Decolonisation and socio-political arenas in science education: reflecting on the role of biological education

In recent decades, global challenges of a socio-scientific nature have brought many relevant and pressing questions to the science education community. Misinformation, climate change denialists and anti-vaxxers, unequal distribution of health access, and the return of fringe scientific racism discourses (Ahmed et al. 2022; Saini 2019) have been pushing science educators further into (re)thinking the purposes of science education within a landscape where connections between scientific knowledge and practices, social (in)justices and socio-political challenges, including around citizenship and democracy, have become increasingly complex (Alsop and Bencze 2020; Bazzul and Tolbert 2019).

Such entanglements between science, social justice and socio-political arenas have recently been pointed out, for instance, by colleagues working in environmental education, such as Eaton and Day (2020) and Dunlop and Rushton (2022). They draw our attention to the lack of social justice and socio-political informed concerns around environmental degradation and climate change within science education. They argue, among other things, that an understanding of the links between this socio-scientific scenario and social injustices can help us to reflect more critically on the role of scientific knowledge, practices and developments in what are known as ‘environmental injustices’: the unequal exposure of already marginalised communities to the impact of environmental degradation resulting from land, knowledge, labour and monetary exploration; and the widespread restrictions imposed onto certain groups within our neoliberal and (neo)colonial societies in terms of their connections with more-than-human entities and flows within the environment, such as land, water, animals, plants, and air (Acselrad 2010). For instance, the recent deadly floods across Pakistan have connections both to global climate change processes that have been driven by global North countries for centuries now, and to specific socio-historical processes faced by that community (such as colonisation by the British Empire), which have resulted in deeply unequal, exclusionary and oppressive ways of engaging, exploiting and living with, and from, that country’s natural resources, particularly water (Ahmed et al. 2022).¹

It is from this consideration of the role of science teaching and learning in relation to science’s own entanglements with social justice and socio-political arenas that a particular notion has been gaining attention within science education: decolonisation. As I have further explored elsewhere (Gandolfi 2021), by drawing on important scholarship from the wider field of Decolonial Studies (e.g. Grosfoguel 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2011) – which seeks to investigate and redress the histories and legacies of colonial projects to our diverse communities, including to education – decolonisation in science education can have as a core aim the fostering of critical engagement with the social, political and ethical legacies of historical and contemporary colonial (and, more generally, oppressive) endeavours to science disciplines, involving both:

1. Rediscovering knowledges, practices and histories that have been hidden by oppressive structures, such as colonial projects; and

2. Fostering critical thinking about such oppressive practices that can be part of histories, knowledges and development within our science disciplines.

In particular, science education can be centred on recognising that ‘science was itself built upon a global repertoire of wisdom, information, and living and material specimens collected from various corners of the colonial world’ (Roy 2018). This would mean going beyond simply adding more diversity to science curricula – through, for instance, more examples of women in science, of Black scientists, etc. – to also making visible the often unequal and unjust relationships established between different communities as part of scientific endeavours, so that science education can more critically and justly engage with global challenges of a socio-scientific nature (Bazzul 2020; Bazzul and Tolbert 2019; Gandolfi 2021). But what can be the role of biological education in such decolonial endeavour? Here I seek to argue that Biology, both as a scientific discipline and as a school subject, can occupy a central role in this scenario, given its deep socio-historical connections with both colonial projects and with socio-scientific challenges linked to ethics, life, and socio-political arenas.

For instance, certain areas of biological interest, especially Botany and Zoology, played an important part in the mapping and studying of natural resources on behalf of colonial projects, as exemplified by well-known natural history expeditions across the Americas, Africa and Asia (Ashby and Machin 2021; Das and Lowe 2018). Within the area of Conservation, particularly in the case of global North initiatives around the global South biodiversity landscape, we also see rising concerns with what has been termed ‘parachute science’ (Hart et al., 2021) and its roots in (neo)colonial mapping, extraction and removal of resources, knowledge, etc. from, for instance, indigenous communities. In Evolutionary Biology and Genomics, issues related to bioprospecting and biopiracy across the global South (e.g. Shebitz and Oviedo 2018), and bioethics and DNA data extraction and use (e.g. Chan et al., 2022), have also been raised in connection to social justice and socio-political issues, as exemplified by the recent case of studies based on the Uyghur’s genetic data.² Similarly, as extensively discussed by Saini (2019), among many others, eugenics occupied an important space in the field of Biology in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries and, even though now discredited, it still resonates with, and has been used to, ground the return of discourses based on scientific racism.³

In the areas of Cell Biology and of Drug Development, Allchin (2020) also recently listed several examples of circumstances where biological research and development has been undertaken grounded on colonial and oppressive approaches to engaging with already marginalised communities, amongst them the well-known case of Henrietta Lacks in the U.S., the Tuskegee syphilis experiment with Black communities in the U.S., and the clinical trials for vaccines against cervical cancer in India in 2009. It is then no wonder that, when facing the challenges of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, marginalised communities across the world were both at the short end of unequal distribution of vaccines and wider medical care (Ahmed et al. 2022), and were also judged in relation to their concerns about engaging with the outcomes of COVID-19-related research. As noted by Waight et al. (2022, 1496) in the case of vaccination hesitancy during is recent pandemic in the U.S.:

The news media has continuously reported the skepticism among Black and Brown communities and their refusal to get vaccinated, furthering racialized discourses that perpetuate false narratives about nondominant communities. Rarely do these discourses address the histories of science and medical technologies by which Black Brown, and Indigenous communities, their bodies, and health have been exploited, experimented, violated, discriminated, and dehumanized in the name of science and research.

Such examples of Biology’s complex entanglements with issues of oppression, social (in)justices and socio-political arenas then raise an important question around the role of biological education in this scenario. Endeavours across biological education have attempted to address issues of such cases of social injustice through the lens of recognising more diverse contributions to biology (e.g. Belczewski 2009), considering issues of inclusion in biology curricula (e.g. Batty & Reilly, 2023), and through further engagement with questions around bioethics (e.g. Chan et al, 2020) and wider socio-scientific issues (e.g. Alsop and Bencze 2020; van der Leij et al. 2023). However, questions remain around how this could be done in order to challenge such issues in meaningful and critical ways within biology curricula around the world which, in most cases, are not grounded on concerns around social justice and socio-scientific challenges, whilst also not fuelling the rise of anti-science rhetoric we have recently seen in relation to climate change denialists and anti-vaxxers (Galamba and Matthews 2021; Moura, Nascimento, and Lima 2021).

I close this piece with a couple of suggestions, drawing inspiration from the works of several colleagues cited above who have been engaging with similar concerns in their work as science educators. I hope some of these suggestions can inspire colleagues in biological education around the vital role that Biology can occupy in addressing the complex entanglements between science, social justice and socio-political arenas:

1. Understanding biology as intertwined with social, political and moral legacies and obligations; that is, engaging not only with its epistemological, but also with its social and axiological elements.

2. Recognising that complex socio-historical processes impact the production of the knowledge we teach and who is part of those knowledge communities (e.g. biologists).

3. Addressing the insularity of narratives about biology and biological development as emanating only from Europe/USA (or the global North) to foster diversity of knowledges, practices and ontologies about the natural world as central to scientific development, both historically and nowadays (e.g. indigenous communities and land-based knowledge).

4. Engaging more actively and in solidarity with the cases, examples, voices and experiences of communities that have been most impacted by socio-scientific challenges and injustices (e.g. formerly colonised communities in the global South; and Black, Indigenous and people of colour BIPOC communities, women, LGBTQIA + people, etc. living anywhere in the world).

5. Recognising (to resist) oppressive aspects within historical and contemporary biological development, including those resulting from (neo)colonialisms, racism, and other unequal and unjust systems and practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is no coincidence that the Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA) in relation to measurements of environmental impact generally coincide with groups facing historical marginalisation, such as communities in the global South, and Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) communities, women, LGBTQIA + people, etc. living anywhere in the world (Eckstein, Künzel, and Schäfer 2021).

2. See more here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/29/academic-paper-uyghur-genetic-data-retracted-ethical-concerns

3. See more here: https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism