Page 343 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

26 Envisioning Polysemicity: Generating Insights into the Complexity 317

Arizona’s long history of land seizing (often for mining purposes). My point in
mentioning these stakeholders is that each brings his or her own cultural identity
and individual narratives that comprise peoples’ histories, and clearly this situation
is fraught with economic, spiritual, political, cultural, and historical complexities.
Given that the situation is quite more complicated than a simple “for” or
“against” binary relating to the mine (Thompson 2008), a different way of framing
this conflict moves beyond the dichotomies presented by positioning the argument
around the interests of the Apache versus the group of townspeople that are pro-mine.
Rather, it is more fruitful to consider the complexities of place and contested areas
by incorporating what Joe Kincheloe and Kenneth Tobin have referred to as “the
power of contextualization” (2006, p. 9), to highlight the personal and contextual-
ized nature of a given situation. A critical epistemology of complexity (Kincheloe
2001) can serve to situate the unfolding struggles in Superior within the broader
sociocultural, political, and historical context and provide a lens with which to
connect back to the possibilities in place-based education. Such a critical complex
lens on this work can illuminate the oppressions in the communities so that they can
be addressed and confronted, without necessarily pitting the indigenous peoples as
existing in de facto opposition to the more recent residents. As the focus is shifted
we are able to look at both the details of positions of these populations as well as
the broader practices that reproduce inequities.
Ironically a multinational corporation and the US Congress have the potential to
dictate the fate of this land, which has huge implications of both cultural sustain-
ability and ecological integrity of the area. The globalization of industry, labor, and
capital is evident in transnational corporations like Resolution Copper Mining, a
division of Rio Tinto, which is a British/Australian mining company based in
London. In the context of a geo-global economy, there is little expectation of a
vested sense of commitment toward environmental justice and to a community.

Working Toward Sustainability and Community Survival

The complexity of this particular contested space is highlighted for me in reading the
points that the authors have made about the possibilities for cultural sustainability
and ecological integrity presented by the rejecting of the mine and the resulting land
swap. This contrasts starkly with the support of the mine by community residents.
Cultural sustainability and ecological integrity are intertwined and cannot be easily
separated. In this particular situation in Superior, there is a dispute over a deeply
meaningful place, which emphasizes the importance in contested areas to try to find
a way to work with the other toward socially and environmentally just outcomes. In
discussing the environmental justice movement, Robert Bullard explained:
The environment is everything: where we live, work, play, go to school, as well as the
physical and natural world. And so we can’t separate the physical environment from the
cultural environment. We have to talk about making sure that justice is integrated through-
out all the stuff that we do. (Schweizer 1999)