than 1000 per cent. In Japan, more copies sold in March than in the past 31 years combined, and at least one bookshop had to ration copies to one per person: people were panic-buying The Plague.” (Earle, 2020) 1

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In the next pages, I revisit controversies that I have documented over the years or in which I have participated. I am now familiar with their socio-political contexts, their ins and outs and many of their concerned actors (social, scientific, political, and journalistic). I wish this chapter to be understood a possible way of living and acting as researcher and teacher in this Great Unsettling (Steger & James, 2020, see Lyn Carter’s chapter). Despite the indignation that these stories of struggle may arouse, a beautiful light shines from them.

3.1 Stories of Environmental and Health Struggle It can be said that controversy enriches the meaning of a situation. (Callon et al., 2001, p. 52)

3.1.1 Dust Quebec City is divided into six boroughs that include 35 neighbourhoods. The Vieux-Limoilou, Maizerets and Vanier neighbourhoods are located in the lower part of the city near heavy industries (port and railway activities, pulp and paper mill, incinerator), high voltage lines and major roads. From the perspective of environmental justice research, populations of the inner-city neighbourhoods of Vieux-­ Limoilou and Maizerets are “fenceline communities” and their environments can be understood as sacrificial zones (Lerner, 2010). They are subjected to outdoor air laden with particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, various metals, dioxins/furans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from surrounding areas (DSPCIUSSSCN, 2018). The life expectancy of the residents of Vieux-Limoilou is lower by a few years than the one in other Quebec City neighbouroods. Premature mortality and mortality related to respiratory health are more frequent there. Indeed, compared to the life expectancy at birth in the Capitale-­Nationale2 (82.5 years), people born in the lower part of the town during the 2010–2014 period will live 6 years less (76.5 years) and people born in Vieux-­Limoilou and Vanier neighbourhoods will live 2.8  years less (79.7  years) (CIUSSSCN, 2018). In addition, social inequalities in health that exist in the Capitale-Nationale result in various chronic diseases as well as early disabilities. Until 2012, my work did not take root in local situations of citizen mobilization. But on October 26th, 2012, in Limoilou,3 a reddish dust settled overnight in the streets, on people’s cars and porches. A couple of days later, I read a newspaper article entitled “Alarming red storm” that mentioned that a citizen, Véronique Lalande, was then concerned about the nature and source of the dust which had  The Capitale-Nationale is an administrative region of the province of Québec. It includes, among others, the city of Québec. 3  I was residing in Limoilou since the year 2000 when the controversy emerged. We moved in 2017. 2

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suddenly covered the toys of her baby son (Lachance, 2012). Articles that followed highlighted both her concerns as a mother on maternity leave and the dust collection she and her scientist partner, Louis Duchesne, had embarked on to document the situation. On October 29th, a transshipment company located at the Port of Québec confirmed that iron dust from the unloading of a ship was suspended in the atmosphere, carried by the wind and then deposited in parts of the neighborhood west of the port facilities. When I became aware of this information, I thought that perhaps this was the beginning of an environmental controversy. Since this situation was related both to my field of expertise and my life as a Limoilou resident, I closely followed the development of the situation through the media. Among other things, I analyzed the political and industrial management of the situation and the arguments mobilized about the origin of the dust and its composition. Over time, I became interested in citizens’ capacities to produce knowledge and in the web of contacts (or “dispositif”) initiated by Lalande and Duchesne but also by other citizens, political representatives, environmental groups and leisure associations (Bencze & Pouliot, 2017). In order to do this, I studied public documents produced by the city, the port, public health, the environment department, and by citizens. I went to city council meetings, Port general meetings and citizen’s meetings (including an outdoor screening of a documentary film made by two brothers living in Limoilou; see Fig.  3.1). I analyzed radio and television interviews conducted with the public health department, the Port CEO, concerned citizens and the Québec City mayor. Using theoretical tools from sociology of science, I wrote a book4 about how citizens contributed to the reformulation of the problem of dust pollution they faced, to the production of scientific knowledge5 and to the identification of solutions (Pouliot, 2015) (Fig. 3.2). The Québec City dust controversy eventually led to legal challenges in  local courts of law.6 For more than 60 days, I attended the Québec City courthouse hearings in the two class action lawsuits brought by Lalande and Duchesne. Behind closed doors, competing versions of the world were elaborated. By spending days at the tribunal, I became familiar with the symbolic harshness of strategic discursive exchanges.7 I heard testimonies from several scientific experts. These people,  It is a non-academic book for general readership. It is a way to disseminate academic knowledge to the communities. It was read by high school and university students, political representatives, local and international colleagues, lawyers, and journalists. It is accessible freely here: https://lel. crires.ulaval.ca/oeuvre/quand-les-citoyennes-soulevent-la-poussiere-la-controverse-autourde-la-poussiere-metallique 5  Louis Duchesne is a forestry engineer. He holds a master’s degree in forestry science and is a researcher at the Ministry of the Forests, where he has been supervising the environmental monitoring of forest watersheds conducted for over 30 years. Duchesne has several scientific articles to his credit, including two published in Nature communication (Brienen et al., 2020; D’Orangeville et al., 2018). 6  See website of Trudel Johnston & Lespérance (TJL; https://tjl.Québec/en/) 7  Discursive psychology establishes that discourse and rhetoric analysis is of great relevance to the understanding of the way people interact and come to understand a situation. 4

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Fig. 3.1  Compared to the life expectancy at birth in the Capitale-Nationale (82.5 years), people born in the lower part of the town during the 2010–2014 period will live 6 years less (76.5 years) and people born in Vieux-Limoilou and Vanier will live 2.8 years less (79.7 years). Here, a picture of the upper town from Limoilou. (Photo: Chantal Pouliot, 2017)

Fig. 3.2  On July 17, 2018, about two hundred citizens attended an outdoors screening of documentary Bras de fer (Arm wrestling). (Photo: Chantal Pouliot)

regardless of their allegiance, appeared to expose their credibility to critique. Their reports – and, in particular, their methodological choices, content of their analyses and scope of their conclusions- were scrutinized and their curriculum vitae were explored in situ by the lawyers so as to weaken or consolidate their legitimacy

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regarding the problem at hand.8 The experts came out of the interrogations exhausted, sometimes clearly shaken by the interrogations by lawyers. From the point of view of discursive psychology analysis (Potter, 2012), the asymmetry of the interactions was obvious: one questions, the other answers, one insists, the other hesitates and then reformulates. There were some funny moments. The kind that gives you a break, that allows you to catch your breath: a lawyer balancing his/her questions on a coat hanger that has incidentally fallen to the floor; a lawyer drinking from a witness’ glass of water and realizing it when putting the glass back on the table; the judge making jokes and, at times, having a good time. But in general, a hostile decorum prevailed. The first class action suit, dealing specifically with the October 2012 red dust incident, resulted in $1.6 million in compensation ($100 or $200 to be paid to residents affected by the dust; MacKinnon, 2019). The judgment in the second class action lawsuit found in favour of the port authority and the transshipment company. For the judge in that second case, the scientific evidence demonstrated that the contribution of port activities to the claimed disturbance was, for all practical purposes, zero; and that de-icing salts and abrasives were the cause of the excess dust found in Limoilou.9

3.1.2 Port’s Expansion Project Between 2015 and 2021, the Port of Québec worked on an expansion project10 which involved filling part of the bay of Beauport to extend the existing pier by 610 metres to operate a deep-water container terminal. The 31.7-hectare project, of which 14 hectare taken from the river, included the construction of railroad tracks and access roads, the reconfiguration of a boulevard and the redevelopment of part of the Port of Québec’s truck loading grounds. In December 2020, the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada released a report outlining the significant environmental, social and health impacts of the project named Laurentia. The Agency noted that the project would cause significant adverse environmental impacts on fish habitat, air quality and human health and on the current use of land and resources for traditional purposes by people. Following this publication, a period of public consultation took place.11 Hundreds of people

 Sheila Jasanoff’s (1998) work, particularly the gameboard of expertise, was helpful in understanding the ways in which expert credibility was established in the two trials. 9  That said, the judge recognized that the citizens of the ‘zone’ face serious inconveniences (excessive dust interferes with their quality of life by preventing them from enjoying their outdoor spaces and by requiring to clean their property more often). At this time, representatives Véronique Lalande and Louis Duchesne appealed the case. They believe that the judge erred in his analysis of the evidence and the law, and hope that the Court of Appeal will hear the case in 2022. 10  The expansion project was initially named Beauport 2020 and later called Laurentia. 11  This was the second public consultation, the first was in 2017 (I refer to the first consultation at the end of the chapter). 8

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expressed their disagreement with the port expansion project, including an association of physicians12 (AQME, 2020) and a collective of 90 Laval University professors (including me). Two elected members of the mayor’s team and several district council members took stand against the project, contrary to the mayor’s stance. Moreover, the Confederation of Student Associations of Laval University and the Laval Graduate Student Association (representing a total of 43,000 students) took positions both against the project and the support of the administration of Laval University to it.13 On June 29, 2021, after $14 million in expenses (Martin, 2021), the Port of Québec expansion project was officially rejected by the federal government (Rémillard, 2021a, b) who determined that the potential direct and cumulative negative effects of Laurentia could not be justified. While the federal government’s decision was a resounding victory for the citizens opposed to it, the details of events since 2015 make it clear that the burden of fighting for a healthy environment falls on citizens and other groups (Bencze & Pouliot, 2017). In spite of it all, some people currently remain on guard, as a passage from the press release issued by the government states that the decision “concerns only the Laurentia project and does not prevent the Québec Port Authority from developing new project proposals to continue its support for the development of our region” (Bossé, 2021). The federal cabinet’s decision came in the same week that the provincial government announced in a press release that it will table a draft regulation to raise the current daily limit for nickel concentration in air from 14 ng/m3 to 70 ng/m3. The draft regulation also provides for the addition of an annual limit (of 20 ng/m3), 67% more permissive than the standard in effect from 2011 to 2013. The government considers nickel to be a “strategic mineral” and claims that the relaxation of the limit will allow taking advantage of the shift toward battery manufacturing for electric vehicles (Rémillard, 2021a, b). According to the Québec City regional public health department, the justification behind the reduction of the standard for nickel in ambient air is mainly “economic”.14 It adds that the monitoring station in Old-­ Limoilou detects nickel concentrations in the air that are higher than the current standard and that even with a daily standard raised to 70 ng/m3, the limit would be exceeded occasionally, according to current data (Rémillard, 2021a, b). In practical terms, citizens living in the vicinity of nickel ore transshipment port activities will, if the regulation is adopted, live in an environment with much more permissive air quality rules, and thus likely with more air pollution.

 Created in 2018, the Association québécoise des médecins pour l’environnement (AQME) brings together hundreds of Québec physicians concerned about environmental issues. It is particularly interested in the impacts of climate change on health, active and public transportation, and pesticides. 13  Laval University rector’s support for the Laurentia project was identified as the controversy of the year in 2020 in the local newspaper Le Soleil (Bourque, 2020). 14  In his chapter Ralph Levinson, points out that Hodson’s four level approach allows students (and teachers) to recognize that technoscientific decisions are based on political and economic interests. In this case, it could not be clearer that the decision is driven by economic considerations. 12

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3.1.3 Smoke In November 2012, an environmental and health controversy began to unfold in a residential neighbourhood of the city of Québec, named Cap-Rouge, known for its relatively high quality of life. Anacolor, a metal painting plant was releasing volatile organic compounds into the air, many of which exceeded emission standards. Since the plant had increased production in late 2012 – but more so between 2015 and 2017  – citizens complained of pronounced solvent odours, headaches, choking, numbness of the tongue, and nosebleeds. Up until 2016, efforts of citizens to stop the situation have had little or no effect. For many citizens, the situation was acute because an elementary school is located nearby, as well as an early childhood daycare. It was teachers who, following recommendation of the public health department, had to judge the intensity of the solvent odours and ensure that the children stayed in closed rooms when necessary (Pouliot, 2016).15 Citizens concerned about the air quality in Cap-Rouge grouped together (Group for the Quality of the Air of Cap-Rouge) and put forward various actions to draw attention of elected officials, public health, the Ministry of the Environment and journalists to the air quality in their neighbourhood (Pouliot, 2017). They were very critical of the fact that although the government had fined Anacolor (through the Ministry of the Environment), it also gave it contracts to paint metal parts of public utility buildings such as schools and hospitals. The citizen group’s work of “intéressement” (“Translation”, Callon, 1986) allowed the industrial emanations to be introduced into the socio-political sphere. Through various actions to raise awareness of the situation they were facing, they eventually convinced elected officials, business actors, journalists and citizens who weren’t directly exposed to the plant’s smoke to take an interest in their preoccupations about a better air quality in their neighbourhood. The mobilisation was so effective that the Premier of Québec at the time declared himself in a video intended for the citizens of Cap-Rouge in favour of relocating the plant: “I know how inconvenient it is for you, that company will move. I repeat, it will move, [the Liberal candidate] will make sure, I will make sure with my colleagues in the council of ministers” (Mathieu, 2017). The company moved to an industrial park in October 2019. When the plant’s activities were over in Cap-Rouge, the representative of the citizen group spoke at a press briefing:

 This Public Health Department’s recommendation was intended to equip the public to manage their exposure to air toxics, but in doing so transferred a crucial part of health risk management to teachers and educators. From the perspective of research on health and environmental controversies, the decision of the public health department is an example of risk management through adaptation, according to which “it is no longer a matter of working to suppress the disaster, but of recognizing its inevitability and preparing individuals by giving them the tools that should enable them to reduce the impact of the coming disaster themselves, both its immediate and longer-term consequences” (Boudia & Jas, 2015, p. 393). 15

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After 7  years of struggle and media outings to make the plant’s management listen to reason, we reached a common agreement. This agreement provided for the cessation of activities in Cap-Rouge on September 30th, 2019, the relocation of Anacolor to the Saint-Lambert-de-Lauzon industrial park on the South Shore, thanks to a $9 million government loan, the purchase of the land by the City of Québec and compensation for the citizens affected (Cattapan, 2019). These words highlight a socio-political dispositif consisting of the media, the city, the provincial government and the Trudel, Johnston & Lespérance lawyer’s firm16 whose actions led to the relocation of the company’s plant. However, they do not explain a fundamental aspect of this story: even though citizens had made 1300 complaints between 2012 and 2019 and the Ministry of the Environment had issued 11 notices of noncompliance to the plant, citizens have never known the exact composition of what they have been breathing for years.

3.1.4 Ongoing Mobilisations Hail, the humanist, hail, the ecologist, hail, the lover, a chance we have you against them. (Achigan, 2023)

Many so-called Science-in-Context controversies (Bencze et al., 2020) are currently at the heart of public conversations in Québec City, including about relaxation of the atmospheric nickel standard, cutting of trees in urban woodlands, drilling of a tunnel under the St. Lawrence River (the Third Link) and the development of an industrial zone in an underprivileged central district of the city. 3.1.4.1 The Standard for Nickel in the Air On December 22, 2021, about 100 Limoilou citizens and representatives of organizations gathered to express their disagreement with the government’s proposed regulation for nickel in the air (Fig. 3.3). Activists and elected municipal officials spoke out in support of the idea that an increase in airborne contaminants is unacceptable (Paris, 2021). Preoccupations about air quality in the city’s central neighbourhoods led to a citizen’s research initiative of knowledge production: in 2022, 75 sensors will be installed on rooftops and balconies to measure fine particles in Limoilou’s air. The data collected will be transmitted on a web platform and combined with other environmental data. Throughout the citizens survey process, participants will keep a logbook related to ambient air quality.

 Trudel, Johnston & Lespérance lawyer’s firm and the Jean-François Bertrand Avocats (JFB) firm represented the citizens of Limoilou and the citizens of Cap-Rouge in their legal proceedings. 16

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Fig. 3.3  The group for the quality of the air of cap-rouge (2019). (Photo: The group for the quality of the air of cap-rouge)

3.1.4.2 The Third Link Since May 2021, citizens have been organizing resistance to a highway project that would link Québec City and Lévis, located on the south bank of the St. Lawrence River. The provincial government plans to dig a tunnel under the River with one of the exits located downtown, near Limoilou (the tunnel is called the “third link” because it adds to the two bridges that connect the two shores). In September 2021, six neighbourhood councils wrote an open letter, in which they argued that highway infrastructures will exacerbate environmental and health problems experienced in a community whose air is already saturated with fine particles and pollutants. In a nutshell, they asked for more consideration for the wellbeing of the population. The project will undergo an environmental assessment before it is sanctioned (Shields, 2022). 3.1.4.3 Development of an Industrial Zone Citizens living in the Lower Town community mobilized against a territorial development project called Zone d’Innovation Littoral Est (Eastern Shore Innovation Zone or ZILE, in French) in an area of the central districts of Québec City where the municipal incinerator and a hospital are located. The ZILE is part of the provincial government’s vision to transform the river valley into a kind of Silicon Valley: 365 companies and university research centres would be located in the area by 2035,

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along with 14,400 residents. Concerned that no consultations have been held to find out what the population’s expectations are for this area, the Maizerets neighborhood council formulated specific demands to the government in May 2021, asking for the implementation of a shared governance mechanism with citizens, the protection of a biodiversity corridor, guaranteed access to the river and the implementation of local urban agriculture zones. For the architect Simon Parent, as for many other members of the citizens group Table citoyenne Littoral Est, urban territorial developments must be planned with and for local communities: “We have to act exactly the same way as the forest guardians are doing right now. Even if the land we inherit is in ruins, even if it is damaged. We will be able to take care of it afterwards, we will be able to heal it, we will be able to regenerate it” (Sanchez, 2022). 3.1.4.4 Urban Forests Québec City has about 50 large woodlands.17 Five kilometers from my home, citizens are campaigning for the complete conservation of the Neilson Forests. Although the ecological value of this urban woodland has already been recognized by the City, urban planning documents indicate an intention to develop 60% of its 25 hectares. A citizens’ group (the Friends of Neilson Forest) was formed to oppose such development. It has 73 active members and approximately 565 Facebook™ subscribers (the coordinating committee is made up of a dozen people). The group is currently in discussion with various partners and recommends that the protection of this woodland be integrated into a national urban park project. Several Québec citizens are also concerned about the short-term future of Lacerte Forest, located on the main campus of Laval University.18 It is planned that a hub of the tramway network will be built on university campus and that a passageway will cross the Lacerte Forest. On September 14th (2021), about 20 citizens met with a journalist in the heart of the forest to raise awareness of the fact that 120 mature trees and 500 smaller trees (all currently identified by ribbons or dots of orange paint) will be cut down. As part of this first media coverage, citizens asked the city and the university to revise the route to avoid the fragmentation of the Lacerte Forest (see Fig. 3.4). *** The citizens whose mobilizations I describe in this chapter express emancipated relationship with political power and scientific expertise, their professional and personal experiences being the source of confidence in their interpretive abilities. They develop fine mastery of stakes and subtleties and, consequently, become experts on the situation that concerns them. Citizens hope that their interventions will lead to concrete results.  Maps, a researcher, notes that some urban forests are not counted by Québec City in its development and protection plan (Maps, 2021). 18  Laval University campus is known for its multitude of habitat types: woodlands, clearings, temporary ponds, grassy areas and planted roofs. 17

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Fig. 3.4  On December 22nd, 2021, a hundred citizens of Limoilou mobilized to demonstrate their opposition to the provincial government’s proposed regulation to increase the nickel limit in the air. The current limit of 14 ng/m3 would be raised to 70 ng/m3. On February 5th, 2022, citizens were 200 to a second gathering. (Photo: Chantal Pouliot)

In public statements of political authorities, citizens’ contributions to understanding the situation is generally not addressed. So, too, is the relevance of the gains made through their struggle: everyone benefits from good air, water and soil quality and from the protection of biodiversity. Many people, whether they are part of government and health authorities, industrialists or citizens, consider it somehow normal that the industrial activities generate air contaminants.19 Economic benefits (local jobs, mainly) of industrial activities are always evoked to justify (naturalize) the deleterious environmental and health effects (Fig. 3.5).

3.2 Two Stories of Requests My friends often despair of the stories I tell. (Eva Joly, 2003, p. 263)

 The controversies surrounding metal dust, that surrounding the expansion of the Port and that concerning the partnership relation between Laval University and the Port of Québec share concerned actors. 19

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Fig. 3.5  On September 14th (2021), about 20 citizens met with a journalist in the heart of the Lacerte Forest (on Laval University’s campus) to raise awareness of the fact that 120 mature trees and 500 smaller trees will be cut down, 202.1 (Photo: Chantal Pouliot)

In recent years, calls for a “social engagement” of researchers have multiplied. On my university portal, professors are invited to sign a declaration of social commitment.20 This initiative is in line with Laval University’s official strategic plan, one of the components of which is oriented towards the transformation of society and the world:

20

 https://www.ulaval.ca/en/social-engagement

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3  Tales of Struggle: Dust, Smoke, Urban Forests and Confidentiality of Research Engagement with society and the community will color all experiences at Laval University. Members of its community will be invited to respond to major societal issues, whether they are taking place in the neighbourhood or in a developing country. Through innovation. Through the courage of sincere commitment and solidarity. Through participation in the development and promotion of sustainable health. Rooted in civic engagement, these ambassadors of Laval University will contribute more than ever to society.

The commitment expected from professors and researchers is not a small thing. Responding to major societal issues, whether they take place in neighbourhoods or elsewhere, also means producing knowledge that is likely to displease influential organizations. In other words, the commitment required is only possible if researchers who might find themselves in trouble (judicially or otherwise) are supported, represented and defended by their home institution. Between 2016 and 2018, I took a close look at a situation that played out in Québec known as Maillé’s Case. Widely documented in Canada, associate professor Marie-Ève Maillé found herself in a situation now considered as a reference case. To put it briefly, Maillé had documented, in her doctoral thesis (2010), deleterious social effects of a wind power project in central Québec (province). A few years later, citizens of the town obtained authorization to lead a class action against the wind power company. The citizens filed Maillé’s thesis in evidence which led the company’s lawyers to ask for the raw data of her research. But Maillé refused, on the ground that her research data had been obtained from citizens under the promise that their testimonies would remain confidential. In January 2016, a judge issued an order: Maillé was to turn over her research data to the company lawyers. What happened next was surprising: the University refused to legally support her. After a mammoth effort, she was represented and defended pro bono by a law firm and succeeded in protecting the confidential information of citizens. I had known Maillé while writing my book on the mobilization of citizens in Limoilou (Pouliot, 2015). A mutual researcher friend had talked to Marie-Ève about me as she was writing a book on social acceptability. She contacted me and we had a discussion about environmental issues from a distance (Maillé being in Germany at the time). I was sorry to learn that she was in such a difficult situation: how does one protect confidential data when a judge orders handing over the information to a private company’s lawyers? In my opinion, the judge’s decision was a threat to the integrity of academic research and was a deterrent for researchers who documents environmental or health controversies (Fig. 3.6). For 7 months, Maillé and I discussed her situation over the phone (we lived in different cities). In November 2016, an article came out about her situation on a public Canadian broadcaster for both radio and television. The very same day, I wrote a letter of support co-signed by 230 Canadian researchers. The letter was published in two newspapers a few days later. Within days, the university changed its tune and supported Maillé in her refusal to provide research data to the lawyers. In a recent interview, Marie-Ève reflects on the moment when the tide turned:

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Fig. 3.6  In 2018, Marie-Ève Maillé published L’Affaire Maillé (The Maillé’s Case) in which she tells her story. This book helps a wide range of readers understand the importance of protecting confidential research data but also realize the extent to which universities are reluctant to provide protection or support to members of their communities when faced with legal situations. (Photo: Hélène Bouffard)

Finally, I obtained the support of the professors’ union [Syndicat des professeurs et professeures de l’UQAM], once the house was burning down. This support came when a part of the population mobilized following the publication in the media, in November 2016, of the letter written by Chantal Pouliot and co-signed by more than 200 researchers. Then, the Union called me in. Chantal has been one of my most valuable friends and allies in this battle. She led the charge when the story broke in the media. And from there, all the support followed. It took Professor Chantal Pouliot’s initiative to write a letter in support of my case. (Roy, 2021)

I supported Maillé21 up until the end this story. I attended the hearing where the judge retracted his decision. In 2018, she published a book telling her story. This book helped a wide range of readers to understand the importance of protecting

 Martin writes “When scientists engage in public advocacy, or indeed in any public comment on controversial issues, there is a risk they will come under attack. […] Building networks for personal support is crucially important, including family and friends, work colleagues and various others. When coming under attack, it is important to document actions, seek advice and behave sensibly. The most powerful counter to attacks is mobilisation of support. It is important to support scientists who come under attack, as this protects scientific freedom for all” (Martin, 2017, Abstract of Preparing for advocacy, resisting attack). 21

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research data, but also to realize the extent to which universities are reluctant (or unwilling) to provide protection or support to their employees when faced with legal situations. For the Canadian researchers Palys and Lowman,22 “If research confidentiality protection is only as strong as the weakest link, then a strong candidate for that dubious position is university administrators. Out of the eight Canadian challenges to date, no group has been more out of step with ethical principles and practices than university presidents and vice-presidents of research” (2019, p. 228). Maillé’s writing is now a mandatory reading in my Epistemology and Education graduate course as well as in my Science Education course (taken by future science teachers). I do not regret having followed the Maillé Affair. I familiarized myself with a case of data source protection and helped a colleague out of an unfortunate situation. My in-depth knowledge of her story of struggle also allowed me to react in an efficient and informed way when I was, in January 2018, concerned by a request for emails related to my book on the citizen capacities exercised in the context of the controversy around metallic dust in Limoilou. When I learned that the communications sent to me by Lalande and Duchesne were requested by both the Port and the transhipment company, I knew that I had to be represented by a lawyer to effectively protect those communications.23 As Poirier mentions in the Bulletin of the Québec Federation of University Professors (FQPPU), legal support was provided to me by my union (see Poirier, 2019). Without going into detail about this period, I find relevant to mention that the judicialization of the research appeared abruptly in my researcher’s life. It monopolized my time and emotions for more than a year. Moreover, the request for emails had immediate impacts on my research practice, self-censorship being perhaps one of the most evident and troubling: between January 2018 and March 2019, I declined most of invitations to be on discussion panels related to researchers’ social engagement and I stopped writing papers for the general media about local environmental controversies.24 However, at some point, I made the decision to consider this

  Ted Palys and John Lowman are pioneers in research on ethics and law of research confidentiality. 23  The Québec Federation of University Professors raised the issues of this situation as follows: “If a third party were to obtain these emails, it would potentially break the relationship of trust between researchers and those that participate in their research, whether in a formal manner or not, and threaten future recruitment of participants. In fact, if the outcome of this case is unfavourable for Ms. Pouliot, chances are a number of researchers will hesitate before tackling controversial research topics, for fear that lawsuits will be brought against them. This perspective would have adverse effects on society as a whole, as the spectrum of topics informed by research would become more limited” (Poirier, 2019, pp. 11–12). 24  Referring to Kempner (2008), Väliverronen and Saikkonen (2021, p.  1175) mention: “Self-­ censoring actions can be conceptualized as a “chilling effect” that severely affects a researcher’s career and working conditions”. 22

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Fig. 3.7  My sons sat in an urban art piece in Limoilou, 2016. (Photo: Chantal Pouliot)

experience as an academic expertise and I did begin to study its details and outcomes. In March 2019, the communication request was dropped by the lawyers (Fig. 3.7).25

3.3 Teaching Stories of Struggle Education, broadly understood, is about enabling people to engage in various societal affairs, to make informed choices of action and discourse, to express disagreement with some decisions or visions of the world and to act democratically for wellbeing of populations and environments. In the course of their lives, students will find themselves in situations of unequal power and resources. They will have to organize to make themselves heard, to master knowledge that were previously unknown to them. In light of the foregoing, a significant challenge facing science education is the necessity to get rid of the deficit model to interpret the preoccupations, roles and capacities of citizens as they engage in the development of environmental and health controversies. The deficit model (Callon, 1999) argues that citizens lack the knowledge to understand complexities of socially acute issues, that it is not their role to generate relevant knowledge to understand what is going on, and that their skills are insufficient to engage in the processes of socio-political

 Needless to say that I share Palys and Lowman’s preoccupation: “We are concerned that a lack of statute-based protection makes researchers and research participants vulnerable to prosecutors and attorneys who feel they have nothing to lose by requesting information from researchers who hold information about individuals who have some connection to criminal or suspicious activity, or who have information from individuals who later become litigants” (2019, p. 19). 25

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debate and decision making. Mobilized citizens are often portrayed as irrational, focused on their own interests and inadequate in their openness towards the large projects presented to them by promoters or members of the government. But the deficit model, as research suggests, is not the best one for interpreting citizen engagement. Indeed, citizens are able, when the situation concerns or interests them, to form precise and nuanced idea of what the problem is and to act in useful and coherent ways. The model of co-production of knowledge, for example, makes it possible to better account for citizens’ contributions and sociopolitical action. This model is characterized by the idea that citizens have a relevant experience of situations and are sufficiently competent to participate in the definition of the problem, in the constitution of research collectives and in the production of scientific knowledge. In a chapter that Audrey Groleau, Isabelle Arseneau and I co-authored (Groleau et al., 2021b), we establish seven principles for the teaching of science on which we rely to teach environmental and health controversies: 1. Familiarize students with the effects of human activities on Earth; 2. Accompany students in interdisciplinary problematization of situations that truly interest them; 3. Bring students to carry out actions and concrete socioenvironmental projects anchored in their territorial realities; 4. Highlight asymmetries and injustices; 5. Encourage students in the development of an emancipated relationship to knowledge; 6. Recognize and improve students’ critical position-making capacities; 7. Present concrete cases of successful citizen mobilizations. With regard to these principles, I made several pedagogical choices to acquaint my students with stories of struggle. For instance, I have often invited people into the classroom to talk about the citizen inquiry process in which they embarked. The conversations had an empowering effect on students, as many pre-service teachers felt that they lacked the ability to get their prospective students to develop sufficient agency to take part in current environmental and health issues. However, several of the students enrolled in my courses have attended court hearings in the metal dust class action lawsuits or in connection with paint plant smoke.26 The hearings provided an opportunity to discover a place where science is used to argue opposing points of view, where the credibility of experts is discursively constructed/deconstructed and where the citizens who testify continue to put forward conceptual, discursive, and interactional capacities. In the dust class actions, citizens were asked to describe the dust (its color, texture, quantity), describe events that took place years earlier.27  I suggested that they attend a hearing but it was not mandatory.  As a result of this experiment, a student wrote Wikipedia entries about the dust controversy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limoilou_dust_controversy) and the Maillé Affair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maill%C3%A9_affair) 26 27

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In the winter term (2021), I had the two judgments of the class action lawsuits opposing citizens to the Port of Québec and the transshipment company read by my science education students. The ensuing discussion focused on the axiological (values) and epistemological modalities of the texts, on the judgment as a writing about the state of the world (we contrasted it with other types of representations: documentary films, comic strips, scientific articles, reports of organizations such as public health). In general, the study of the issue of metallic dust in Limoilou (and more broadly in the central districts) was supported by the idea that it is necessary to familiarize not only students but also teachers with local and current environmental and health problems. The case of metallic dust is particularly interesting because it has been widely documented in the media since 2012 (these articles can be considered as pedagogical tools). Teaching local environmental and health controversies requires reflection on the pedagogical goals pursued, the content of classroom interventions, the materials to support teaching and learning and, above all, one’s own epistemological posture with respect to the situation addressed. Judgment and diligence are required, as students enrolled in the course may either live in a polluted neighbourhood or be related to people linked to the situation at hand (e.g. lawyers, judges, workers, company owners).

3.4 Collaboration For several years, the authors of this book have been companions in thought. I met Larry at a Canadian conference in 2006. Several conversations followed which led to articles and research work. Larry showed an early interest in the Limoilou dust controversy. He and his team were the driving force behind the creation of a graphic novel on civic engagement, a video and an educational guide for teachers. I met Lyn in 2013. She and her husband came to Québec City with Larry and his partner. We had dinner at a restaurant in the heart of the fortifications of Québec City. I found Lyn bright and sensitive to my efforts to speak in English. She and Larry convinced me to go to the ESERA Conference to be held in Cyprus in September. That is where I met Isabel and Ralph. One warm afternoon, Larry, Lyn, Isabel, Ralph and I sat under the trees and discussed this idea of a politicized science education book. At several points thereafter, and around the world, we continued this conversation, including in Washington, D.C., where I met Matthew, whose intellectual openness blew me away. It is difficult to separate the contributions of each of the co-authors of this book to my research work and reflections. We live in different countries (except for Larry and me, who do not live in the same province of Canada and do not speak the same language) and this played a role in how my convictions as a researcher were established. Our conversations, whether political, educational, or epistemological, have enriched both my worldview and the theoretical apparatuses I use in my research and teaching. This book, which will have taken a long time to take shape, embodies what unites us: the serious joy of conversation about politicized (contextualized) science education.

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The international research collaboration with Lyn, Isabel, Ralph, Matthew and Larry is complementary to other relationships I have with local researchers. I mentioned earlier Marie-Ève Maillé, who courageously and decisively protected the confidentiality of her research data despite a judge’s order to turn over sensitive information to lawyers of a wind turbine company. I also exchange regularly with Mélanie Lemire, who holds the Nasivvik Research Chair. Her work focuses on effects of contaminants on the food systems of northern populations. While persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are declining in the arctic, mercury is still an acute question. Every year, I speak in her public health medicine course. I talk about environmental and health controversies and discuss relevant theoretical tools for interpreting their development, management and how citizens contribute to the understanding of the problem. I also have the pleasure of discussing with many colleagues about participation of researchers in socio-political conversations. The exchanges I have had in recent years with Simon Viviers, Louis-Philippe Lampron and Patrick Provost have particularly enriched my vision of both academic freedom and the responsibilities of university professors.28 Simon’s research focuses on relations between mental health and work. Louis-Philippe works on the protection of fundamental freedoms and equality rights in pluralistic societies. In a conversation we had in the spring of 2021 as part of a special issue of the ACFAS Magazine intitled State of the world, Research and Politics, Simon and Louis-Philippe expressed their views on the effects of the rise of managerial ideology in universities on early career researchers. For Louis-Philippe, “When early career faculty members are afraid to speak out publicly when the subject of socio-political conversations is related to their expertise, the very purpose of academic freedom is weakened: the ability of academic institutions and those who work in them are to contribute to the vitality of democratic debates by providing reliable and quality ideas, data and information on which to make free and informed decisions.” In Simon’s view, “the more experienced [professors] among us need to educate by passing on a memory of what the University was and what it might become again.” This is exactly what my colleague Patrick Provost, researcher in medicine,29 is doing as he exercises his

 In January 2019, we published an article in the newspaper in which we asked the administrations of Québec’s CÉGEPs and universities to publicly affirm their commitment to defend their members against any measure or pressure, internal or external, that could hinder their autonomy, compromise the pursuit of their work or undermine their ability to participate in the intellectual, scientific and civic life of Québec society. This text was co-signed by more than 450 professors, researchers and lecturers from CÉGEPs and universities across Québec (Lampron et al., 2019). 29  Patrick is a Full Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Infectious diseases and Immunology at the Faculty of Medicine of Université Laval, and a Researcher at the CHU de Québec Research Center/CHUL Pavilion since 2001. He discovered, in 2002, the ribonuclease Dicer in humans. This enzyme catalyzes the formation of microRNAs (19–24 nucleotides long), now recognized as key regulators of ~60% of the genes in humans (http://www.crchudeQuébec. ulaval.ca/en/research/researchers/patrick-provost/) 28

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academic freedom and forcefully expressed his concerns about a partnership agreement between Laval University and the Port of Québec that made the headlines (e.g. Provost, 2021).30 But Patrick’s contributions extend beyond writing articles for the general media. He established a group in 2019 that brings together over 475 scientists from 17 of Québec’s universities. This grouping, called Des Universitaires (or DU), allows university researchers to mobilize their knowledge in current socio-political conversations. Since 2020, two books have been edited, which include articles published in the general media. They also include chapters on how the books can be used for pedagogical purposes.31 In June 2021, a meeting was organized by my professors’ union with members of Des Universitaires as part of a publication on academic freedom. The aim of the meeting was to discuss the knowledge sharing needs of engaged citizens with university professors. Someone noted that citizens can discuss as equals with experts as well as with politicians or public authorities regarding the management of ongoing local stories of struggle (Rivet, 202132). Among other things, the citizens present at the meeting emphasized the importance for universities to put in place markers that respect local communities and the wellbeing of environments. The university, they added, must respect the role that citizens play in the debates and consultative processes. I was impressed by what happened that day. For a rare time, a conversational space was set to listen to what citizens had to say. This meeting embodies the co-­ production of knowledge models of interactions of citizens with scientists established by Michel Callon (1999). It is characterized by two-way discursive interactions in which citizens contribute to the definition of what is problematic and a recognition of the capacity of citizens to produce legitimate interpretations. Such an encounter flies in the face of the academic system’s tendency to exclude laypeople (or heretics) whose knowledge is partial because it comes from a local experience (Fig. 3.8).

 Provost (2021) wrote: “A partnership [with a private company] agreement that requires absolute confidentiality on the part of researchers and university administrators is problematic in several ways: (i) it threatens the independence, probity, integrity, and reputation of our public institutions; (ii) it may compromise the integrity of academic freedom, freedom of expression, and collegiality among faculty and researchers; (iii) it carries the risk of undue pressure and ethical abuses, and (iv) it may undermine the confidence of the general public in the ability of universities to carry out their research and teaching mission with integrity and solidarity.” 31  The books are available here: https://desuniversitaires.org/collection-du/collection-du-tome-1/ 32  https://spul.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Bulletin_SPULienJuin2021-V3-copie-reduit.pdf 30

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Fig. 3.8  Along the Saint-Charles River in Limoilou, while playing with toads (2015). (Photos: Camille Hammond)

3.4.1 Political Love Between January 2018 and March 2019, I was preoccupied with email requests. While I usually read articles that come out in science education journals, during this time several writings escaped my attention. As a matter of fact, I did not notice Bazzul and Tolbert’s Love, politics and science education on a damaged planet (published in April 2019). The authors build on my work and the notion of political love to argue that engaging larger systemic context is necessary when educating for different futures (p. 303). I must say that I have never thought of my academic activities of research, teaching, and community service (in the words of my collective agreement) as acts of political love.33 Rather, I consider them through specific convictions such as  How does some of my academic activities constitute acts of love, one might relevantly ask? For Bazzul and Tolbert (2019), “In Chantal Pouliot’s situation, her initial act of love, as the foundation of her political engagement, was to reach out in response to Marie-Ève’s Facebook post, sending her an email to express her concern, which was connected both to Marie-Ève’s situation as well as the larger politics of corporate ownership of knowledge and sense of responsibility to engage in public debate. Finding out that Marie-Ève, an assistant professor, was unsupported by her own university in her struggle to maintain the confidentiality of her research participants, Chantal further engaged in an act of love by sharing an article published about Marie-Ève’s case with her own colleagues (who expressed support for Marie-Ève’s efforts), and by composing a letter and petition that she later distributed to major news outlets. Through acts of love, Chantal helps carry some of the weight of MarieÈve’s vulnerability, and together they continued to distribute the petition widely.” (p. 4) 33

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intellectual integrity and social relevance. My research must benefit society and allow communities (and other social actors) to act on the world in such a way as to make it less unjust, less violent and more healthier. That said, I felt moved and grateful to Jessy and Sara when I came across their article. In particular when I read this: In science education there often seems to be more fidelity to some “field” rather than social transformation and collective world-making in the name of justice. Part of the problem is that science educators have largely been unable to effectively open the restrictive boundaries of science and science education. […] So, if not the “field” of science education, what should guide our work? We propose here an ethic of political love. Love that serves as the foundation for an end to hegemony and the collective construction of new societies. What, then, becomes our primary role as academics? What might this look like? Chantal’s work can serve as an example here.

Love, politics and science education on a damaged planet allowed me to see my academic activities in a different light, to extract an element (namely love) that I had ignored up until now. It brought me to make sense of a text, written in 2017, when the controversy around metallic dust was at one of its acutest peaks.

3.4.2 The Second-Year Class Visit34 Thursday, February 3, 2017, 10:35 PM

I have spent the last two evenings at the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency’s public hearings. The Agency is evaluating the Port expansion project. I was present at the public hearing as a researcher interested in the development of the controversy surrounding metallic dust in Limoilou. For 7 h, 40 or so citizens took turns sitting at a table and speaking at the microphone. Seven hours during which the wind blew. During which a health expert revealed that we now know that air pollution causes the development of asthma. Several minutes to hear (some) people pretending that there is no more dust in the central districts of the city. Two exhausting evenings for everyone. My kids are asleep. That is fine, because I wouldn’t have the courage to give them an account of tonight’s discussions. They are interested in dust, it is part of their life. Regularly, I have to re-explain to my oldest that he can’t collect dust to put it in a jar that he would display in his bedroom.

3.5 Friday Morning I barely slept. My head has been denying itself rest. The adrenaline still present, I am on the alert. I am exhausted. A double espresso. I walk the kids to school. Parents worried about the dust in the neighborhood ask me how the two evenings of public consultation went. I stammer. I don’t know what to tell them. I come back home. 34

 Personnal archives.

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I have 15 min to prepare myself: I am invited to an elementary school in Limoilou. I’m going to meet Ms. J.’s second graders who wrote a letter to the mayor of Québec City in December 2016 (published in Le Soleil). The students want Limoilou to have compost bins: “With compost, less waste would be burned. The neighborhood would be healthier and we would breathe fresher air.” I look forward to meeting them. The intern who led the composting activity and the teacher are going to take advantage of my presence to tell them that the mayor has e-mailed them back. I enter the school. The hallway is narrow, filled with coats and boots of all colors. Drawings, cards and other schoolwork hang on the walls. The students are in a good mood. The teacher tells them that the mayor has responded. She projects the text on the interactive whiteboard. Smiles and little “ah’s” of curiosity. Who wants to read the first paragraph? Who wants to read the second paragraph? The intern asks them how they find the letter. “Interesting,” says one. “Important,” says the other. I take the floor. I ask them how they felt when they found out their text had been published in Le Soleil. “My mom believed me, but at the same time she didn’t believe me,” one student says with a laugh. I congratulate them on writing down their ideas. The teacher speaks up. She tells the children that she and C. had come to my house to submit the letter to the newspaper. I am surprised, I didn’t expect her to share this with students. I feel lucky to be here, warmly welcomed. I suggest that we applaud everyone’s efforts and obviously the kids are having a blast. A few minutes later, I encourage them to continue their interest in the environment, wish them a good day and leave. At the coffee shop, I write to my colleague in Toronto. I am washed out and vibrant. Larry knows the controversy about the dust in Limoilou. He knows how socially acute the issue is. I finish my coffee. It’s the best I’ve had in a long time. I think about the kids in Ms. J’s class. I think about the kids in other inner-city schools. I think about my two sons. I look outside, a blurry but bright outside. I see the dark grey dust on the windowsill. Tears make their way down my cheeks. I return to my house. I have to prepare for a program committee meeting. As I finish formatting this chapter, I learn that an elementary school teacher was disciplined in June 2021 for requesting that an item on the agenda for the next teachers’ meeting proposed addressing the climate crisis. She was asked to avoid irrelevant or off-topic interventions with school personnel, otherwise she will face more severe sanctions. The school administration formally forbids her to discuss her personal interests with her colleagues at the school council. In a recently published text (Morand, 2021), the teacher, writes: In the face of the Covid pandemic, as in the fight against bullying in schools, the school community has shown that it can react quickly and extremely effectively to meet overwhelming challenges when the issues are taken seriously, and the political will is there. In the current critical context, it is unacceptable that the Québec government still refuses to adopt a real education strategy on the environment and climate change. Solutions exist. Isolated initiatives are emerging in schools to get young people to become agents of change.

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We know the best practices. But school teams are still too often deprived of the pedagogical resources and training necessary to go beyond the search for cognitive performance in their students and turn resolutely towards concrete actions in their environment for the protection of the land and life.

The situation in which Mrs. Morand found herself first illustrates difficulty that teachers can face in putting forward educational initiatives that focus on the protection of environments and on the health of populations. But once seen as an act of political love, the opinion piece she courageously wrote also shows that there are educators, beyond the co-authors of this book, who disrupt the (science) education status quo to prepare students for lives of resilience, resistance, knowledge production and mobilisation. *** There is no such thing as naive and pure observation, decontextualized and disincarnated. Every research object (or programme) is embedded in prior questions, in a movement of intellectual curiosity rooted in a field of research, in social and/or environmental and/or political and/or economic contexts. My research work is no exception. It is the result of personal decisions: there are many socially active issues from which to choose. I decided to analyze the development of local and current controversies. The object of my reflections has shifted with time. It has expanded towards academic freedom with the tribulations and the emergence of stories of struggle. In writing this chapter, I have struggled with the idea of not exposing, either in tone or content, the sensitivity inherent in analyzing informed citizens’ capacities in the context of developing environmental and health controversies. As we know, the dominant paradigm (although it is losing momentum) imposes a projected image of objectivity (understood as the absence of subjectivity), neutrality and distance from the actors involved (citizens, elected officials, members of the academic community, etc.). Such a posture would require documenting the ways in which people organize themselves to end toxic exposures while being impervious to social inequities. In particular, I hesitated to insert the text on the second-year class visit. I have attended court hearings related to various socially acute environmental questions (e.g. Maillé’s case and the smoke and dust cases) and I know that people can make short work, to say it in a fancy way, of scientific humility. In spite of what people attached to a positivist conception of the world and of research might think of this chapter, I thought it wise to show that research on difficult knowledge carries an emotional charge that can surface from time to time (Gordon et al., 2019). In this chapter, I have therefore chosen to free the word, to put forward a posture of epistemological modesty. In the end, I am satisfied with this decision as it fits the spirit of this book and, more broadly, the fundamental goals of education.

Chapter 4

Science Education and Possible Futures

4.1 As a Way of Introduction From an objective and synthetic perspective, this chapter presents my personal views on challenges faced by science educators, which are grounded on nearly 40 years professional experience with theoretical and empirical investigations in the field of Science Education. Broadly speaking, theoretical analyses have explored ways through which aspects of globalization and neoliberalism in contemporary scenarios have shaped views of citizenship and justice as goals of science education. On the other hand, empirical studies have analysed collaborative educational experiences that carry marks of resistance, insubordination and creativity so as to counteract feelings of immobility, impotence and inexorability experienced by educational agents in scenarios that control subjectivity and constrain the agency of both educators and students. Inevitably these analyses both reflect and refract aspects of my positionings and experiences as a white Brazilian university educated cisgender woman, brought up in a Catholic middle-class family. Personal and professional experiences have always been intertwined in my life and constitute the researcher I became. A researcher who is capable of benefiting from and creating opportunities to interact with colleagues, who likes to like people she works with, who enjoys challenges, who believes in collaboration, who faces dilemmas regarding epistemic and contextual values in science (education), who values and respects culture and difference but who finds it hard to give up on the idea of some universal values. Such identitary features will reveal themselves, especially in the context of debates involving the main focus of this chapter, namely the relationships between (science) education, citizenship and social justice and how they constitute challenges for science educators.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_4

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For this reason, perhaps a better way to present this chapter would be to describe it as a sensitive experience, organized by writing. Looking back at this process, I feel that the Bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and exotopy are perhaps the most apt resources to explain the singular nature of this report and the extent to which my text is constituted by my co-authors’ discourses. The reason for that is twofold. Firstly because my voice necessarily embodies and articulates a diversity of social horizons, of historical, ideological, social and linguistic elements, instantiating the inherent responsive character of discourse, whereby previous things are actualized and new ones are generated. Secondly, because their surplus of vision has provided me with the opportunity of seeing things I would not see otherwise and enriched my possibilities to reflect upon my efforts to transform educational realities through research. My account has also benefited from intense dialogue with cognate projects developed by co-authors of this book. Throughout the years we have met regularly, face to face and at a distance, to discuss the ways we experience changes in the world and the impact they might have in science education. We shared hopes and concerns, conference floors and café tables, theoretical references and activism practices. Although a great deal of my professional experience has happened in the context of Anglophonic research environments, I have a clear identity with issues and practices which are typical of Southern Latin American Brazilian research traditions. Also, my experience with colonialism and imperialism was constructed from, so-to-speak, the other side of the counter where my English, French and “Estadunidense1” colleagues stood. Even the Canadian and the Australian colonial experiences were not quite comparable with the Brazilian. This means that, despite sharing both cultural experiences and conceptual repertoires with my colleagues, my perspectives are strongly influenced by a sociocultural-political background and a colonial history that shaped current geopolitics and helped establish epistemological hegemonies. This recognition was not, however, construed as a hindrance or as an obstacle. On the contrary, it was source of “estranhamento”, understood here, in its philosophical sense, as a mixture of admiration and discomfort, as a feeling that provokes a rupture with orderly habitual ways of thinking and of knowing, as an invitation to problematise and to ask questions, as a displacement from a comfort zone. I have a sense that this feeling was, to a greater or a lesser extent, reciprocal, that is, my colleagues were also “displaced” from their comfort zones by exotopic outlooks. The surplus of vision that we were able to offer one another yielded to the need for explaining the obvious, for denaturalizing the habitual, to aim at new formulations and possibilities of thinking and acting. Thus, what follows is a set of utterances, full of responsiveness, counter-words, links in a chain of communication which, I hope, will last for many more years to come.

 I prefer using this demonym because the word American does not fully recognize or distinguish the spectrum of citizens of all different countries localized in the American continent. 1

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4.2 The Beginning: A Very Good Place to Start Back in September 1987, the year I started my PhD, a Caesium 137 source, formerly used for radiotherapy, was taken from an abandoned hospital in the city of Goiânia, Brazil, and sold as scrap iron to a junkyard dealer. At the junkyard, the lead shield was violated and 28 g of a beautiful shiny blue powder were distributed to families and friends in the vicinity. It did not take too long for people who had contact with the source or its fragments to start showing the first symptoms of radioactive contamination. Within a few weeks the incident, as well as its unfoldings, featured in both national and international media. There was a great deal of discussion about the role of science education in preventing unfortunate events such as that one involving the Caesium 137 radioactive source. However, I kept asking myself if a higher degree of scientific literacy would be sufficient to avoid the radiological accident of Goiânia for I could not see how it would have prevented the hospital from returning the teletherapy device to the manufacturer, or stopped a person from trespassing and taking private property, or impeding someone else from buying it without asking for its provenance. Issues such as unemployment, oversight of controls, unaccountability seemed also to play a large part in explaining the incident. In other words, the limits to Enlightenment perspectives to science teaching – akin to those later labelled by Roberts (2007) as Vision I scientific literacy-, as a basis for informed decision making were evident. Over the years, I have asked myself similar questions. Most recently, I witnessed that even sound recommendations by the most committed and competent scientists were not sufficient to promote adherence to lockdown and vaccination policies or prevented erratic management of vaccine distribution during Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. The understanding of inter-­relationships between science and other relevant factors that play a part in informing our decisions concerning science related matters has been a concern that accompanied me throughout my professional life. I was then very glad to learn that they resonated with Chantal Pouliot’s own reflections about about the need for rethinking an agenda for the field of Public Understanding of Science so as to encompass citizens agency in the debate about scientific matters with public concern. We shared concerns about the role of both scientists and science educators in society and I was able to learn a lot from her experience (Pouliot, this volume). Since the Goiânia accident, relationships between science technology and society (STS) approaches have expanded so as to give more prominence to environmental matters (STSE), to consider the role of both ethical and moral issues in dealing with socioscientific issues (SSI), to conceptualize the interdisciplinary nature of socially acute questions (SAQ), to recuperate values such as altruism and well being as utmost goals for science and technology education (STEPWISE) (Levinson, 2017). Thus, Science Education has been increasingly thought of as instrumental in educating for citizenship and achieving social justice. In other words, there has been a growing concern about the importance of contextual values in addition to epistemic values in Science Education.

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However, in as much as I agree and align myself with researchers who have stressed the importance of connecting citizenship, social justice and science education, it seems to me that there is a blind spot with respect to the assumptions and presuppositions that support this connection. It can be summarized as a coupled reductionism, namely, one which overrates the effect of knowledge on the possibilities to exercise citizenship and another which equates citizenship with decision making. Citizenship is a very complex concept which, throughout history, has been signified in different ways. Besides being related to issues such as rights to education, access to and freedom for knowledge circulation in society, the exercise of citizenship involves considerations about political life, that is, relationships between people and between people and institutions, as well as about forms of government and political regimes. Therefore, citizenship is related to but cannot be reduced to decision making. On the other hand, albeit important, scientific knowledge is not the only – or perhaps even the most important – factor to play a role in decision making in contexts involving science matter with public concern. If not, how can we explain that the number of obese and malnourished people  – including children -, has skyrocket despite the fact that we have never had so much information about healthy eating? Likewise, why is it that teenage pregnancy is still an issue even though contemporary curricula include topics such as sex education and reproductive health? I wonder whether we are asking the right questions and what the consequences of reframing our inquiry so as to consider wider perspectives on decision making would be. For instance, how do nutritional information weigh against cultural habits, access to and cost of wholesome food in deciding how to feed one’s family? Are there societies where becoming a mother is considered to be a prerequisite to adulthood and emancipation? These questions could be rephrased as: Is health a right or a commodity? What has been “globalised” due to globalisation? How many feminisms are there? Which universal values are we prepared to waive? Not only does such problematisation suggests there is more than scientific knowledge involved in decision making but it also warns us that the role played by cultural, affective, economical and socio-political aspects in deciding about matters involving science and technology in society may be underestimated. As I found limitations in framing Science Education solely in terms of teaching and conceptual learning, I directed my efforts to developing an agenda of research and practice which foregrounded social dimensions of science, technology, health and environmental issues. This is not to dismiss the importance of conceptual knowledge but, instead, to acknowledge the fact that it needs to be placed in a wider context that accounts for its historical character, its sociocultural dimensions and its political implications. Such enhanced conceptualization is needed if we are to address social justice and education for citizenship as main goals for Science Education. This formulation is ubiquitous in curriculum policy documents all over the world but more than often it is referred to in an unproblematic way that does not account for its polysemy. In the sections to follow I will argue, by means of references to research I have conducted, that discursive constructions of citizenship and of social

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justice in Science Education must be problematised. I claim that there is a danger of incorporating such expressions in educational discourse as slogans and, in this way, to facilitate their co-optation by neoconservative neoliberal agendas. The consequences of such framing for science education is, of course, political, but also epistemological and pedagogical. It helps challenge a somehow anachronistic arrogant Enlightenment ideal of knowledge superiority by expanding the boundaries of established fields of knowledge beyond well demarcated ontological and epistemological foundations towards multi and interdisciplinary approaches for problems that cannot be reduced to one dimension. This has obvious consequences for teacher education, curriculum planning and pedagogical practices that happen in a school system that tend to reproduce the internal logic of scientific disciplines.

4.3 Back to the Present: Challenges for Science Education in Contemporaneity In order to start discussing contemporary challenges faced by science educators, it is necessary to clarify, even if tentatively, the concept of contemporaneity itself, a demand which was rightly posed to me by Larry Bencze. Since the last two decades of the twentieth century, different labels have been used to refer to the complex characteristics of the times we have been living in. The complexity is enormous and derives from socio-political transformations that involve challenges to well-­ established notions such as identity and objectivity, the end of metanarratives, the culture of hyper consumerism, the onset of flexible capitalism, and the digital revolution, amongst others. Different authors have theorised about the nature of these transformations and given them different label, while foregrounded different aspects of contemporary life, namely, culture, economics, communication etc., in their accounts. Despite calling it late modernity, high modernity, post-modernity, it is fair to say that society has been irreversibly impacted by these transformations. Contemporaneity is, therefore, not easily defined as it refers to a set intrinsically complex and changeable sets of power relations and power struggles, which have expressions in different realms of social life, such as the economic, the political and the social. Another difficulty for defining it is the fact that it is impossible to adopt an external stance or view point over contemporaneity, as we are totally immersed and involved in the production, distribution and consumption processes of contemporary discourses (Henningen, 2007). Quoting Maria Lucia Wortman and Antonio Veiga-Neto (2001), Inês Henningen (2007) considers that the very attempt to define contemporaneity can be a mistake and that it would be “more pertinent to describe it as a set of conditions that produce and are produced by a wide range of processes – social, cultural, economic, technological etc.”. The author also draws attention to the fact that, for Veiga-Neto, scenario and plot are confused in the contemporaneity, that is, “there is no external (causal) condition prior to the production of events the conditions contemporary social, political, economic and

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cultural engender” (Veiga-Neto, 1999; Henningen, 2007). This vision has important consequences in accounting for reflexive processes in scenarios where science educators are implicated in such as teaching, research and policy. Such recognition carry important epistemological bearings and consequences. It challenges notions of objectivity and displaces us to rather uncomfortable and somehow incompatible stance with respect to knowledge, especially science knowledge and its modern legacy. It would be out of the scope of this chapter to try and resolve this. Thus, instead of providing a precise definition, we will settle for discussing some of the features of contemporaneity in connection to globalisation, neoliberal reforms, social inequality. This will be illustrated by references to some of the challenges that are posed to science educators who, in contexts of environmental crises, structural racism and threats to democracy, seek to establish a driving agenda for science education that is committed to citizenship and social justice.

4.4 A (Brief) History of the Present (as Seen from Brazil) 4.4.1 Globalisation As a major driving force of contemporary social life, globalisation presents itself and is experienced in many different ways throughout the globe. Broadly speaking globalisation is associated with the shortening of distances permitted by (digital) technology and the conditions for breaking territorial and cultural boundaries. Social and spatio-temporal desimbedding, that is, “the ‘lifting out of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (Giddens, 1990, p.  21) has been made concrete by emblematic examples, like the outsourcing of call-centres, which make services impersonal to consumers but cheaper to the organisation. Knowledge and information also became detached from spatial territories allowing for new forms of interaction and identification with and between different subcultures, as in the case of the influence of k-pop subculture beyond Asia. Another example of these transformations concerns challenges to essentialist views of identity (Hall, 2015). The idea of fixed stable identities was surpassed by the recognition of cultural identities as historical constructions which are traversed by a multiplicity of intersecting discourses and positionings. Such transformations, and their corresponding theorisations, are themselves intrinsically dynamic. For instance, the debate on identity has been further elaborated by feminist discourses, which paid attention to the different contours that ethnicity and social class give to an issue initially conceived mostly in terms of gender. Such recognition accounts for different meanings of the label “independent working woman” when ascribed to a White liberal professional single mother and to her Black uneducated domestic employee single mother, an unfortunately common scenario in some Brazilian households.

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The very concept of globalisation has been itself an object of investigation, which led to fruitful problematisations and reconfigurations. According to the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos (2017), globalization can be understood either as a “fable” or “perversity”. In an earlier chapter with my fellow co-authors (Bencze et al., 2019a, b, c), I wrote The view of globalization as fable corresponds to hopes that technology would allow for more increased awareness, horizontal participation and fairer distribution of goods in society. Such a view is grounded on features like the contraction of time and space, the global village, and the homogenization of the world, which Santos refers to as myths. Optimism around opportunities brought about by globalization is confronted with the reality that distances have been shortened for a minority and that dreams of truly universal citizenship have gradually been replaced by ideals of consumerism, while local differences were exacerbated. Together with phenomena like homelessness, unemployment, starvation, and lack of access to clean drinking water, migration and refugee crises, among others, they constitute the face of globalization as perversity. (p. 396)

Optimistic, though not at all naive, Santos (2017) also suggests that globalization can present itself also as possibility. He argues that the combination of competition ideology with manipulation of information by the media create conditions for global capitalism to prosper more and more. However, digital technologies and social media could also help facilitate non hegemonic actors to share contexts, to present interests which are not subordinate to hegemonic ones and to create new meanings. Mixtures of peoples offer potential for mixtures of rationalities, that is, encounters between dominant hegemonic rationalities  – often associated with science and technology – with counter-rationalities – that are typical of socially disadvantaged social groups – would become possible. We shall come back to that later in the text.

4.4.2 Neoliberalism Globalisation, as we experience nowadays, is inextricably linked to the hegemonisation of neoliberal ideas and policies throughout the world. Urbanisation, industrialisation, growth and interdependency of markets are amongst the features of the expansion of capitalism. For Octavio Ianni (1997) “Since capitalism developed in Europe, it has always had international, multinational, transnational and global connotations, developed within the original accumulation of mercantilism, colonialism, imperialism, dependence and interdependence.2” (p. 14). Ianni analyses metaphors and expressions, such as the “global village” or “global capitalism”, to uncover features of societal movements which defy ourselves to reflect more deeply about how they shape our ways of being in the world. One of the consequences is the reorganization of relationships between state, market and society so as to provide the bases of political-economic models (Harvey, 2014).

 Translation by the author.

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Relationships between global capitalism and neoliberalism – and their implications for (science) education -, have been extensively discussed by Lyn Carter (2014, this volume). Her account helps understand how neoliberal reforms have been implemented all over the world. In Brazil this has happened for at least the three past decades. Sometimes this process was subtle and negotiated, sometimes it was abrupt and autocratic. In education, we have witnessed discursive changes that accompanied and materialised social changes. The language of performativity and management became ubiquitous in educational discourse, values such as meritocracy and competitiveness were celebrated, and words like autonomy and agency were re-signified. Not only were such changes present in public policy discourse but also in their enactment in different institutional contexts. More recently, the New Secondary Education Bill (Brasil, 2017) established explicit links between general education and the market demands. Despite the rhetoric that students will be able to choose subjects they like best or that they consider to be more useful in their lives, in practice, there is a risk that actual curriculum organisation is limited to offering educational opportunities that are closely linked to demands posed by regional job markets. Another nefarious side effect of such myopically pragmatic stance is that it does not tackle problems like the chronic shortage of qualified teachers in some disciplinary areas, whose training should actually be encouraged if access to different areas of knowledge is to be widened. The reform is also designed to prepare students for becoming entrepreneurs, which fits in a scenario where labour reforms have suppressed workers’ rights and encouraged self-employment. Its enactment in contexts like large scale testing and certifying examinations is another cob in the intricate mechanisms characterised by Stephen Ball as cycles of policy and networks of influence (Ball et al., 2012). The potential of this educational bill for deepening social inequality in Brazil is enormous as it makes it acceptable that some students are alienated from scientific knowledge whereas others will continue to have access to knowledge that enjoy prestige and social legitimacy, and that is instrumental for decision making. In doing so, it endangers possibilities of social participation and emancipation of a number of students. Fortunately, for the last months, in the context of recent government changes, there has been a mobilization for the repeal of this law. Another feature of neoliberalism is the co-optation of social movements in a way that transforms their agenda of struggle into material targets for achievement. For instance, social inclusion is mistakenly identified with the access to consumable goods. In other words, the right to health is associated with being able to pay for private insurance, efficient transportation is only possible by owning a car. In some cases, wider social issues are misrepresented as when identitarism becomes synonym to cult of identity and loses connection with the need for defending minorities or populations that have been historically deemed as subaltern (Hardt & Negri, 2009). Therefore, it is important to be aware of the limits of isolated steps in overcoming a complex structure of oppression. For example, necessary though it is for increasing representativity in Science Education, the inclusion of images of Black female students in textbooks has to be accompanied of critical reading activities. If not, there may be a risk of bureaucratising the issue. Although certain

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social groups  – like Black girls, − have been traditionally absent in science textbooks, the mere inclusion of the occasional image or reference may not be sufficient to problematise the history and consequences of such absence for the constitution of their identities and of a wider social imaginary about science. The increase in representativity is necessary though not sufficient. It must be accompanied of anti-racist curriculum practices in schools and in teacher education (Pinheiro, 2023). Although some of globalisation’s and neoliberalism’s general features lead to similar scenarios, there are specificities in the ways they constitute mentalities and experiences in different countries. In countries like Brazil, marked by profound inequality and social injustice, appeals to growth, developmentalism and competitiveness in global markets play a strong part in shaping and reinforcing the ways through which neoliberal discourses are assimilated. Take the political choice to structure the economy around commodity exports. It can be partially explained in the context of the history of land occupation and exploitation in Brazil, which favoured monocultures for exports in latifúndios.3 The choice for this agrarian model coupled with the lack of consistent policies for family agriculture plays a part in the explanation for contradictions like the co-cuurence of records in agricultural exports while famine and food insecurity grows in Brazil.4 Within this perspective, food education is an example of domain where such contradictions become more than relevant to explain why a multifactorial approach is necessary if we are to understand food beyond nutrition, that is, as a complex web of inter-relationships between biology, history, culture, geography, geopolitics, economy. In Brazil, as well as elsewhere, debates about globalisation, neoliberalism and other features, like the technologisation of social life, have proved relevant to frame contemporary challenges to educational goals (Villanova et al., 2021). Within this

 A latifúndio is a large estate, usually owned by one person or one family, used for agricultural exploitation. Its origins date back to a model of land distribution, which involved the division of the Brazilian territory in 15 large stretches of land and their subsequent donation by the Portuguese Crown to beneficiaries, usually member of the Portuguese nobility. This system, called Hereditary Captaincies, started in 1530 and was later substituted when first beneficiaries made further land donations, which were called sesmarias. Land concentration, monocultures and slave labour characterised the Brazilian agricultural model throughout the subsequent 350 years. Latifúndios were legalised at the end of the nineteenth century by a bill which established that land possession could only be achieved through purchase or donation. As a consequence, land remained concentrated in the hands of few and it was impossible for enslaved workers and peasants to claim rights over the land they had worked on for all their lives. Although there have been attempts to address the issue of a fairer distribution of land, to this date there are still many conflicts over land possession and property in Brazil, which happen between, land owners, and landless workers and indigenous populations, despite constitutional determination for the disappropriation of improductive land and guarantees of labour rights. 4  Sadly, Brazil returned to the United Nations World Hunger Map in 2021. Please see FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. 2021. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021. Transforming food systems for food security, improved nutrition and affordable healthy diets for all. Rome, FAO. https://doi.org/10.4060/cb4474en, available at https://www.fao.org/3/cb4474en/ cb4474en.pdf 3

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perspective, the issue of social and ecological justice has been an increasing object of research and developments in Science Education. For Cristiano Moura (2019), such effort involves establishing relationships between Science Education and contemporary political issues as well collaborations between science teacher and science education researchers to the construction of a fairer and less unequal world. Social justice has been discussed in connection with topic themes such as Scientific Literacy (Valladares, 2021), Nature of Science (Yacoubian & Hansson, 2020), Cultural Studies (Tippings et  al., 2010), and Youth Activism (Bencze & Alsop, 2014), amongst others. Many of these accounts frame, in one way or another, these connections in terms of relationships between social justice, citizenship and decision making about socioscientific issues that traverse people’s lives. Although, in many cases, they may be treated as if they were automatic, these connections are far from unproblematic as they deal with fundamental issues concerning concepts such as freedom, equity and democracy connection is far from simple. Am I free to decide about not vaccinating my child? Should I buy an electric car? Can I ensure a balanced pesticide-free diet? Do I cling on to mobile phone, even knowing that raw materials used in their production come from child labour? I have found some help in Political Philosophy (Kymlicka, 2002; Sandel, 2009) to understand what is at stake when we are trying to understand the nature, the motivation, possibilities and obstacles to informed decision making regarding such matters of individual and public concern, such as those we encounter in many instances of social life.

4.4.3 Democracy, Social Justice and Inequality Debates between freedom and equity, normative theories of ethics, issues of fairness and distributive justice are at issue when we are talking about decisions which main effect change in individuals and in society though education. Together with Francine Pinhão (Pinhão & Martins, 2016), I explored the extent to which recommendations regarding decision making which would be compatible with different models of democracy. Our analyses focussed on core features of Classic Liberal Models, Republican Models, Procedimentalism, Liberal Multiculturalism and Participative models and discussed possible pitfalls and consequent risks of a-critically adopting them in Science education. Classic liberal models argue for universal rights, such as right to life, right to freedom, right to organise oneself in groups as well as social rights such as the right to education and to health. The enforcement of such universal rights would guarantee equality. However, in liberal societies, equality can be restricted to legal or trade systems and, as such, depend on political and economical regimes (Buffa et al., 2010). Moreover, the right to private property and to unrestricted accumulation of capital produces inequality. Therefore, the assumption of universal rights does not stand when challenged by social inequality and asymmetries of power in

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society. Consider the insistent advice for washing hands and vegetables for people who do not have running water at home. We can see very quickly how disregarding objective material conditions in people’s lives could make some recommendations in health education manuals empty, if not offensive. Science education cannot therefore fall into the trap of working with a fictional notion of equality that would lead decision making to be conceived from a perspective of neutrality. The political character of rights (Habermas, 1995) is foregrounded in republican models. They rest upon the premise that participation in political processes determines the belonging of individuals to a community. Such processes involve socialisation, self-determination and a reciprocal dependency relationship between individuals. In other words, besides judiciary guarantees that are provided by the state, they demand ethical commitment and solidarity. However, there remains a challenge of effecting good-fellowship and sociability in a world that is tainted by social injustice. There seems to be a hidden assumption that ethics precedes social organisation, which would lead to an idealised relationship between ethics and citizenship. What if my income does not stretch far enough to buy fair trade coffee or chocolate? What if I decide that my family should eat organic food but I cannot afford it? To what extent is this debate situated in concrete socio-political contexts? The role of the economical system has to be brought to bear a problematisation of particular forms of relationship between individual(s) and society. Otherwise, the risk for Science Education may be the unwitting adherence to naive or reproductive pedagogical discourses. The consideration of (individual) rights, on the one hand, and of specific cultural or socio-political contexts, on the other hand, are considered in procedimentalist models (Habermas, 1995). From this perspective, individual rights are not thought of as separate from an individual’s position in the broader social community. Certain assumptions and procedures are to be valued and shared in contexts of decision making, which should not favour a privileged standpoint. In matters concerning science and technology, for instance, decision making in the public sphere would not rest upon the superiority of science and technology alone, but depend on communicative acts  – oriented by universal procedures  – that lead to consensual views. There would be, in Jurgen Habermas’ terms, a discursive rationalisation of decisions made by governments and by citizens themselves. But how would this set of relationships, these forms of producing consensus work in different democracies? Think about the different histories through which democracy was achieved and sustained in different countries and in their impact on what is understood by citizenship in each one of them. What are the risks involved in countries with a recent democratic history or with a fragile democracy? To what extent is it possible to educate citizens based upon abstract decision-making models that do not bear concrete grounds with political practices? Covid-19 has taught us a lot about subtleties in the ways through which consensual views can be achieved. In my country we have observed clear disagreement and opposition between recommendations given by scientists and multilateral organisations, like WHO, health authorities, and some politicians’ approach to the (mis)management of the pandemic. Lack of dialogue, erratic policies, questionable decisions did not lead to

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the construction of consensus regarding public health policies, and that happened at the expense of thousand lives. Critics to procedimentalist models say that they merely displace universality, be it of knowledge or rights, to the communicative act. Liberal multicultural models give up the goal of achieving universality by arguing that rights of social groups that share cultural backgrounds can be regulated in a way that inclusion can be reached. The recognition of difference would make society more egalitarian. The model is labelled liberal because it foregrounds relationships between cultural identity and citizenship in terms of individualism, autonomy, and freedom of choice. In other words, such view would favour principles, practices and ethical options that are still normative, generalising and very often associated to dominant male white European values. Will Kymlicka and other liberal multiculturalists are also often reminded that decisions about ways of living are not made as if there were several available choices. Critics, like Forst (1997), stress that as culture is not a “context of choice”, but rather a “context of identity”. Such reflections are particularly important in the context of the debate about multiculturalism and universalism in Science Education (Cobern & Loving, 2001). Rita Vilanova et al. (2011) have asked whether young girls from an indigenous people in Brazil, who are prohibited to attend school, would be having their individual rights threatened even if that particular group is not organized in terms of liberal values. This is just an example of how individual and community rights must be negotiated and conflict must be managed. It poses enormous challenges for educational projects that seek to construct consensus in contexts where tensions and conflicts are present. More contemporaneous models of citizenship like the one proposed by Boaventura Sousa Santos (2007) argue for a novel conception of democracy, which is based upon a critique of reductionist views of representative democracy together with an appreciation participatory democracy. He criticizes both liberal and Marxist views on citizenship, saying that in both scenarios there is a great number of people at the outside margins of what is understood by citizenship. For him, the production of non-citizens and the abyssal character of thinking are products of modernity. Epistemological diversity and radical co-presence are essential pre-requisites to construct a new social order which would not be characterised by lines of demarcation between knowledge systems and by the subalternisation and marginalisation of certain social groups. Nevertheless, his model of an “ecology of knowledges” demands radical ruptures with (Western modern) science and its forms of organising knowledge and social life. Environmental issues are a good example of the complexity of the relationships involved in effecting decision making, both at individual and collective levels, in a context where many interests are at stake and science is one of many variables in the equation, and bring important consequences for social organisation, governance, conflict management, institutional science. Likewise, current alternatives to structure new forms of political action, for instance, the Fridays4future, are still incipient.

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These brief considerations show how challenging it is to consider the issue of decision making in contexts of social (in)justice in face of its intricate dependency on broader societal issues, which include complex models of democracy, cultural issues and economic-political relationships.

4.4.4 Education for Citizenship If we are to talk about (science) education for citizenship or for the promotion of social justice in connection with decision making it is necessary to generate situated accounts of the goals of education in the context of different social projects and their impact on socio-political relationships between individuals and between individuals and institutions. Before we do that, let us consider the polysemy around the term citizenship. This involves discussions about individual and collective rights as well as about possibilities and practices of decision making in society. Because it involves relationships between people and institutions, the concept of citizenship has a strong relational character. In other words, in different attempts to explain it, historical and contextual aspects have been considered. Paulo Freire, a worldwide known Brazilian educator, in one of his last books, wrote: Às vezes penso que se fala em cidadania como se fosse um conceito, muito abstrato, com certa força mágica, como se, quando a palavra cidadania fosse pronunciada, automaticamente, todos a ganhassem. Como se fosse um presente que políticos e educadores dessem ao povo. Não é isso. É preciso deixar claro que a cidadania é uma produção, uma criação política5 (Freire, 2004).

Freire calls our attention to the fact that citizenship is not an abstraction. On the contrary, it is concrete, and it is possible to relate it to particular objects and events. For him, citizenship is not “natural”. Instead, it has got to be cultivated, produced, in a process that attends to specificities and contingencies in time and space. In the fields of Political Philosophy and of Sociology, we find different models of citizenship. One of the earlier and most well-known of these models was proposed by British sociologist Thomas Marshall in 1949 (Bottomore & Marshall, 1997). The author presents an evolutionary model that describes aspects of how, in post-Second World War Great Britain, the attainment of social rights, such as the right to education, housing and health, was the consequence of a succession of historical

 “Sometimes I think that we talk about citizenship if it were a concept, a very abstract concept, with some sort of magical power, as if when the word citizenship were pronounced, everybody would get it automatically. As if it were a gift that politicians and educators gave to people. It is not that. It is necessary to make it clear that citizenship is a production, a political creation.” (author’s free translation) 5

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events that began with the achievement of political rights, such as voting and organization in political parties, and went on to obtain civil rights, such as the right to property and to expression. Social rights represent the culmination of this process. This model describes and explains the course of the evolution of citizenship in England in the first half of the twentieth century, and is firmly contextualized in terms of events that characterized the history of this country, including the suffragette movements, the Second World War and the implementation of what became known as welfare state policies. However, such a model is not universal and does not fully explain the “development”, or “evolution” of citizenship, for example, in Brazil. Brazilian historian José Murilo de Carvalho (2012) points out that, unlike what happened in Great Britain, in Brazil social rights did not follow political and civic rights. During the “Era Vargas”, Brazil was under centralised authoritarian rule. During this period, between 1940 and 1945, local elections were suppressed, and political parties were declared illegal. Nevertheless, it was during this period that occurred the creation of the minimum wage, the regulation of a daily work journey of 8 h, the prohibition of child labour, the implementation of social security and the creation of pension schemata. Similarly, it was during the Military Dictatorship, between 1964 and 1980, a period during which the National Congress was closed for three times and a number of people were politically persecuted, tortured, exiled and killed, that additional social rights were granted: social security and pension rights were extended to different groups of workers and housing policies were created. The fact that dictatorial governments have granted social rights motivates Santos’ term “regulated citizenship”, mentioned by Carvalho (2012, p. 115), to explain elements of citizenship in Brazil. Of course, between dictatorships, there were democratic periods where civil and political rights were restored, but we see that the idea of an evolutionary model does not apply here. The construction of a democratic society in Brazil had both advances and setbacks that impact on the ways we, Brazilians, understand citizenship. More contemporary classifications of the concept of citizenship also incorporate contextual elements in explaining forms of relationship between people, institutions and the state. In his characterisation of three ideal types of citizenship, Bryan Turner emphasises the way it is traversed by social, economic and political aspects (Turner, 2017, pp. 10–11). The first, which he calls national citizenship, is related to forms of ethno-nationalism and to various nation-building projects. The second is called social citizenship and is related to forms of citizenship associated with rights guaranteed by social welfare policies established in post-war democratic societies. The third type is associated with demands for self-sufficiency that compensate for the lack of provision of rights such as social security and health in liberal economies. According to the author, these three types of citizenship coexist and, as a result of minimal state policies, they merged into a fourth type of passive citizenship in which consumers, apolitical and isolated, start to interact through electronic media, characterizing a new form of individualism. Tom Bottomore’s and Bryan Turner’s accounts are instrumental in advancing our understanding of crucial features of contemporary citizenship. Nonetheless, and in line with Carvalho’s warning, we think they may not be sufficient to describe

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meanings of citizenship that apply to Brazilian society, given its heterogeneity. A more contemporary analysis of citizenship in Brazil, made by Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza (2012), questions views of citizenship that are based on a supposed linearity between legal and political citizenship and ideals of social equality. In his view, the historical unequal distribution of privileges, rights and duties is a consequence of the 350  years of institutionalised enslavement practices. The absence of integration policies after the abolition of slavery provided conditions for the establishment of social inequalities that persist to this day and that explain the existence of second and third category citizens. Souza (2012) considers structural racism (Almeida, 2019) and the naturalization of inequalities as key factors in understanding the complexity and diversity of perspectives in an attempt to define a concept of citizenship in Brazil. From this point of view, the consequences of neoliberal reforms in Brazil cannot be seen in the same way as in the so-called developed countries. Even the suggestion that, nowadays, citizenship has been modeled in terms of relations in the corporate environment must be relativized in view of the historical processes that explain “... the existence of invisible and objective networks that disqualify individuals and social groups [who live precarious forms of life] as sub-producers and sub-citizens” (Souza, 2012, p.  177) in peripheral societies are distinct from those that occur in central countries. It is possible to say that the association between citizenship and science education is constitutive of the history of the field itself. Such association demonstrates the centrality of education in the construction of a project of society. It involves the goals of educating students in science, in terms of both personal growth – in the sense of bildung -, and of the expectations about their present and future roles in social life. In the specific case of Brazil, Myriam Krasilchick (2000) discusses the way through which political, economic and social factors impacted educational policies between the 1950s and 2000s, with special reference to the preparation of future citizens. She draws attention to the different conceptions of citizenship that permeated these policies and their relations with macro-social conjunctures. She establishes relationships between motivations for investment in scientific-­ technological research and development projects in different contexts of dispute for political hegemony. In her analyses, Krasilchick (idem) suggests that the different curricular reform projects, conceived in the context of the Federal Bills that establish guidelines and legal bases for Brazilian Education, promulgated in 1961, 1972 and 1996, were consistent with the circumstances of the Cold War, of the Technological War and Globalization, respectively. As a result, they have different emphases in terms of projects of education for citizenship. They expressed different emphases, from the formation of an elite of critical citizens capable of making decisions on a scientific basis, through the formation of a “working citizen,” capable of contributing to the country’s development, to the formation of a “citizen-worker-student” who would learn, throughout his life, developing ethics, intellectual autonomy and an understanding of the scientific-technological foundations of productive processes in the exercise of social life and work (Krasilchick, 2000, p. 87). Analyses of further changes towards centralised curricula in Brazil (Brasil, 2002, 2018) shows that the emphasis on contextualisation and interdisciplinary is assimilated in order to justify

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an orientation to functional – as opposed to transformative – education goals, which establish the job market as a priority. Likewise, ideas and concepts which have been studied by educators, in general, and by science education researchers, in particular, such as social emancipation and scientific literacy, are appropriated so as to create the necessary level of identification with a hybrid text that can be read in different ways. The most recent reforms, however, are less subtle with respect to the kind of citizenship to pursue. In preliminary versions of the National Curriculum Guidelines (Brasil, 2017, 2018), there was a substantial reduction in the number of hours of disciplines such as History and Sociology in Secondary Education. In the revised version of the same document, expressions such as “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” have been eliminated. Such choices are in line with orientations proposed by neoconservative movements, which seek to eliminate aspects of political education by deeming them ideological and favouring binary models to address sexuality. This represents a huge setback in a country where LGBTQIAP+ awareness is not just related to recognizing and celebrating diversity but to fighting prejudice and violence towards these groups in society. The challenge of education for citizenship is yet more complex if we consider claims from the field of eco justice. We have witnessed novel meanings for citizenship to arise from the consideration of non-human entities, such as rivers or mountains, as subjects of rights, in countries such as Equador and New Zealand (Branquinho Barboza Tozzi, 2019). Moreover, hegemonic views on human nature relationships start to be challenged by ancestral knowledges of first-nation peoples (Martins et al., 2023) as limits and consequences of views associated to Modernity – which led to ideals of control and predatory exploitation of nature-, are challenged, for example, by the recognition of the ways through which traditional sustainable practices of forest peoples have helped preserve both Rain and Tropical Forests. In Brazil This is why, views of the relationships between science education and citizenship need to be expanded and updated in order to acknowledge important conjunctural changes both at national and international levels.

4.5 Past, Present and Future Challenges for Science Education With that in mind, I turn to topics which have been addressed by our research group in Brazil. We have using Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2003), Social Semiotics (Hodge & Kress, 1988) and Multimodality (Kress, 2010) to frame and analyse semiotic representations of social problems, especially those concerning both research and curriculum practice. Our analyses articulate conjunctural analyses and textual analyses, in a way that assumes a dialectical view of the relationships between discursive change and social change. Following Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), not only do we seek alternatives to address and to overcome some of these problems, but also ways of identifying obstacles that prevents us recognising problems and that may lead to dangerous naturalisations. My efforts to provide

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intelligible accounts of the social problems I try to address in my research to my fellow authors, in a way that is contextualised yet relatable, were instrumental to enlarge the scope of my questioning, motivating conceptual displacements and expanding my theoretical repertoire. Estranhamentos were decisive in this process. For example, when I was stunned at Matthew Weinstein’s accounts of blood sell in the USA or when they expressed their bewilderment at the circumstances of the Goiânia accident. I have listed some topic areas in which these contributions have been mostly significant and that are present in the agenda of our research group in Brazil.

4.5.1 Environmental Vulnerability and Risk Although geologically disputed, labels such as Anthropocene and Capitalocene are frequently mentioned in reference to the consequences that human action has had upon biogeochemical cycles. In 2020, the World Meteorological Organisation recognised record temperatures of around 30 °C in the Artic and 20 °C in Antarctica. Nearly 10.000 reported natural disasters, such as floods, draughts, landslides, wildfires, amongst others, are thought to be the cause of displacements of 310 million people between 2008 and 2020.6 While international reports recognize the possibility of natural origin in some cases, their increased frequency and intensification is often related to human action. Beck’s risk society hypothesis has been probematised by authors like Engel and Strasser (1998), who analyse global risks against the background of social inequality. The unequal distribution of environmental risk in Latin American countries, a topic that has been widely documented by Joan Martinez-Alier (2005). In their analysis of the Mariana disaster,7 Freitas and collaborators (2019) analysed a number of aspects that constitute environmental vulnerability, namely, the dependency of certain populations of economic activities which have significant environmental impacts, precarious work conditions, inefficient emergency planning and lack of accountability of corporations. In a paper presented in a panel at the 2021 4S Conference (Mejía-Cáceres; Martins; Martins, 2021), we have analysed discourses about potential connections between, on the one hand, environmental changes, the pressures to keep up trade and industry activities, and the spread of Sars-Cov-2 and, on the other hand, the unequal impacts of Covid-19 pandemic on human and environmental well-being throughout the world. In this panel, in dialogue with Larry Bencze, Matthew Weinstein and other colleagues, we addressed the need for problematising links between current models of socioeconomic development and models of scientific development (Bencze, 2017a, b, c) as an imperative for Science Education.

 https://www.internal-displacement.org/  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_dam_disaster

6 7

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4.5.2 Racism and Other No Less Significant -Isms There is a well-known quote by Angela Davis that states: “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist”. Its pertinence is evident when we recall the perversity and abuse that characterised George Floyd’s murder in USA and, perhaps the less known, João Alberto Silveira Freitas’ and Moïse Mugenyi Kabagambe’s murders in Brazil, a country where, in 2017, 75% of homicide victims were Black.8,9 Besides valuing African History and Culture, explaining the low representativity of Black scientists in society, deconstructing views about indigenous knowledge as primitive, problematizing how racism can be one the most determinant factor for social inequality, educating for ethnic-racial relations also means condemning shameful heinous crimes. Although schooling alone will not be capable of reversing years of disqualification of the Black population, and consequent racial injustice, it is instrumental in exposing the roots of racism and in fighting against and overcoming prejudices of all kinds. As Paulo Freire wisely said “Educação não transforma o mundo. Educação muda pessoas. Pessoas transformam o mundo”10 (Freire, 1987, p. 87). For science educators, it is both urgent and important to address the issue of racism and the way it relates to institutional, structural systemic racism (Almeida, 2019) in different countries as well as to develop anti-racist educational initiatives. In doing so, I found it important to address scientific racism, often expressed as theorisations about relationships between physical/biological characteristics and psychological/intellectual capabilities, both at collective and individual level. According to Brazilian anthropologist Lilia Schwartz, at some point, Linnaeus’ classification rationale “escapes Biology to enter cultural and political domains” (Schwarcz, 1993, p.  55) and the supposed existence of “races” helps sustain the establishment of hierarchies between them. It is therefore important to understand contexts in which science has been recruited to justify and legitimate racist practices in society. For instance, it is well known that J Marion Sims perfected surgical techniques by operating on Black women slaves without anesthesia. Conversely, it is also important to show how these ideas were disputed in Science, for example by scientists like Richard Lewontin, and deconstructed in contemporary Medical Education contexts (Borret et al., 2020). This aspect is closely connected with the social character of scientific research and practice, and their inherent controversies and contradictions. It is therefore important for Science Education to keep drawing on sources from the fields of Social Studies of Science, History and Philosophy of Science and Cultural History of Science (Yacoubian & Hansson, 2020) in order to

 https://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/images/stories/PDFs/relatorio_institucional/190605_atlas_da_ violencia_2019.pdf 9  According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, 54% of the Brazilian Population self-declared as Black in the 2019 National Census. 10  “Education does not change the world. Education changes people. People transform the world (author’s free translation). 8

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understand and develop accounts of how scientific propositions about race were conceived and appropriated so as to produce hierarquies and prejudice and not to acknowledge and celebrate (cultural, ethnic, genetic) diversity and difference. Because racism manifest itself in different social practices in different ways, it is important to problematise relationships between race, gender, class, sexuality in order to understand and fight racism in different societies. Other powerful approaches to understand these problematics are Critical Race Theory, (Black) Feminist Studies and Intersectionality – fruitfully actualised by Brazilian scholars such as Gonzalez (2020) and Ribeiro (2019). In my academic journey, I am grateful to Yasmin Lanatte, who helped me problematise aspects of White privileges and make teachers’ stories of struggle and hope towards achieving an education for ethnic-racial relationships visible.

4.5.3 Post-truth and Denialism in Science and in Science Education Perspectives that connects Science, Science Education and Society cannot neglect the nature of power struggles in contemporary contexts. Critical discourse studies call our attention to different aspects of the discursive construction of hegemonic power structures, including those concerning knowledge. Phenomena such as post-­ truth and denialism became particularly relevant for the understanding of this processes. They involve the fabrication of plausible narratives which appropriate people’s genuine claims and recontextualise them in a way so that people can identify with and feel represented by them. This is to say that evidence grounded on scientific research does not work in isolation, but against a background of values and beliefs that are socially constructed. Therefore, the power of scientific evidence, statistics and logical argumentation cannot be taken for granted. Flat-Earth and anti-­ vaccination movements, quantic mysticism and anti-ecologism are examples of scenarios where such discursive struggles take place (Karl et  al., 2022; Alves & Martins, 2021). While research on Science Communication has helped problematise the role of social media as a source of both information and disinformation, Science Education research literature shows possibilities of developing educational experiences, in both formal and informal environments, that stimulate critical analyses of discursive disputes.11 Studies about the Nature of Science can be particularly relevant, especially when they include warnings about the risk of reverting to scientism in the attempt to fight denialism. It is of utmost importance that we, science education researchers, as social scientists, include the popularisation of the science that we  The journal Science & Education (https://www.springer.com/journal/11191) has increasingly featured such discussions in recent issues, while Caderno Brasileiro de Ensino de Física (https:// periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/fisica/issue/view/3108) has published a special issue on related subjects. 11

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make in our agendas as phenomena such as post-truth, denialism and fake news are present in the ways discourses about education are disseminated in society. Take, for instance, the widespread claims that state-run schools are inefficient and that parents should be given vouchers to enroll their children on private schools. There is sound educational research that challenges this premise by questioning the validity of criteria under which efficiency is judged and that provides arguments, grounded on data, that the transference of public funds to private schools does not diminish social inequality or improve chances of success in the job market. It is therefore important to think about ways the internet and social media could also be used to democratise knowledge that we produce.

4.5.4 Blind Spots in the Science-Technology-Society (STS) Debate The acknowledgement that STS related movements originated in European and North American countries that had gone through different stages of industrialization and reached higher levels of economic and social development calls for its re-signification in different contexts (Martins et  al., 2020). Similar arguments apply to the debate around sustainability, biodiversity and de-growth, and other fields that foreground relationships between science, technology, society and environment. For example, although the STS related agenda addresses topics which are global in scope, some Latin American perspectives broaden and enrich the debate by problematizing the impact of colonization (Dussell, 2005) and its relationships with high rates of social inequality, environmental injustices, the hierarchy between knowledge and cultures, as well as with tensions between models that prioritize economic or social development and the challenges for emerging democracies in the region. Some priority research areas that deserve to be highlighted are: (i) the relationships between the principles of a STS education and the ideas of Paulo Freire in contexts that promote the emancipation of social groups and seek to denaturalise oppressive relationships in society (Auler et al., 2009); (ii) the need to consider specific contributions from the fields of Economics and Political Science in the conceptualization of a Latin American Thinking in Science, Technology and Society (PLACTS), especially in the proposal of scientific and technological research and development policies (Dagnino, 2008); (iii) reflections that explore the connections between Freirian thought and the PLACTS proposal (Auler & Delizoicov, 2015); (iv) the problematization of some foundations of STS approaches from a dialogue with the perspectives of the Social Studies of Science and Cultural Studies (von Linsingen & Cassiani, 2013); (v) the consideration of the relationships between local knowledge and scientific knowledge as a constitutive element of STS relationships (Molina, 2020).

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4.5.5 Decolonialities Instigated by my former student and present colleague Bruno Monteiro, new perspectives have been opened to me concerning the dialogue between STS related perspectives and decolonial pedagogies. In the preface to the seminal collection organised by Monteiro et  al. (2019), I have pointed out, that thanks to Peruvian author Aníbal Quijano, it is possible to understand how articulations between modernity and coloniality led to the predatory exploitation of nature and to different forms of epistemicides. Moreover, I have stressed that models based upon constitutive element of Modernity, such as capital accumulation and scientific technological development, have sustained, justified and stimulated models of social development that have social inequality and epistemicide amongst its more embarrassing and undesirable circumstances. It is therefore important to address issues such as progress, universal thinking, technical rationality – and other markers of Eurocentric superiority – that lie at the root of the construction of asymmetries and hierarchies between peoples. Once again, I refer to Social Studies of Science and Cultural History of Science as powerful sources of examples and analyses of both conceptual and contextual aspects involved in thinking about science as a social practice. Other important contribution is that of critical interculturality (Walsh, 2012). Such academic orientation favours the creation of spaces of interaction where cultural diversity is respected and valued, and different perspectives and world views can engage in dialogue. Examples from the Science Education research literature include Lyn Carter’s about possible contact zones between socioscientific issues and decolonialism (Carter, 2017), and between academic and indigenous knowledge El-Hani (2022). These examples reinforce the potential of decoloniality and interculturality for establishing interfaces between the fields of Human Rights Education, Citizenship Education, Ecojustice and Science Education and for relocating the debate about relationships between scientific knowledge and society in a contemporary post-colonial geopolitical scenario in which colonialism persists despite the formal end of coloniality.

4.5.6 Education as Praxis This association is far from novel, and has been present in approaches framed by critical pedagogy, but can be expanded in the context that new forms of globalisation emerge. Earlier described Santos’ metaphors provoke us to think about globalisation not from the dominant Northern Hemisphere perspective, but from “the critical point of view of the Third World, who bore the greatest burdens of globalization.” He considers change may arise as an “upward movement” whose “main actors are underdeveloped countries and not rich countries; the abandoned and poor classes instead of the opulent and obese; the free individual who participates in new masses

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instead of the person in chains; free thinking and not a single speech” (Santos, 2017). It is possible to ask us to what extent some of these movements may already be happening, for example, in the form of attempts made by socially organized groups who directed their demands through legitimate channels and succeeded in promoting a type of education that is congruent with their specific social projects. Education as praxis can also be re-signified in terms of the experiences gestated in social movements. I would argue that Bachilleratos Populares, in Argentina, Quilombola Education and the schools of the Landless Workers Movement, in Brazil, could be examples of attempts to develop and to institutionalise curricula according to a political-pedagogical orientation that is committed to revisited ideals of autonomy and social emancipation. The “Bachilleratos populares” are schools for young and adult education created out of the Piqueteros and Unemployed Workers movement in the 1990s in Argentina. Instead of focusing their demands on economic matters, like most trade unions did, they focused on demands for fulfillment and expansion of educational rights. Schools created set out their own curriculum and not only are they committed to both new forms of management but also to projects of social transformation. A number of them have been accredited by the official school system. Their experiences in Health Education are marked by dialogue between different types of knowledge in community-based projects so as to provide widened multidimensional conceptions of health, understood as a field of struggle with potential to generate transformations in different areas of life, besides disease prevention so as to include housing, leisure, quality of life. (Garelli et al., 2019). The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil also struggles to develop and institutionalize a school system with its own political-pedagogical orientation, which has a curriculum of their own and is committed not only to new ways of management, but also with social transformation projects. The work in MST schools involve interactions between parents, children, educators, activists designed to create educational opportunities in itinerant schools. The novelty of such experiences points to the need for systematic evaluation of its curriculum organisation, development and implementation of pedagogical projects, assessment practices and relationships between the school and other elements of settlements (MST, 2001). Another example is that of Quilombola education.12 It is fully recognized by the State Brazilian and conducts its work based on methodologies that combine academic and cultural knowledge. Quilombola schools serve groups which have Black ancestrality and are committed to both resistance to historical forms of oppression and specific territorial relations. Their curricula values collective memories, native languages and traditions as well as the development of educational resources that value experiential knowledge and cultural identities of quilombola communities (Costa & Fonseca, 2019).

 https://normativasconselhos.mec.gov.br/normativa/view/CNE_RES_CNECEBN82012. pdf?query=ensino%20m%C3%A9dio 12

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Could these be alternatives leading to more productive debates about the role of schools and education in relations of autonomy/transformation and control/ reproduction in society? Which other experiences are there? How do they interconnect socioscientific issues and cultual elements in potentially emancipatory practices (Peres & Martins, 2022). How do similar experiences end up silenced in the context of present curriculum policies which naturalize values such as entrepreneurship and meritocracy as instrumental for students’ achieving their aspirations and constructing their future in times of uncertainty (Silva & Martins, 2023)? Despite strongly grounded in specific realities such experiences can help us think about social relations between different knowledge systems, that is, about the nature of the disputes between them and about the conditions of their struggles to become hegemonic. The examination of such alternatives is in itself an exercise involving alterity in as much as it can also help us problematise naturalised aspects of our own practices and, in this way, develop a more sensitive perception towards issues which are usually overlooked.

4.5.7 The Precarisation of the Teaching Profession It would be, to say the least, incoherent, if, after problematising issues related to participation, democracy, recognition of differences and dialogue, we did not say a word about how research design should contemplate these principles. It has become quite clear to me that investigations should, whenever possible, involve scenarios in which opportunities for collaboration and exchanges can be constructed. In other words, where there is space for the exercise of alterity and reflexivity in research. In this regard, one more time I refer to Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and exotopy as instrumental in describing the type of intended interactions in the research environment. Firstly, because we need to be attentive to the ways in which our voices incorporate and articulate a diversity of social horizons through historical, ideological, social and linguistic elements. In other words, we need to be aware of the inherently responsive character of discourse, which manifests itself in the way previous utterances are updated while new ones are produced. Secondly, because the surplus of vision of the group’s collaborators, one in relation to the other, gives the opportunity to see things that would not be seen otherwise. This apply both to documentary research and field research, where the diversity of participants – real and represented -, perspectives and implication should be considered and valued as part of analytical procedures. Another aspect in the field of educational research is the inseparability between the purposes of, on the one hand, producing sound reliable knowledge and, on the other hand, intervening in educational reality. In our research projects, we have been trying to explore this dual commitment. One way to do this is by privileging data acquisition contexts that are also formative contexts for all participants involved, including researchers themselves. In these scenarios, knowledge produced refers to a plurality of objects and scenarios, namely, theorizations and transdisciplinary

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dialogues necessary to understand educational issues, methodologies and approaches to curricular contents, model proposals and analysis of (teacher) educational experiences, to history of educational systems and to the development and assessment of educational resources, among others. All this discussion would be rendered empty if we did not mention a number of problems which have been neglected for quite some time, and which the Covid-19 pandemic helped expose. The struggle for social justice in education involves the consideration of processes through which chronic insufficient investment in public schools gave way to disinvestment and cuts which, in some countries, resulted in a lethal combination of derelict installations, lack of qualified personnel and lack of access to personal computers compromise disadvantaged students’ right to education. The experience has exposed a social apartheid between public and private education, the vulnerability of some groups and the precariousness of teaching as a profession (Butler, 2004; Nóvoa, 1992). In some countries, like Brazil, the expression “überisation” of the teaching profession “describes the reality of precarious work contracts, exhausting long journeys, use of personal financial resources to enable professional activities, faced by teachers. They also show ways through which the pandemic made chronic problems acute, revealed the fallacy of improvisation and the euphemism of creativity in overcoming difficulties, as well as how inapt and misleading the phrase new normal” can be. This has been an integral part of the agenda of our teacher education programmes, preferably developed in/by communities of learning and co-teaching methodologies (Martins & Lima, 2020; Correa et  al., 2018), though not at the expense of research and development of theoretical and empirical studies.

4.6 Ways Forward I have situated most of my work under a broad umbrella which covers the field of scientific literacy (SL). However, it is not possible to adhere to discourse studies and leave unscathed. In this text I have illustrated the intricate, almost indistinguishable, relationship between text and context and explained the grounds for my discomfort with expressions such as citizenship education, citizen science and, of course, scientific literacy. Beneath a superficial consensus, SL is a rather polysemic expression. It has been conceptualized as a teaching objective, as a learning goal, as a framework for curriculum development, as a basis to assess public understanding of science, and as a research topic (Roberts, 2007). It has been connected with science knowledge, with knowledge about the nature of science and with knowledge that is relevant to action (Roberts, 2007) as well as to contemporary socio-epistemological demands (Sjöström & Eilks, 2018). SL has been understood either as a state or as process, as an individual attribute or as something that is distributed within social systems (Roth & Calabrese Barton, 2004).

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In my own work I have tried to be attentive to such polysemy but to use it in my favour. I have argued that, as a metaphorical appropriation of literacy – a concept from the fields of Language and Literacy Studies -, the expression scientific literacy carries historical, sociological, psychological, political, affective dimensions, amongst other. In our efforts to promote scientific literacy research and practice, we have emphasise the need to extrapolate a functional view of literacy and suggested an expansion of the Scientific Literacy agenda so as to include and problematise these dimensions (Martins, 2011). An immediate consequence is questioning reductionist views of decision making implied by the direct connection often made between scientific literacy and citizenship education. Acknowledging the role of metaphor in discourse as a carrier of meaning between social practices may point to new conceptualisations of Scientific Literacy or to explorations of other relevant source domains for generating apt novel concepts to frame future agendas for what Science Education. Such an agenda involves epistemic and institutional commitments, such as acknowledging the political nature of education, valuing the teaching profession and teachers’ professional knowledges (Tardif & Lésard 1999), establishing more horizontal collaborations between different agents in Science Education. Our world is a fast-changing one. However, differently to what the label “postmodern” suggests, contemporaneity is not characterized by a complete obsolesce and replacement of ideas, attitudes and values associated with modernity, but coexistence between and those of post-modernity. In fact, some of the ideals forged in what we call modernity are constituents of our contemporary ways of thinking and being. Coming back to citizenship, the possibility and ability to participate, directly and indirectly, in public affairs continues to be relevant in social life. Indeed, according to Charles Taylor (2011), the only defense against the loss of freedoms we are experiencing today is the consolidation of a vigorous political culture. This is even more important in the context of dystopian views, which can easily lead to immobility and hopelessness both in institutions and in our capacity for political action. In this context, a sense of future continues to be required (Klein, 2018). A future that is not the conclusion of a predefined narrative, but that can be seen as a horizon that is constantly imagined and reimagined in order to create educational alternatives committed to construct possible worlds where alterity provides grounds for empathy and mutual respect. Acknowledgements  Apart from my fellow authors, I wish to express gratitude to my research students who push my thinking and with whom I learn more and more everyday. CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brazilian Ministry of Education), CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology) and FAPERJ (Fundação Carlos Chagas de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – Rio de Janeiro State Secretary of Science and Technology) are gratefully a acknowledged for financial support.

Chapter 5

Science Education and Social Justice: A Possible Dream

5.1 Preamble I begin with three thoughts which set the scene for this chapter.

5.1.1 First Thought Halfway through the novel, Anna Karenina, there is a discussion on education which touches on something which must have exercised its author, Leo Tolstoy, in late nineteenth century Russia. It is a dilemma which I have struggled with throughout my life in education. I suspect it touches a nerve for all of us who want schools to be the means to a more socially just world. One of the main protagonists of the novel, Levin, is a wealthy landowner, a humane and liberal-leaning man, who continuously engages in what is best for the muzhiks and peasants who tend his land. He goes to stay for a few days with his friend, Sviyazhsky, and discusses the problem of land and workers with him. Sviyazhsky is proficient at reasoning but only superficially interested in the problem, a dilettante. Sviyazhsky argues that schools are the solution to the education of the peasantry. ‘That’s something I’ve never understood,’ Levin objected hotly. ‘How will schools help the peasantry to improve their material well-being? You say that schools, education, will give them new needs. So much the worse because they won’t be able to satisfy them. And how the knowledge of addition, subtraction, and the catechism will help them to improve their material condition, I never could understand. The evening before last I met a woman with an infant at her breast and asked her where she had been. She said: “To the wise woman, because a shriek-hag has got into the child, so I took him to be treated.” I asked how the wise woman treats the shriek-hag. “She puts the baby on a roost with the chickens and mumbles something.”’ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_5

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‘Well, there you’ve said it yourself! We need schools so that she won’t need the shriek-hag by putting the baby on a roost. …’ Sviazhsky said, smiling gaily. ‘Ah, no!’ Levin said in vexation. ‘For me that treatment is like treating the peasantry with schools. The peasants are poor and uneducated, we see that as surely as the woman sees the shriek-hag because the baby shrieks. But why schools will help in this trouble – poverty and uneducation – is as incomprehensible as why chickens on a roost help against the shriek-­ hag. What must be helped is the cause of the poverty.’ Levin/Tolstoy dismisses schools as sites of material (and political transformation) for the oppressed. He would have scorned the neoliberal model for schooling. And what is the relationship between emancipation and education, specifically in the context of this book, science education (Valladares, 2021)? One of my main motivations for teaching is that schools could enhance social justice. For much of my teaching career I positioned near Sviazhsky but Tolstoy has perturbed my certainty.

Soon after I read Anna Karenina, I came across Hannah Arendt’s essay, Crisis in Education (1993). This was written in 1954 critiquing the US education system from the viewpoint of a refugee from Nazi Germany. Towards the beginning of the essay Arendt contemplates two things: the nature of a crisis and the role of education. Crisis and education are in some ways intertwined. The nature of a crisis is that it strips away prejudices, long-held beliefs which can no longer address the new circumstances created by crisis. The essence of education is ‘natality’, that humans are ‘born’ into the world. Arendt was writing at a time when revolutions of whatever order precipitated by crises included terms like ‘education of the masses’ which she saw critically, and rightly, in my view, as tyrannical and retrograde. And then she writes this sentence: ‘It is in the very nature of the human condition that each new generation grows into an old world, so that to prepare a new generation for a new world can only mean that one wishes to strike from the newcomers’ hands their own chance at the new’ (p. 3). In other words, be very careful of schools either as sites of political transformation or as sites of social reproduction. I recognise this sentence sounds reactionary and conservative at first reading. This, I think, is the excitement of dialectics. What I think Arendt is saying is be open to the fresh and new; we can be clouded by our own dogmas, something that any leftist of my generation and after will recognise. Well, we should be perturbed otherwise we will cease to exist. Although I think Tolstoy and Arendt would have been quite suspicious of each other had they met in another time zone, I think they would have concurred on the role of schools. Having taught in schools and been a teacher educator, I can see their point. But this raises unresolved questions for me which I come to later. And an early warning: I have no answers, possibly different kinds of questions.

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5.1.2 Second Thought A few years ago I observed 16–17 year old school pupils, from socially disadvantaged areas, visiting the biomedical research laboratories in our university. The students were engaged by the idea of doing research, they asked lots of probing questions, and expressed a wish to discuss research papers with their teacher. Towards the end of the visit the students were being shown round the laboratories where one researcher was explaining her work on neurological development of chick embryos. Two young women in the group asked what happened to the embryos which could be seen to be no more than a small red speck on yolk. The researcher, a little disconcerted by the question, explained that there were regulations to which they had to adhere to work with any living matter. The students asked again what happened to the embryos, the researcher responded that they were destroyed, and quickly moved on. I was standing near the two young women who had taken part very enthusiastically in the early part of the visit. They appeared distressed and no longer paid any attention to the rest of the talk nor engaged in the rest of the visit. I approached them and asked what had upset them. They explained it was wrong to dismiss living things in the way the researcher had done, they felt that any kind of testing on animals was cruel. Rather than enthuse them, this part of the visit had put them off doing biology in higher education. I draw on this episode because it reflects conflicting attitudes and thoughts in my own development as a science teacher and subsequently as a researcher, and I suggest these attitudes have much wider currency throughout science teaching and learning. There were assumptions that the researcher and students had internalised as a matter of course and had taken as common-sense. (I should add, as an aside, that as soon as anyone tells me an idea is common-sense my hackles rise; it suggests that disagreement from the norms is somewhat perverse and nonsensical.) But ‘common-sense’, ‘rules of thumb’, ‘the blindingly obvious’ are ways of grounding our prejudices. I want to suggest that the episode I have described reflects two distinct philosophies of science that have a long history. One philosophy is that Mind and Matter are separate. Matter is inanimate, insensate and to be explained through experiment, it is perceived by the Mind and acted on but cannot perceive back. I suspect this dualism has become a rule of thumb for many. The second assumption, far less prevalent in the world of science research is Holism, that Mind and Matter are not separate. Mind is Matter and Matter can generate meaning. The researcher was perhaps influenced by dualistic thinking although she was unlikely to name it as such, it was simply common-sense. And the two students were judging what they saw holistically, and again would have been astounded had they been told that. We all probably move between diverse philosophies of Nature without knowing it. They are the norms we respond to. And so it goes on . . .

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5.1.3 Third Thought There is a fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Rome by the Renaissance artist, Raphael. The picture is entitled ‘The School of Athens’. You can google it. It portrays various famous philosophers at leisure just at the point when two of the greatest philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, enter through a portal deep in conversation. Plato, the older man, points upwards towards the Heavens with the forefinger of his right hand. I take it to mean that Plato is enjoining that the source of Truth is Above. There, with little gravity, little interference from matter, ideal conditions are maintained. To understand how things work on this messy Earthy planet of ours we need to learn from the Heavens with their magnificent crystal spheres. In Aristotle’s left hand is a large book but with his right he appears to be motioning towards the Earth, as if to say the source of all Truth is here, in front of our eyes. That snippet of imagined conversation between Plato and Aristotle is one that continues every day in science lessons in schools around the world although the participants don’t necessarily know it. I shall return to this picture towards the end of the chapter when I try to resolve my version of the argument. Pondering these problems over the past years I often felt alone as the pressures in science education research and practise increasingly came to emphasize ‘impact’ often through ‘enterprise’ and ‘innovation’, ‘impact’ meaning something like competitive success such as international TIMSS and PISA scores, products that enhanced exam success or likelihood to take up science at university. Then over the years I met my co-authors when it became possible to write this book. We don’t agree about everything – thank goodness, disagreement is what sparks our friendships – but I think we cohered as a group because we found each other empathic interlocutors. Our common understanding, that science education as it stood is intensely politicised and unjust, underpinned by neoliberal norms, bound us together despite our smaller differences.

5.2 Science Education and Crises During the time of writing this chapter in the UK we are all affected by the COVID-19 pandemic: a crisis because we face new types of problems with uncertain solutions. At first when I wrote ‘we’ my field of vision was focused solely on the UK; that is, what the UK media bring into my home, what is nearest to me geographically and culturally. That seems common-sense – ‘charity begins at home’ etc. – but we live in a global world, a concept that I come across every day of my life without thinking too closely about what it means. And in science education, as well, we take for granted formulations of science that have close connections with power and plunder without being aware of it. A few weeks ago I was reading an article in a literary journal about French intervention in the Sahel, in west Africa, a region which was colonised by France. It was

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difficult for someone sipping a cappuccino on a warm dry day in an edgy London cafe to imagine a world where pandemics are just another part of uncertain and transient existences: villages held hostage to warlords, lack of basic healthcare, continuous migrations to less murderous dwelling places, no effective government, basic schools a luxury, penury, illness, all these horrors the taken-for-granteds of life in the Sahel. COVID, with no immediate prospect of vaccine supplies, yet another obstacle to endure. Global community, so integrated a part of our educative discourse, seems laughable in this context. Hence, I prefer the rather clumsy term ‘worldification’ (Romer, 2021), ‘the possibility of politics for which a common world is necessary’. And it raises the question that emancipation is not a generalised concept but one that is situated and intersectional. ‘Affected’ by the pandemic is therefore an inadequate word because it gives little sense of the huge inequalities of suffering. Even in the context of the UK, a wealthy and technologically sophisticated country, older, dependent people, particularly those living in care homes, have had far higher death rates from COVID compared with younger people, those from ethnic minorities have suffered disproportionately. The first 12 doctors to die in the UK from COVID were all from a South Asian or Afro-Caribbean background (https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/ remembering-­the-­uk-­doctors-­who-­have-­died-­of-­covid-­19/). Socially disadvantaged people living in cramped accommodation with little access to fresh food have endured severe mental and physical stress, students have experienced restrictions on their movements and psychological disturbance compared with students in earlier years who had all the opportunities of making new friends and enjoying life away from home that higher education afforded. Hospitals have been overcrowded, and staff physically and emotionally exhausted. The national vaccine roll out has, at least, promised some relief. Up to the time of writing it appears to have been very successful although there have been concerns about the safety of some of the brands (Mahase, 2021), and how effective the vaccines are against new variants. That I have to say at ‘the time of writing’ is an indication of the uncertain post-normal world we live in (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993) or what Bennett and Lemoine (2014) refer to as the VUCA world – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. One issue now headlining is ‘booster’ vaccines for older people – a question of justice given that so many people on the Planet have little chance of receiving even one vaccination let alone a booster, a luxury for the inhabitants of wealthy countries. When the more infectious variant increased risk, teaching unions in the UK demanded schools be closed generating a confusing media storm (Asbury & Kim, 2020); although young people have a much lower risk of suffering harmful effects if they contract COVID-19, teachers are susceptible, and, of course, the virus can be transmitted to older family members. (There is also emerging information that the new variant does not discriminate so clearly between age). But it is at schools that discrimination is heightened even more than other areas of life. Those at wealthy private schools have all the digital resources and physical space to enable them to continue learning. Others living in crowded conditions, little space or leisure to learn with restricted or no access to computers have at least learned, a la Freire (Freire, 1985), of the cruelties of a class-ridden society.

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Among all this inequality and uncertainty, the UK government has had a trope which it repeats with glib self-confidence: ‘follow the science’. (The US President, Joe Biden, also used this term, although by many it was seen as a relief that this President took scientific expertise seriously). It takes little probing to discover that scientists differ on how to act on the evidence and that the government is using the detached tone of ‘following the science’ as a cover for ideological decision-making. Some scientists have responded sharply to this deceit (Stevens, 2020), pointing out the distinction between science and politics, or rather that they are entangled in complex ways where decision-making can be evaded using science as a disguise. But this belies the point that the government thought such a trope possible. Science as a property of brilliant individual minds (why is the name Einstein echoing as I write?) was a view I grew up with at school and, still today, I find it difficult to shake it off entirely. Writing during the pandemic brings into stark relief questions of utility about science education. In times such as a pandemic where epidemiological studies can only follow its effects, where economic viability has to be balanced against risks to mortality, where economies can crash either because workers are too ill to support the base or because lockdowns lead to stagnation, where decisions have to be made quickly to avoid drastic consequences, the stakes are indeed high, and we live in a post-normal or VUCA world. The debate over wearing masks is a case in point. The WHO changed its recommendations on face masks in June 2020 (https://www. webmd.com/lung/news/20200608/who-­changes-­stance-­says-­public-­should-­wear-­ masks). A Norwegian meta-study (Iversen et al., 2020) indicated that medical facemasks offer a protective effect in community settings. Yet the data is very variable. With non-medical face masks there is no reliable evidence of effectiveness in community settings. Uncertain facts, contested values, high stakes and urgent decision-­ making are features of frontier science in the public domain. And how can science education help?

5.3 Visions of Science Education There appear to be three main ways of responding to this question. The first is to identify science’s epistemic distinctiveness: a way of explaining the world through experimentation and theory separate from values and emotions, its validity ensured by a community of fellow practitioners (Gelwick, 2004). Science has no social and personal utility in this sense (Wolpert, 1997). Second is to acknowledge that science and technology and society are functionally inter-related and that a sound knowledge of scientific principles can support decision-making, the prevalent notion of functional scientific literacy (Laugksch, 2000). Thirdly is the view that scientific knowledge is imbued with cultural, social and political ideas and commitments, that its historical domination by white men reflects its intrinsic power relations, hence scientific knowledge per se cannot solve the world’s urgent problems without acting against its implicit values (Bencze & Carter, 2011).

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Back to the first response. Perhaps it is possible for people to be encouraged to ‘follow the science’ because this is what generations of school students have been taught to understand, that the methods of science rise above the messy uncertainties of everyday existence and obey universal laws free from human error, the Platonic ideal. Roberts’ (2011) characterisation of Visions of science education reflect these purposes. Vision I forefronts the power of the academic discipline. It presents an essentialist view of scientific thought, gaining mastery of established scientific laws, theories, facts, concepts, terminology; that scientific knowledge is divorced from social constructions; that science practise has a rigour and certainty quite distinct from other forms of knowledge besides mathematics. That the Moon orbits the Earth and the Earth orbits the Sun is not influenced by social preferences or ideologies, unlike the Humanities. As Donnelly (2002) argues, a central feature of scientific practise is its reductionism. It is not difficult to see why this view has considerable purchase in schools and in instrumentalist curricula divided by disciplines. Science is understood as empirical, it explains the world by experiment, observation and modelling (Giere, 1991). The models and ideas inferred from observation and experiment are constantly tested against Nature. Doing that requires a certain detachment of mind and allegiance to the norms of disinterestedness, universalism, communality and organised scepticism (Merton, 1973). Young and Muller (2013) have underpinned a social justification for a Vision I approach as disciplinary Powerful Knowledge. The disciplines have provided a means for young people to secure knowledge about the world that they would not have been able to attain through everyday experience. They argue that not only does such an approach confer deeper understanding about Nature but it is knowledge that is socially progressive, i.e. it enables access to the higher echelons of knowledge enabling social progress, what Young (2008) has depicted as ‘social realism’. They distinguish powerful knowledge from knowledge of the powerful, i.e. the kind of knowledge and skills that maintain social status. Young and Muller (2013) argue that educational justifications for the socialisation of science knowledge have conflated this distinction. Braund (2021) and Blandford & Thorne (2020) broadly confirm this view that a more critical informed understanding of science would help young people to make sense of the diverse and contradictory sources and explanations confronting us over COVID. In this approach theory and knowledge precede practise. Vision II is both essentialist and progressivist, incorporating a social context to science knowledge; indeed many projects and curricula such as PLON (Eijklehof & Lijnse, 1988) and twenty-first Century Science (Millar, 2006) from the late 80s onwards – coinciding not entirely serendipitously with the onset of modern neoliberalism – were built on social issues in science. While, for example, many science products have undeniably benefited society (vaccines for example) the undesirable side-effects need to respond to a critical democratically accountable public. The Nuffield 2000 report identifies many of the problems within school science education 20 years ago and which persist today.

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the current curriculum retains its past, mid-twentieth-century emphasis, presenting science as a body of knowledge which is value-free, objective and detached – a succession of ‘facts’ to be learnt, with insufficient indication of any overarching coherence and a lack of contextual relevance to the future needs of young people. The result is a growing tension between school science and contemporary science as portrayed in the media, between the needs of future specialists and the needs of young people in the workplace and as informed citizens. (Millar & Osborne, 1998, p. 2004)

It goes on to recommend that ‘school science education should aim to produce a populace who are comfortable, competent and confident with scientific and technical matters and artefacts.’ I must say my reading is that this is an excellent account of what a comfortable conformist technocratic bourgeoisie would look like. It continues. ‘The science curriculum should provide sufficient scientific knowledge and understanding to enable students to read simple newspaper articles about science, and to follow TV programmes on new advances in science with interest. Such an education should enable them to express an opinion on important social and ethical issues with which they will increasingly be confronted’ (p. 2009). So, a knowledge of science should help social and ethical decision-making. Theory – again – precedes application. But it does not recognise the problematic separation of scientific knowledge from values, a persistent feature of the dualism inherent in science since the Enlightenment, the separation of the rational from both what is valued and the affective domain, an exemplification of the naturalistic fallacy, or more strictly the is/ought dichotomy. This was vigorously elaborated in a riposte in the British journal for science teachers to including ethical issues in science. Science is a discipline concerned exclusively with the reliability that can be attributed to factual (‘is’) statements as a result of empirical investigation. It is widely recognised that ‘is’ statements in science cannot be turned into the ‘ought’ statements of moral discourse. For example, science can fairly accurately judge the consequences of bringing together a number of subcritical masses of U-235 above a densely populated geographical area. It can say absolutely nothing, however, about whether such an action would be right or wrong. (Hall, 1999, p. 15.)

Such an approach excludes the human and humane responses of horror to such events. How does a teacher answer young people when discussing the science of nuclear fission, i.e. the atomic bomb? One way, as advocated by Hall in a personal email was to supply the students with two hats, one marked Science, one marked Ethics. When discussing an ethical point they should don the Ethical hat to show their awareness of the epistemological distinction. This is a perfectly serious point because there has been much deliberation over the is/ought dichotomy (Hudson, 1967). I want to argue that such a separation of facts from value, promoting the cold steely unemotional eye of science, is not feasible in an education whose guiding requirements are ‘securing human diversity, compassionate justice, and the renewal of life’ (Simon, 1992, p. 27). But the epistemological point is a serious barrier and cannot be ignored. In studying ‘nano’ Masters courses in universities in France and the U.S. Fages and Albe (2015) found that incorporating socio-scientific issues into courses could be used as a means of staunching protest against ‘innovation’ and in the process

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inducting students into a dominant technoscientific narrative. They also highlighted the opportunities to ‘work collectively for a more democratic division of power regarding socio-technical choices’ (p.433). Responding to Fages and Albe’s work, Gough (2015) points out how STEM and society can be framed as a social compact between technoscience production and society but which distances scientists from the moral impact of their work in outsourcing moral decision-making to the wider community. With Vision II  – particularly with Vision II  – science can be framed as non-­ political. For those leaving school, science could be seen mainly in the following ways (and often in more than one way): • Boring and irrelevant but we know the formula of water. (Even that uncomplicated fact is not the certainty it seems.) • Totally irrelevant to social concerns but an important subject to pass exams. • Social context makes science accessible for learning. • Informed citizens should know some science but how that science translates into anything politically or socially meaningful is unknown. • You need some science for a good job. • A fascinating arena of study to pursue for many years hence. Nearly all school students know as well that the benefits of science are also a curate’s egg. Contemporary technoscience represented the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992; Levinson et al., 2012) because such benefits had chances of going wrong: a small number of people react adversely to certain pharmaceuticals despite rigorous testing; air travel is much safer than car travel but you can’t rule out unforeseen problems; despite all the technologies in preserving food and drink even with sampling, the odd contaminant gets by. But the probability is so small as to be negligible. We live with chance and risk but the dominant message from schools is these are beyond ideology. Twenty years ago, Derek Hodson (2003) articulated the difficulties in predicting and advocating the science curriculum appropriate for an uncertain future, as well as the corporatisation of the science curriculum in supporting the mission of supplying a society of consumers. He recognised that science and science education had become impregnated with neoliberal values, (despite the is-ought dichotomy) hence a radical transformation of the curriculum was imperative. His proposal, a four level approach incorporated an appreciation of the social, political and cultural impact of scientific and technological change; a recognition that technoscientific decisions are based on political and economic interests; support in students developing their own value positions; and finally preparing and taking action. Hodson also identifies broader philosophical positions in exposing the problems with an anthropocentric (dualistic) view of science compared with a biocentric (holistic) view which reflects the implicit dilemma in my ‘second thought’. This is not a straightforward strategy: it presupposes a culture change in schooling and pedagogy but one which has possibilities under present circumstances. One can see Hodson’s influence in the philosophy and pedagogy of STEPWISE (Bencze, 2017a, b, c).

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At this point it is worth noting how Ajay Sharma (2020) disturbs the relation between science and risk and constructs COVID as an assemblage. COVID is a virus  – a material though tiny thing  – which infects people causing ill health in some, and death in a low but significant proportion of those who become infected. But it is also an assemblage, a connected arrangement of actants and entities made possible through the global market, and in contemporary terms, neoliberalism. We are enduring a pandemic because of global travel, human consumption of meat, the requirements of marketisation and competition. Focusing solely on the virus and its effect on the human is a substantivist ontology, discounting the relational effects such as the role of the media, the health service infrastructure; cultural attitudes, for example in an individualist society it will be more difficult to encourage people to adhere to legislation in relation to prevention of transmission and social distancing. So the predominant visions of science education, Vision I and Vision II are inadequate in preparing young people to deal with COVID, and Hodson’s, Sharma’s and Bencze’s work point to possible – and viable – approaches to a science education which can respond in socially just ways to COVID. I want to raise here, though, some problems which I shall address later. 1. The epistemic case which still needs undergirding. I am taken with the solutions advocated by Hodson and Bencze. They are founded on a strong values approach towards social justice but there needs to be a stronger foundation in epistemology, ontology, and specifically explicating what is entailed by ‘action’. 2. Curriculum reforms of the kind advocated by Hodson need to take account of a deep political bias which goes well beyond any progressive moves which can be made in contemporary political life. 3. Levin’s /Tolstoy’s scepticism still holds although both Hodson (2003) and Bencze (2017a, b, c) put up good cases for student activism. I wonder if these moves are reformist, assuming neoliberal values and objections will somehow fall away. But first some personal history and some problems. Because solutions often have a problematic history.

5.4 Personal History 5.4.1 Going into Teaching My first full-time teaching post was in 1978. Teaching was a natural route for a young person of a leftist persuasion who wanted to make a difference to the lives of young people for the better. My formative influences had been socialist scientists from the 1930s to 1960s such as Lancelot Hogben, J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley and, most prominently, the crystallographer, J.D. Bernal. His view of science was broadly visionary, that the benefits of science went hand-in-hand with social transformation.

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Bernal’s philosophy still retains a current of foresight that is all the more relevant today. In his essay, Marx and Science, Bernal (1952) sees that science has the potential to play its part in a socialist revolution. He draws on Marx’s formulation of dialectical materialism that people can only make their own history if they can satisfy the basics of existence: nourishment, leisure, clothing, a roof over their heads. Individuals are not separate; they are both influenced and changed by the material conditions of their existence but also influence those conditions, i.e. a dynamic relationship between structure and agency. Those material conditions interplay with the development of science; science and industry (in this case the actions taken for the betterment of the human condition), science is therefore a social activity driven by need and historical circumstance, not an idea which emerges from the lone genius. But he also recognises that the theories of science become the ideological property of the ruling classes and are adapted to suit the interest positions of that ruling class. For example, the hierarchical structure of medieval science reflected the feudal order whereas in the move to mercantilism and trade, and early capitalism, science became more dynamic, preparing the way for a heliocentric universe and the theory of gravitation. For Bernal modern science had become a ‘separate force distinct from labor’ and pressed into the service of capital (p. 33). Science and industry had generated the modern working-class and the surplus value created through labour could not be socially utilised to benefit those who produce that value unless it is under their control, in Bernal’s terms meaning the industrial working class. Those benefits, the conditions of freedom, cannot be incorporated under market forces, hence they presuppose the overthrow of the bourgeois state. This broader interconnectivity of science to social justice was inspirational to me as a young teacher. I saw myself as a science teacher transforming my students’ visions of the possible in creating a new anti-capitalist world order. My first ever lesson was teaching elements, mixtures and compounds. I was baffled. I could not link it to my sense of a better world. Such problems can only be addressed through engagement with reality through praxis; I’m still struggling to sort it out but I think I’ve moved on.

5.4.2 The Remedial Anti-racist Instinct My first teaching post was as a science teacher in a multi-ethnic school in northwest London. In hindsight it was a significant period politically. It was the end of the post-war neo-Keynesian welfare state consensus and the beginning of modern neoliberalism. I started out teaching towards the end of the term of the Wilson-Callaghan Labour government and the onset of the Thatcherite years which were to have such a lasting, and many say damaging, influence on education. Shortly after I started teaching, a young teacher, Blair Peach, was killed by police in an anti-Nazi demonstration in London. Compared with the overwhelming managerialism of schools in contemporary England (Ball, 2003), we had quite a lot of freedom at that time. Teachers could set the curriculum and organise their own teaching consistent with certain criteria: the

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curriculum had to meet the needs of students doing examinations but in years where there were no national tests we were free to organise lessons which reflected values of the community and the school. This was not straightforward, particularly in my school, as I will explain. From what I could ascertain from the attitudes of my colleagues in the school, education was deemed to be socially progressive; a good in itself, and a means for children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds to live a more economically productive life than their parents’ generation. But education was also something that enhanced individual and social wellbeing, and in a Deweyan sense created a more democratic and just world (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-­h/852-­h.htm). This presented dilemmas. One commonly acknowledged aim of education, for example, is the development of moral autonomy (White, 2006), i.e. the individual to discriminate between the virtuous and non-virtuous and decide for themselves on particular matters. But how does this operate in schools with strict regimens and a clear ethos as became more evident in the 1980s and 1990s? What takes place when a student comes to the considered conclusion that school is not for them? And in terms of liberation what is it that students are being liberated from? (I am reminded here of an episode one of my students, a beginning teacher reported to me. A group of 17–18 year olds in her school had garnered support from many of their school mates to go into central London on a weekday afternoon to protest at the visit of President George Bush, the younger, to London and the role of the UK in the invasion of Iraq. The Principal of the school excluded them for truancy.) And, finally, what does learning science have to do with all this? I did experience evidence of achievements but also failure, far more failure than success. Nor was the solution straightforward. First, achievements. In the mid-1980s I taught in a girls’ school with a predominantly south Asian intake and an equal mix of Afro-Caribbean and white students. One of the students in this school was an articulate and thoughtful Afro-Caribbean girl (I shall call her Janine) who, when I left at the end of her tenth grade (she was about 15 at the time) wrote me a poem about atomic structure which I had taught in chemistry. It was a wonderful gesture, the sort of thing which makes teachers say ‘despite all the stress this reminds me why I’m in this job.’ Twelve years later I was working in higher education but took out a year to work for the organisation for professional chemists producing chemistry resources for teachers. I’d heard that the department I was in was run by a very capable young woman who was ‘going places’, and then I had a daunting surprise when I found Janine was my boss. But such cases were rare. There were far more examples of students who performed well at school and did not succeed professionally beyond school, or more usually did not perform well at school because of structural disadvantage (Gillborn, 2005). As a teacher I found my politics seriously complicated at this time (late 1970s, early 1980s) by opposing pressures in the educational authority where I first taught. The main concern in my school and in and many other schools in urban areas of the U.K. was that science was ‘white’, not that it was necessarily colonialist and oppressive but that disproportionately few people doing science were from minority

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ethnic groups, particularly Afro-Caribbean. The problem, as perceived, was not the values of the science base and the socio-political structure that maintained it but its monochrome personnel. Several remedial strategies were employed: one was to exhibit posters of Black scientists as role models; message: the colour of your skin should be no barrier to success. Another was to demonstrate that the production of science was genuinely multi-cultural, not wholly Eurocentric. So, I taught a course called Third World Science. It was at this juncture that I first began to understand that the way to science education hell was paved with the best of intentions. One of the lessons we taught was soap-making and it had a colonial context. As large industries moved out of African countries at independence in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a focus in those countries on home-made natural products to make up for the lack of manufactured goods like soap. Soap is an oil based constituent emulsified as a surfactant by adding alkali. Ghana had the natural resources to do this because oil can be extracted from palm trees, and potash alkali from ashing banana skins. And so we focused in ninth grade on making soap from oil and banana skins, a messy and rather riotous experience based on rural Ghanaian processes. We would test the final products and their cleaning potential. During the session one of the students approached me (it was 40 years ago and I can still remember his name and his expression), complaining that coming from a Ghanaian family he felt humiliated by these lessons. Soap can be manufactured on a large scale, we find it in supermarkets etc. – ‘you’re calling us primitive.’ At first I was shocked how any student could see this process as anything other than beneficent but it’s difficult to see you’re being patronising when you’re being patronising. Around that time I came in early one morning to find a woman in our science staff room waiting for one of the teachers to arrive. She asked me what particular science subject I taught, and, then directly after, why Black children were not achieving in this school. I suggested there were probably many reasons but it must have something to do with racism in British society. Her response was explosive: she told me I was a typical liberal teacher unable to recognise my own responsibility for educating Black children. Typical of people like me to attribute the reason to some amorphous social cause. The conversation upset me for two reasons. One, she had been direct to the point of rudeness. Two, there was a kernel of truth in what she said. Later, my colleagues explained that she was a campaigner for independent education of Black children in my local authority because state schools were failing them. The solution was to have Black only schools where students could succeed without ‘patronizing’ teachers like me. At that time it set up both a personal dilemma and a political one. The local authority for my school was well-known as a committed left wing Labour council which, while firmly anti-racist, was opposed to independent schools being set up in any shape or form. This caused a huge political conflagration locally when this woman, angered by the unyielding local authority, defected to the Tories (the right wing party) on the council. There were all sorts of social fractures: young Afro-Caribbean teenagers born in the U.K. and rebelling against their parents’ more conservative attitudes. The education system failed to respond adequately; while I never saw evidence of open hostile

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racism in my first teaching post there was an implicit understanding that when Black pupils succeeded and went to university, this was somehow exceptional. Racism wasn’t overt; it was implicit, deep-rooted, and structural. I could also see the teachers who were popular and respected were not openly liberal: strict, smartly, even conservatively-dressed, who stood no nonsense. I was at that time a bearded leftie who preferred to facilitate and be soft on discipline. I learned quickly that didn’t go down well. But it was a personal contradiction: I was nonetheless perceived as a member of that system associated with oppression and soft white middle class attitudes from a position of privilege. The problem has changed, although there are remnants. Too often as a teacher I recall bright Black and Ethnic Minority children coming into the school, keen as mustard, and a few years later demoralised and failing. By the time I left that school 5 years later, and an episode of my life that was a struggle but one which I recall with much joy, I was less convinced that schools and science were engines of change, if anything they reproduced inequality. More recently there have been moves broadly flowing from Critical Race Theory, and even more recently spurred on by the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd, which have recognised the need to expose racist, sexist, colonialist assumptions implicit in educational discourse. This parallels the movement in radical science through STS studies in its focus on post- and de-colonialism. In England a new initiative in 2019 has brought a Black Curriculum in history into some school classrooms to address ‘the lack of Black British history in the UK curriculum’ (Moncrieffe & Harris, 2020). My former doctoral student, Haira Gandolfi, has devised a series of classroom activities as an adaptation of Global History of Science which teaches ‘science as a product of exchanges among different communities in diverse historical moments’ (Gandolfi, 2021, p. 555). The significance of this approach is that scientific knowledge and development is studied as a cultural exchange, for example, in studying magnetism, how knowledge exchanges through trade led to the development of the compass. Gandolfi co-devised four units on Medicines, Magnetism, Evolution and Earth’s Resources each of which builds on knowledge gained from another unit focusing on the scientific, social and political changes influenced by such intercultural exchanges. This has the advantage of shifting scientific knowledge from a Eurocentric perspective but also emphasises the power bases involved in exchange and collaboration. It also sets knowledge in a ‘worldification’ perspective in contrast to the soap-making episode which was removed from its broader socio-political context.

5.4.3 Second Teaching Post: SSIs It was in my second teaching post in a girls’ school in west London in the mid-­1980s that I became interested in socio-scientific issues (SSIs) which afforded some scope for my Marxist perspective. I asked the girls in the sixth form what they would most like to learn about in science and they mentioned health and environment but also their social effects. A curriculum which related science to

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society would, it seems, benefit young women and encourage more women to do science. The BBC Education department were running debates on science and social issues and they came along to record a discussion between 16 and 17 year olds in my science group about nuclear power. What was so striking was both how passionate these young women felt and that those who were not the higher academic achievers seemed to be the best informed. A socio-scientific approach would both stimulate interest and encourage under-achieving students to do science. And the research suggested that presenting science in a social context had no detrimental effect on standards (Barker & Millar, 2000). A number of contemporaneous events corresponded with my feelings about teaching SSIs. There was more media discourse about science (mad cow’s disease, Chernobyl, genomics) and science issues entering overtly and publicly into the political arena. In 1985 the Public Understanding of Science report commissioned by the Royal Society suggested that scientific institutions should be more media savvy (The Royal Society, 1985). At the same time a lot of research appeared demonstrating that the British (and US) public were ignorant of basic science (Durant et al., 1989), for example, only ‘31% of British respondents (to a quiz item) knew that electrons are smaller than atoms’ (p.12). It was time for a top-down approach. Such ignorance could not sustain a scientifically literate society. How, for example, some commentators exploded, could you have a debate about the introduction of Genetically Modified crops if the majority of the population had no understanding of genetics? Many resources were published to use social issues to enhance the appeal of science, eg SATIS (Hunt, 1988). In the early 2000s the curriculum took up this challenge. Public examinations were designed, Science for Public Understanding, Nuffield Chemistry, and most importantly the GCSE, Twenty First Century Science, at first denominated Citizen Science. In the 1990s and early 2000s, however, a number of events took place which demonstrated the tensions in such an approach. There were the much publicised Science Wars (Gross & Levitt, 1998) which evoked the huge polarisation in attitudes towards the socialisation of science revealing both political and epistemological differences. The ‘conservatives’ maintained that the status and practise of science was under attack from post-modernists and relativists, for example Collins and Pinch’s book The Golem: what everyone should know about science (1998). These latter, the science triumphalists complained, wanted to undermine the authority and rigour of science whose validity was authenticated by the Mertonian norms. The attack from the modernisers aimed to demonstrate both how the authority of science had more to do with those in power than with any intrinsic rigour, and that it risked being weaponised by the right. Opponents of this view lampooned these ‘post-modernists’ of not having any experience of doing science themselves. This furore came to a head when the physicist, Alan Sokal, published a spoof article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in the journal Social Text, even though it had been peer reviewed (Sokal, 1996). In fact this attack on Social Text was deeply unfair. Many world class scientists (Gould, Lewontin, Rose) were also outspoken against scientism although they tended to take a more nuanced approach (Rose, 1997).

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In the early 1990s, a small book was published by a little-known press. The book was called Inarticulate Science (Layton et al., 1993) and was an empirical study of lay people dealing with issues which had scientific content such as the establishment of a chemical factory in the locality, parents’ caring for Down Syndrome children, Cumbrian farmers concerned about the effect on their sheep from the Chernobyl fallout. What Inarticulate Science demonstrated was that a top down deficit approach to public understanding of science was counter-productive. If scientists could learn to listen to lay interest groups and engage in dialogue much could be gained by both sides. Such a process would lead to scientific knowledge itself not just being made more palatable and presentable to a lay audience, but also significantly recontextualised, in other words not PUS, Public Understanding of Science but Scientists Understanding the Public (Levinson, 1999). So, SSI pedagogy was not a simple transfer of accredited scientific knowledge into social issues; it was driven by personal and public experience and recontextualised science. But with most schools within an explicit neoliberal agenda, aiming for good examination results in a climate of competition, schools were not fertile ground for SSIs. In this educational context perhaps Powerful Knowledge was the most propitious way forward. At the turn of the millenium I was at a meeting organised by The Royal Society which was the trigger for me to re-think more thoroughly the relationship between scientific knowledge and social justice. The occasion was the launch of the report Beyond 2000 (Millar & Osborne, 1998) which, as discussed earlier, was about making science more relevant to the contemporary world. The meeting was addressed by the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Robert May. May took everyone by surprise, not least one of the report’s authors, Robin Millar, who dealt with the aftershock with superb equanimity. May savaged the report and the sensibilities behind it. Socialising science to make it more palatable to marginalised young people was no way to address the problem. The problem, he insisted, was not a science curriculum more attractive to young women, for example, but better opportunities for young women, such as advanced childcare, to take part in science, rather than to socialise and dilute hard-earned scientific knowledge. His message seemed to me to be, although he might not have intended it that way, that the problem was not the knowledge edifice of science but social inequality. Such inequalities would be passed over by a supposedly progressive approach (Vision II) aimed at making science more attractive, and hence cheapening it, rather than looking at the real causes behind power inequalities in science. Social and political change would remedy that. Perhaps May was a closet Marxist (or a Tolstoyan). May’s polemic had even more force when I re-read Beyond 2000. It was vigorous in its claim to update science, to make it more relevant to the contemporary world. But what was not said was more significant: nothing about addressing injustice, inequality, the global problems that beset us. Writing considerably later I feel Annette Gough (2015) caught the politics of the socialisation of science in the compact between the STEM community and governance in which, as the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair said: “Science doesn’t replace moral judgement. It just extends the context of knowledge within which moral judgements are made. It allows us to do more, but it doesn’t tell us whether doing more is right or wrong” (p. 452). Back to the authority of the is-ought dichotomy.

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May’s position perturbed me for some years. I felt innovations like Twenty First Century Science were important and could help shift imbalances but it took me back to Anna Karenina: enable the powerless and disempowered and leave the academic content alone. Advocating school science for social justice was rather like advocating that a hyena behaves more like a deer. What was built into the knowledge structures of science could not be levered to say anything about social justice. We ought to stop trying and teach the main science concepts without worrying about their social meaning. They had none. Listen to the Naturalistic Fallacy. An example of this problem then materialised 10 years later at a meeting I was fortunate enough to attend in Australia, when my co-author and friend, Larry Bencze, presented a resource he had devised called Blood Diamonds. This text dealt both with the chemistry of carbon and diamonds but also with the exploitative conditions under which South African diamond miners worked. One of the participants at the meeting dismissed the resource as ‘not being science’. This intervention disturbed me. It was true diamond miners worked under terrible conditions but there was no necessary epistemological connection between that problem and the chemistry of carbon. Despite my belief that the practise and production of science was enmeshed in capitalist production, inimical to the interests of most human beings, I had struggled throughout my teaching career to illuminate this problem through the content of my teaching. In research I carried out for The Wellcome Trust on teaching controversial socioscientific issues (Levinson & Turner, 2001) one teacher made the point forcefully to me that you don’t need to know the molecular structure of Zyklon-B to understand the morality of the Nazi gas chambers. There was no denying the logic of his proposition. The justifications for a Vision I view of science education suddenly were very powerful. I was troubled. I was convinced science had to be set in its social context, it had to expose problems of social justice, but besides a firm belief that this was a good and progressive thing to do I had no other justification.

5.5 Towards A Resolution To recap. My problems as a science teacher were that schools were predominantly conservative institutions unable to challenge social prejudices such as racism, sexism and colonialism. Teaching about science and social justice had only superficial effects; if anything it served a corporatist agenda. I struggled with this for some time until I came upon the metatheory of Critical Realism (Collier, 1994) which addressed both academic content and social inequalities in a way that began to make sense to me and provided the epistemological justification that I felt was lacking in other science-society curricular reforms. I begin with an example. In 2014, I was working on a European Union project, PARRISE (www.parrise. eu), the subject of which was Socio-Scientific Issue Based Learning, SSIBL. The purpose of this project was to inquire into socio-scientific problems using scientific

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knowledge and a transdisciplinary approach. The main structure of the inquiry process is encapsulated in Fig. 5.1. One inquiry carried out in a school was to explore the efficacy of catalytic clothing (Levinson, 2022). Catalytic clothing was the brainchild of a collaboration between the clothes designer, Helen Storey, and the chemist Tony Ryan (https:// www.sustainable-­f ashion.com/catalytic-­c lothing#:~:text=Catalytic%20 C l o t h i n g % 2 0 w a s % 2 0 c o n c e i v e d % 2 0 b y, h i g h l y % 2 0 a c c l a i m e d % 2 0 art%2Fscience%20collaborations). Clothes can be designed such that when you use a washing powder containing the catalyst, titanium dioxide, the catalyst clings to the fibres of the material and helps to break down oxides of nitrogen emissions from car exhausts. Briefly, the catalyst works as follows. When it’s in contact with moisture in the air, it enables splitting of the water molecules into free radicals. These high energy free radicals are able to react with NOx fumes in the atmosphere and in turn convert them into the harmless dilute nitric acid which can easily be washed off the clothes. There seem to be no losers here. You can wear lovely clothes and purify the air, enhance the environment at the same time. A brilliant technological solution. What is there, as the trope goes, not to love? The students were enthused by this problem. How could you find out how efficient this invention was? How much NOx would be broken down and over what time interval? The students went away to think about a research approach. A few days later one of the students reported that what seemed like a wonderful innovation came with a back story, one which didn’t have any traction in the web pages of scientific societies which praised the wonders of Titanium Dioxide. Titanium Dioxide is indeed a wonder chemical. It helps to put the shine in gloss paint, is a constituent of toothpaste brightening the lustre of teeth in its role as a photocatalyst, and it removes contaminants from water. That’s the message. An important aspect of Critical Realism is what is absent from the narrative; absence is implicated in causes, e.g. the absence of a respirator

Fig. 5.1  Model for Socio-Scientific Issue Based Learning (SSIBL)

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in a badly-financed hospital is implicated in patients’ deaths. Well, this student had discovered a disturbing absence. Titanium dioxide is mainly extracted from the mineral ore, rutile, which is mined predominantly in Sierra Leone. A large multinational owns the rutile mines resulting in the displacement of fruit farmers over a large area and the destruction of their livelihood with minimal compensation (NACE, 2009). Corruption, avoidance of proper taxation from multinationals in a country ravaged by Ebola in 2012, meant struggling with a health infra-structure inadequate to the task of dealing with a stricken population. There are beneficial aspects of this production process but those are well-known. The student’s inquiry led her to expose this problem and inspired by this the group working with her unveiled other problems that go unremarked in common chemical processes. One reaction to this inquiry is to admit that it reveals a core injustice about capitalist methods of production, particularly in decolonised countries, to the question Larry faced about Blood Diamonds. Is it science? Back to the dilemma in Second Thought the two young women faced when trying to link their intrinsic sense of justice for all species to the practise of science. From a reductionist perspective the socio-economic consequences of extracting titanium dioxide aren’t science. I believe that Critical Realism offers a sound refutation of reductionism and a powerful way forward to link science to justice in the school curriculum. It also provides that openness which I feel Arendt was alluding to in allowing scope for ‘natality’.

5.6 Critical Realism I have written elsewhere (Levinson, 2018) of ideas that inspired me to learn science. I am both mystified and excited by how much of our knowledge is based on invisible, and sometimes, abstract entities: spinning atoms, quanta, force fields, electron charge clouds, viruses, nerve impulses, Black Holes. It is really a fairy story and a small child might well look askance, having entered the world of elves, fairies and imps, that at least the latter have recognisable shapes and forms and don’t appear and disappear at the same time. This world of real fantasy is indeed a compelling one. I’m prepared to stretch reality, to be surprised. But there are some things I learned at a relatively young age which experience told me were palpably untrue yet theory – and older and wiser others – informed me were facts. Perhaps the most enduring fairy tale is the Law of Falling Bodies. I think I was about seven or eight when a boy of nine, and therefore infinitely wise, told me that if I dropped a lump of lead and a feather together, they would both reach the ground at the same time. Now, like a good scientist, I tried this with similar objects, a stone and leaf. And 100% of the time the stone reached the ground first. I even saw pictures of Galileo standing near the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropping two objects to prove his point. Later on, having imbibed this Truth despite my experience, I learned that the Law held only if the experiment was performed in a vacuum. There’s a near perfect

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vacuum beyond the stratosphere in outer Space but few natural vacuums exist on Earth, at least those which are extensive enough to carry out this experiment on this Planet. This thought about vacuums reminded me of a picture by the painter, Joseph Wright of Derby, in the National Gallery of London, An experiment on a bird in the air pump, painted in 1768. It shows a scientist demonstrating the power of a vacuum to an audience, and the viewer’s eye is drawn towards a young girl of about nine or ten and her older sister or mother. They are alarmed and turning their faces away because at the top of the vacuum pump is a cockatoo, and when the vacuum is created the cockatoo will die because all the air will have been removed. In a way the two young women I described in Second Thought are contemporary versions of the two women in Joseph Wright’s painting. No one else in the painting appears to show any concern about the fate of the cockatoo. The picture does two things in a fairly straightforward way: it shows the power and possibilities of science and technology but also how such technology can result in horrific outcomes, something we are only too aware of in modern times. It convinces the viewer unequivocally that air is necessary for life. The principles of science are best demonstrated in closed systems. This distinction between closed and open systems holds for many phenomena. Either these principles need to be demonstrated in special conditions where everything is closed off except the variables being investigated, or corrections for error are always being made. Take the Ideal Gas Law. The message is in the name. No gas obeys the assumptions behind the explanations of the behaviour of the Ideal Gas; adjustments have to be made to explain the behaviour of non-ideal gases. Models are made, questioned, reassembled to explain data but data has an annoying habit of being capricious. Much of science learned at school is explained through the use of closed systems: conditions which do not pertain to the real world in which we live. The metatheory of Critical Realism addresses this problem in science. First, it distinguishes between how the world is and what human beings know about the world. It therefore avoids the trap of naïve realism (that the whole of Nature can eventually be described and explained) and extreme relativism (there is no objective reality; the world we act on is constructed through discursive interaction), both problems which lie beneath the surface in science teaching. Hence, Critical Realism postulates that there is an ontologically real world but our knowledge of it is derived through human experimentation and theorising which is mediated by culture, experience, background knowledge, language, social norms, in other words epistemological relativism. This does not mean, however, that anything goes, that one idea is as good as any other. Ideas and experiments can be judged and validated, and some knowledge has better credentials through critical testing, for example, than other types of knowledge. This combination of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgmental rationality can be depicted as the (holy) trinity of Critical Realism. A second aspect is that of causation. Take again a feather falling towards Earth. The Earth has a tendency to pull objects towards it but air currents have a tendency to

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resist the object falling, a tendency which is manifested particularly on low density objects with a large surface area. Objects have causal tendencies or causal powers triggered by particular events (Kaidesoja, 2007). For example a piece of metal and acid. A metal, such as magnesium, has the power, or tendency, to displace hydrogen molecules from aqueous acids in the form of hydrogen gas. Acids have the potential to oxidise metals. When a metal and acid are brought together this event is actuated. Use of causal powers allows explanation of events in the real world rather than the caveats added on to universal laws to move from closed to open systems. Once we consider interacting tendencies in the empirical world everyday experiences open up to scientific explanation. We can then think of Critical Realism in terms of three different dimensions: the Empirical, the Actual, the Real (Table 5.1). Take a stagnant pond in a park. I’m thinking particularly of an attractive pond in our local park which harboured fish, mandarin duck, coots, and lots of plant life on its borders. Then, the park moved out of local authority control, it became neglected (absence) and all animal life disappeared from the pond. Sitting by the pond today an observer can see and smell, i.e. experience, the decay. These are the empirical indicators, those that can be observed at a surface level. Then there are the actual events – the growth of anaerobic bacteria, the dead pond life, the lack of oxygen, the decreasing lucidity of the surface waters of the pond. The third dimension is in the domain of the real, the causal mechanisms that contribute to the problem. And these are multifarious. There are the biological mechanisms, the loss of plant life through lack of photosynthesis because of decreased light transmission through the cloudy water, the lack of oxygen from photosynthesis contributing towards the growth of anaerobes, the stench from the pond due to decaying dead matter and sulphides emitted by the action of anaerobes. Beyond the biological causes are physico-chemical ones – the cloudiness preventing light transmission, the slow diffusion of oxygen, the reduction in photosynthetic chemistry. There are scientific explanations for the problem of the pond. But these are incomplete, beyond these are socio-economic causes: insufficient care due to lack of investment, local residents without the political or communal will to sustain the pond, no infra-structure to enable response to the problem. And these in part might not operate because of disaffection, psychological maladies spreading because no one cares. These are real causal mechanisms but hidden because they act at micro levels or require sophisticated historical critique. My tentative point here is Table 5.1  Domains of critical realism in maintaining a local pond

Experience (observing pond including all senses and experiences of pleasure) Event (Signs of a healthy pond: clear water, water lilies; food chains; oxygenation; signage) Mechanism (diffusion of oxygen and carbon dioxide; photosynthesis; socio-economic-political structures which oversee maintenance of pond)

Real domain x

Actual domain x

x

x

x

Empirical domain x

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that the explanation of any phenomenon in the real world is almost always transdisciplinary, relying on knowledge from the physical and biological disciplines as well as the humanities and social sciences. In other words a layering of responses from different disciplines. This takes us back to the Third Thought. Much of the science I learned at school, particularly in the physical sciences, followed Plato’s nostrum, that the clues to the way the world worked existed in the Ideal conditions of the Heavens. Critical Realism is closer to earthly pragmatism; we must learn to explain the complex open systems of our earthly existence. To understand the importance of transdisciplinarity in more depth I turn to the concept of emergence. To reflect, for example, on a scientific problem a number of conditions have to be satisfied. It presupposes a mind, a rather abstract entity, but the notion of mind would not be possible without a functioning brain. Biologically a brain is a very specialised organisation of nerve cells. Nerve impulses transmit as waves of ions depolarising along the axes of nerve cells as responses to stimuli. The concept of Mind is more than biologically organised physico-chemical functions but there cannot even be a notion of mind without this level of organisation. Such functions are essential for a concept of Mind but Mind and Consciousness are more than these, in other words, Mind is an emergent entity. But if Mind is the seat of thought and consciousness and scientific ideas, endeavouring to solve the scientific problem could not come to fruition without the socio-cultural infra-structure which organises scientific production and the economic impetus behind this. The publication of a scientific paper depends on diverse interacting mechanisms  – physical, chemical, biological, psychological, social, economic, political. It would seem unreasonably reductionist to describe the quality of a scientific paper in terms of nerve impulses but if this production is an assemblage then they matter at some level. How can someone with a deficient diet, hence insufficient fuel to fire those nerve impulses, scraping to keep alive, let alone reflect on a scientific problem, contribute to that process? In doing that I’m describing a significant proportion of the world’s population. Science cannot claim to be democratic, open and impartial if there are gaps in these mechanisms. This is a reflexive opening for science practise. These essential conditions for existence reflect Marx and Engels’s thoughts on human freedom in making history. the first premise of all human existence and therefore of all history, the premise namely that men (sic) must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history.’ But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. (Marx & Engels, 2004, p. 48)

To understand the world we live in we need to account for ‘events’ such as the production of titanium dioxide or a scientific paper in terms of physico-chemical, biological, psychological, socio-cultural, economic and political, i.e. multi-­disciplinary explanations. Our world is open, single disciplinary concepts are insufficient though necessary, as are crucial explanations that challenge false beliefs, i.e. that the production of science is non-discriminatory.

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And so back to ‘blood diamonds’. It depends on the question being asked. If the question is ‘Why are diamonds so expensive?’ then the answer to that question has to do with the structure of carbon atoms in giant molecules which cause light to be internally reflected and produce the lustre. But such an explanation is inadequate without an understanding of how diamonds are extracted and their market costs. It’s not that blood diamonds aren’t science, it’s that they are not just science but so much more. To understand the world we need to explain its interconnections, in which we all have a stake. What should we do? Through my history as a science teacher and educator I have been an advocate of the ‘socialisation’ of science but came to recognise its contradictions. I have suggested that a Critical Realist approach is a potential solution because it incorporates social and political critique into the construction of a science curriculum  – and importantly into the socio-economic-political environments which influences the making of that curriculum. However, having a curriculum does not presuppose a pedagogy. A response from many science teachers would understandably be ‘We’ve been trained to teach science, not social critiques’. To devise a curriculum which is beyond the capacities of most schools and teachers is unrealistic and unfair. I should also add that my comments relate most closely to the system I know best, that is the curriculum and teacher education structures in England. There are differences, for example, between pedagogy in the UK and the US and the concept of ‘didaktik’ in much of Europe. I think, however, there are commonalities between science education throughout the world, and it is these commonalities I will try and focus on while recognising the differences. A Critical Realist (CR) approach enables a perspective which encompasses the ‘unseen’ both in terms of material entities but also in terms of social mechanisms that we so often take for granted but can be constituted as forms of oppression. I believe the advantage of a CR approach in schools is that it opens diverse avenues of connectivity, it opens the world for reflection and for new connections of possibilities.

5.7 Chemistry of Aluminium When I was a young teacher covering the topic of aluminium for the first time my concern was how to make it as interesting and relevant as possible. Aluminium is the most common metal element in the Earth’s crust and its low density and resistance to heat makes it very useful for aircraft structure, drink cans and food wrapping. But this didn’t seem the kind of information that would excite 15-year-olds. Most of them understandably felt it as a route into learning ‘the proper science’ which would be assessed in examinations, and their suspicions would have had a firm basis.

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The reason I have chosen aluminium is because most students – and I suspect many teachers – found the extraction and uses of aluminium topic ‘boring’, something to get through. The central scientific concept is symbolised in Eq. (5.1): aluminium ions are reduced to pure aluminium metal at the cathode during electrolysis.

Al +++ + 3e = Al

(5.1)

So to start with Eq. (5.1), how might a CR approach work here? The first point is that while that equation is a reduction reaction it is reasonable to ask where the constituents on the left-hand side of the equation – the aluminium ions and the electrons – come from. About 65 million tonnes of aluminium is produced annually and three times the molar quantity of electric charge is needed to reduce that quantity of aluminium ions. The electric charge has to have a source, and in the case of aluminium smelters, it is mainly hydroelectricity. Hydroelectricity is mostly seen as a ‘clean’ source of electricity and those companies producing aluminium are keen to publicise their green credentials, and keep their shareholders onside. To take an example. Rio Tinto announced on 9th March 2021 that they were upgrading their ‘Isle-Maligne hydroelectric station, which is essential to the production of hydroelectricity for the manufacture of low-carbon aluminium in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec’ (https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/releases/ 2021/Rio-­Tinto-­invests-­a-­further-­92-­million-­in-­Isle-­Maligne-­power-­plant). On the same website, in a note to editors, Rio Tinto add that its operations in Quebec ‘are powered with 100% clean, renewable hydroelectricity.’ As mentioned earlier we need to see what story is not told, particularly when that narrative is eulogistic. Some basic physics can identify what is absent. Hydroelectricity depends on a plentiful supply of water, i.e. rivers, and for that water to fall under gravity from a height to provide the kinetic energy for the rotation of a turbine. So the two main requirements for hydroelectricity are water and height -rivers and mountains -areas of outstanding natural beauty. Building a power station requires constructing dams, environmental despoliation. Moreover, fish are poikilotherms, i.e. cold-blooded organisms and the heat generated by power stations has a detrimental effect on fish stocks. Heat deoxygenates the water because the solubility of oxygen decreases in water as the temperature rises. What does ‘100% clean renewable hydroelectricity’ mean? Concepts such as energy transfer, redox, solubility of gases in water can be disassociated from any social context but once we pay attention to the world of experience their social importance becomes manifest. We can go a lot further with aluminium. We started with the reduction of aluminium ions, Al+++. What is the source of these ions? ‘Aluminium is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust’. That statement, on its own, seems made for an anthropocentric world, one that supplies the resources for all human needs (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). (Although a central question that I suggest science should be engaged in is the question of distribution). But the

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problem is that statement isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. Aluminium is bound up in very strong chemical bonds with non-metals, most commonly oxygen, as Aluminium Oxide, Al2O3. It is in fact found mainly in a mineral ore, bauxite, together with many other metal oxides such as iron and titanium and minerals such as sand. So the first problem is how to separate pure aluminium ions from all the other stuff – not a straightforward task and one that, as we shall see, has had potent effects on society. Back to some basic chemistry. Aluminium in its combined state is in ionic form. Aluminium has an atomic number of 13 and sits in group III of the periodic table. Because of its small size (its low atomic number) and its high positive charge in a combined state (3+) it has a high charge to volume ratio. That means it holds very tightly on to the oxygen. But this also gives the oxide an unusual status being amphoteric; it reacts with, and is soluble in, both acids and bases, unlike most other metal oxides which are basic. Hence when dissolved in an alkali, like sodium hydroxide, NaOH, aluminium oxide can be filtered from other metal oxides which do not dissolve in the alkali. Here aluminium ions combine with the hydroxide ions of the alkali to form aluminates which can be separated off from the other metal oxides then purified by heating. The purified alumina is then ready for the smelter. In 2010 there was a tragic accident in an aluminium smelter near Ajka in western Hungary. The storage tanks containing the alkali burst, releasing thousands of gallons of this toxic chemical into the landscape poisoning the water table, killing millions of fish in rivers and turning farming land into sterile red mud. Ten people died as a result of these floods. Caustic soda is needed for the extraction and purification of alumina. So why did this accident happen? The question has to go back to storage facilities and knowledge of the potency and toxicity of NaOH.  These questions relate to health and safety concerns, good governance, the political responsibility involved in building the smelter near to a populated area. To understand the causes behind this event we need to have some insights both into the socio-political context as well as the chemistry. We can take the chemistry of Al2O3 one step further. Electrolysis is a common component of secondary school chemistry curricula. For electrolysis to occur you need an electrolyte, an ionic compound such as Al2O3, alumina, with mobile ions. The ions are not mobile in the solid state but as a liquid, and they can be liquefied in one of two ways, solvation in water or melting the solid by heating. Alumina presents two difficult problems, solvation in water would generate hydrogen from the water, not aluminium, at the cathode because hydrogen has a lower electrode potential and would be liberated more easily. So if solution in water is not possible the chemical must be molten. But here is another physico-chemical problem. As stated before, the charged ionic bonds between the aluminium and oxygen atoms are so powerful that it needs an enormous amount of heat to melt the solid alumina, making the process impracticable and uneconomic. Since the purified alumina can neither be dissolved in water, nor melted, for the smelter how can the problem be resolved? The unlikely answer lies in a material called cryolite, Na3AlF6, a solid mineral found mainly off the coast of Greenland,

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and significantly, more recently in Amazonia. Cryolite has the following important physico-chemical properties: it has a low melting point and can dissolve alumina without compromising its electrolytic properties; it is also inert so does not interfere with the electrolytic reaction. A perfect solution. The story could stop there. But at the time of World War II Greenland, under control from Nazi-occupied Denmark, was the main source of cryolite. Air power is crucially important to modern warfare. Since aircraft need to be built from strong, durable, low density metals aluminium is integrated into the building of all aircraft. Any warring party which could manufacture lots of aluminium would be in a very powerful position. But the limiting factor was cryolite which could only be extracted from Greenland, more specifically, the small coastal village of Ivvituut. The United States colonised Greenland in 1941 and made it a protectorate which safeguarded supplies of cryolite to the Allied forces. In fact, at that time, strategy demanded that cryolite be artificially synthesised but the natural sources were still crucially important. Today, the coastline around the village of Ivvituut is completely devastated environmentally, and the local fishing industry destroyed, by the commercial opportunities offered by cryolite and other mineral sources located in that area. Finally aluminium can be recycled. Recycling aluminium means less strain on manufacturing plants and less environmental despoliation. Brazil has become a foremost recycler of aluminium cans in part due to the “catadores do lixo”, self-­ motivated rubbish collectors who can be found on the streets of most Brazilian cities picking up empty drink cans (Levinson, 2009). As well as performing a public service, the recycling of aluminium, the activities of the catadores do lixo has been so influential they have been unionised which enables them to have access to education and health. However such gains do not come without trade-offs. Recycling aluminium affects the production of primary aluminium and, while this might be seen as an asset it also affects employment where primary aluminium is made. So local benefits might be detrimental to more global effects and vice versa. Also, the recycling process involves adding a layer of varnish which produces toxic fumes in the process of refabricating drink cans, a health risk to workers involved in recycling. My points about the story of aluminium are threefold 1. A narrative engaging with social justice can be built around science concepts; 2. The activity of technoscience and social justice are closely intertwined; 3. The focus of teaching science should be through events rather than concepts. To expand on the third point. The events I have described  – the construction of hydroelectric dams, red mud flooding, the occupation of Greenland and subsequent pollution, recycling of drink cans in Brazil – have multiple causes which emerge from a transdisciplinary approach. I am not advocating that all teaching has to be transdisciplinary. To grasp concepts such as atomic structure, momentum, gaseous diffusion, focus on fundamental interlinking concepts is necessary. But to grasp their meaning is to transcend subject boundaries. It is more than application or contextualisation. Events that affect us all draw on different disciplines, and that understanding the concepts in those disciplines can be enhanced through their interaction in explaining events.

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5.8 Concluding Points The main problem I have encountered during my teaching life is demonstrating that science cannot be detached from cultural, historical and political considerations. CR offers a way of addressing that problem in teaching through events, and bringing in transdisciplinary concepts to help explain those events. This not only shows how science links to the way life is lived and basic aspects of justice but by helping to show its epistemic relationship to life’s problems it acts as motivation and interest. Both Plato and Aristotle were right. Universal laws hold in closed systems. But science needs another approach to engage with the real world. Scholars have mapped out the influence of competitiveness in schools in terms of results, and a narrowing outcomes-based agenda which stipulates targets to be measured on a top-down basis influenced by market forces. Stephen Ball (2003) has described how teachers’ professionalism has been ‘fabricated’, designed to meet pre-determined ends which mark out the worth of schools, and how nations stand in market competitiveness. Although this is driven by supposedly market forces shrouded in neoliberal verbiage about individualism and freedom, it has nothing to do with individual freedoms. Chantal Pouliot has demonstrated in her work with primary schools in Quebec how any informed action taken by students and teachers to enhance their local environment is challenged, and effectively suppressed, by the authorities. The danger, often invoked to justify a discipline-focused examinations-led curriculum is that schools should be a politics-free space. Let us leave the contradiction of such a position aside and note that a CR approach acknowledges connectivity and the responsibility of us all for the other. This is what gives meaning to what is studied. There are movements towards activism which my colleagues are invested in, for example, Chantal in describing the struggle with authorities over nickel dust, and Larry in his STEPWISE approach. Action towards social justice works when school students, for example, are motivated by the meaning of the knowledge they have, when they not only understand interconnectivity but have also developed the political nous to know how democratic change is effected. At the start of this article I elaborated three thoughts which have recurred during my experiences as a school teacher of science – and later as a teacher educator. If a curriculum, and associated pedagogy, can be developed based on interconnectivity of ideas then the ground is set for an understanding of the importance of social justice in aims for learning which, of course, includes science. I am still sceptical – like Tolstoy’s Levin – that schools can be instruments of beneficent social change but institutions, and society more broadly, are influenced by the consciousness of their constituents. This is only a start but the more teachers that engage critically with the possibilities of CR, the prospects of meaningful and just learning open up.

Chapter 6

Towards a Science/Education of Late Neoliberal Bodies

This chapter is a reflection on the etiology of my theorizing science education. Many years ago I heard Karen Barad (1999 Society for the Social Studies of Science conference) explain that she did not have a career trajectory as much as a wave function. Certainly, my own path has had uncertainty, circles, cycles, recurrent themes, and dialectical swings. This is a recounting to, first, make sense of this in the sense that narrative brings sense to the chaos of the world, and to, second, try to understand what it means to engage in “the state of things,” sometimes intentionally, sometimes driven by something more ineffable. Often I have counted on writings from social margins to make sense of and provide lenses through which to understand and re-imagine possibilities. Jasanoff and Kim (2015) point to national projects that articulate technoscientific futures as technoscientific imaginaries, for instance the moon shot served this function in the 1960s and early 1970s. I have turned to technoscientific counter-imaginaries of various forms: radicalized experimental subjects and politicized medics to help map more habitable futures in the sciences, especially scientific education. And this paper is, beyond the autobiographical trace, an argument for what we might attend to in those discourses labeled science education or STEM, such that we produce worlds capable of joy and the thriving of people and the web of life. While STEM boosters point to hypothetical shortages of coders as the foundations for STEMifying every technical field, my own understanding of what STEM means is grounded in interests in a different kind of scientific economy. On January 22, 2020, an article appeared in my Facebook feed shared by Canadian technology fiction writer Cory Doctorow, which to the extent true, revealed a set of relations around contemporary capitalism, science, and the null or hidden curricula of schools The article titled “Harvesting the Blood of America’s Poor: The Latest Stage of Capitalism” by Alan MacCleod (2019) noted, “The blood of poor Americans is now a leading export, bigger than corn or soy.” The blood economy that MacCleod reports on revealed hierarchies within science and STEM as it manifests in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_6

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contemporary capitalism. Driving this other-STEM world is desperation. The neoliberal economy leads the poor to capitalize their own flesh to survive. MacCleod writes Almost half of America is broke, and 58 percent of the country is living paycheck to paycheck, with savings of less than $1000. 37 million Americans go to bed hungry, including one-sixth of New Yorkers and almost half of South Bronx residents. And over half a million sleep on the streets on any given night, with many millions more in vehicles or relying on friends or family. It is in this context that millions in the red have turned to selling blood to make ends meet. In a very real sense then, these corporations are harvesting the blood of the poor, literally sucking the life out of them.

The image of rooms of people giving blood to survive, many daily, provides a radically different image of the role of STEM in the present moment. Rather than the ludic and creative spaces of big tech, MacCleod shows the drained (emotionally and biologically) bodies of the poor. Close attention to labor markets points to other forms of STEM stratification. Morales and Gutstein (2019) in their analysis of the racial economy of STEM in Chicago point to low skill STEM sweatshops, again, far from the ludic spaces of Google or Apple, that are the STEM endpoints for many poor racialized youth in Chicago. Together MacCleod’s journalism and Morales and Gutstein’s research gives lie to the claims of a knowledge economy, of STEM lifting all boats, of an information society. At the base of the economy is not information or knowledge, but the extraction of labor, natural resources, and human life. MacCleod’s documentation of the exploitation of the bodies of the poor (and the impact of such extraction on their health), provides a dark picture of what precarity means for many as they are made disposable in the gendered, racial and class structures of a U.S. that is deindustrialized, robotized, and that identifies poverty as personal responsibility. So in this chapter I try to imagine a science education addressing this zeitgeist and more critically account for my own evolving thought as I approach this moment. What is the appropriate form of science education given the kind of social relations that are likely to ensnare and exploit students, if we imagine them not in the playful halls of Google or Apple, but in blood-draw chairs and sweatshops? In other words, as a science educator, my interest is in preparing students for lives of resilience, resistance, and revolution in the worlds they likely face. In this chapter I wish to explore – by way of reflecting on my research, my teacher education practice, and my dialogues with this collective – what such a science education might look like, one appropriate to the material conditions and social structures that exist in the U.S. with an eye focused on engaging and transforming them. My purpose here is to trace an evolving project to help would-be teachers find spaces, languages, and standpoints for engaging science. My intention for my practice is to envision and produce more secure, more joyous, more caring worlds, and central to that has been understanding science as an enterprise (rather than a means of inquiry detached from political economy). My apparatus for engaging in this project as a researcher and teacher is that complex and contradictory research body that identifies as feminist/queer/post-colonial science studies, i.e., a science studies that always already takes as problematic, as oppressive, as needing transformation or excoriation the

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content, context, and machinery of knowledge (scientia) production. My narrative has a topology, that of a helix, where progress reconnects to past and returns in cycles and loops rather than measured as a distance from some zero-point. I begin with a contemporary moment of humans as objects of science, and will return to this same anchor after wandering to other frameworks and analyses. Before retracing these steps it should be clear how these figures of STEM or blood donors articulate to science and science education. I have argued that when we as teachers “conjure science,” as Chris Toumey has called such remote referencing of science as abstract and homogenous (1996), it is as one of four specters (Weinstein, 2008). First, science can be understood as an abstracted method or materialist attitude for solving problems. This I name “science as investigation.” When teachers talk about “everyone doing science” and “children are natural scientists,” it is this universalized vision of what science is that being called forth. But there is, parallel to this, a paid job of being a scientist, i.e., there are people with degrees that say biology or geophysicist who identify as scientists by their training and their employment. In other words, we can also evoke “science as work.” To a large extent this is the science that we see in Latour’s classic volume Science in Action (1987) in which scientists publish, argue with each other, try to enroll each other in their labors. Beyond the investigation we have collaboration, conferences, publications, emails, and other forms of sociality involved with working as a scientist. But if science is a job, it is a job paid for by someone who seeks profit or benefit from the employment. That is “science as enterprise,” meaning capitalist (or state or non-profit) organization which pays for some science and not others, which increasingly has become entangled with ideas of intellectual property, often detached from the scientists themselves. Scientists in Latour’s account are too autonomous, too independent of organizations, and perhaps that made sense when most professional science was happening on the dole or by the rich. In a neoliberal era in which state enterprise (as much science is in the U.S.) is forced to function as a business and businesses hoard intellectual property, Latour’s narrative makes less sense, and focusing on enterprise in addition to work helps explain winners and losers in a way Latour’s narrative cannot. But of course, science is not just a job, it is not just an enterprise, it is also part of a larger culture whose members believe they get viruses rather than demon possessed, not that in some social spaces the latter does not happen. “Science as culture” refers to the larger appropriation and contestation over the other three levels (investigation, work, and enterprise) of science. It refers to the ways that science as an ambiguous referent shapes homes, mothering, education, sex and so on, all outside the bounds of the other three levels of framing science. My argument is not that science is properly one or the other of these things but that to engage in science education should be the addressing of science at every level. Science education is about the coming to understand how science makes meaning and is made meaning of in “our” (our students, our own) lives. One note before diving in; this paper was written at a highly unstable time. Writing as I am in the United States, I began when neo-fascism was on the rise, and Trump seemed securely in office and before COVID-19 shut down schools. This project has since seen the return of center-left neoliberal governance in President

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Joe Biden and the sinusoidal opening and closing of schools and economy as waves of the virus spread and people accept and refuse limitations on their lives. So speaking to the state of a shifting world has produced a less than coherent narrative. It will be clear at times that I’m speaking to a Trumpian moment and at others to the return of the neoliberal guard. The state of the world resists both the time it takes to write, no less publish.

6.1 Guinea Pig Pedagogy My context is science teacher education; over some 25 years I have taught in three universities, and have tried to develop a pedagogy responsive to the inequalities and systems of oppression and despoilment characteristic of these moments and places I have worked. In the 1990s, in my novice years as a professional teacher preparer, I focused on the use of socioscientific issues as an occasion for connecting science to social justice issues. In the early 2000s I crafted the concept of the guinea pig pedagogies. i.e., pedagogies that frame science as relational, specifically a relation between a researcher and an object of research: the scientist and the guinea pig, as it were. This relationality was made the focus of bioethical politics by the publication Guinea Pig Zero (GPZ, 1996–2000; Helms, 2002). GPZ was a zine (informally produced magazine) edited produced by anarchist historian Bob Helms in the 1990s and early 2000s for the “professional guinea pig” – i.e., human subject, I will use the terms interchangeably in this chapter – for Helms the term Guinea Pig was preferable since it foregrounded the objectification and, thus, exploitation of research subjects (for a more detailed analysis of Helms’s work as a guinea pig and an editor of GPZ see Weinstein, 2001). GPZ reversed the panopticon and put the medical establishment under surveillance. In the zine, Helms published report cards on medical research units, uncovered histories of human subjection, and curated art and poetry relevant to his professional guinea pig audience. His zine could be read as an emergent standpoint knowledge that could speak back to the positionality of scientific knowledge writ large. Standpoint knowledges are narratives and social analyses that emerge through the negotiated understandings of the inequities of the world produced through social movements and struggles (Harding, 1991). They are not individual narratives of the world, but collective ones produced out of oppression that challenge fundamental assumptions about what is real and what matters (Butler, 1993). Of course, human subjects are not all professionals. There are multiple avenues by which people become subjected to science. Consider minimally the following: • Those who exchange body parts and fluids for money • Those who gift body parts and fluids • Those who have body parts taken or reclaimed from them, e.g. Henrietta Lacks (Skloot, 2010)

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• Those who sign up for experiments as a social good • Those who sign up for experiments either as income or as a misguided form of health care • Those who are medical researchers and self-experiment • Those who are coerced or not consented into medical experimentation • Those with digital monitors that translate their health into data for analysis and as a commodity. Here are subjects/objects of science splintered and imbricated by class, gender, race, prisoner status, etc., not a simple standpoint at all. But it is important to apprehend standpoints as historic accomplishments in which heterogeneous collectives of people develop a narrative of history and strategy of redress, as Sandra Harding (1991) has argued. Thus, despite these differences, a zine like Guinea Pig Zero could be seen as providing a contingent foundation for a guinea pig standpoint, of moving from a scattered set of biotissue “workers” (Bob Helms claims they are not workers, though Cooper and Waldby’s (2014) claim they are a type of labor akin to Uber workers and other “contract” workers) to a political community, connecting different bodies who are scientifically objectified, i.e., mined for data and material. To place this analysis in its historical context, such reconsiderations of socio-­ scientific standpoints were in the air, e.g., in the early work of Stephen Epstein (1996) who looked at how AIDS patients challenged clinical trial design and in Haraway’s sacralisation of Oncomouse™ (1997), the first patented mammal who sacrifices (or is sacrificed) itself to treat breast cancer. At this same time, bioethics were making news, as the Clinton administration formally apologized to the survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a U.S. Public Health Service study in which 399 African American men were denied care and left to suffer the ravages of syphilis out of morbid, racist curiosity (Jones, 1993; Reverby, 2000). I was also cued to rethink scientific standpoints through my graduate work with Michael Apple whose early work focused on ideology and the selective tradition (1979). However, as Bob Helm’s zine Guinea Pig Zero demonstrated, such rethinking was not limited to the academy, even if doctors, bioethicists, and other academics were the primary consumers of the zine, as Bob Helm’s confided to me. In addition to the academic context for my pedagogical invention was a historical context that needs to be acknowledged. Bob Helms’s standpoint analysis of human subjection in the U.S. context was enabled by the material and legal conditions of the 1980s and 1990s in which big Pharma relied on U.S. populations to run clinical trials and participation was deemed to be “voluntary” rather than coercive (through not consenting patients or using prisoners in coercive ways). Human subject recruitment was in the 1980s transformed into a market in which those conducting trials would advertise, and subjects would sign-up for experiments “voluntarily” in exchange for cash. This economy of choice allowed Helms and others to think of themselves as human subject “professionals” (Robert Abadi (2010) titles his book on Helms and others The Professional Guinea Pig). Only in this neoliberal transformation of experimentation could subjects see participation as work, and this allowed a certain critical analysis  – it is telling, for instance, that Tuskegee Syphillus Study survivor Herman Shaw hated the term guinea pig and, by implication,

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Helms’s praxis; Shaw was an involuntary participant and the comparison to an animal he found insulting. To a large degree the conditions that created Helms’s zine passed by the mid 2010s. The development international protocols as well as the kind of international movement of money and material enabled by globalization lead to the offshoring of trials. While there remain certain informal expectations by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that clinical trials enroll ¼ of subjects in the U.S. and Canada, there are no laws requiring it (Robbins, 2017). The abuses opened by this offshoring have been explored by Adrienna Petryna (2009) and Cooper and Waldby (2014). My point here is that the shift of clinical research to poorer nations located outside the colonial centers of power has meant that the population of professional guinea pigs in the U.S. ha been severely diminished, in fact to a large degree the moment of the guinea pig standpoint within the West has passed. Repositioning whose knowledge science education should represent, that of the objectifier or the objectified, makes central a counter ethics, political economy, history, and language of science. GPZ through its report cards, investigative journalism, and history of human objectification (as well as its guinea pig aesthetics which often employed the grotesque) could help students see not just the ethics of consent and participation, but the power dynamics and impovertisation which more often than not leads people to sign up for medical experimentation. GPZ in other works could serve as a “generative text/theme” in Freire’s sense of the word (Brown, 1978), or “figures” in Donna Haraway’s mode of analysis (1994), a prop to make power relations concrete. But GPZ is only one such figure/text; the stories of the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study provide another (Jones, 1993; Reverby, 2000), the story of Jessie Gelsinger (killed in the first gene therapy experiment) a third; the victims of the plutonium experiments (Welsome, 1999) – patients injected with plutonium as part of the Manhattan Project – another; and the history of Alexis St. Martin, whose injury was exploited to research digestion in the 1800s, yet another again. But beyond the histories of others, any experiment done with students, where teachers can step back and ask students to consider the point of view of the object and what it might think, feel, or know is an occasion to reconsider the relations of science and ask following Sandra Harding, “Whose science? Whose knowledge?” (Harding, 1991). For example, students of mine have asked 6th graders to consider the feelings and desires of caterpillars they were studying; and I push my students who are expected to conduct lettuce seed bioassays to explore the practices of science, to consider that they are torturing and killing life to get knowledge. This is an opening to consider model animals and the use of life (human and other) in medical/scientific research. To be clear, I never proposed that guinea pig pedagogies would be sufficient. In my teaching, guinea pig perspectives have always been layered over scientists’ and others’ narratives  – i.e., social perspectives not captured in the binary of scientist and object. The enterprise of science, meaning science in its capitalist (or nationalist) context includes multiple actors contending and contesting for claims on “the real” (Latour, 1987). I will return to a transformed guinea pig pedagogy, in the light of MacCleod’s article in a later section. As an aside, while acknowledging a shift in the political

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economy of pharmaceutical clinical trials, attending to guinea pig standpoints connects to a larger philosophical move of post-humanism that is engaging science educators. In other words, there is a continuing relevance to my guinea pig artifactual epistemologies beyond just the moment in which clinical trials drew on professionalized guinea pigs, and beyond just the biological and medical sciences. Drawing on queer technoscience studies we can begin to acknowledge the animicies (Chen, 2012) of all things and trouble the ways that living/non-living are themselves constituted in science as enterprise and culture. This idea of animicies which one finds echoed throughout posthumanism (e.g., in Haraway’s material-semiotic actor and in Latour’s actant) is coined by Mel Chen who notes “My question here is, what is lost when we hold tightly to that exceptionalism that says that couches are dead and we are alive? For would not my nonproductivity, my nonhuman sociality, render me some other human’s ‘dead’ – as certainly it has, in case after case of the denial of disabled existence, emotional life, sexuality, or subjectivity?” (Chen, 2017, p. 305). To understand atoms, blocks on inclines, clouds, and seismic zones as both socially constituted and agential means that we can consider a guinea pig pedagogy of physics, chemistry, and earth/space science, in which we might ask why we seek knowledge, how the objects we isolate resist, and how an animated world might figure itself? Certainly such a project can be found in the post-human philosophies of Karen Barad (2007), who speaks of entanglement, as both an ontological and ethical concept. “The yearning for justice, a yearning larger than any individual or sets of individual is the driving force behind this work, which is therefore necessarily about our connections and responsibilities to each other – that is, entanglements” (kindle loc 123). Her entangled ontology is about the living and non-living tied together. At stake in guinea pig pedagogies is an ethic of care (Noddings, 1984). Science is reformulated as a relation both material and affective. Power is made salient in the relationship between knower and known if we start by acknowledging that science begins with objectification, and that is the context for care; care provides relations within power laden systems (Liboiron, 2021, p. 115). But that is not all science is. I do not want to deny that science opens up and shifts worlds and power; science even in its objectifications often is the means to contesting power, as Kelly Moore has shown (2008). Scientists objectify and then contest climate change, disease etiology, and ocean acidification. How to enter that other standpoint, that of the objectifier, and still foreground an ethic of justice, while never denying the violence implicit in objectification? That question drove me to explore the politics and nature of science within struggles over injustice.

6.2 Red Zone Pedagogy I ended the last section with a question implying dissatisfactions with the guinea pig pedagogy project. In this section I want to trace how I came to engage with that questions.?But before getting to that shift, I want to note that other issues and projects were pressing even as I was working on the guinea pig pedagogy project.

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The attacks on the U.S. of 9/11 and subsequent Second Gulf War dominated the state of my world in the early 2000s. The attacks of 9/11 were almost immediately followed by the anthrax attacks in which politicians and media figures were targeted with powdered anthrax delivered through the mail system (Decker, 2018). While the anthrax attacks are largely forgotten today, it was those attacks which, to a large degree, made credible the rationale for a war in Iraq, which had had no part in the attacks of September 11. The anthrax attacks seemed to me to call for an analysis through science studies, especially, the anthropology of science, in which I had trained. The slipperiness of discussions of physical and national bodies, the construction of nature and nation, and the construction of national identity all seemed open to examination. Within weeks of the attacks I began scheming how I could analyze all the relevant news articles in two cities at different removes from the attack to see how this bionationalism differentially developed. Apple’s new operating system (OS X) had just been released and there was a paucity of tools for this sort of discourse analysis of 100s of articles. To make possible the project I started developing TAMS Analyzer, a qualitative analysis tool that is still used by qualitative researchers today (Weinstein, 2002, 2006). Among the things I was able to track, with Dr. Nidaa Makki, were the impacts of distance from Washington, DC and New York City on the nationalist identity as played out in the news. At the same time, both of my cities definitely felt involved in the attacks, especially through the use of security drills to localize the crisis. This localization was critical to the Bush Administration, and I was able to track how administration used the anthrax attacks to nationalize 9/11, to make us all feel attacked and to raise the specter of weapons of mass destruction, esp. biological weapons, which the architects of the war, through deception, linked to Saddam Hussein (Weinstein & Makki, 2009). However, this project, while important, did not have the pedagogical dimension that the earlier Guinea Pig project provided. I did explore the articulations of the anthrax crisis as a kind of public pedagogy of science, but from the point of view of future science teachers, it was less useful. At this same time, I also wanted to find a way to address political economy within science education; which neither the human subjects project nor the anthrax project had really made possible. Of course, political economy had mattered in these early projects. For instance, as noted, the development of a professional guinea pig class was itself part of a neoliberal moment, in which the creation of guinea pig markets were seen as an answer to the problems of research ethics and the theoretical end of coercion of human subjects in experiments after the scandal of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (Jones & Tuskegee Institute, 1993). Several key texts mobilized me to make political economy more central in my work: primary among them was Naomi Klein’s (2007a) Harper’s Magazine article “Disaster Capitalism: The New Economy of Catastrophe” which built on her volume The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007b). Published before the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, this article captured the bifurcation of social life, taking the infamous green and red zones of Iraq during the war (green zones were for the U.S. command structure and provided infrastructure support and a functioning economy; the red zones were left in political, economic,

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technological, and social turmoil) as a kind of clarifying example for how the world was being reapportioned. Just prior to the financial collapse I had been seeking a project that could explore science, activism, and this division between the haves and have-nots (green zones/red zones) and came across the street medic movement. The street medics are a community of volunteers who most famously provide medical support at protests. Their origins were in the civil rights movements and anti-war protests of the 1960s and 1970s; but they experienced a renaissance in the late 1990s in the protests against corporate globalization (WTO, IMF, FTAA, etc.), i.e. the autre mondialisation movement (Graeber, 2009). Focusing on the street medics meant my concern was shifting from guinea pig to “authoritative” points of view (the medical gaze), but it connected directly to the earlier project in that street medics, like the professional guinea pigs, emerged at least in part from anarchist communities. I approached a medic collective and participated in their meetings and trainings. I was particularly interested in how the medics negotiated scientific authority, multiple medical paradigms, and conceptualized social justice in their work. Certain themes were particularly informative as I tried to build some bridge between the world of the street medics and the pre-service science teaching that was my bread and butter. One of most critical bridges was the idea of the state of emergency or exception, which, on the one hand, provided the legal context of the medics – they operated under Good Samaritan laws which allowed them to deploy their non-­licensed, often uncertified expertise only in states of exception – and on the other, characterized life in the modern state (Agamben, 2005). While a certain strain of political theory has long posited the state of exception as integral to governmentality, in neoliberalism, this exception, or anti-democratic outside-of-law state action is foregrounded because governments are in a state of perpetual austerity as a means to privatize public structures and spaces. Neoliberalism here marks the shift in capitalist logics from one in which the state works with industry to provide stability to one in which the only valid solutions are based on markets and/or privatization. The role of government is reduced to creating (and mimicking) rather than managing markets (Harvey, 2005). As life becomes precarious under this expanded privatization, the state of exception is spread. Medics were interesting to me because they are trained to operate in this space of exception. For instance, they learn forms of medicine that can be used to keep patients well (or well enough) beyond the so-called golden hour after injury when they should receive clinical care. In other words, street medicine is a medicine designed is particular ways for life in Klein’s generalized idea of red zones. What relevance does this have for science education? If we reframe the lives of students (both ours in teacher education and theirs in k-12 classrooms) as living in red zones, a sort of critical science curriculum suggests itself, which could be informed by the legal and technical dimensions of street medicine, or, as one street medic said to me (not exact quote) street medicine should be what students learn in science class. Science education could be a curriculum of survival for communities in resistance. So the question becomes what sciences and knowledge are needed to live in states of exception? We can get tastes of this in the curricula that have been emerging around community gardens in schools (Aguilar-Valdez, 2017;

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Pierce, 2013). Less developed are curricula around health justice and wellbeing (Schramme, 2019), the work of Gretchen Kraig-Turner (2016/2017, 2017) being a significant exception. Health justice is a framework that challenges liberal models of health usually grounded in some market or means testing model instead linking health to issues of inequity, housing, environment, labor, and identity. Critically, the health justice model means going beyond questions of healthcare and its apportionment, but articulating health to questions of food, shelter, community, etc. In other words, this broadens the question of health from one of care delivery, e.g., medicare for all, (which responds late in the etiology of sickness), to contexts that foster wellness. To think about a curriculum of science education as health justice both at the level provision (learning about the body and its care) and of articulated systems (energy, housing, ecology, etc.) is to place science education and the body of scientific understandings at the service of resistance to power and to community needs. By rethinking science education as a curriculum of health justice, via the lens of street medicine and the precarity of red zones, we can imagine the classroom as a preparatory space of survival and resistance. It should be clear that certain practices of the street medics challenge notions of scientific purity. Much of the Nature-of-Science education literature is about boundary work in marking science from non-science (Gieryn, 1983, 1999). In contrast, the street medics practice what I call medical heteroglossia, i.e., an easy willingness to shift between technoscientific and Chinese or other scholarly medical knowledge systems (Bates, 1995; Weinstein, 2015). They place enormous emphasis on empiricism, and use blind clinical trials to test their treatments, but appear agnostic regarding the sorts of contesting ontologies medical emerge from. At first glance, such heteroglossia challenges the precision and materialism of science as it is normally understood. However, such integrative and empiricist approaches to medicine may find an analogy in science and science education. Certainly we have Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) and Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism (2021) as models of how to move between and entangle but contesting worlds. This idea of world traveling in science, to draw on Maria Lugones’s analysis of the phenomenology of playfulness and how we are constructed in social worlds (1990), invites an analysis of how language, representation (in its broadest term, not just having marginal “others” play at scientists through “inquiry”), and inter/intra action shape students as playful, wonder-full (Gilbert & Gray, 2019), and agents in ongoing struggles of identity and power. While such a project is ever-unfinished, we can see glimpses. Philip Bell (Bell et al., 2012), for instance, has worked with students from diverse cultures drawing in their family medical practices and articulating them to biology as a way to place their lives within a broadened understanding of science and biology specifically. But the idea of health justice as a framework for science education that can bring street medic knowledge to the practices of science education builds on work already done. Collaborator Larry Bencze dubs his justice oriented science pedagogy “STEPWISE” where the WISE stands for “wellbeing of individuals, societies, and environments” (2017a, b, c). In the very practical terms by which he leads his students to understand the ideological and material construction of commercial objects

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he is in fact approaching a notion of health justice. Isabel Martins (2017), another contributor to this volume, has examined the notion of well-being in the context of STEPWISE and notes that the term carries multiple meanings and glosses contrasting and competing ideologies. Well-being in her analysis signifies individual or subjective perceptions of happiness, objective material conditions, and ultimately a dialectic that transforms both discourse and materiality. However in my thinking through of a street-medic science pedagogy, I am not sure I want only to point to anything as specific as STEPWISE, and instead I offer it merely as one example in a spectrum of curricula that link wellbeing in the largest and most extra-human sense (i.e., ecological sense) to the common topics of science be they equilibria, chemistry, energy, etc. One can imagine many curricula, from those involving gardens, sustainable housing, local energy production, etc., that place science education at the service of wellbeing (or health justice) rather than professional reproduction (make more scientists) or the production of a populace of scientific faithfuls (as proposed, for instance, by Shamos, 1995).

6.3 STEM to STEAMD My development of both guinea pig and street medic curricula were largely exercises in providing figures against which scholars and educators could understand the ideology and lacunae in contemporary science education curricula and standards. They made particularly visible the ways that programs such as Next Generation Science Standards operated in re-inscribing the truth functions of science as a capitalist enterprise; the way such standards and concomitant curriculum erased issues of ethics and power. Their very unrealizability was in large part the purpose of such acts of curriculum theorizing, i.e., in highlighting the limits and failures of extant curriculum – for instance, by making visible the evacuation of all discussions of ethics in the Next Generation Science Standards. My day-to-day teaching, however, had to be much more grounded in the curricula that my pre-­ service students would be asked to teach, those same standards that they were asked to enforce, and the general labor of teaching as it has developed in the post-No Child Left Behind United States. This has meant grappling with the neoliberalization of education and the larger intersection of education and capital at every level, so well captured by Clayton Pierce (2013), Stephen Ball (2012), Michel Apple (2006a, b), Henry Giroux (2004) and so many others. In science education that has meant attending to the discourse and ideology of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), including the material networks trying to materialize it. STEM conceptually I read as both a discourse articulation [to use Stuart Hall’s (Hall et  al.,  1996) idea] and a boundary work project [to use Thomas Gieryn’s (1983) analysis of how the walls between science and other fields are created and erased strategically]. Gieryn noted that sometimes scientists would identify engineering as science and sometimes not, depending on the audience. STEM builds a boundary that on the one hand co-locates these four

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technical fields, and critically bounds them off from history, sociology, philosophy, literature, etc. More practically, the STEM era for science teachers has been defined by (engineering) design projects. These are the extension and infiltration of pedagogies resembling the “egg drop” (National Research Council, 1996, p. 162), in which teachers enjoined students to create an apparatus that would protect an egg dropped from the roof of their buildings using some laundry list of materials. Alternatively, STEM can be understood as an articulation, i.e., an ideological connection of dissimilar discourses, in which science and the other members of STEM subjects are brought together and made to seem a natural whole (again, Gieryn is instructive here as engineering has often been seen as very distinct from science). The structure of these engineering projects have involved 1. The teacher supplying a challenge and constraints 2. Students designing (and hopefully explaining the science of the solution) 3. Testing the solution, and 4. Revising the solution based on the test. This is posited as the “design cycle” (for instance, NSTA, ND). It is the injection (or further injection) of engineering into science education. To understand this as ideological it is helpful to understand what engineering means historically. Engineering is deeply tied to capitalist interests. It is a fusion of science and corporate projects. As David Noble (1977) notes, “[t]he professionalization of engineering and the establishment of engineering education as a recognized branch of higher learning forged a link between the corporation and the university that remains unbroken to this day” (loc. 63). This corporate form of solution finding is evident first in the top-down manner in which problems are posed in design education. Problems come from the teacher, they are not democratically constructed with the community. In theory such democratic practices could be enacted. David Sclove and his Loka Institute (Sclove, 1995) have pushed for a democratization of the design cycle for decades. Recent interest in socialist engineering for instance in Chile under Allende (Medina, 2011) also points to an absence in U.S. STEM curricula, a null curriculum, i.e., excluded knowledges in extant capitalist schooling. But beyond the question of whether design can or should be a democratic or, at least, a participatory process, there is something essentially reductionistic in the practice of engineering itself, which makes the general fetishization of STEMified science problematic, e.g., by the National Science Teachers Association who has been a major force in science STEMification. The logic of engineering design is one of technical fixes, that is, displacing ecological, community or social solutions with managed technological solutions, which ultimately will have unanticipated effects needing more technical fixes. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in Robbie Davis-Floyd’s work on technocratic ideologies of pregnant women’s bodies (Davis-­Floyd, 1992b; Davis-Floyd & Sargent, 1997). In this model the body is first modeled as a machine to be manipulated and adjusted biochemically and surgically.

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It is then managed by technocrats (doctors) whose knowledge trumps the feelings, experience, and wisdom of the woman (now reduced to patient-machine) herself. Furthermore, “[d]uring pregnancy and birth, the unusual demands placed on the female body-machine render it constantly at risk of serious malfunction or total breakdown. This belief [is] the foundation of modern obstetrics…” (Davis-Floyd, 1992a, p. 53). Thus each deviation of the woman/body-machine needs managing, normalizing, or treating which, given the complexity of the body, is inevitable. But while making the power, and patriarchal operations clear in this example, it should be understood as more than an example, rather a clarification. Nature is to the engineer a machine, and is positioned as female in its fecundity and complexity. The figure of biotechnical obstetrics is a metonym for the engineering of nature; or of STEM, where nature and science (the art of figuring [out] nature) are brought together. To engineer the world is to see it as a system or machine; it is to engage with a kind of violence (which may be useful, or necessary even) on the chaotic pattern of life. This takes form in President Trump’s STEM policy which was largely a continuation and reorganization of President Obama’s plans, esp. Obama’s Computer Science For All (Smith, 2016). Both emphasized the ambiguous idea of “computational thinking” which was now supposed to infect science and math education. Phase 1 of this new version of the old design cycle was decomposition, basically analysis of organic processes into parts which could be managed or replicated on digital platforms (Rich et al., 2018). As Joshua Tenenberg (2018) has argued however, this is a mythic form of cognition divorced from the situated and non-linear process by which real scientists (including computer scientists) and engineers manage systems. It is as un-natural a reading of software and computer development, as biomechanical obstetrics is of the woman’s body. Furthermore, as Tedre and Denning (2016) have argued, computational thinking (and I would argue the design cycle model) has in fact no real research to back it up, and there even exists research that documents that the model is completely wrong in some of its key premises. That said, the presence of design processes (as engineering or computation) does ideological work whether or not it comports to any reality. It is part of a logic in which science is about the production of solutions that ultimately must exist in a market. It is about shifting science and science education from focusing on understanding and modeling nature, to so called translational science, one in which the value of science is predicated on its market value. Philip Mirowski (2011) has best captured this transformation and its consequences in his work on neoliberal shifts in science. He notes three huge changes that have resulted in both the measurable (through citational and other bibliotechnical analyses) decrease in quantity and quality of science since the 1980s: 1. The proliferation of procedures to grant, manage, and ascertain intellectual property rights that limit both the production of knowledge and the ability of different organizations to cooperate.

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2. The decrease in publications that track unexpected phenomena in research, since all research is judged by either results or market compatibility (again so-called translation). This leads to a diminishing future research is often sparked by these unexpected effects. 3. The proliferation of junk science given that market rather than peer review or replicability is taken as the measure of value, in pure Hayekian terms (Hayek is one of the authors of neoliberal economic theory). (kindle loc, 3770) The Next Generation Science Standards embrace of engineering reflects, on the one hand, an awareness that science is increasingly subject to market forces and, on the other, exhibits a deep ignorance of the ways such an embrace accelerates the continuing decline of the science it claims to promote, i.e., through decreases in science funding, competition with corporate misinformation, etc. It also embodies the sort of ethical/political blindness that Sclove and Noble warn about engineering, best illustrated when the Earth and Space Science standards give a positive nod to Russ George’s illegal experiments dumping 100 tons of iron to force plankton blooms so he could claim carbon credits (Lukacs, 2012). I am specifically thinking of HS-ESS3-4 which includes in part the following clarification statement: “Examples for limiting future impacts could range from local efforts… to large-scale geoengineering design solutions (such as altering global temperatures by making large changes to the atmosphere or ocean)” (https://www.nextgenscience.org/dci-­ arrangement/hs-­ess3-­earth-­and-­human-­activity). Several things lead me to try to rethink science teacher education in the light of these concerns. First, the science and technology market collapsed after 2008, and the absurdity of the call for more STEM students became clearer. There were not shortages according to most serious analysis in the early 2010s. Many Ph.D. programs were turning away candidates. But a few loud voices (e.g., Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg) kept insisting that they needed more coding bodies. With the money and influence of this minority, STEM camps and classes proliferated, and STEM took over. Second, the durability of neoliberal ideologies after the Global Financial Crisis I found shocking. At first, the crisis seemed to signal the failure of free market governmentality, and yet, President Obama response was to finance publicly the neoliberal establishment, especially the financial sector. Prior to the crisis I had not really addressed neoliberalism in my Methods classes, not as something that was necessary for future teachers to engage with politically, but in the aftermath of neoliberalism’s resuscitation it became increasingly important to address the ideology head-on. Third, there started to appear in the early 2010s resistance movements to neoliberalism in the teaching profession. Critical among them were the Badass Teacher Association (BATS), initially an extra-union organization in which teachers came to each others’ aid to respond to teacher blame, e.g., around low test scores (Singer, 2016). If one teacher was singled out the local BATs would come and literally stand behind the teacher at whatever disciplinary hearing was held – glaring in an attempt to intimidate the teachers’s accusers. If bad press about teaching occurred,

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a “BAT swarm” would be initiated, and teachers would come to the defense of the profession in large numbers. The independence from unions was important. The union leadership had been pretty passive in the face of the high accountability measures and ­curriculum/pedagogy changes that followed from No Child Left Behind, which reshaped teaching along neoliberal lines (Koppich, 2005). Furthermore, non-union and weak union cities/states were hit particularly hard, e.g., in New Orleans, Louisiana, where schools were en masse converted to charter schools (Buras, 2015). So being independent of the union meant that the BATS could operate in regions where unions were absent or weak. What the BATS provided my teacher education practice was a ready network that could carry forward the social justice issues I was pushing upon my students, esp., around the neoliberal reform of education. Fourth, I received support in rethinking teacher education/science education, from the network assembled in this volume. Until 2013 I did not have a research community that was anti-neoliberal, not to mention anti-capitalist. My own institution had in practical ways embraced the banner of education reform (especially faculty affiliated with special education who stressed direct instruction, value added measures of accountability, and standardized testing, but also by progressive multicultural educators who saw testing as a means of holding the white establishment accountable). That year the National Association of Research on Science Teaching held its annual meeting in a resort in Puerto Rico. It was at that meeting that Larry Bencze, Lyn Carter, and I trespassed onto a beach side cabana and sat to discuss what we saw as the state of science education; its relationship to commercialism, capitalism, and power; and possible collaborations. I called the group the Occupy Cabana #20 collective; a short lived moniker since soon after I was included in additional collaborations on these topics by a larger group that had met and had had parallel discussions at the previous ESERA (Larry Bencze, Lyn Carter, Isabel Martin, Ralph Levinson, and Chantal Poulliot). The larger group was very focused on the role of neoliberal reforms shaping science education, and using various platforms, we would meet regularly to plan panels, publications and to listen and reflect on our diverse situations spanning England, Francophone and Anglophone Canada, Brazil, the U.S., and Australia. For the first time I was really collaborating with a group that brought, if not a common critique, a family of connected critiques working as we did in various formations of, at first, neoliberal governmentality and then later reactionary governmentality (with the rise of Trump, Bolsinero, Johnson, etc.). It was this group that inspired me to try to design a curriculum of resistance to neoliberalism for my students. Working with Dr. Julia Aguirre, who was my mathematics counterpart in our program, we crafted something I called STEAMD – science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics, and democracy. Dr. Aguirre added an antiracist focus; while I emphasized the political economy of teaching. Critically, we linked students with moments of progressive resistance, e.g., the BATS, Rethinking Schools, and the Northwest Teaching Social Justice Conference. For both of us it was critical to attack both intraclassroom issues including teacher-­ student relationships, curriculum, and pedagogy; as well as mesoscale structural

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issues of school organization, such as the role of mathematics and math in the sorting and selecting operations of schools. I also connected students to unions and other teacher networks within and between schools and districts. In my head was the idea that our program would be a path, not to STEM as currently imagined, but to movements of resistance of teachers against the capitalist reforms of the 2000s. I wanted to valorize the BATS and support social justice unionism. This was before or concurrent with the transformation of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) into a union that pitted an alliance of communities, families, and teachers against Mayor Rahm Immanuel (Jacobin & Chicago Teachers Union, 2014). The CTU was the U.S.’s first teacher union and had through most of its history focused on traditional wage and working condition issues. The transformation of the union into something community centered occurred in response to Mayor Rahm Immanuel’s mayorship which was marked by closing community schools, opening charters, and in other ways enforcing neoliberal policy agendas. The CTU pioneered a new form of unionism in which parent and neighborhood concerns were part of the bargaining and lead to powerful community support for the union. This was before the Red for Ed movement that adopted the CTU strategies and scaled them to state level teacher rebellions in Republican (Red) dominated states (Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona). It was anticipatory of, or developed simultaneous with, a teaching culture in which theory, language, and organization was finally able to respond to the models of reform and accountability that followed from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) – a full history of this time of resistance has yet to be written. Because of that groundswell, as I tried to explain to my students, I had hope for the teaching profession for the first time since NCLB. To codify STEAMD I created a zine that laid out the theory for the program as I envisioned it. The principles that I identified included that learning involves multiple perspectives, that schools themselves must be objects of study and a site of struggle/praxis, that teachers must engage with politics – but critically teachers and teacher educators must be politically engaged themselves over the very conditions of schooling, and that theorizing democracy must be central, since democracy is what is at stake so often in the exception of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005). I argued in the zine that democracy should not be seen as voting, or a decision making process, but instead (1) as a continuous project that is marked by ongoing inclusion of marginalized and oppressed people into empowering them to make determinations of their lives and futures, (2) a process of care rather than impersonal accountability or transparency, and (3) participation through multiple nexuses of teachers, students, parents, etc. working together to meaningfully shape the lives of students. I have the privilege of being the primary instructor for the science cohorts – I taught the same group in six courses over a year. This meant I had tight control over the curriculum and could build the program around these principals in a very tightly scaffolded way. I could, for instance, dedicate an entire course to teaching science, technology and society. I also controlled portions of our assessment system, and designed a portfolio around the STEAMD program values, meaning that the assessment of our students could be dialogic, allow for growth, and reinforce our values. Students also deeply exploration of neoliberalism and its implications for schools as

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well as resistance movements against these reforms. Students explore traditional inquiry frameworks, but also guinea pig pedagogies starting with reading the biography of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot, 2010), then reading my research on guinea pig pedagogies, and then using an STS process drawing on Latour and Actor-Network theory (1983), to develop lessons that explore the multiplicities of science and STS concepts (Appendix I). This STEAMD model was very much grounded in a resistance to the reformation of neoliberalism after the Global Financial Crisis. However, in 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election bringing to the U.S. a different assemblage of interests and ideologies. This shift if nothing else, signaled a need to re-evaluate the STEAMD model.

6.4 STEM and the State of My World So to engage with the possibility of science educations that speak to the state of the world, two considerations I feel are needed: the first is the impact of the rise of reactionary conservatism (I wrote this while Trump was trying to undermine the election results) and second the rise of the COVID-19 virus (I wrote this while numbers reached new peaks in the Fall of 2020). I will wrestle with these each in turn. What changes in a science education praxis are needed to contend with whatever we want to call the coming to political power of a reactionary power bloc, e.g., Trump, even as it leaves Washington, DC? First, this bloc has encouraged a kind of explicit sexualized racism that was in the aftermath of the civil rights movement in the U.S. considered taboo. Until his election multicultural neoliberalism was taken as the norm, meaning, that a discourse of concern with racial equity was highlighted while policies often continued to disempower and dispossess people of color in the U.S. (Melamed, 2011) This explicit racial nationalism – a phrase I consider redundant since the very idea of the nation-state is premised on such an articulation of race and geography – legitimates an acceleration of the red/green zone construction of targeted precarity that Naomi Klein has analyzed (2007a). This has meant a symbolic and actual increase in violence, from the state separating children (Cumming-­ Bruce, 2018) to the president encouraging fascist, racist, and other extreme groups to act, leading to an expansion of hate groups and crimes (Cineas, 2020). The role of the teacher as both a community member and functionary of the state has to be reconceptualized. The ethical stance and the risk of being asked to be complicit in the separation of families and the endangerment of children undoes a teachers’ core responsibilities of providing safe learning environments. But a second current in the Trump administration has been a more overt abandonment of the poor and people in need, including such usually sanctified populations such as veterans. In most ways this is just an acceleration of the bifrucating red and green zones Naomi Klein (2007) and Michael Davis & Daniel Monk have described (2007). Trump has accepted and institutionalized the cruelty inherent in neoliberalism leaving behind its ideological conceits, which are usually taken as the essence

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of neoliberalism (e.g., market fetishization). I am certainly not the first to note the strange ways President Trump straddles authoritarianism and neoliberalism. Nancy Fraser (2019a, b), for instance, has analyzed Trump’s rise in terms of shifting Gramscian neoliberal blocs The political universe that Trump upended was highly restrictive. It was built around the opposition between two versions of neoliberalism, distinguished chiefly on the axis of recognition. Granted, one could choose between multiculturalism and ethnonationalism. But one was stuck either way, with financialization and deindustrialization. (p. 18)

Fraser argues that although Trump ran against neoliberalism, in the end his governance was a continuation of the old order with the appointment of Wall Street regulars in Treasury (p. 24). Given this odd mix of counter-globalizaton, retro-racialization, and neoliberal cruelty, I was curious what science or STEM education would mean for the new regime. Lei Zheng (1999) has argued that STEM as it portrays itself in advertising seeks racialized youth, often for explicitly militarized projects. My own reading of STEM, as noted, as it swamps science education, is that it is about creating a market mentality within the field, in which research is replaced by competition, and curiosity is replaced with entrepreneurship. STEM seems to me a quintessential neoliberal project. As noted, soon after Trump’s election I researched Trump’s policies regarding STEM and science education. The first year of his administration was marked mostly by legislation that funded scientists to go into business (targeting women, especially) as well as strange media spectacles that focused on Trump’s ego and NASA, which is a pet projects of his (Wattles, 2020). One of these involved a “phone call” to the International Space Station to congratulate Commander Peggy Whitson, who had the longest time in space of any U.S. astronaut. Rather than emphasizing Commander Whitson’s accomplishment – which was acknowledged – the White House press releases focused on (1) the difficulty of the call, and (2) the labor put into creating a miniature of the oval office so that every camera angle could be carefully choreographed. Whitson’s fame was oddly displaced by the White House’s technical prowess in staging the spectacle that was the call to the space station. This initial period of spectacle and legislation ended in December of 2018 when, complying with federal law which requires such things, Trump published Charting a Course for Success: America’s Strategy for STEM Education (Committee on STEM Education of the National Science & Technology Council, 2018, December). In many ways the document signaled a mere continuation of the Obama administrations’ policies. Both Obama’s and Trump’s policies strongly emphasized multicultural neoliberalism, i.e., the use of a discourse of race inequity to promote integration within extant labor systems (Melamed, 2011). The two policies were not identical; Obama emphasized, at least in passing, racist structural obstacles to success in STEM subjects by minorities. He also emphasized the central role of public schools; Trump has seemed to merely blame employers for not being fair in their hiring practices. Interestingly, and probably reflective of Betsy DeVoss’s disinterest in

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public schools, public schools are for most purposes absent as an object of policy in his Charting document. Beyond the general erasure of public schools, Trump’s policy talks about community partnerships often emphasizing churches and businesses, presenting a somewhat reactionary vision of community in line with his other policies and his political base (which is strongly Evangelical Christian). These differences aside, the document was remarkably similar in tone and content to Obama’s. At one point I created a list of nearly identical quotes from the two documents emphasizing international competitiveness, the need for equity in STEM, the goal of “computational thinking” (which I problematized earlier). This similarity suggests that – following work by Ajay Sharma (2017) – behind STEM is a fairly stable network of philanthropic divisions of high tech and pharmaceutical companies and military contractors, who can be seen as the ultimate consumers of STEM students. Administrations come and go, but the STEM Funders Network (2020) remains, including Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Carnegie Corporation, and Dow Chemical. Understanding the funders, the sales pitch (Zheng, 1999), the anxieties it plays upon, the economic framing, and the internal logic for STEM helps us to understand and challenge the larger project of STEM and conceptualize alternative engagements with science that address both science’s structural and epistemological limits and its possibilities. So the goals and values of STEM as articulated by the Trump administration proceed and continue into Biden’s administration and beyond, though perhaps with less spectacle. These values are driven by the need of high-tech firms to have disposable populations of workers to keep wages low, though the rhetoric is often of militarism, nationalism, economic competition, and futurism which narratively play well together (national dominance through a military dressed in high technology). While the Trump administration may have signaled a discontinuity with previous administrations in many domains (international trade, for instance), this was barely evident in STEM policy. This is where journalistic accounts of the “blood and tissue economies of clinical labor” (Cooper & Waldby, 2014; Waldby & Mitchell, 2006) help us understand STEM. Alan MacCleod’s (2019) article, see earlier discussion, points to the ways that clinical laboring (i.e., guinea pigging or plasma donating) has transformed in recent years, linked to the development of “lively capital” (Sunder Rajan, 2012), and has now proliferated into a major industry, at least here in the U.S. Rayna Rapp (2015), in her review of Cooper and Waldby takes them to slight task for not having data on the extent of the clinical labor they analyze. MacCleod provides numbers. Blood and plasma remain major industries, greater than agriculture, in the late-­ neoliberal economy of Donald Trump (to be clear he is the maintainer, not the architect, of this economy). The breadth of this came home to me when I shared MacCleod’s article with my 2020 preservice science cohort. They had already read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot, 2010) and my article on guinea pig pedagogies (2004). I had already given them a guided tour of the literature on human subjects. Still, I expected them to be shocked, and some were; but two out of the six students were active participants in the blood economy, regularly donating. And rather than shock,

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they expressed outrage that the people in the article collected US $100 per week, whereas they were only receiving $75. A new critical pedagogy is suggested here, one that entangles and extends the guinea pig pedagogy of the Aughts with the STEAMD pedagogy of post Global Financial Crisis neoliberalism. This is a pedagogy of lively capital (Sunder Rajan, 2012) and clinical labor (Cooper & Waldby, 2014). It involves the science knowledge of those that are objects or raw materials of biomedical and tissue economies, at different scales and levels: the big data of the biobanks that collect both biological samples and digital information to the nurses, doctors, researchers and clinicians – of all sorts – that handle, examine, classify the people and their samples. It involves understanding the global nature of tissue economies and clinical trials. It involves exploring the boundary work between gift and labor in biomedical exchange. It is cellular biology, economic anthropology, and critical theory of neoliberalism all bound together to make sense of science at the level of contemporary enterprise(s) of science. In other words it is an articulation that looks nothing like STEM as it is currently configured and promoted. If guinea pig pedagogy was a tool for critique within the framing of “science as investigation” by highlighting the relationship between the studied and studier, the pedagogy of “tissue economies” is operating at that of “science as culture” and “science as enterprise.” Critically, both point to relations of power; one cannot engage in either pedagogies without a broad discussion of vulnerable populations and how they are constructed through dynamics of gender, racial, and economic inequality. (As I finalize this chapter a wonderful new book has been released exploring issue of plasma economics and cultures written by Kathleen McLaughlin [2023].) It is helpful here to draw on Sylvia Wynter’s critique of neoliberalism and its long history (McKittrick, 2015). She points to the ways that only some people get to be human within our colonizing, neoliberal econoscientific political system. The dehumanizing of the poor, or of immigrants, or of the racialized bodies from other than the European colonizing ethnoclass (to use her language), provides an epistemological/ontological foundation for exploitation, in this case rendering humans as raw materials for biomedicine. Part of a revised STEAMD pedagogy must be helping students follow the ontogeny of rendering of people as non-humans. How, first, some must be classified as other, markets are created for them (or their bits and pieces) to be exchanged, and ultimately how this demonization is managed legally, psychologically, socially, etc. We are not so much dealing with disposable populations as commodified populations here. And the platform economy, i.e., the economic models of Facebook and Twitter, enable this. Such platforms are machines by which desire, loneliness, and sociality are turned into profits, bought and sold (Fuchs, 2012). This idea of a tissue cultures pedagogy forms part of what I would call STEAMD 2.0. Clearly, part of STEAMD 2.0 is an understanding of how we are being sold cell by cell; gene by gene in biocapitalism. Part is understanding that the referent of STEM is hierarchical markets that involve at the bottom humans-that-are-notallowed-­to-be-human being excavated for parts, multiple levels of labor that are Fordist and post-Fordist in different dimensions (Morales-Doyle & Gutstein, 2019),

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and part is understanding how STEM is a strategy of wage lowering and overproduction (Charette, 2013). But part of STEAMD 2.0, is imagining an ethic of post-­ humanistic caring in which animicies of all sorts are considered in the form of knowledge and material production. It is imagining what Alexander Wehellye, building on Deleuze and Wynter, calls “lines of flight” (Weheliye, 2014), in an effort to find hope against the totalizing glosses that Agamben provides of the state of exception. It is discovering what Max Liboiron calls our L/land relations (2021, pp. 6–7). That D (democracy) in STEAMD still matters as a path to an alternative social organization, i.e., democracy. Part of D means models of joyful pedagogies that resist the tissue/gendered/gig/neoliberal/financialized/racialized/hypercommodified economy of knowledge, part of it means bridging students to organizations and networks engaging in alternative pedagogies. This has to be seen as a continuous, collective struggle by students and (we) teachers to rearticulate science in the world. Complicating this has been the pandemic of COVID-19, which is ongoing as I write, that in some senses emphasizes the urgency of STEAMD 2.0; and in some ways complicates it enormously. On the one hand, what could make an understanding of tissue economies more important than a pandemic in which blood and tissue is demanded by networks of nations and corporations racing for better vaccines. The media have provided an evolving science text that covers issues of the drug approval process, different forms of clinical trials, the ways that vaccines depend on other socio-technical machinery (e.g. refrigerants which are needed to keep the vaccine stable until its administered, but also the databases needed to track the recipients so they receive two doses), and the role of politics in the success and failure of medicine. Of course, part of the curriculum (story) of COVID-19 is also about disposable populations, as the oppressed in a variety of modes (racial, geographic, etc.) are forced to expose themselves (or starve) and thus are suffering and dying in higher numbers (Walsh, 2020) than the ruling ethnoclass. But COVID-19 has also made such a curriculum challenging, i.e., schools as institutions are flailing. Absenteeism has spiked, meaning teachers are reaching fewer students and, because they are chaotically tossed into remote (online and not online) pedagogies, connecting with students is even less effective. Washington State, where I live and work, about 29,000 students have gone missing (Shapiro, 2022). Over the summer of 2020 I invited alumni of our program back to speak to the current class, they were seeing only about 50% of their students (some had lost ¾ of their classes). But beyond the question of attendance is a larger crisis of presence, of being present in a time and space set aside for instruction/learning. Elsewhere I have discussed how this moment is marked by what Boaventura de Sousa Santos points to as “the sociology of absences” (2020). This sociology he is crafting is addressing of large scale acts of structural violence – the removal and detention of immigrants behind private prison walls, for instance. But the idea of how the virus and its quarantine circulate absence is much larger than this. As I taught through Zoom, multiple forms of absence emerged. Of course, there were the students who dropped out, because of new work schedules, sudden financial calamity, mourning over the dead, and a simple inability to engage in an online setting, but even those who were there, were palpably absent to me. My undergraduates mostly

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turned off their cameras often because of low quality Internet services and provide me with a sea of little black squares to teach to – they were blocked from having images/avatars for FERPA or some other reason by the college. Even if their cameras were on, there was a sense of absence. Their eyes never quite looked at me, there was always – and I have nothing but sympathy for this – distraction, sometimes needed after long days of sitting and Zooming. Of course, as someone who believes that we learn what we do in a Deweyan sense – or in a McLuhan (1964) sense of the medium being the message – I felt deeply another absence, the absence of a pedagogy that involves the body, that develops a connected sense of community. I tried to simulate aspects of that. I would give the class problems, such as using Zoom in a grid layout to create a single image, but it was simulation, it was a partial reconstruction of the lessons I intended them to learn. Demographic and affective absences are ubiquitous in the interregnum that COVID-19 has induced. But my experience of absence, is metonymic of the larger transformation of education which reproduces the red/green zone divide. The media mostly have grasped this through quantitative measures. The rather ominous McKinsey Group, who bill themselves as a “Global Management Consulting Firm” (known for their entanglements with authoritarian regimes and participation in the OxyContin crisis; see Wikipedia, 2020) have translated this anxiety to concerns over impacts to the achievement gap of brown and black students (Dorn et al., 2020), while the newspaper EdWeek has fretted over students’ lost contact hours again, noting that this is a problem of the have-nots rather than the haves (Gewertz, 2020), stating “EdWeek data suggest[s] that risk is even greater for students in high-need neighborhoods” (p. 14). But all that this anxiety points to is that life is precarious for those in the red zones of neoliberalism. And it signals how those who need STEAMD 2.0 the most because they are facing the risks of the tissue economy and disposability generally are least likely to receive it, especially if schools are the sole delivery vehicles for critical knowledge. So maybe the primary battle to engage with after the COVID-19 crisis passes is the re-establishment of schools. This entails however engaging in the continuing struggle to create spaces of radical responsiveness to the lives of students that challenge systems of power/knowledge as they are configure the “state of our world.” That means resisting a standardized system, premised on standardized students. Thus, critical in this moment is the continuing push back against standards which so often leave little terrain for radical visions of the future. But I don’t want to merely reject standards, instead I want to think about what is needed in the current state of the world, that is the goal of STEAMD 2.0. I think, to promote something positive rather than mere critique, such a programme needs to be premised around three elements, which largely regurgitates what has been said: 1. Systems, skills, and knowledge for precarity: as social systems and institutions come under attack. If we are living and/or teaching in neoliberal red zones, then the knowledge and frameworks must support wellbeing in those geographies. This means a focus on medicine, shelter, food, and other sciences of life for unstable social worlds, but also on the social technologies: cooperatives,

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processes of decision making, democratic engagement with communities, that can provide a kind of steadiness in the face of social volatility as states discipline and abandon constituent populations. Clearly, I am thinking here of the street medics and the development of low technologies of life support for riots, natural disasters, homeless encampments and other zones of fragile living. 2. Understandings of tissue economies and the segregated nature of STEM as well as guinea pig standpoints. STEM in the discussions I have been part of always emerges as some natural reflection of the confluence of science, engineering, and technology – with math being some sort of glue needed for all things. Instead, it might be worth thinking about STEM as something that happens to students and their communities, that is STEM is imposed, it interrupts and violates their community’s systems. Helping students understand the levels of STEM, from assembly clean rooms and Fordist electronics assembly lines to blood draws to the romper rooms of Google and Facebook can help students understand the politics and the ways theories and machines incorporate the ideologies of their makers. 3. Engagements with science that are global, heteroglossic, and contested. For science to be a meaningful system of knowledge generation in the world’s red zones, it has to be seen as of those zones. It has to able to be (at least partially) in what Bakhtin (1981) has called the internally persuasive languages of the communities living in precarity. To achieve this, it helps to have a people’s history of science, an anti-colonial vision of science, and a dynamic vision of science that rejects internalist, Western narratives of knowledge development. Of course, science is often used as part of what defines Western, but that is in no way necessary; people have engaged with the meaning of phenomena globally, and furthermore, those plural understandings or models are part of what is incorporated in what we think of as enterprise science. Of course, while science is done everywhere, it accumulates and becomes weaponized as it enters imperial hubs – because of the expense of science, because such hubs draw people in, because empires as they expand must engage with a wide variety of phenomena (diseases, climates, geographies) – which isn’t to say they respect or understand what and who they come across. But knowledge production is not some special skill of the powerful. Science can contend with having multiple framings, metaphors, models. Our students can be, as the Street Medics learned to be, heteroglossic. This idea of multiplicity in science is what the ethnographer Sharon Traweek (1996) is arguing for when she writes, Does thinking without singularities mean we cannot think carefully about ourselves, other human beings, and our phenomenal world? Not only are we doing it, we already know how to be playful and graceful as we think, dance, and sing about ourselves, the other humans, and our world. What is the name of some of these other ways of making sense? I always look to the students in artificial intelligence, graphics, and music to answer that one: I know that they can already talk powerfully about complexity, composition, instabilities, variations, transformations, irregularities, patterns, morphing, and diversity in performance, research design, research design, images, software design, scores, and data analysis. (p. 148)

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This embrace is necessary since enterprise science and its singular discourse is tied to objectification and experiences of abuse; singularity is the singularity of the center (what Bakhtin calls authoritative discourse). Such visions of knowledge as plural get their clearest enunciation among anti-colonial scholars. Walter Mignolo (2015) argues that Sylvia Wynter constructs a notion of scientia, which premises a knowledge production economy that does not demand some people be less-than-human. For Wynter, the core principle of whatever scientia or successor science system develops, is “sociogeny” which he explains as “the process of languaging and knowing. It uncovers the differential workings of power embedded in the rankings of languages in the modern/colonial world order” (p. 115). In positioning language as equally important as “energy” in physics or “genetics” in biology, Wynter is arguing that all sciences, i.e., ways of knowing, must be grounded in the idea/knowledge that knowledge itself is socially structured. This is not Wynter’s vision alone, however. For instance, it is also the hope within Sandra Harding’s idea of a “successor science” (1986) – not surprisingly, given the influence of anti-colonial scholarship on Hardings work (2011). Both projects focus on the social nature of knowledge production, rather than the idea that knowledge is unrelated to the social, as is so often taken as commons sense – e.g., when the physicists that Sharon Traweek studied declared they have a culture of no culture (1988). I am not claiming that these three aspects of STEAMD 2.0 are sufficient or complete. They are merely what I have figured in trying to imagine a pedagogy that can speak to the “state of the world” from the standpoint of the red zones, rather than taking the stable, power centered, vision of science that is of the green zones. They speak to trends larger than the reactionary era. In other words, these trends of red and green zones, of precarity, of devolved power in the center, will likely remain. What I have tried to do with STEAMD in its various generations is to imagine a science education that is not merely job prep for the few or a training of compliance in the many.

6.5 Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to trace how my analyses of how sciences enact and produce certain forms of power, social inequity, and injustice have developed, leading me me to research radical technoscience communities. As part of that scholarship I have tried to promote and embrace particular visions for schools and science education. These are visions that work against the grain of how science and science education is currently configured and ideologically oriented. I have traced how in the end I have felt an urgent need synthesize my earlier critiques, specifically, those of science as a practice and relationship – highlighted in my guinea pig standpoint analyses and pedagogies – with my understandings of political economy and social insecurity – revealed best perhaps in my study of the street medic network.

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In the end the effectiveness of a programme like STEAMD (1.0 or 2.0) cannot be appreciated in any short horizon. The obstacles to such pedagogies, i.e., those which stand in opposition to many of the goals of current schooling/science education, are many. The rich and powerful play an oversized role in organizing schooling to meet their economic interests, evidenced in the current STEM mania. To reconstruct education requires a long vision, and one that does not just transform schools, but society at large. Because of that link between schools and the rest of the social world our struggle needs to be part of larger social movements. To challenge the geography of red and green zones or to fight precarity means entering into other struggles for these same ends. Certainly in the U.S. Black Lives Matter is one such movement. With them are the mutual aid networks, the Democratic Socialists, the New System’s project, and other efforts at reimagining the terrain upon which justice and wellbeing can be founded. At present all of these organizations and networks are relatively weak. They have not achieved significant power, and their goals are at best locally reached. A reimagined science education or counter STEM, such as STEAMD, has the power to support these movements in that they connect these larger struggles with teachers through a relatively sacrosanct subject area – albeit mathematics is even more hallowed, as Gillen (2014) explains in Educating for Insurgency. In other words, STEAMD by itself is immaterial, even a path of despair unless it supports the social movements that are working and willing to embrace long time horizons, to achieve power to transform the precarity we find ourselves in.

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 ppendix a List of STEAMD STS Concepts Addressed by A Students in Lesson Plans

Chapter 7

Growing Pro-ecojustice Dispositifs Through Science and Technology Education

7.1 State of Our World I despair for the state of our world. Humanity appears under immediate existential threats (Ord, 2020), including regarding devastation from increasing average global temperatures linked to fossil fuel combustion (Ripple et  al., 2022), the apparent sixth mass extinction, largely from habitat despoliation (Wignall, 2019) and nuclear warfare associated with different (e.g., cultural) conflicts (Peters, 2019). We also continue to struggle, for example, to eliminate numerous ongoing illnesses like cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and other maladies connected to manufactured foods and other sources (Pollan, 2016). Recently, humans also are increasingly subject to privacy and self-determination compromises from dramatically increasing surveillance systems that continue to interconnect myriad living and nonliving entities (Zuboff, 2019) – manipulative surveillance that apparently has massively increased during the CoViD-19 pandemic (Nimmo, 2020). Along similar lines, very recent uses of rapid advancements in artificial intelligence technologies appears to threaten ownership of public knowledge, individual subjectivities, further climate disruption and much more (Klein, 2023). Such crises, moreover, may generate combined effects that may be hard to predict and, so, may increase societal disorientations about risks (Tooze, 2022). In terms of actor-network theory (Latour, 2005), causes and/or responsibilities for harms like those above may be considered shared among entities (‘actants’) that form co-effecting networks of living and nonliving actants. Many analysts suggest, however, that problems like those noted above would not have their character or extents without human interventions – a view leading many to call our current epoch the Anthropocene (Horn & Bergthaller, 2020). On the other hand, to blame all of humanity seems simplistic  – overlooking limitations of human agency due, for instance, to differences in inherited abilities and possession of and/or access to cultural and social capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Indeed, many analysts suggest that few © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_7

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humans have as much agency across networks as those most strongly influencing flows of financial and related capital, leading numerous social and natural scientists and others to name our current problematic epoch the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016). Although capitalism, in different forms, has had a long history, it appears to have dramatically increased its global hegemony – particularly in putative democracies – since about 1970, with widespread adoption of neoliberal (e.g., facilitated) versions of it (Cahill et al., 2018). As distinct from earlier laissez faire forms, neo-(new-) liberalism seems to draw its power from its orchestrated assemblage of myriad living, nonliving and symbolic (semiotic) actants into a massive and tightly-woven dispositif (Foucault, 2008; Latour, 2005) – a material-semiotic network prioritizing private profits. In this light, capitalists should not be considered individuals; but, rather, they may best be considered components of an alliance  – not unlike The Borg1 from the Star Trek™ entertainment franchise – that may assimilate almost anything into its material-semiotic circuits. On the one hand, assimilation may not be absolute, allowing, for example, adaptations in  local (e.g., cultural) contexts (Roudometof, 2016). A prime example of such an adaptation, apparently, has been so-called ‘progressive’ neoliberalism; that is, claims for promotion of such progressive outcomes as equity, diversity and inclusion that often fall short of promises but, perhaps more significantly, serve as smokescreens enabling officials to further implement neoliberal economic policies (Fraser, 2017). Regardless of such variations, net results often retain core capitalist ideological perspectives – such as possessive individualism (McMurtry, 1999), consumerism (Steinberg, 2010) and continuous economic growth (Matusitz & Lord, 2013). Often included in capitalist dispositifs are actants like: financiers and corporations; many governments; transnational groups (e.g., World Trade Organization); transnational trade agreements; acceptance of cost externalizations (e.g., arranging for workers and consumers to bear costs of commodity production and disposal); think tanks (e.g., Atlas Network); banks; many universities and schools; many social media platforms (e.g., Facebook™); various machines and devices; entertainers; transportation systems; STEM (science, technology, engineering & mathematics) workers (Krimsky, 2019); enthusiastic consumers; and myriad more (e.g., Hardt & Negri, 2019; McMurtry, 1999). Given their roles in generating and managing for-profit goods and services, fields of science and technology must be considered key actants in pro-capitalist dispositifs and, accordingly, share some responsibilities for aforementioned harms to individuals, societies and environments. Indeed, analysts like Krimsky (2019), Mirowski (2011) and Ziman (2000) suggest that pro-capitalist ideologies like those above have, to varying extents, corrupted integrity of many STEM fields, prioritizing private profit over general social and environmental wellbeing. Problematic aspects of such associations can be understood in terms of the schema in Fig. 7.1, an earlier version of which Roth (2001) used to depict reciprocal relationships between ‘science’ and ‘technology.’ Assuming these fields co-affect each other (indicated by

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg

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7.1  State of Our World

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Fig. 7.1  Model of STEM relationships

the double arrowheads), the model may depict a hybrid entity, perhaps called technoscience (Sismondo, 2008). However, also assuming that technology and engineering fields often work in collaboration and that fields of mathematics frequently are involved in related processes, this model may be a useful conception of the four STEM fields, which are currently commonly linked in educational contexts (Li et al., 2020). With reference to the schema in Fig. 7.1, relatively unavoidable problems may arise due to ontological gaps; that is, inconsistencies in translations between entities of the World and representations (Signs) of them that occur because of differences in their compositions (e.g., limitations of a drawing to represent a tree). More problematic, however, may be inconsistencies due to ideological gaps; that is, intentional mistranslations between World and Signs – such as when climate change ‘deniers’ misrepresent climate scientists’ results in ways that suggest lack of correlation between CO2 outputs and average global temperatures and/or anthropogenic causes of such changes (Klein, 2014). Arguably among the most significant kinds of ideological gaps in STEM translations (Fig. 7.1) are those pertaining to promotion of consumerism (Barber, 2007). Although that term may connote emphases on purchases of physical commodities, which are on the World side of the dialectic in Fig. 7.1, pro-capitalist dispositifs have apparently placed greater foci on Signs; that is, representations that may stimulate emotional and/or identity-satisfying desires for commodities, often more so than needs for them (Bencze & Carter, 2015). Clothing purchases based largely on current ‘trendy’ styles, versus functionality, are typical examples of such desires-­ based consumption. Foci on abstractions like ‘style’ arose, apparently, largely due to increasing efficiencies of companies’ production and manufacturing systems, leading them to emphasize repeating consumption-disposal cycles, especially by people and groups able to afford purchase prices (McMurtry, 1999). A particularly effective and problematic aspect of such foci are their uses of subterfuge. To stimulate commodity desires, representations (Signs, like ‘sexy’) may be created with such increased ideological gaps that, while consumers may associate them with real phenomena of the World (e.g., a car), which Baudrillard (1998) called a hyperreal condition, consumers may be distracted from consciousness of problematic aspects of the ‘real’ world (e.g., pollution from cars and unfair labour practices of their construction). With advances in artificial intelligence, consumer manipulation

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may dramatically increase (Klein, 2023; Ward, 2023). Such problematic trickery has many applications in pro-capitalist systems. Among numerous cases, there is much concern, for example, about pro-capitalist efforts to mislead members of the public through funding of research and/or publications to cast doubts on or distract people from awareness of research-based harmful effects of commodities (e.g., cigarettes) (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). Recently, particularly in response to the CoViD-19 pandemic’s apparent needs to track carriers of the offending virus, procapitalist subterfuge has ‘progressed’ to enhance applications of prosumption; that is, engagement of consumers in production that may, in turn, contribute to further consumption – such as uses (as ‘consumption’) of self-tracking devices (e.g., internet-connected sports watches), data (as ‘product’) from which companies use to increase consumption and, often, pro-capitalist subjectification (e.g., imperialist identity formation) (Wade, 2018). Given apparent essential roles for STEM fields in pro-capitalist dispositif activities, it seems logical to assume that equally important in this regard may be their educational counterparts. Indeed, McLaren (2000), for example, suggested that “the major purpose of education is to make the world safe for global capitalism” (p. 196; emphasis added). More specifically, Giroux and Giroux (2006) claimed that education often is orchestrated to contribute at least two broad categories of citizens useful to capitalists; that is, knowledge producers and knowledge consumers  – the former consisting of few people who can generate knowledge for production and marketing of for-profit goods and services while the latter much larger group may be composed of workers who are conditioned to follow labour instructions from experts and, for most citizens, enthusiastically and unquestioningly engage in consumption-­disposal cycles. Such a view of society seems reminiscent of that depicted in Plato’s Republic, with ‘philosopher kings’ perhaps now being represented by financiers, CEOs, etc., professional warriors now represented by engineers, scientists, etc. and masses of workers exchanging labour for food and shelter in both worlds (Lewis, 1995). A legacy of this kind, indeed, seems evident in some promotional material for the most recent and very influential science curriculum in the USA, in which authors suggested that STEM professionals, who comprise(d) about 4% of the workforce, can govern job development for most other workers (NRC, 2011). Mechanisms for sorting students into at least these two broad societal categories are, likely, quite varied. Several of these are considered below in concert with suggestions for educating students to overcome personal, social and/or environmental harms that concern them. From capitalists’ perspectives, ‘the’ neoliberal dispositif has been very successful – dramatically concentrating wealth from about 1970 onwards, often at expense of wellbeing of most living and nonliving actants (Piketty, 2020). Recent reports suggest, for instance, that relatively small fractions of humanity (e.g., just over 2000 billionaires) possess total wealth equivalent to roughly half (albeit, the poorest half) of the world’s population (i.e., about 4.6 billion people) – average incomes of which are about $5.50 USD per day (Oxfam, 2021). Such wealth concentration, dramatically increased during the CoViD-19 pandemic (Oxfam, 2023), depriving most living and nonliving entities of wellbeing, seems reprehensible. Indeed, conditions in

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such terms may be worsening – in light of recent suggestions that increasing numbers of nation states, like China and India, have become much more authoritarian, eroding liberal democratic principles like individual and human rights, gender and racial equality, and religious tolerance while still concentrating wealth through state-managed capitalism (Duncombe & Dunne, 2018).

7.2 Imagining Social and Ecological Health and Harmony Everywhere Given widespread harms like those discussed above linked to pro-capitalist dispositifs, it seems clear that significant disruption of such assemblages is necessary. Replacing them, however, appears – to say the least – challenging. Capitalist dispositifs have remarkable resilience; often adapting well to threats to their existence, such as the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis. There have been suggestions, for instance, that hardships inflicted on many populations due to neoliberal capitalist forms have greatly contributed to recent rapid emergence and spread of so-called right-wing populism (RWP) (Mouffe, 2019). Although different versions of RWP seem to exist and that analysts often disagree on their general characteristics, there appears to be much support for claims that they often feature charismatic leaders – like former US President Trump – who are portrayed as ‘saviours’ of common people against harms (e.g., offshoring & precarity of jobs) supposedly perpetrated by ‘evil elite’ often in government and, perhaps, working behind the scenes as a ‘deep state.’ However, much of this seems to be a ruse. Forms of disaster capitalism (Klein, 2007a, b) may be at play – with RWP leaders and governments ‘capitalizing’ on public perplexity and anxiety during times of crisis, using them to rationalize states-of-exception (Agamben, 2005); that is, giving them perhaps mostly tacit ‘permission’ to implement certain pro-capitalist (and, often, other [e.g., racist]) policies and practices that would not be acceptable under ‘normal’ circumstances. These may, for instance, include (further): tax reductions for rich individuals and groups; de-regulation of for-profit businesses, regardless of possible harms to individuals, societies and/or environments (e.g., from petroleum-based industries); and, privatization of public services (Rodrik, 2018). Included in such irregular policies and practices, as may be expected from arguments given above, are further or continued pro-capitalist uses of fields of science and technology (or ‘STEM’). Soon after being elected to the USA presidency, for instance, the Trump administration was reported to have implemented numerous policy changes to either minimize or eliminate climate science activities or problematize existing evidence of its anthropogenic and capitalist sources (Carter et al., 2017a, b). In addition to concerns around difficulties with reforming or replacing capitalist systems, there appear to be dilemmas regarding extents to which reformers should adhere to preconceived notions of a better world. Although numerous theorists have proposed societal transformations using different conceptions that prioritize social

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and ecological justice goals, for example, it also is essential that reformers acknowledge possible oppressive characters of overly aggressive efforts to achieve them. They may not want to be guilty of authoritarianism they claim to oppose. Accordingly, theorists like McLaren (2000) have reminded activists to emphasize democratic decision-making  – encouraging engagement of multiple and varied stakeholders in cycles of critical reflective practice (praxis). Doing so, of course, might, however, lead to results not aligned with reformers’ ideals. Having said that, allowing for considerable diversity in decision-making is, perhaps, a hallmark of democracy to be encouraged. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987 [1980]) conception of micro-political (e.g., local, contextual) decision-making, Omura et al. (2019), for instance, advocate for multiple worldings – different non-predetermined ontological arrangements occurring in various spaces. While acknowledging needs to promote multiple worldings that may or may not yield results aligned with certain desired values, there is much historical precedence for imagining ideal  – perhaps utopian  – worlds. Bregman (2017) claimed, for instance, that “[t]he great milestones of civilization [e.g., ‘elimination’ of slavery] always have the whiff of utopia about them at first” (p. 42). In light of struggles experienced by people and groups in reforming pro-capitalist dispositifs, many theorists and others recommend different forms of replacements of such self-serving assemblages (e.g., Hardt & Negri, 2019; Piketty, 2020). Forms of socialism, which can be antithetical to capitalism, may seem obvious choices. Having said that, many so-called ‘socialist’ states, like the former Soviet Union (USSR), have been very authoritarian (Borgnäs et al., 2015). More libertarian forms of socialism, as advocated, for instance, by Chomsky (1999) may be more suitable. They often prioritize democratic decision-making by local groups of community members, relatively free from oppressive influences of centralized power entities (e.g., governments in representative democracies). At the same time, there appear to be merits to continued promotion of some central organizations, such as those for providing essential services like universal health care (Monbiot, 2017). With escalating environmental problems like those linked to climate disruptions, however, there also have been numerous calls for prioritizing ecological vitality. Among these, forms of eco-­ socialism have, for instance, become prominent (Saito, 2017). Many of these promote values like environmental diversity and resilience to go with socialist priorities like social equity, diversity and inclusion (Borgnäs et al., 2015; Löwy, 2015). Rather than casting humans, for instance, as members of Homo æconomicus (e.g., self-­ interested, entrepreneurial, selves), we could be conceived as members of cooperating collectives that prioritize health and harmony for all humans and for the whole planet – judging societal ‘successes’ beyond foci on Gross Domestic Product, for example, also valuing global vitality conditions like those related to biodiversity, habitat uses and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations (Raworth, 2017). Perhaps aligned with such imagined futures are those drawing on a relatively old conception; that is, the Gaia hypothesis, which sees living and nonliving entities on earth as a living organism (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974). Arènes, Latour and Gaillardet (2018), for example, argue that socialist decision-making, while localized, must also take into consideration Gaian ontological perspectives that conceive

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of humans as not, necessarily, dominant over other earthly living and nonliving entities but, rather, incorporated into and co-affected by them. Perhaps above all, such collectivist ontologies would be guided by axiological positions of mutual care (Lent, 2017).

7.3 Eco-Social Change Through Science and Technology Education Among numerous actants that perhaps could be engaged in helping to transform societies into those prioritizing social justice and environmental vitality, it seems clear that prominent roles may be played by fields of science and technology education. Firstly, it is apparent that general increases in proportions of populations receiving higher education are correlated with political orientations towards social and economic justice (Gethin et al., 2021). More specifically, Jasanoff (2015), for instance, claimed that societal changes tend to co-develop with ‘advancements’ (acknowledging problematic changes) in fields of science and technology (or ‘STEM’). Such ‘co-productions,’ moreover, are seen as consisting – as described above – of certain assemblages of living, nonliving and symbolic actants into alliances (dispositifs) that tend to co-support particular ideological perspectives. Jasanoff and Kim (2009) have referred to such unifying ideological perspectives as key to sociotechnical imaginaries (SIs), which they define as: “collectively held, institutionally stabilized and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (p.  4; italics added). This conception also seems to align with Piketty’s (2020) analyses of developments of pro-capitalist systems for at least the last two centuries  – suggesting strong associations between fluctuations in such systems and normalized societal ideological perspectives in democracies (Foucault, 1995). As societal organizations that can, for instance, identify and educate potential scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and related professionals and provide other students with practical and realistic literacy in such fields (Hodson, 2008), school science and technology (or ‘STEM’) are well-placed for providing students with sociotechnical imaginaries (SIs) promoting social and ecological justice  – along with means for developing SIs aligned with students’ preferred value systems. As a science educator and researcher with degrees in biological science (B.Sc., 1974; M.Sc., 1977) and in science education (B.Ed., 1977; Ph.D., 1995), along with work as a secondary school teacher of science for 11 years in independent, public and private high schools, school district science consultant for 4 years and university science education professor for 21 years, I feel that my oeuvre of work has contributed to such goals. Having said that, I believe I am not a single entity and, indeed, in light of actor-network theory, I feel embedded in a network of living and nonliving actants that collectively  – more or less  – are active in promoting social and

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ecological justice through science and technology (‘STEM’) education. This claim echoes that made by Tennyson in his 1842 poem, Ulysses: I am part of all that I have met.

Such an ontology also can be conceptualized in more complex terms; with regards, for example, to contemporaneity – which posits influences from the past, contemporary actions-at-distance (e.g., via Internet communications) and future considerations (Dooley, 2010). Although I believe that my formative years featured considerable poverty and paternal psychological and physical abuse,2 for instance, I feel that my mother was extremely nurturing, a male neighbour served as a father figure and, notably, a secondary school teacher of English was instrumental in helping me transfer from a technical programme that would have led me to a career as an electrician to an academic trajectory that, ultimately, has provided me with sufficient psychological, cultural and social capital that I can use for promoting social and ecological justice through science and technology education. In that regard, there have been numerous local and international individuals and groups (and connected nonliving actants, such as computer systems) – several of whom are mentioned below in specific contexts relating to my reflections  – that I believe have made significant ‘Gestalt-like’ (e.g., collective, but not all equal) contributions. A few, however, stand out to me as supportive of my efforts to promote increased social and ecological justice through school science and technology education. Through long conversations in and around the host city (Vancouver) for our national educational research conference in 2008, for instance, Steve Alsop and I created an online, open-access, community-reviewed journal, Journal for Activist Science & Technology Education (JASTE3) – which, since 2009, has published numerous articles written by science education scholars, as well as by teachers and students. That journal, in turn, seemed to me to be a resource and inspiration for an edited book with chapters documenting and promoting sociopolitical activism through science and technology education (Bencze & Alsop, 2014). Also, as I later learned, Ralph Levinson became aware of my work through JASTE, which featured articles written by some co-authors here (e.g., Lyn and Matthew). Later, as our interactions continued to develop, Matthew, Lyn and I organized a symposium critiquing the ‘gatedness’ of the 2013 conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) that was hosted in a private Puerto Rican resort and, in that context, held an impromptu meeting in a private cabaña and, in honour of our transgression, named ourselves the ‘Occupy Cabaña 20 Collective.’ This collective then began planning a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies of Science Education (CSSE) focusing on biopolitics and science education (Carter et  al., 2017a, b). Meanwhile, in early stages of developing my understanding of socioscientific issues (SSI) education, I attended a pre-conference workshop on that topic,  Reports from acquaintances and family members suggest that his frustrations and authoritarian parental practices may be explained, in large part, in terms of the authoritarian personality (Adorno et al., 1950) – since he was, apparently, subjected to similar treatment from his father. 3  JASTE is available at: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/jaste/index 2

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partly facilitated by Ralph Levinson, at the 2010 annual meeting of the Australasian Science Education Research Association (ASERA). Afterwards, Ralph, some other colleagues and I planned a follow-up workshop about SSI education, which we conducted at the 2011 ASERA conference. During this workshop, in which we asked attendees to focus on controversies associated with mining, production and marketing of cosmetic diamonds, Ralph and I were surprised to conclude that some of the science educators in attendance claimed that such a topic was inappropriate for science education – perhaps more suitable, due to its apparent limited science knowledge content (e.g., carbon crystal formation), for social studies courses. In our subsequent discussions, we agreed that this response stimulated us to give increased priority to promotion of sociopolitical matters as they relate to controversies involving science and technology. While the above kinds of collaborations were happening, I also was working progressively more closely with Chantal Pouliot. As I increasingly learned after our first meeting at a Canadian conference in 2006, her work in science education research was different from – although very much related to – my work in educating students for civic actions. Rather than just using reports of others about sociopolitical actions, she was generating them – largely through her studies of local environmental political controversies. I was particularly interested in her detailed, long-term, studies of sociopolitical actions by a group of community members who were concerned about apparently toxic dust (containing heavy metals, like lead and arsenic) that they determined was emanating from the local shipping and storage ocean port. Her analyses (Pouliot, 2008), especially in terms of uses of theoretical perspectives like actor-network theory and categories of civic engagement in controversies developed or used in science and technology studies (STS) were particularly attractive to me. After exploring, at different conferences, the nature of the dust controversy in her city, we placed particular emphases on roles of competing dispositifs (Foucault, 2008)  – highlighted by ‘battles’ between community activists, their research and civic actions on the one hand and port authorities, shipping company executives, local politicians and port facilities and growth agendas on the other hand (Bencze & Pouliot, 2017). We have, moreover, analyzed and reported on this work in terms of the concept of socially-acute questions (SAQs) – which seems to be one of a few ‘science-in-context’ movements struggling for attention in science and technology education (Bencze et  al., 2020). I believe that this work, particularly regarding the dispositif concept, has had profound influences on my research and publication programme. I have, for instance, strongly encouraged teachers to encourage students to promote development of dispositifs that support their ideological perspectives (Bencze, 2020). For example, I have been inspired by Chantal’s orientation towards publication for general community members, most notably her book that provides them with a summary of and possible actions to address the controversy (Pouliot, 2015). In that vein, graduate students and I collaborated with Chantal and, in consultation with civic members who have led protests regarding

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the dust controversy, produced a graphic novel4 describing the case – which we have been actively promoting for educating students, future teachers and others about socially-acute questions that may inform civic actions (Zouda et al., 2019). Although collaborations grew since about year 2000 among different combinations of members of our authorship team, it seemed to significantly deepen in 2013. Most of us had gathered in Nicosia, Cyprus, for the tenth semi-annual conference of the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA) in September of that year. Ralph Levinson had organized a symposium about ‘teaching against the grain’ (Cochran-Smith, 1991), in which several of us were contributors. As is common in between conference sessions and for evening meals, we met for combined social and academic purposes. At one of these meetings, Ralph and I organized a discussion regarding possibilities of several of us co-editing an academic book. In our deliberations, although Ralph and I first invited colleagues to focus chapters on needs to politicize socioscientific issues education, harkening back to our experiences (see above) at ASERA 2011, other members of our group seemed to shift our foci and lead us to plan to address broader problems of neoliberal influences on science and technology education. We approached Bernadette Ohmer, publishing editor for Springer Nature™, with whom many of us had earlier worked, and she said that our ideas had merit. That support appeared to lead, in different ways, to events that – along with publication of this book – deepened and broadened ‘capital’ that I can use for promoting altruistic civic engagement through science and technology education. Just prior to our symposium presentation at ESERA 2013, Ralph introduced me to Isabel Martins. She said that she planned to invite me to Brazil to give a major address to science educators at their annual conference in October of that year. Shortly after doing so, I had a major medical emergency – and, because I was so far away from home medical care and family, she, colleagues and acquaintances took time to ensure my safe and effective recovery. Beyond admiring Isabel and others who came to my rescue for their academic excellence, I feel that I developed deep and lasting senses of belonging to her caring collective. With renewed health, courtesy of socialized medical care (from Canada), Brazilian colleagues’ generosity and Brazilian surgical expertise, I felt able to resume my career and associated network relations. In mid-June 2014, for instance, several of us on the Editorial Board of CSSE met  – partly funded by National Research Council of Luxembourg, the University of Luxembourg, and Springer Nature™ (publisher of CSSE)  – at U.  Luxembourg to brainstorm research and publication possibilities regarding science education and matters of culture. Among numerous publications that resulted from this meeting, I was fortunate to have led a chapter dealing with controversies surrounding relatively recent STEM education initiatives (Bencze et al., 2018) – the book for which, notably, was co-edited by one of the founders (Tobin) of the CSSE journal. This chapter seems to represent, like many of my publications, a form of direct sociopolitical action in my field of scholarship. Similarly, after a series of conference presentations, including an invited symposium (in 2017)

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u3LL9LbEu7fjl0mD9RKccGdPZFaQCoJ4/view?usp=sharing

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that later appeared to lead to a contribution to a book chapter (Bencze et al., 2019a, b, c), the STEPWISE book was published (Bencze, 2017a, b, c) – which featured documentaries written by teachers, graduate students and others and ‘commentaries’ about STEPWISE schema written by several educational researchers, including all co-authors of this book. Although all authors of commentaries in the STEPWISE book seemed to provide support for the framework, there also appeared to be more critical analyses and corresponding helpful suggestions – including about varieties of interpretations of ‘wellbeing’ (Martins, 2017) and kinds of actions to achieve ‘it’ (Carter & Martin, 2017). Having acknowledged ontological, spatial-temporal, emotional, and other complexities of apparent supports for ecojustice education, it seems that, nevertheless, it may help readers of this contemporaneous retrospective if I focus my discussions of networked influences on ‘my’ perspectives on science and technology education. Among myriad choices for organizing my reflections, it seems that the most appropriate framework in this regard is the ‘STEPWISE’ curriculum and pedagogical schema5 – a tetrahedron, in which learning domains (e.g., “Skills Education”) are shown to co-affect each other while also prioritizing “STSE Actions.” This schema has underpinned much of my academic work since I developed it in 2006. In the sub-sections that follow, I reflect on numerous (a)biotic actants that I believe significantly influenced particular suggestions for science and technology education based on the STEPWISE schema that may help societies transition towards those supporting ecojustice values. In the spirit of external validity in naturalistic knowledge development (Guba & Lincoln, 1982), readers may find various levels of usefulness of these networked reflections in their particular contexts.

7.3.1 Prepare Students for Altruistic Civic Engagement Although the bi-directional arrowheads in Fig. 7.2 are meant to imply equal distribution of influences (or ‘power’) throughout the tetrahedron, I placed ‘STSE Actions’ in its geometric centre to semiotically-suggest (which I also often explicitly state) that priority should be given to encouraging and enabling learners to, altruistically, ‘spend’ at least some of their cultural, social, symbolic, and other capital (e.g., the ‘peripheral’ curriculum elements, like ‘STSE Education’) on efforts to increase wellbeing of some or all individuals, societies and environments (WISE). This orientation, which could guide development and implementation of whole units of study and/or courses, is meant to greatly prioritize altruistic community participation and directly oppose possessive individualism (Macpherson, 1962) that I saw/see as a major driving force of pro-capitalist networks (Cahill et al.,  ‘STEPWISE’ is the acronym for Science & Technology Education Promoting Wellbeing for Individuals, Societies & Environments. Elaboration of this pedagogical & research programme, along with many open-access theoretical & pedagogical resources, are available at: www. stepwiser.ca 5

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Fig. 7.2  The STEPWISE theoretical framework

2018; Monbiot, 2017). Education, particularly education in science and technology, should not, in my view, be structured as a capitalist-like competition among students for access to limited cultural, social and other ‘riches’ contributing to and perhaps augmenting societal stratification by which individuals largely ‘hoard’ capital. As described above, this appears to be a continuing and apparently intensely expanding problematic phenomenon. I believe that, for ontological and ethical (axiological) reasons, each of us has a duty to share much of our ‘wealth,’ in different forms, in actions to ensure wellbeing of all living and nonliving things. Such an orientation appears aligned with Karl Marx’s (1845) famous advice: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it (11th thesis).

A useful starting point for rationalizing such a noble goal as altruistic uses of a person’s forms of capital appears to be ontology; e.g., studies of what may exist. A prime claim in that regard is that humans are reciprocally connected to all biotic and abiotic actants. A corollary of that view is that achievements (and ‘failures’) that any of us might claim for/about ourselves may more rightly be attributable to, as Alperovitz and Daly (2008) suggested, ‘infrastructure’; that is, in actor-network

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theory terms, assemblages of living, non-living and symbolic actants in which our personal and professional lives are embedded. With such a view of being, it can be argued that we have ethical responsibilities for reciprocal actions. On the other hand, reasons for doing so seem complex. Although some people may be said to have acted in completely selfless ways, it may be most common for people to act ‘altruistically’ for somewhat egoist reasons – rationalizing that acts for others may, because of our interconnectedness, be reciprocated, to varying degrees, to benefit us (Batson et al., 1994). Although it is extremely difficult to determine a person’s motivation for acting to benefit other living and nonliving things, my reflections on aspects of my (not, necessarily, separate) personal and professional lives suggests that my altruistic tendencies  – likely in some balance with egoist motivations  – appear largely driven by experiences, especially in my early family life in relative poverty and much psychological and physical abuse from my father, that led me to develop empathies for those in apparent need. It is, of course, one thing to want to help other living and nonliving things; but, one also must have means to do so. Again drawing from ANT and the dispositif concept (as I see them), civic actors can greatly benefit from supports from many living and nonliving actants. Early in his work to understand successes of mobilization of ideas, objects, processes, etc., Latour (1988 [1984]) noted, for example, that processes of pasteurization of milk only became commonplace in France when actants like legal arrangements, technologies for manufacturing, transport, etc., technological training and effective communication systems aligned with that cause. Likewise, any student wanting to implement effective sociopolitical actions to help overcome STSE harms of their concern would – based on the central placement of STSE Actions in the STEPWISE tetrahedral schema (Fig. 7.2) – be able to draw on ‘capital’ realized as learning in the four peripheral domains (e.g., Skills Education). Without sufficient learning in the peripheral domains and myriad other resources, students’ sociopolitical actions are likely to be limited. Indeed, in a study of students’ projects resulting from teachers’ pedagogical approaches in two schools in the same district, students’ projects were much more elaborate (e.g., incorporating actor-network analyses) where the teacher used direct instruction in the peripheral domains than where teachers expected students to develop concepts, skills, etc. in these domains largely through inquiry-based learning (also see below) (Bencze et al., 2019a, b, c). While teachers may have or develop desires and means (‘capital’) for promoting students’ sociopolitical actions to help overcome STSE harms, much such implementation seems likely to depend on numerous other – often co-affecting – factors. In a 3-year study of a teacher’s (Mirjan Krstovic’s) uses of the STEPWISE schema to promote more active civic engagement, we concluded that his abilities to do so depended on factors like: his long-term tendency for critical reflective practice aimed at continuous pedagogical innovation and increased student ‘achievement’ (including in terms of social justice); experiences, including through his graduate (Master) studies in education, that contributed to his more Naturalist-Antirealist

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views about science in terms of Loving’s (1991) Scientific Theory Profile (STP6), as depicted in Fig. 7.3, which seemed to contribute to (among several outcomes) his supports for students’ diverse kinds of sociopolitical actions; administrative and collegial supports for his ongoing critical reflective practice; and, the fact that local official curricula (e.g., MoE, 2008) included STSE education among its three overall learning goals for all grades. Inclusion of STSE education in local curricula, in turn, appeared to result from a national set of science curriculum recommendations (CMEC, 1997). At the same time, related to Ontario curriculum influences, although it only mandated that students must develop plans of action to address STSE controversies, Mirjan appeared to agree with me that encouraging students to implement their plans could be justified by noting that doing so was a form of assessment and evaluation – which seemed to be a priority of the apparently neoliberal government at that time (McNay, 2000). Finally, I and others may be motivated to act for others by role models like Greta Thunberg,7 a Swedish teenager who, in a relatively short period of time, seemed to have stimulated a global movement of youth and

Fig. 7.3  Scientific theory profile. (Loving, 1991)

 On the horizontal axis of the grid, Rationalists tend to believe in highly systematic methods of science, including rational judgements about theory. Naturalists, by contrast, assume that conduct of science is highly situational and idiosyncratic, depending on factors like psychology, society, culture and politics. On the vertical axis, Realists believe that scientific knowledge corresponds to reality, while (extreme) Antirealists claim that each person’s constructions are valid. More moderate Antirealists believe in useful knowledge. 7  Note, for instance, Time magazine’s attention to Ms. Thunberg’s causes by naming her 2019 Person of the Year: https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg/ 6

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others to conceive of climate change as a crisis; and also fight, for instance, for ‘system change, rather than [just] climate change’ (Thunberg, 2023).

7.3.2 Encourage and Enable Students to Use Claims from Their Self-Led Primary and Secondary Research to Inform Their Altruistic Actions Although the STEPWISE framework is intended to guide development of whole units of study, providing students with cultural and other forms of ‘capital’ (e.g., from the teacher, texts and others) and encouragement to ‘spend’ at least some of that on altruistic actions, the schema places much priority on urging students to base their sociopolitical actions – in part – on claims they generate from their self-led primary, as well as secondary, research. I have justified this recommendation largely using Wenger’s (1998) knowledge duality theory, through which he suggests that learner engagements (e.g., emotional and identity-related attachments) tend to increase as they are increasingly allowed to make personal decisions for – as illustrated in Fig. 7.1 – representing and changing the world. Although, as noted below, providing students with attitudes, skills and knowledge (‘ASK’), etc. appears to be essential for effective sociopolitical actions, much motivation to do so can be derived from self-led research. As a science educator and researcher, I have had numerous, mostly positive, experiences over many years with self-led knowledge development projects and have, accordingly, great passion for promoting them in educational contexts. After perhaps typical secondary school and undergraduate science experiences, focused mainly on learning science knowledge (mostly biology & chemistry), I felt fortunate to be invited by Drs. Klaus Brasch and Bradley White (instructors in my undergraduate programme) to join their molecular genetics research group and pursue an M.Sc. degree. Conducting research inquiries, with some struggles (i.e., trying to locate and characterize a specific gene on a fruit fly chromosome) and successes (i.e., characterizing ‘lampbrush’ [active] genes on the chromosomes, Bencze & Brasch, 1979), seemed to develop in me deep, long-lasting, commitments towards knowledge generation in science. Indeed, such commitments appeared to stay with me when I transferred  – largely inspired by my enjoyment as a university-based teaching assistant – to a B.Ed. programme focusing on secondary school science education. My enthusiasm for student-led research seemed to have, fortuitously, been reinforced by then-contemporary emphases on a ‘science process skills’ (e.g., experiment design) movement, perhaps signified by a popular publication of the day; that is, Science  – A Process Approach (AAAS, 1967). Congruent with this movement, I chose to produce a unit plan – a culminating assignment for the B.Ed. programme  – focusing on science skills development; about which I believe an instructor (‘Bert’ Horwood) further inspired my passions for student-led research by commenting that my plan was “superb!”

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Given my penchant for science process skill development and student-led primary research, my entry into secondary school science teaching occurred at an interesting time (1977). Although, clearly, it is difficult to precisely describe the societal zeitgeist (e.g., normalized values) at that time and its influences on cultures of school science, it seems that many ‘technologically-intense’ countries – undoubtedly led by the USA – were transitioning from a ‘post-Sputnik’ era to emergence of neoliberalism, both of which seemed to prioritize uses of science education in support of global economic competitiveness. The mood seems well-reflected by an oft-quoted statement from the US National Commission on Excellence in Education, in which authors suggested that international competitors’ socio-technical and educational developments represented acts of ‘warfare’ (NCEE, 1983). Although such a competitive production orientation may be conducive to science education focusing on skill development, it seemed that school science systems tended to promote more consumerist education – emphasizing teaching and learning about ‘products’ (e.g., laws, theories & inventions/innovations) of fields of science and technology (Wellington, 1989). I experienced this orientation early in my teaching career. My preference was, with reference to Lock’s (1990) schema for planning/analyzing variations in student learning control depicted in Fig.  7.4 (which I later learned about from Derek Hodson during my doctoral course work), to engage students in more student-directed (SD) and open-ended (OE) science inquiry activities – such as science experiments they designed and conducted and about which they were encouraged to draw their own conclusions based on available data, theory, affective factors, etc. A major emphasis of my pedagogy, in other words, was – in addition to

Fig. 7.4  Control of learning model. (Lock, 1990)

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teaching them about ‘products’ of professional science and technology – to encourage and enable students to develop knowledge (‘products’) that may (or may not) differ from those of professional scientists and engineers. On the one hand, I believe I was, indeed, able to strongly promote  – largely implementing my science processes unit developed in teachers’ college – such inquiry activities in most of my teaching career; mainly, it seems, when I was the only teacher of courses for which I was responsible in different schools in which I worked. However, once I started working in larger secondary schools in which I was just one of a few teachers teaching the same courses, I recall feeling ‘out-numbered’ by teachers who mainly prioritized teacher-directed (TD) and closed-ended (CE) approaches to teach students about ‘products’ of science and technology and, consequently, I dramatically reduced my efforts to encourage students to design and conduct science inquiries for the later years of my school science teaching career. Suppression of my orientations towards students’ independent knowledge development appeared to be, fortuitously, lifted, however, when I was appointed to be the science curriculum consultant for my school district – perhaps, ironically, because my early teaching career was in two very small independent schools (with salaries about 50% that of teachers in public schools), in which I needed to create new curricula. I feel that this position enabled me to encourage and enable teachers to promote student skill development and science inquiry projects and, in doing so, develop new relevant insights and practices. Particularly influential during my 4-year tenure as a science consultant seemed to be my experiences with the school district’s ongoing science fair movement. Facilitators of these events, at which students present summaries of their projects and are judged by ‘experts’ (e.g., university students, teachers and/or university-based scientists, mathematicians and/or engineers), seemed to broaden my perspectives about ‘science processes’ to include correlational studies (inquiries into naturally changing variables) as compared to experimentation (inquiries into results of forced changes in variables) and engineering design and field-testing. Such insights appeared to lead me to expand my science process skills unit that I developed in teacher’s college – producing a teacher resource booklet,8 including lesson suggestions and sample student activities for promoting experiment and/or study-based science inquiries and technology design projects. My revitalized enthusiasm for promoting student-led science inquiry (and technology design) projects might again have been inhibited due to relatively abrupt elimination of my 4-year consultancy position (apparently due to government/ school district budget cuts) had I not – again, perhaps fortuitously – chosen near the end of that time to pursue a Ph.D. degree in science education. I think it is not an exaggeration to claim that graduate studies dramatically changed my perspectives, practices, educational confidence and much more. Although influences are far too numerous to discuss here, I believe that my doctoral supervisor, Derek Hodson, was

 A later version of my Skills Apprenticeship booklet, first produced in 1992, is available at: https:// drive.google.com/file/d/1ILy340QmazY-CbVgmAzCm51_JgeJLcyw/view?usp=sharing 8

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an excellent model for promotion of substantial changes in science education that included changes to the nature of empirical activities (e.g., Hodson, 1993) and, for example, for educating me about the ‘nature of science’ (NoS) – much of his course material being incorporated into a later related book (Hodson, 2008). Given that mainly elementary school teachers of science appeared to have supported my efforts to promote student-led science inquiry and technology design projects during my consulting career, I chose to use action research (also promoted by Derek) for my Ph.D. thesis research aimed at studying possibilities for such project work in secondary school science contexts. Among outcomes of this work were a general constructivism-­informed science education schema for helping students to develop science inquiry and technology design projects (which, later, influenced development of the STEPWISE pedagogical schema), several related teaching and learning resources and, notably, research findings that suggested that students’ projects contributed to increased senses of intellectual independence (Munby, 1980) (e.g., epistemological and methodological autonomy) and new NoS perspectives – including, for example, that hypothesis development often followed, rather than preceded, empirical work (Bencze, 1995). My doctoral research also seemed to lead to my first publication in a refereed journal, a report of merits of and experiences with promotion of correlational studies in secondary school science contexts (Bencze, 1996). A major claim in that paper is that prioritizing uses of controlled experiments in school science may be popular because it can help to conscript students into further science education studies and careers – portraying science as relatively certain, which may not arise from studies, which involve multiple changing variables that critics often claim severely compromises their causal character. Having apparently had relatively positive experiences with them in my doctoral thesis work, my early research and publication programme as a science education professor continued to focus on promoting  – largely through action research  – student-­led science inquiry and technology design projects. Indeed, this focus seemed to receive a boost as I transitioned from doctoral studies to professorship – again, with apparent supports from Derek Hodson, who mentored me through two publications drawing on supplementary action research I had conducted with teachers of elementary school science during late stages of my Ph.D. programme (e.g., Bencze & Hodson, 1998). In the approximately first half (1997–2006) of my professorial career,9 my research and publication programme may be explained – as I now believe is true for my entire personal and professional lives  – by Lévi-Strauss’ (1966) bricolage concept. That is, in my ongoing promotion of student-led science inquiry and technology design, my action research foci appeared to depend on assembly of various, not necessarily ‘ideal,’ available supportive actants. As with much university-based research and publication work, this often seemed to largely depend on funding  – including financial supports beyond, as well as within, my  My professorial career included: a 1-year term position as Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan (1997–1998); 20 years as, first, an Assistant Professor and, then, Associate Professor (tenured, 2003) at OISE, University of Toronto (1998–2008); and, finally, Associate Professor Emeritus at OISE (2018–present). 9

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employing institution. In addition to ‘start-up’ funds entitled to every new professor, my institution was generous in frequently awarding me small grants from a pool of federal funding. Ironically, given my current capitalist critiques, I also was given regular financial support from the Imperial Oil Foundation  – from which Derek Hodson was awarded a large grant. He used this grant, in part, to fund research of immediate colleagues in science, mathematics and technology education. I also was successful in competitions for a few provincial and federal research grants. I believe that funds from such sources, along with my university’s apparent (to me) quite explicit (and tacit) supports for academic freedom,10 enabled me to relatively freely pursue my interests in promoting a non-mainstream area of research; that is, student-­ directed, open-ended science inquiry and technology design projects. As one might expect, within confines of promoting student-led inquiry and design projects, my research and publication programme with such supports seemed relatively eclectic. Working with colleagues and graduate students and others, for instance, our work spanned several contexts and focused on different aspects of promoting student-controlled science and technology projects. Among ways to conceive of this work, a useful one seems to be the schema in Fig. 7.5 – which I frequently used in my research and teaching during this period – that depicts a model of processes in science and technology that I developed in my Ph.D. research. Although including numerous common processes, such as questioning and hypothesizing, its stereotypical nature appeared to enable me to learn about teachers’, students’ and others’ views of the nature of science (NoS) – particularly regarding NoS claims that I derived from Loving’s (1991) Scientific Theory Profile (Fig. 7.3). In a study of teachers’ changing NoS views as they studied field ecologists in a near-­ arctic context, a former graduate student and I developed a pedagogical heuristic for NoS education  – which suggests that teachers provide learners with experiences enabling inductive thinking (e.g., interpretations of field research) in synchrony with provision of NoS claims they may deductively evaluate in empirical contexts (Bencze & Elshof, 2004), which seems similar to dialectic relationships depicted in Fig. 7.1. This work, in turn, seemed to contribute to collaborative research with two colleagues beyond my institution that suggested that teachers’ tendencies to promote more student-led science inquiry projects were increased (although not guaranteed) if they held more Naturalist-Antirealist NoS views (Bencze et al., 2006). On the technology design ‘side’ of the schema in Fig. 7.5, meanwhile, collaboration with a graduate student (at that time) to explore modifications to a technology design workshop for secondary school students visiting a science and technology museum seemed to highlight, for instance, apparent limitations of societal

 Although, as a professor, I always felt free to choose my research and publication agenda, as well as the nature of content of my courses, my institution awarded each professor ‘merit pay,’ additions to our regular salary each year based on evaluations of a committee of colleagues who ranked our performance on a 5-point scale (1 = very poor; 5 = excellent) in terms of our records of teaching (e.g., student evaluations), service (e.g., conducting workshops) and publications in refereed and non-refereed outlets. For some of us, therefore, there may have been for-profit incentives for appealing to perceived standards of achievement of our local academic community. 10

7  Growing Pro-ecojustice Dispositifs Through Science and Technology Education

A Person’s Ideas, Theories, etc. About Objects & Events

‘Science’ Science Literature & Socio-political Actions

Discussions/ Debates (e.g., at conferences)

OBJECTS & EVENTS

Observations

A Person’s Ideas About Inventions

‘Technology’

Questions

Problems

Predictions & Hypotheses

Solutions & Reasons

Tests of Predictions & Hypotheses (e.g., experiments & studies)

Data Analyses & Conclusions

Project Reports

Sharing & Interchanges

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Tests of Inventions & Reasons (e.g., experiments & studies)

Technology Literature & Socio-political Actions

Discussions/ Debates (e.g., at conferences)

Data Analyses & Conclusions

Project Reports

Fig. 7.5  Processes of science & technology. (Bencze, 2001a, b, c)

orientations towards Ellul’s (1964 [1954]) conceptions of epistemological technique (e.g., efficiency ideals, like reductionism and systematization) (Bencze & Lemelin, 2001). It seems that a turning point in my scholarship (and teaching) occurred as a result of my reading and thinking about relationships between science and technology/ engineering. Particularly influential seemed to be Roth’s (2001) article, in which he provided a theoretical framework that conceived of science and technology as dialectical and, perhaps, most importantly, problematic in terms of ontological gaps (as depicted in Fig.  7.1). Although such translational problems seemed problematic enough, putting into question scientists’ and engineers’ abilities to fully know and change the ‘World,’ this schema seemed to contribute to my emerging conception, particularly after reading about hegemonic influences of globalizing capitalist systems (e.g., Gabbard, 2000), of what I have called ideological gaps; that is, intentional mis-translations between World and Signs  – in cases, for instance, of advertising to idealize for-profit commodities (Bencze & Carter, 2015). Empirically, I believe I could ‘see’ such capitalist influences on science inquiry and technology design projects in my long-term (2002–2010) studies of science fairs – events in which students display and summarize their inquiry and/or design projects, often in competition for various prizes (e.g., medals & money). Collaborating with Michael Bowen, it seemed to us that such fairs (especially Canada’s national fair) largely served as gatekeepers and advertisers for capitalists and instruments of wealth creation (e.g., scientists & engineers) (Bencze & Bowen, 2009). Perhaps the most

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dramatic and persistent illustrations for me of capitalist influences, however, were those from my ongoing efforts to promote student-led science inquiry and/or technology design projects through my teacher education courses. Despite, for example, using such pedagogical techniques as multimedia case methods (Bencze et  al., 2001) to suggest to student-teachers that many of our non-mainstream perspectives and practices (e.g., student-led inquiry, technology design in school science and STSE education) may be feasible in school contexts, it eventually became very apparent to me – also with help from books like that of McMurtry (1999), who suggested that capitalism was so hegemonic as being likened to metastasizing cancer, and Ziman (2000), who claimed that many idealized practices in fields of technoscience often are corrupted by profit motives – that there appeared to be an ‘invisible hand’ (i.e., capitalism) preventing implementation of student-led science inquiry and/or technology design projects. Such insights seemed to lead me to soon give a presentation about capitalist influences on science education at an academic conference (Bencze, 2001a), which then appeared to lead to a corresponding refereed journal publication (Bencze, 2001b). This realization, in turn, apparently contributed greatly to my eventual decision in 2006 to develop the STEPWISE tetrahedral framework and its promotion of sociopolitical actions informed, in part, by students’ findings from self-directed science inquiry and/or technology design projects, to overcome capitalism-associated harms.

7.3.3 Directly Teach Students Important Attitudes, Skills and Knowledge, etc. Although the STEPWISE tetrahedral schema in Fig. 7.2 was designed to emphasize socio-political actions to overcome harms in STSE relationships that are informed (and influenced) by students’ developments in the four peripheral domains (e.g., Products Education & Students’ Research), I believe our action research with teachers soon led us to conclude that this theoretical framework was not very practical in school science systems that emphasized teachers’ ‘efficient’ instruction mainly for achievements in Products and Skills Education. To accommodate such concerns, I developed a relatively sequential pedagogical schema similar to that illustrated in Fig. 7.6 that I think teachers have found more practical. I based this pedagogy on my conceptions of constructivist learning theory (e.g., Osborne & Wittrock, 1985), which – as I believe I learned from Derek Hodson (1986) – suggests that learners’

Fig. 7.6  STEPWISE pedagogical schema

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interpretations of phenomena (e.g., science education experiences) vary according to their prior experiences and, thus, existing attitudes, skills and knowledge (‘ASK’), etc. Because I felt that learners’ prior ASK often are subconscious, I claimed that the STEPWISE pedagogy should begin (in the Students Reflect phase) by asking students to express (e.g., orally and/or in writing) some of them in response to stimuli like commodities relating to science laws, theories, etc. – a tack that I suggested was aimed at allowing students to re-consider their prior ASK in light of exposure (e.g., from the teacher) to new ones. I felt that students’ access to new, useful, ASK can, however, present some problems. Two of these pertain to common educational ‘movements’; that is, inquiry-based learning (IBL) and STEM education. I believe that zeitgeists of whole societies also must be considered. As I think I largely learned from Lyn Carter (2005) and others (e.g., McMurtry, 1999), many societies’ zeitgeists have been significantly influenced by neoliberalism (refer above), which (I suggest) encourages assemblage of myriad living and nonliving actants into dispositifs that largely promote values like: competitive and individualized possessiveness, continuous growth and cost externalizations. I suggest that apparently aligned with neoliberalism are IBL priorities and practices. Although there appears to be much variation in goals and approaches in such practices, it seems to me that many are structured to ensure students discover or, perhaps more often, confirm pre-­ determined STEM products, such as laws, theories and innovations, and methods, including experimentation and technology design. Schwartz, Lederman and Crawford (2004), prominent proponents of IBL in the USA, have, for instance, characterized its practices as involving: “… student-centered projects, with students actively engaged in inquiry processes and meaning construction, with teacher guidance [e.g., sometimes called scaffolding], to achieve meaningful understanding of scientifically accepted ideas targeted by the curriculum” (p. 612). I think that such activities may, however, be discriminatory, sorting students for future roles in socioeconomic systems in terms of, for example, variations in abilities and cultural and social capital (Bencze & Alsop, 2009; Bencze & Carter, 2011) that can limit their access to abstractions supposedly associated with particular experiences (Kirschner et al., 2006). According to Wellington (1989), for instance, “… [empirical] work is still not a good tool for teaching theory – [T]heories are about ideas, not things. Theories involve abstract ideas which cannot be physically illustrated” (p. 7, italics in original). Such difficulties for student discovery through their inquiries seem to me, then, to be amplified because of lack of availability of information about harmful effects of influences of powerful people and groups on fields of science and technology and much else. I think many STEM education initiatives are relatively silent in this regard, possibly to encourage potential knowledge producers to pursue STEM careers and other students to be receptive to pro-capitalist STEM products and services (Bencze et al., 2018; Hoeg & Bencze, 2017). Meanwhile, there appear to me to be concerted efforts by private sector interests to omit and/or distort information for public access – such as science of climate disruption (Klein, 2014) – that, as noted above, may incriminate financiers and corporations (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). Overall, in other words, I believe that information available to students appears to be largely sanitized (or ‘de-problematized’) and, as part of that process,

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punctualized (Callon, 1991)  – made to appear highly reduced, dissociated, for example, from influences of powerful societal members. In his analyses of STEM education foci in the USA national curriculum, for instance, I believe Pierce (2013) described such subterfuge using actor-network theory, pointing out that commercial products like genetically-engineered (GE) salmon tend to be portrayed in positive ways, for example, as being abundant food sources, which can distract consumers from awareness of such problematic actants as parasitic sea lice, which tend to thrive in seaside salmon pens, and government-facilitated patenting, which can minimize wild salmon fishing often, for example, critical to Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods. For reasons such as these, I designed the STEPWISE pedagogy (Fig. 7.6) to suggest that teachers directly teach (in the Teacher Teaches phase) students about possibly problematic STSE relationships and sample civic actions to overcome harms. Drawing from Chantal Pouliot’s (2015) long-term study of civic actions in Québec City to eliminate perceived toxic dust pollution, for example, we developed a graphic novel11 to summarize this case – which highlights competing dispositifs – and then a video-based lesson12 to teach about related STSE relationships and civic actions. Although such direct teacher instruction can, we suggest, be helpful, we also suggest they must be closely accompanied by relevant activities that help students to apply important ASK (e.g., problematic STSE relationships) just taught. Justification for such application activities may, again, be drawn from Wenger’s (1998) knowledge duality theory, which suggests that depth of and commitments to learning are enhanced as students’ choices in both representing and attempting to change the world (Fig. 7.1) are increased. Matched with our lesson about the Québec City dust controversy (as above), for example, we developed a video-based application activity13 for students that focused on another controversy; that is, (non-)uses of plastic water bottles.

7.3.4 Encourage and Enable Students to Practise Informed Sociopolitical Actions Prior to Self-Directing Them Again, although I suggest that the ultimate goal of the STEPWISE schema (Fig. 7.6) is to encourage and enable students to self-direct research-informed and negotiated action (‘RiNA’) projects to help overcome harms of their concern in STSE relationships, I also claim that the pedagogy is strongly oriented towards educating students prior to encouraging them to more autonomously act on the world. Given students’ general inexperience with self-led research and sociopolitical actions, the pedagogy was designed to follow Hodson’s (2011) recommendation to provide students with an ‘apprenticeship’ that involves teaching them about exemplars of RiNA projects  tinyurl.com/yxa9ptq6  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGt7DJsIrY0 13  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-1hYf8YQDM 11 12

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(in the Teacher Teaches phase), encouraging and supporting them to develop and implement small-scale RiNA projects to overcome harms of their concern (Students Practise phase) prior to asking them to self-direct projects (Student-led RiNA Projects). Again, based on Wenger’s (1998) knowledge duality theory, students may progressively deepen their expertise and commitments to RiNA projects as they increasingly control – with reference to the schema in Fig. 7.1 – development of representations of and actions to change the world. As one might expect, students tend to vary in extents to which they appear to require teacher supports along such apprenticeship trajectories described above. Although we have not studied this in detail, variations in student abilities and cultural and social capital (as argued above) may help explain such different needs. Regardless of reasons, however, we tend to at least provide students with sample STSE controversies – which, again, have varied in terms of our perceptions of students’ needs. At one end of the spectrum, for example, we have given students lists of controversial questions like, “To what extent should oil and gas extraction be permitted in polar regions?’ At the other end of the spectrum, graduate students and I have developed several ‘multi-actant documentaries’ (MADs), each of which provides small amounts of information (in Prezi™ online environments) about various actants relating to a commodity (e.g., cell phones).14 These latter resources were based on my understanding of actor-network theory and, especially, dispositifs – which, again, were reinforced in my collaborations with Chantal Pouliot and her studies of the Québec City dust pollution controversy. Perhaps the greatest needs that students have in eventually self-directing RiNA projects, however, are those relating to methods (and epistemological principles) for research and actions. Although I think they have some familiarity with uses of experiments, it has been apparent that they tend not to have had much understanding of and control over their design; but, most significantly, most have had little exposure to uses of correlational studies. Drawing from action research for my Ph.D. thesis (which, in turn, drew upon my teacher education assignment, teaching experiences and consulting career), I provided teachers with suggestions and resources for ‘skills apprenticeships’ using constructivism-informed approaches not unlike that in Fig. 7.6 (Bencze, 2000). Students experiencing STEPWISE-informed pedagogical lessons and activities seem to have had some successes in eventually self-directing RiNA projects to help overcome STSE harms of their concern. For example, after her extensive research into chocolate products and having interviewed peers about their chocolate bar choices and, in that context, informed them of some of her secondary research findings, a tenth-grade student concluded that, “… after everything they’d learned [e.g., from her], [they indicated] they’d be less willing to purchase chocolate that they actively knew had been made with child labour” (Nagi, 2018, p. 39). Such a claim suggests to me that this student had determined that youth may be willing to enact underlying ideologies about care for others rather than, for instance, self-interests that often are prioritized by capitalists. From the video-based description (tinyurl.

14

 Our ‘MADs’ are available at: tinyurl.com/9acay7ca

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Fig. 7.7  Student value analyses about marijuana for current & future dispositifs

com/y34982nv) of her project, it seems to me that  – with reference to Fig.  7.1 above – she was interested in narrowing ideological gaps between aspects of the ‘World’ (chocolate production, etc.) and ‘Signs’ to represent them, such as regarding advertisers’ tendencies to depict individual adult chocolate company workers as one mechanism for distracting consumers from awareness of uses of child labour in harvesting cocoa. Buoyed by such results, graduate students (especially Sarah El Halwany & Majd Zouda) and I have – with significant collegial supports, I believe, from Matthew Weinstein, Lyn Carter, Steve Alsop and others – been exploring uses of research from Science and Technology Studies (STS) that deals with problematic STSE relationships involving powerful individuals (e.g., financiers) and groups (e.g., corporations). A teacher (Dave Del Gobbo) of secondary school science with whom our action research group has been working has had some significant successes in helping students in his ‘academic’ (university-qualifying) science courses to develop useful understandings of such abstract STS concepts as actor-network theory, dialectics, semiotics, normalization of discourse, and sociotechnical imaginaries (Bencze et al., 2019a, b, c). For example, a student in his tenth grade class recently explored (largely through secondary research) values that appear to orchestrate numerous actants relating to marijuana, as shown in the left frame of Fig. 7.7, and new sets of values – as shown on the right frame in Fig. 7.7 – that might characterize a future imaginary in this regard.

7.4 Coda Based on argumentation above, along with those from related publications (e.g., Bencze, 2017a, b, c; Bencze & Alsop, 2014), I suggest that the STEPWISE pedagogy appears capable of assisting teachers in encouraging and enabling students to develop and implement research-informed and negotiated sociopolitical actions to help overcome harms in STSE relationships of their concern  – and, in so doing, contribute to increases in social justice and environmental vitality. I cannot, however, claim full responsibility for such outcomes. I think they have been ‘built on the shoulders of giants.’ Although too numerous to list, major personal human

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contributors seemed to me to include: Miss McCormick, the teacher of English who encouraged me to transfer from a technical to an academic secondary school programme; Bert Horwood, a teacher’s college instructor who praised my science process skills unit plan; Derek Hodson, my doctoral supervisor, mentor, inspirational science educator and provocateur; my wife, Eva, who has supported me in countless ways; teachers  – especially Dave Del Gobbo and Mirjan Krstovic  – who have explored uses of STEPWISE; graduate students who have helped conduct STEPWISE-based action research, especially Sarah El Halwany and Majd Zouda – who have been part of the project for 8 and 9 years, respectively; STEM and inquirybased learning ‘movements,’ which I believe have generated considerable antipathy driving my work; and, my co-authors here, who I suggest have – in eclectic and inspirational ways – contributed greatly to my scholarship and comradery. In light of actor-­network theory and the dispositif concept, moreover, STEPWISE successes also likely seem greatly attributable to such non-living actants as: Ontario curriculum sanctioning of STSE education; technology (e.g., computer & Internet) mediated communications; local and global transportation systems; Canada’s abundant natural resources; and, relative academic freedom at my university. ‘The’ dispositif briefly outlined above not only seemed to me to be effective in educating young people so that they may be more civically-engaged, it also appeared to stimulate noteworthy supports from science education scholars around the world, such as: Sjöström et al. (2017), who suggested the STEPWISE framework aligned well with promotion of ‘Vision III’ (e.g., more personalized and activist) science literacy goals; participants (e.g., Amos et al., 2020) in the Socio-scientific Inquiry-­ based Learning programme of the European Union, which apparently drew inspiration from STEPWISE goals (although supporting inquiry-based learning, about which I am critical); and, participants (e.g., Choi & Lee, 2019) in the Socioscientific Issues for Responsibility programme in South Korea, which has incorporated STEPWISE pedagogy into its methods. To suggest, as indicated by the above summary, that a ‘pro-STEPWISE’ dispositif can encourage and enable students to critically analyze products and services of science and technology and to develop and implement sociopolitical actions to try to overcome harms they determine in STSE relationships seems to me to be overly hopeful. As apparent in my 3-year action research project with Mirjan Krstovic, a secondary school teacher of science, I believe his ‘successes’ in this regard were relatively rare  – only possible in uncommon interrelationships among multiple actants, such as: congruent government curriculum policies (e.g., prioritizing STSE education); school administrative and collegial supports; his increasing comfort with STEPWISE-related principles and practices; a growing repertoire of STEPWISE-related teaching and learning materials; his congruent views about the nature of science (i.e., more Naturalist-Antirealist [Loving, 1991]); and, action research facilitation by me (Bencze & Krstovic, 2017b). Consequently, despite my belief in broader supports from science education scholars and some others, I also feel there is considerable general opposition to promotion of STEPWISE-related perspectives and practices. Although such resistance is likely complex and somewhat uncertain, ‘a’ prominent factor – acknowledging its diverse forms – seems to

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me to be avarice. Although, as discussed in this chapter, one can ‘blame’ particular pedagogical movements like STEM education, which I suggest tends to have relatively narrow foci on knowledge and skill acquisition, I also suggest it is just one of many actants embedded in pro-capitalist dispositifs that I think Piketty (2020) suggests have, for centuries, featured various inequality regimes that have more or less continuously contributed to dramatic wealth and wellbeing concentration and social justice compromises and environmental degradation. Accordingly, it seems clear to me that dramatic increases in social justice and environmental vitality will only occur if new dispositifs promoting them are developed – a project requiring numerous actions involving myriad living, nonliving and symbolic actants. In this light, as suggested by Paulo Freire (cited in McLaren, 2000), I suggest that educators have prominent roles to play in promoting conscientization (critical consciousness) of diverse actants – such as politicians, labourers, corporate CEOs, government officials, development of more ecojust technologies, and many more – while engaging them in continuous praxis (critical reflective practices) to democratically determine new, perhaps more altruist (less avaricious), worldings. While such revolutionary transformations in being and becoming seem daunting, it seems to me that those adhering to more material-semiotic ontologies and prioritizing ecojustice must persist in actions to increase likelihoods of such radical changes.

Chapter 8

Can We Be Hopeful Yet?

Being a critical scholar has tended to be a grim business. Generally consigned to the little swirling eddies along the margins of educational mainstreams, critical scholars take up the somber task of bearing “witness to negativity” in the hope of uncovering “spaces for possible action” to further justice and equity in education” (Apple, 2006a, b, p. 681). However, in the face of “capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009) that naturalizes a fatalistic sense of resignation in the education community and with public education systems under siege from the ‘capitalism run amok’ (Ranis, 2016), this usually proves to be a lifelong uphill task. Not surprisingly, sooner or later many of us find ourselves agreeing with Gramsci’s (1996) avowal that “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will”. This willful ‘intelligent’ pessimism tends to suffuse much of critical scholarship with a “left melancholia” (Brown, 2002) that hesitates to declare any grounds for optimism for bringing about any transformational progressive changes in education or anywhere else. Fortunately, there have been a few voices, such as Duggan and Muñoz (2009), who have dared to be hopeful. In this concluding chapter, I echo these voices by making a case for entertaining at least some measure of docta spes (educated hope) (Bloch, 1995) for constructing concrete utopian futures in science education and other domains of progressive politics. Viewing policy and social change from the theoretical perspective of punctuated equilibrium, I argue that the long period of the policy, curricular and structural stability that frustrated progressive efforts in science education in recent decades may soon be coming to an end, and we may be transitioning into an interregnum that opens paths for all kinds of utopian (and dystopian) futures. I identify the crumbling hegemony of progressive neoliberalism and ongoing socioecological crises as the probable causes of this impending period of rapid change. I believe that the critical work done by the brilliant, little group of activist-scholars who have come together to write this book and their compatriots in the critical scholarship community is going to be foundational to efforts to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_8

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collaboratively build concrete utopian futures. But, only if we can come together to collectively seize the opportunities offered by the interregnum for a progressive and transformational counterhegemony.

8.1 The Change We Believe In As the readers may have noticed, the contributors of this book are deeply aware of their marginalization from the mainstream discourses and networks that dominate science education policy, curricula, and science teacher preparation. While they are deeply opposed to neoliberalism and hyper-capitalism, they are also acutely cognizant that as scholars they have also benefitted from their privileged status in powerknowledge relations that structure knowledge production in advanced capitalist societies. But, perhaps sensing that it may be futile and even impossible to critique and transform capitalism and capitalism friendly science education from the outside, this group has continued to advocate for and make grounds for change from within, while recognizing their marginalization as an acceptable collateral damage. For someone like me who hails from an erstwhile colony, this is a classic postcolonial response to oppressive structures and discourses that ‘natives’ have long engaged in to subvert oppression from within. Perhaps, we are all postcolonial now. While each contributor may have emphasized different aspects of what ails mainstream science education in late capitalism, there are broad overlaps that outline their critique and lay the ground for the kind of transformative change this group would like to bring about. Beginning with critique, my sense is that this group would agree with Lyn Carter’s (Chap. 1) broad characterization of mainstream science education as a (neo)liberal democratic project. As she makes the case, the two poles of (neo)liberalism and democracy in this project have long existed in a tension as they sought to push science education policy, curricula, and instruction in opposing directions. However, her somber assessment points to democratic goals losing out to the (neo)liberal agenda in recent decades – a realization commonly shared among the critical scholarship community in education. As all contributors have argued, a key implication of this neoliberal dominance in science education has been the stripping away of possibilities for positioning science education as a vehicle for achieving social justice both within and without schools. Indeed, it has become increasingly difficult for science teachers to even articulate let alone implement social justice oriented pedagogy within the bounds of official material-­ discursive resources and structures made available for teaching science. Further, the writers of this book rightly warn that a social efficiency goal oriented science education may diminish the democratic commitments inherent in the idea of citizenship in democratic societies. Indeed, the worry that neoliberal education prepares students to see an ideal citizen in the image of a perfect consumer in a market economy has long goaded critical scholars to work for transformative changes in education. As Larry Bencze (Chap. 7) makes the case, this critique of science education perhaps needs to be read alongside a wider and corresponding

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critique of the role science and technology have played in shaping our societies in ways both good and bad. People at the margins often do not get to decide what happens at the center. However, as Matthew Weinstein explains in his Chap. 6 margins offer a vantage point that lets marginalized groups catch a better glimpse of how things could be otherwise while also offering access to alternate discourses that provide the wherewithal to construct alternative hopeful futures. This is important because critique allows us to disarticulate the existing discourses and practices through which the current hegemony is established and reproduced, with the aim of constructing a different one … The second moment, the moment of re-articulation is crucial. Otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation of pure dissemination, leaving the door open for attempts of re-articulation by non-progressive forces (Mouffe, 2008; para 18).

That is, as Fraser (1995) once argued in the context of feminist struggles, efforts to counter the current hegemonic order need “both deconstruction and reconstruction, destabilization of meaning and projection of utopian hope” (p. 71). Heeding this advice, the contributors in this book offer a collective, progressive vision of a profoundly different and transformative science education. This vision is borne out of long histories of activism and the intertwining of personal and professional lives, some vivid glimpses of which can be seen in Chantal Pouliot’s and Isabel Martin’s Chaps. 2 and 4. As Matthew Weinstein and Larry Bencze make the case in their Chaps. 6 and 7, the collective vision of this group rests on the assumption that the impetus for transformative change can only come from the periphery and accepts the inevitability of a long struggle before the vision can translate into lived realities. Further, abandoning the certainties of old-school Marxism, this group is understandably more humble about what the future entails and how their vision should be or could be translated into reality. As we see clearly articulated in Ralph Levinson’s Chap. 5, this group does envision that a transformative, progressive science education would be one that is rooted in social justice and sees science concepts as tools to understand the world around us rather than an end in themselves. But, this hope comes attached with an implicit acknowledgment that progressive, transformative science education will be historically situated and socioculturally contingent and determined locally through democratic, grassroots activism. Thus, eschewing any further prescriptive advice, the collective vision of the group limits itself to opening possibilities for local groups to imagine “technoscientific counter-­ imaginaries of various forms” so as to “map more habitable futures in the sciences, especially scientific education” (Weinstein, chapter 6, p. ?). As many readers may have noted ruefully, this vision is not new. Further, the key concerns and ideas forcefully articulated in this book have also been brewing and bubbling up in liminal marginal spaces in the critical scholarship community for quite some time. However, despite best efforts, we have not been able to make much progress in realizing most of our progressive ideals. That is to say, there has been remarkable stability in the overall education policy world over the past few decades in many advanced capitalist societies. This stability is reflected, inter alia, in the

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normalization of education standards, econometric measures of teacher accountability, the commodification of education, and a market-based education discourse in the provision of public education. The next section offers a theoretical perspective that may help us understand why the success has so far eluded the contributors of this book.

8.2 Equilibrium: The Graveyard of Progressive Hopes In 1972, evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium according to which most biological species originate during brief geological moments of rapid change and then persist without much evolutionary change for long stable periods, or “stasis” (Gould, 2009). Over time, this theory has grown in influence not only in biological sciences but has also led to new insights and lines of inquiry in some disciplines in social sciences. One such discipline that has hugely benefitted from Gould and Eldredge’s pioneering work is social policy, where it has emerged as a leading theory to understand the relatively long periods of stability in many public policy subsystems, such as nuclear energy and capital punishment (Cairney, 2019). It has also been used, albeit sparingly, to understand policymaking in higher education contexts, see for instance Ecton and Dzienski (2021), and Parsons and Fidler (2005). As I illustrate below, this theory is also well suited for explaining why critical scholarship has made so little headway in influencing education policies in most advanced capitalist societies. As we will see ahead, punctuated equilibrium theory also opens up possibilities for change for us in the near future. Public policy researchers have long noticed that often policies will appear quite stable for a long time, open to only small, incremental changes, and then suddenly they undergo a period of rapid, transformational change (Cairney, 2019). According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, this is because in ‘business as usual’ times, the policymaking environment achieves a sort of policy equilibrium among government based experts, interested parties, and groups (Baumgartner & Jones, 2010). Any impetus for change is counteracted by opposing countervailing forces leading to a policy stasis that is defined and sustained by the following three features. First, a network of actors comes to enjoy a policy monopoly that enables them to frame the issues among policymakers in ways that favor their interests and worldview. According to Cairney (2019), this “monopoly may be ‘institutionalised’ when rules are created and resources devoted to solving the policy problem on those terms” (para 6). Policy monopolies tend to be anti-democratic as they actively exclude laypersons and other competing groups from the policymaking process. Competing groups tend to challenge the policy monopoly through venue shopping, that is by seeking other available platforms to voice their criticism and alternative policy proposals. However, such efforts are rarely successful in overthrowing the existent policy monopoly. Second, policymakers exhibit cognitive and emotional restraints in their decision making. That is, their rationality is bounded in ways that

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suggest they selectively attend to only a few issues and information about them while ignoring all other considerations to arrive at ‘good enough’ rather than ‘best possible’ decisions during the policymaking process. Finally, there is a lot of friction in the policy system as the “formal rules that govern policy action require a great deal of energy to overcome – by electing a new party with fresh ideas, for example” (Baumgartner & Jones, 2010; p. xxiii). This friction contributes to policy stability as well. As I argue next, the long period of policy stability in education marked by these features can be well explained by the hegemony of progressive neoliberalism in education as well as society at large since at least the 1970s. If one looks back at the last few decades, it would be difficult to miss the rapid strides most advanced capitalist societies have made in achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion goals on socio-cultural issues of identity and representation. On the other hand, it is also safe to say that by most measures, materially speaking life has become increasingly precarious for the majority of people in the advanced capitalist societies, and health, wealth, and income inequalities have steadily worsened too since the 1970s (Standing, 2021). Interestingly, while the past few years have been dominated by massive public protests to achieve greater racial and gender justice, we haven’t seen any commensurate mass movements to redress economic injustices in these societies. Fraser (2017, 2019a, b) has sought to explain this dissociation by directing our attention to the cultural-political hegemony of progressive neoliberalism in the ‘western’ world. This hegemony has enabled the ruling elite to naturalize its domination and further its material interests by shaping the society’s common sense in ways that conform to its worldview. When viewed as a political process, the hegemony of the ruling elite is usually achieved by “creating and maintaining a system of alliances by means of political and ideological struggle” (Simon, 2015; p. 23). That is, unable to hegemonize on its own, the ruling class often ends up negotiating and accommodating some concerns of the non-dominant social groups to create alliances that allow it to exercise hegemonic domination over the society. Mukand and Rodnik (2020) have found such contingent political bargains between the elite and other social groups to be fairly representative of the political economies of liberal democracies throughout the world. Thus, as Fraser (2017, 2019a, b) argues, in the closing decades of the last century in order to maintain their hegemonic status the economic elite in most advanced capitalist societies cobbled together such an alliance with enough members of the racial, gender, and ethnic minorities by co-opting and legitimizing some of their cultural, gender and racial identity recognition based politics, and giving them enough concessions to secure their consent and cooperation. This co-option of some elements of progressivism in neoliberalism gave neoliberalism an attractive progressive sheen and seduced “major currents of progressive social movements into the new hegemonic bloc” of progressive neoliberalism while legitimizing and protecting hyper-capitalism that they need to further their material interests (Fraser, 2017; p. 4). Equally importantly, it also led to the neutering of the social justice and individual rights focused stream of the progressive movement because its ideas were now relocated and articulated within the overall political economy of financialized hyper-capitalism. That is, we now have ersatz progressivism

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where struggles for equality are reduced to neoliberal capitalism friendly strategies like the framing of emancipation as self-responsibilization and self-enterprise and a general valorization of meritocracy. In recent years, several researchers have noticed the influence of progressive neoliberalism in diverse disciplinary fields, such as media studies, women’s studies, and social work (Cummins, 2020; Duffield, 2018; Rottenberg, 2014). There are strong indications that progressive neoliberalism has been exercising an unparalleled hegemony in the domain of educational policy and practice as well (Sharma et al., In press). This hegemony has enabled a very powerful transnational global policy and advocacy network committed to progressive neoliberal policy goals to enjoy a policy monopoly in educational policymaking spaces in advanced capitalist societies (Ball, 2012). The impact of this policy monopoly can be seen in the successful positioning of education in STEM fields and training of future workforce as the central purposes of public schooling in the United States. My exploration of this issue showed that a very powerful, well-funded network comprising business lobby groups, powerful corporations, non-government advocacy groups, and political leaders at local, state, and federal levels have monopolized policymaking to ensure an unprecedented level of STEMification of public education in the United States (Sharma & Hudson, 2021). Further, we also see a vigorous effort to position STEM education as critical not just for neoliberal goals that benefit the ruling class, but also for progressive goals of social justice (Drew, 2020). In the United States, a similar cast of actors funded by the ruling class has also been hard at work to frame policies that seek to position school choice as key to saving the nation’s economy while also promoting educational equity for the vulnerable sections of the society (Campi, 2018; Mac, 2021). Further, Williams (2019) has suggested that the bounded rationality displayed by individual or collective agents when it comes to decision-making is very much shaped by the ideology that enjoys the hegemonic status in the political context in which the decision is being made. This is quite evident in education where for long progressive neoliberalism has framed the grid of intelligibility within which ‘rational’ policy decisions are made and assessed. Thus, for instance, there is considerable evidence that the US economy does not suffer from any “skills gap” in terms of the education and skill levels of the workforce prepared by the nation’s schools (Cappelli, 2015; Salzman et al., 2013). On the contrary, research indicates that there is enough and even an oversupply in some fields of STEM-educated workforce in the United States (Camilli & Hira, 2019; Salzman & Benderly, 2019). Also, it appears that schools that offer a STEM program do little to encourage students to pursue STEM related majors in college (Bottia et al., 2018). Still, when it comes to improving public education, politicians and policymakers of all political hues cannot seem to think beyond doubling down on STEMification of public education (Sharma, 2016). The personal narratives shared in this book reflect a realization all too common among critical scholars that it is exceedingly difficult to break the progressive neoliberal policy monopoly of the ruling class in public education and that this policy equilibrium has existed for far too long. Progressive dreams have also

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withered in other areas of public policy in recent decades. In fact, it can be argued that the neoliberal hegemony goaded the entire capitalist societies into a sociopolitical stasis that offered openings only for little incremental changes while stabilizing the material-discursive conditions for the maximal regressive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich under a no-holds-barred capitalist regime. Naturally, finding little headway in the policymaking circles, critical scholars have venue shopped and shared their vision, ideas, and plans for transformative education on alternative platforms. This is well reflected in the impressive quality of critical scholarship and the availability of alternative publication venues for sharing progressive proposals during progressive neoliberal hegemonic times. Vethe nue shopping has kept the truly progressive vision, goals, and discourse alive and the progressive neoliberal hegemony contested. As I explain in the next section, this should prove to be critically important in building hopeful futures in the days to come.

8.3 Punctuation: The Harbinger of Possibilities When Baumgartner and Jones (2010) examined different areas of public policy, they found that “most issues see little or no policy change”, but “when policy did change, it tended to change dramatically” (p. xxvi). They found that the punctuation that destabilizes a policy equilibrium is marked by the breaking up of existent policy monopoly and the reframing of issues in a different light. These changes in turn tend to happen when the broader sociopolitical climate undergoes a significant transformation. Interestingly, when the broader sociopolitical climate begins to transform, at first the government tries to ignore all information indicative of change as long as it is politically feasible to do so. But, if the changes persist there does come a time when it is no longer possible to ignore broader changes and pretend a business-as-usual scenario for policymaking. When this threshold arrives, the hitherto excluded competing groups and their perspectives are able to gain entry into the policymaking realms. The policy equilibrium gets punctuated and reset to reflect a different ideological and policymaking orientation. In their influential study of public school reforms in the United States, Tyack and Cuban (1995) came to a similar conclusion. They found that “usually some major societal change  – typically called a “crisis “triggers a burst of concern about schooling” (p. 43). These concerns then accumulate over time, become widespread, get talked about in the media, become a focus of public activism, and get debated by politicians. After a while, the pressure for change becomes too overwhelming and the government is forced to initiate transformative educational reforms. As I argue ahead, if one peers ahead such a punctuation point in the education policy realm can clearly be seen to be looming in not so distant future. My case rests on two related ongoing major developments that are expected to accelerate and unleash a disruptive dynamics in the sociopolitical climate of advanced capitalist societies, and even the rest of the world.

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First, as Fraser (2017, 2019a, b) has argued, the progressive neoliberal hegemony looks increasingly vulnerable in the United States and many other advanced capitalist societies. As explained earlier, this hegemony rested on a marriage of convenience between the elites and some sections of the nondominant groups in which the ruling class agreed to address some identity-related injustices faced by minority groups. In return, the elites got to maintain their political dominance and further their material interests. They also managed to secure consent for their “expropriative, plutocratic economic program” from a large enough group of people belonging to minority groups, entrepreneurs, suburbanites, new social movements, and the youth (Fraser, 2017). This hegemonic bloc has never been secure from contestation from sections of society that felt excluded and marginalized. Chief among them is remnants of an erstwhile vibrant working class whose lives have become increasingly precarious in recent decades because of the elites’ expropriative program of “accumulation by dispossession” through the deindustrialization of industrial towns, unrestricted financialization of the economy and shredding of the social welfare programs (Harvey, 2005). For a long time, they could not figure out a way to successfully challenge the progressive neoliberal hegemony. However, as Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 presidential elections indicates, these “dispossessed” members of the working class found that the progressive neoliberal hegemony could be destabilized through a counter-hegemonic putsch based on a white grievance, atavistic nativist ideals of white supremacy, and a reactionary populist ideology. Of course, this can only be seen as a highly regressive development that threatens democracy in the United States. Unfortunately, the United States is not alone in this regard. Many liberal democracies all over the world are reeling from such a surging tide of reactionary populism (Mondon & Winter, 2020). According to Fraser (2019a, b), these developments indicate that the progressive neoliberal hegemony may be on its way to the ‘dustbin of history’. A few other scholars, such as Solty (2013) and Stahl (2019) have also raised the possibility that we may be entering into an interregnum, a temporary crisis period in which the erstwhile hegemonic order is losing the consent of the masses, but a new hegemony has not taken its place yet. Such a possibility foretells much uncertainty and sociopolitical upheavals. Writing of such uncertain times, Gramsci (1971) predicted that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (p. 276). While it would be naive to make any firm predictions, three distinct possibilities can still be discerned. First, the ruling class may still be able to protect its interests and dominance by appeasing enough members from the working class while keeping the minority groups, entrepreneurs, and suburbanites within their hegemonic bloc. In that case, the predictions of the demise of progressive neoliberal hegemony may prove to be just wishful thinking. In fact, the victory of a moderate politician like Joseph Biden over Trump in the 2020 US presidential elections can be construed to support such an outcome. Second, it is also possible that Trumpian reactionary populism rallies again to capture political power and entrenches itself as the new hegemony in many countries. Naturally, such a development would be disastrous for education. For instance, in the United States, such an outcome might lead to the

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proliferation and mainstreaming of more regressive educational reforms like the current attempts by rightwing forces to make public education ‘trauma free’ for white, male students by forbidding teachers to engage in critical pedagogy on racism or sexism in their classrooms. In case either of these two possibilities materializes, we may see critical scholarship continuing to toil away in the margins without making much impact on educational policies. But, as Fraser (2017) has surmised, it is also possible that a more hopeful outcome emerges from the interregnum. That would be the case if minority groups and large enough sections of the working class can come together to form a counterhegemonic alliance against the ruling class based on a progressive populist ideology that sutures egalitarian redistribution with non-hierarchical recognition. In recent years, Senator Bernie Sanders has been trying to stitch together such an alliance in the United States, though his efforts have not been as successful as one might have hoped. But, the resurgence of the pink tide and recent presidential elections in Chile, Honduras, and Peru indicate that under certain conditions it can be possible for progressive populism to successfully challenge other ruling ideologies for hegemonic status (Casals; Feldman, 2021; Guardado, 2021). The second ongoing historical development that is likely to disrupt the sociopolitical status quo and thus create conditions for the punctuation of the policy equilibrium in the realm of education is climate change. For more than two decades, this monumental socioecological crisis has been accepted as a topic in both science education and science education research. However, it tends to get taught and represented in curricula in ways that are hugely problematic. First, in science classrooms climate change is largely represented as a scientific-technical issue that ends up further reifying the hugely problematic and capitalism friendly nature-­ social dualism (Sharma & Buxton, 2018). Second, climate change has been seen as the single biggest failure of capitalism (Stern, 2009). But, because only its scientific-­ technical dimension is presented to the students, students do not get to understand climate change as a societal issue. Third, climate change has been partitioned off as an environmental science topic to be covered among many other such topics in science curricula (Sharma, 2012). As a result, it has had a minimal impact on science education policy, curricula, and instruction. But, that may change soon. Wainwright and Mann (2018) investigated the political-economic implications of climate change and found that climate change is likely to give rise to profoundly different sociopolitical systems. They traced four possible political-economic future scenarios. Unfortunately, three of the four possible future outcomes do not offer much hope for progressive politics. But the fourth scenario, labeled as Climate X, does offer some hope. In this scenario, struggles for climate justice by marginalized social groups all over the world coalesce to build a postcapitalist, democratic future that “affirms climate justice and popular freedoms against capital and planetary sovereignty” (Wainwright & Mann, 2018; p. 17). Seeds of Climate X are already visible in the environmentalism of the poor in different parts of the world (Nixon, 2011). However, as Wainwright and Mann (2018) readily acknowledge, the forces on the left have much work to do before they can expect to build such a future on the successes of the environmental

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struggles led by the poor. In any case, it appears reasonable to assume that in addition to the crumbling of progressive neoliberal hegemony, any significant changes to the political economy induced by climate change can also be expected to punctuate the existing policy equilibrium in education creating grounds for hitherto marginalized groups and their perspectives to make a play for constituting a new and different policy monopoly. Thus, as I insist in the final and concluding section, we might do well by cultivating some measure of hope about the future.

8.4 Cultivating Docta Spes The way I see it, the issue at hand is how to consider the interregnum that is likely to be upon us on account of the possible demise of progressive neoliberal hegemony and monumental transformations in the political economy triggered by climate change. This transitory period is likely to be pregnant with all sorts of possibilities good and bad. To make the best and opportunistic use of these possibilities, it would be important to refuse the cult of futility and adopt a more hopeful orientation toward the future. In recent years many scholars, such as Ericsson and Kostera (2019) and Mauch (2019), have theorized and speculated upon different ways in which it is still possible to entertain some hope and use it to create positive change. This scholarship is much indebted to Ernst Bloch’s (1995) critical theory of hope. Thus, it is my suggestion that critical science education scholars too might benefit by taking some inspiration from Bloch to guide their work as we approach the interregnum. As critical scholars, we tend to oscillate between fantasies about our utopias and materialist deterministic fears about a grim future borne out of a teleological view of the world. Both these affective responses goad us to a feeling of powerlessness and futility of action. In contrast, Bloch (1995) invites us to harbor docta spes or an educated hope that “is not taken only as emotion, as the opposite of fear …, but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind” (emphasis in original) (p. 12). As Duggan and Muñoz (2009) assert docta spes is not “the naive hope that tells us “everything is going to work out fine, don’t worry be happy” (p. 278). Rather, it is a cultivated hope that is firmly planted in a critical awareness of the contradictions and injustices of the present, and a clear-headed understanding of what to do about them. That is, it is not the naïve feeling that things will get better, but a belief in the possibility of a better future through our actions. Bloch believed that through our actions we can tap into our “not-yet-conscious” access to reality to discover new “objective possibilities” about how the world could be. According to Bloch, the relationship between material reality and human action is always full of potential. Often this potential cannot be actualized because the material conditions are not yet ready for that to happen (Bloeser & Stahl, 2017). But, if we are willing to enact Marx’s notion of praxis (as the unity of theory and action), we can facilitate the translation of “not-yet-conscious” but “objective possibilities” into concrete utopias. Thus, in contrast to “the traditional understanding

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of utopia as a Telos, a pre-existing ideal state”, Bloch saw docta spes as a necessary component of social and political change and encouraged us to work towards a utopia that would be “the product of the process of getting there” (Thompson, 2013; para 4). To see docta spes in action, critical scholars might want to turn their gaze towards and take inspiration from the environmental and climate justice activism in the South Pacific where many communities are under severe threat of going underwater because of the rise in sea levels on account of the climate change. Unfortunately, the apocalypticism prevalent in mainstream environmental discourses on such issues has tended to encourage a cult of futility that can lead to “denial, paralysis, apathy or even perverse reactive behavior” (Hulme, 2007, p. 818). It also, as Bettini (2013) explains, de-politicizes, de-temporalizes, and de-individualizes the threatened communities. As a result, the affected populations are stripped of any agency through their discursive construction as unlucky victims of a calamity that cannot be forestalled. In sharp contrast, however, environmental and climate justice activists from the South Pacific have taken “a deliberate stance against this kind of apocalypticism” through the cultivation of hope and engagement in collective action that is effectively buttressed by “narratives of hope and survival that focus on resilience, community, and the fruitful connections between various grassroots initiatives fighting for climate action throughout the Pacific and beyond” (Straß-Senol, 2021: para 4). One can indeed see glimpses of docta spes at work in this kind of activism as these activists refuse to see and be seen as victims, and rather than succumbing to despair or cynicism, they are channeling their concerns into informed and educated action. According to Duggan and Muñoz (2009) the opposite of hope is not hopelessness but complacency and inaction. Like the environmental activism from the South Pacific, the dogged insistence on remaining angry and focused on keeping the alternatives alive despite all disappointments and hurdles shines through clearly in the preceding chapters. To me, this stubborn refusal to succumb to resignation despite daunting odds clearly indicates a subterranean stream of docta spes that runs through the lifework of this remarkable group of critical scholars and educators. Perhaps, taking heed from them we all should do the same so that when the right time comes, we are ready and able to translate our ‘no-where’ ideals into the ‘now-­ here’ utopias (Robinson & Tormey, 2005).

Correction to: Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice

Correction to: M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­39330-­3 The author names were not included in the opening page of each chapter. The names have been included in the first line of each chapter abstracts, which have been approved by the authors. Corrections: Titles and Abstracts, Revised to add author names to abstracts

The original version of the book has been revised. A correction to this book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­39330-­3

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Weinstein et al., Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice, Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_9

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