Abstract
This chapter advocates viewing science education as a site for biopolitical struggles and the reworking of subjectivities. Such a perspective provides a framework that can unite various struggles for social justice and help educators and students intervene in the forces of what philosopher Michel Foucault calls biopower. This chapter draws from Foucauldian notions of biopolitics and subjectivity and the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, to provide some notes on biopolitical theory and potential applications in science education. This chapter is just one theoretical articulation of how biopolitics and biopolitical struggle can inform critical, activist work in science education. The full productive ‘value’ of biopolitical theory has yet to be realized.
Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.
(Foucault 1982, p. 785)
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Notes
- 1.
I use the terms biopower and biopolitics in the way Hardt and Negri (2009) do. Simply put, biopower represents the control and exploitation of populations, life forces, and human bodies. Biopolitics operates in relation to biopower and consists of interventions and challenges to biopower on the same terrain of bodies and subjectivities toward different subjectivities, social relations and ontologies.
- 2.
Obviously science education discourses cannot completely constitute subjectivities, but works in conjunction with other discourses, institutions, and material realities. Moreover, as John Fiske (1998) notes of Althusser’s work and production of subjects, education systems are not able to tell a different story than the legal system or the family.
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Bazzul, J. (2014). Science Education as a Site for Biopolitical Engagement and the Reworking of Subjectivities: Theoretical Considerations and Possibilities for Research. In: Bencze, J., Alsop, S. (eds) Activist Science and Technology Education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4360-1_3
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