John Bencze, OISE, University of Toronto; Sheliza Ibrahim, University of Toronto; Dave Del Gobbo, Peel District School Board;
Although some of us reside in privileged material and other contexts, our world largely features existential threats to humanity and other living and nonliving things (Ord, 2020). Climate scientists, for instance, have released numerous recent 'warnings to humanity' about the climate crisis (Ripple, 2022) and atomic scientists have suggested there is about 90 seconds left on its 'Doomsday Clock' due to threats from nuclear war. Meanwhile, many foods and beverages we consume appear linked to ongoing diseases, labor injustices and environmental degradation (Pollan, 2016) and artificial intelligence technologies threaten human subjectivities, democracy and more (Bess, 2023). Among reasons for such harms, assemblage of material-semiotic networks benefiting few elite-such as those capturing immense wealth at most others' expense during the CoViD-19 pandemic (Oxfam, 2023) and, more generally, those dominating neoliberal and/or authoritarian contexts (Piketty, 2020)-seems prominent (Hardt & Negri, 2019). Given significant uses of technoscience fields in such biased and problematizing networks, their educational counterparts may help prepare students for critical and pro-active citizenship that may increase social justice and environmental vitality. For this panel, scholars are invited to share research into direct educational efforts to explicitly de-punctualize (Callon, 1991) and problematize existing hegemonic and problematic arrays (Foucault, 2008; Latour, 2005) and sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015) for students and prepare them to develop personal and sociopolitical actions that may align with their personal or group visions of material-semiotic assemblages that may address power-related personal, social and environmental harms of their concern.
