Science, Coloniality, and “the Great Rationality Divide”

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how science is discursively attached to certain parts of the world and certain Bkinds of people,^i.e., how scientific knowledge is culturally connected to the West and to whiteness. In focus is how the power technology of coloniality organizes scientific content in textbooks as well as how science students are met in the classroom. The empirical data consist of Swedish science textbooks. The analysis is guided by three questions: (1) if and how the colonial history of science is described in Swedish textbooks; (2) how history of science is described; (3) how the global South is represented. The analysis focuses on both what is said and what is unsaid, recurrent narratives, and cultural silences. To discuss how coloniality is organizing the idea of science eduation in terms of the science learner, previous studies are considered. The concepts of power/knowledge, epistemic violence, and coloniality are used to analyze how notions of scientific rationality and modernity are deeply entangled with a colonial way of seeing the world. The analysis shows that the colonial legacy of science and technology is not present in the textbooks. More evident is the talk about science as development. I claim that discourses on scientific development block out stories problematizing the violence done in the name of science. Furthermore, drawing on earlier classroom studies, I examine how the power of coloniality organize how students of color are met and taught, e.g., they are seen as in need of moral fostering rather than as scientific literate persons.

“Real-Life Needs”: How Humanitarian Techniques Produce Hierarchies of Science and Mathematics Education

“…Advanced science and mathematics coursework is equally indebted to its early 20th-century cultural and sociopolitical formation-reinstating onto-epistemic hierarchies (Warren et al, 2020) and racializing premises of what constitutes talent or potential (Bullock, 2020). Scholars have examined how imperial and settler colonial projects shaped disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and mathematics, and how elements of these disciplines became converted into ostensibly neutral subject matter of K-12 schooling (see, e.g., Adams & Weinstein, 2020;Greer & Mukhopadhyay, 2012;Ideland, 2018;le Roux & Swanson, 2021). These works importantly denaturalize the curricular content of the natural sciences and mathematics.…”

Special issue “reflecting on Freire: a praxis of radical love and critical hope for science education”—theme: transnational collaborations and solidarities

“…And I would argue that this Freirean perspective on the profession might be even more imperative to the science teaching profession, where decades of a naïve perspective on the neutrality of science have led to an acute absence, in science teachers’ professional development, of an explicit engagement with science’s own norms, values or socio-political interests, as highlighted by Peñalosa et al in this special issue and by others working in this area (e.g. Dunlop, Atkinson, Stubbs and Diepen 2021 ; Gandolfi 2022 ; Ideland 2018 ; Valladares 2021 ). In a world with increasingly complex injustices emerging from socio-scientific issues, such as environmental injustices and unequal access to healthcare (as exemplified by the current COVID-19 pandemic), my critical hope for science education certainly involves a deep rethinking of the science teaching profession.…”

Like a Pig in Mud: Rejecting the Manicured Boundaries of the Patriarchy

“…The supremacy of rationality emerged concurrently with the rise of modernity and coloniality (Ideland, 2018). As such, we must acknowledge the connections between the colonial project of empire with the science of rationality.…”