Education in the Age of Biocapitalism

Clayton Pierce's Education in the Age of Biocapitalism challenges educators to rethink and reconstruct education in an era marked by a frightening acceleration of potentially dangerous biotechnologies and crises and devastation of global capitalism that affects life itself. Pierce raises the question 'What kind of life do we want education to be for?' and challenges educators and citizens to produce an educational life worthy of human beings and the nonhuman world. - Douglas Kellner, George F. Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education, University of California, Los Angeles, USA and author of Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere This ambitious project provides a sturdy bridge between educational theory and the rich literatures of biopolitics. It resituates Marxian forms of analyses into a biopolitical critique in order to illuminate how neoliberal pressures on schooling are treating student bodies as resources to be mined in order to satisfy goals of national security and capitalist expansion. Yet it also identifies practices of resistance and alternative forms of education that can emerge even in such contexts. Pierce has provided a valuable contribution to contemporary efforts to steer a steady path toward egalitarian transformations of US education. - Sandra Harding, Departments of Education and Women's Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA