Page 196 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

13 Working for Change: Reflections on the Issue of Sustainability and Social Change 173

Insurrection of the Subjugated Knowledges

To me as a researcher and knowledge-worker, Glasson’s work is doubly special as it
represents what Foucault (1980b) called an insurrection of subjugated knowledges
against the tyranny of globalizing discourses of science and other avant-garde
knowledge systems invested with power and sanctified by prevailing truth regimes.
By subjugated knowledges, Foucault was referring to “a whole set of knowledges
that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated:
naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of
cognition or scientificity” (p. 82). For Foucault (1980a), the role of an intellectual
was not to “criticise the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to
ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology,” but to
critique and change the “political, economic, institutional regime of the production
of truth,” and to ascertain “the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth”
(p. 133). Foucault found that critical scholars have largely performed this role
through resurrection of subjugated knowledges. For quite some time, there has been
a lively discussion among science educators about the role and space of these “local,
discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges” (Foucault 1980b, p. 83),
within the overall school science framework (McKinley 2005). I would not take any
sides here or stake out my position. However, it might be salutary to assert that this
insurrection of subjugated knowledges is not opposed to “the contents, methods or
concepts of a science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked
to the institution and functioning of an organised scientific discourse within a society
such as ours” (Foucault 1980b, p. 84). By engaging in a bottom-up building of an
agriculture-based curriculum and then writing about it in the context of ecojustice in
this book, I feel George Glasson has been the intellectual that Foucault envisaged.

Sustainability and Social Change

However, I cannot help but think that that might not be enough especially in the
context of the overwhelming odds posed by globalization to ecosystem people and
by a globalized school science discourse to their indigenous knowledge systems.
As campesinos of Latin American farming communities realized in their struggle
to maintain their local sustainable agricultural practices against corporatized agri-
culture, just preserving local indigenous knowledge systems and practices in one’s
own local communities is neither sustainable nor sufficient in the long run to with-
stand the onslaught of global capitalism (Holt-Gimenez 2006). A similar conclu-
sion was reached by Pretty (1999) in her investigation of sustainable agricultural
systems in Africa. And when I look back at my experiences in the HSTP program
and think about its limitations and widespread impact, I too find that evolving a
local response to globalization – in education, agriculture or in any other field – is
just the first, albeit necessary, step in the struggle for ecojustice for the oppressed
and marginalized. What is also important is to make one’s work a part of a wider
effort for social change.