Education in the Age of Biocapitalism

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.

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.