EcoJust STEM education mobilized through counter-hegemonic globalization

We are a group of university‐based science educators from six different countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Syria, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America). While we are far apart physically, we are, in many ways, united ideologically. Among our areas of agreement, perhaps few rival our concerns about neoliberalism – a capitalist ideology that we believe is wreaking havoc around the world. Although named as a new form of economic liberalism of the eighteenth century, in which proponents urged governments to limit regulation of private sector economic transactions (thus, liberating them to pursue economic self‐interests), neo‐liberalism is a more recent socio‐economic system that encourages government intervention and, moreover, has rallied vast and complex networks of cooperating “actants” (e.g. materials, including people and diamonds, and semiotic messages, like “I’m successful!”) aligned to its causes (Latour, 2005). It is like a giant three‐dimensional spider web that encompasses nation states and infiltrates into them. In his book, Global Education Inc., Ball (2012) describes various neoliberal networks involving “think tanks,” like the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, that are reciprocally (and dynamically) linked to diverse other actants, such as: John Blundell, Koch Family Foundations, Education for All Brazil and Families that Can. Critical to such networks are trans‐national organizations, like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that operate largely independently from nation states. Such vast and deep networked orientations toward private profit apparently have engendered many personal, social, and environmental problems (McMurtry, 2013). There is alarming poverty worldwide (Oxfam, 2016), for instance, that appears destined to dramatically increase (Piketty, 2014). We also are facing many social and environmental challenges linked to neoliberalism, not the least of which are severe problems from climate change associated with excessive fossil fuel uses (Klein, 2014).

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