Education in the Age of Biocapitalism

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Clayton Pierce

      Pages 1-38

3. Origins of Educational Biocapital

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 39-39

      PDF

   2. Learning to be Homo economicus on the Plantation: A Brief History of Human Capital Metrics

      • Clayton Pierce

      Pages 41-62

   3. Schooling for Value-Added Life: The Making of Educational Biocapital

      • Clayton Pierce

      Pages 63-84

4. Promissory Future(s): Learning the Science of Life

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 85-85

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   2. Engineering Promissory Future(s): Rethinking Scientific Literacy in the Era of Biocapitalism

      • Clayton Pierce

      Pages 87-109

   3. Learning about AquAdvantage® Salmon from an ANT: Actor Network Theory and Education in the Postgenomic Era

      • Clayton Pierce

      Pages 111-136

5. Biological Citizenship in a Flat World: Governmentalities of Optimization and Their Alternatives

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 137-137

      PDF

   2. The Biomedicalization of Kids: Psychotropic Drugs and Biochemical Governing in High-Stakes Schooling

      • Clayton Pierce

      Pages 139-163

6. Epilogue

   1. Epilogue

      • Clayton Pierce

      Pages 165-173

7. Back Matter

   Pages 175-211

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Biocapitalism, an economic model built on making new commodities from existing forms of life, has fundamentally changed how we understand the boundaries between nature/culture and human/nonhuman. This is the first book to examine its implications for education and how human capital understandings of education are co-evolving with biocapitalism.

• capital
• education
• nature

Winner of the 2013 AESA Critics Choice Book Award

"The book is a deep theoretical probe into the agenda and assumptions of current education policy initiatives and an important practical means for developing alternatives. This is a must have for all collections serving the social sciences, education, and education-related related fields." -Choice

"With Education in the Age of Biocapitalism: Optimizing Educational Life for a Flat World, Clayton Pierce offers a rich examination and critique of biocapitalism, a bourgeoning strand of production within neoliberalism that has become increasingly influential over educational policy and practice . . . It is a timely work that importantly extends critiques of neoliberal education to include the proliferating biocapitalist paradigm and its insidious logics of value production and extraction." Educational Studies

"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

Clayton Pierce is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, Culture, & Society at the University of Utah, USA.

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