Page 195 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

172 A. Sharma

chapter, I begin by placing the effort within the wider context of globalization and
counterresponses to it from below. Then I lay out three main challenges that need
to be met if we wish to see such efforts become not only sustainable but also

important contributors to progressive social change.

The Global Unrest

Communities, especially those on the margins, throughout the world have long realized
that changes to their lives, livelihoods, culture, and material circumstances that are
triggered and sustained by corporatized globalization from above have rarely worked
in their favor (Brecher et al. 2000). Advanced industrial societies are founded upon a
technological rationality that legitimates and rationalizes perpetual domination and
exploitation of both individual and nature by the productive apparatuses of the society
(Marcuse 1964). This exploitation is sustained by transmuting both nature and indi-
vidual as fungible, commoditized factors of production for the purposes of ever-
increasing profits, economic growth, and even social stability . The profound
¹
compression of time and space that has occurred with the help of technology in mar-
ket transactions has helped to phenomenally increase the reach and frequency of
market transactions, and hence exploitation, commoditization of nature, and privati-
zation of hitherto public commons in all corners of the world (Harvey 2005). As a
result, communities on the margins of global economic order or ecosystem people as
labeled by Gadgil and Guha (1995) have found themselves expropriated from their
commons, displaced from their homes, and deprived of their traditional livelihoods.
Many of these communities have responded to the devastating effects of global-
ization from above by adapting or glocalizing global products and forces for their
local contexts and needs (Robertson 1995) as well as by developing their own
counterresponses that seek to preserve their livelihoods, communities, and right to
live with dignity and hope (Hawken 2008). These efforts range from sustaining and/
or developing upon local traditional agricultural practices (Holt-Gimenez 2006)
and maintaining and resurrecting traditional indigenous water management systems
(Singh 2008) to preserving local indigenous knowledges through school-based
reforms (Schroder 2008). The work done by George Glasson and his colleagues in
Malawi is one such hope-inspiring example of much-needed “global unrest” that
needs to sprout everywhere for ecojustice and against the destructive force of
corporatized globalization.

1 Let me quote (Gellner 2006) here. According to him, “Industrial society is the only society ever
to live by and rely on sustained and perpetual growth, on an expected and continuous improve-
ment. … Its favoured mode of social control is universal Danegeld, buying off social aggression
with material enhancement; its greatest weakness is its inability to survive any temporary reduc-
tion of the social bribery fund, and to weather the loss of legitimacy which befalls it if the
cornucopia becomes temporarily jammed and the flow falters” (p. 22).