Page 199 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

176 A. Sharma

and technologies between agricultural experts in universities, corporations, and
government agencies.
However, according to Holt-Gimenez (2006), as a social movement the farmers
movement suffers from a key political weakness that has limited its abilities to
contribute to a wider social change or even to counter-globalization from above.
This weakness lies in the relative absence of vertical networking of the movement
with national and transnational advocacy networks working for similar causes.
Absence of such linkages hinders this movement’s ability to exert political influ-
ence for affecting changes on wider structural, policy, and institutional levels. Thus,
as George Glasson and his colleagues work to make their efforts sustainable, their
work may benefit from initiatives to create and nurture symbiotic linkages with
similar efforts on the ground as well as advocacy groups that can project their voice
and political heft at wider and higher-level forums from where globalization from
above gets directed and inflicted upon hapless communities down below.
3. Theorizing peaceful and progressive social change: The national and interna-
tional linking of ground-level social movements into a global movement against
globalization from above has been labeled by scholars as grassroots globalization
or globalization from below (Appadurai 2000). This global movement suffers
from two closely related weaknesses that reflect rather poorly on efforts made by
university and other institution-based scholars to contribute to this movement.
First, in my opinion, philosophers, critical theorists, and social scientists have
fared rather feebly in their attempts to offer workable and robust theoretical
frameworks for understanding and working toward peaceful and progressive
social change. There was a time when Marxism offered a framework that one
could use to work for progressive change. But the global failure of socialism and
the tendency of Marxist-inspired movements to solidify class-based antagonisms
and bring about change through violence have served to severely weaken the
efficacy of Marxist ideas. Critical and poststructural discourses that arose partly
in response to the failure of Marxist perspectives to bring about social change
have not served the interests of the oppressed that well either. In their preoccupa-
tion with issues that largely pertain to the individual, such as issues of identity,
and their focus on discursive and cultural aspects of our lives, they seem to have
under-theorized or even ignored the material and structural aspects of our exis-
tence. In fact, some scholars, such as Harvey (2005) and Cole (2003), not only
doubt that such perspectives can ever be forces for social change and social justice,
but even allege that critical discourses are quite compatible with neoliberalism –
the governing ideology of the globalization from above.
Second, according to Appadurai (2000), “one of the biggest disadvantages faced by
activists working for the poor in fora such as the World Bank, the U.N. system, the
WTO, NAFTA, and GATT is their alienation from the vocabulary used by the
university-policy nexus (and, in a different way, by corporate ideologues and strate-
gists) to describe global problems, projects, and policies” (p. 17). As Appadurai
further argues, “a strong effort to compare, describe and theorize ‘globalization