Power, Knowledge, Subjectivity: Science Education and Questions of Collective Existence

This chapter argues that all major social and ecological contexts involving science today are entangled in a tripartite frame of science, power, and subjectivity. Events like the COVID-19 pandemics can be analyzed by how knowledge, governance, and changes in practices of collective living come to bear on everyday life. This chapter begins by suggesting that the realities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic existed well before—thereby questioning its salience as a major event. The chapter then discusses some aspects of the identitarian politics around vaccination in North America using the work of philosopher Michel Foucault. This chapter argues that politics and subjectivity are forgotten dimensions of sense-making when it comes to issues of collective existence involving scientific knowledges/practices. Educators need to engage questions of collective existence, along with the questions of politics and subjectivity associated with them, in order to be relevant in times of precarity.