Repoliticizing STEM Education Through the Medium of Climate Justice

The climate crisis defines the present. The world’s living and nonliving entities face a devastating array of impacts from the myriad tentacles of rapid human-generated climate change.^1,2 Science has positioned itself front and center in the fight against the climate crisis, through proposals for technological solutions ranging from feasible (e.g., electric cars, renewable energy), yet often problematic,^3,4 to grandiose and ill conceived (e.g., large-scale geo-engineering proposals to reduce incident sunlight, arbitrary tree planting for “carbon offsets”).⁵ However, science rarely questions its own role in creating and propagating the current climate crisis, often greenwashing its solutions,⁶ which fail to genuinely address the issues in sustainable ways,⁷ or are well meaning but ultimately damaging.⁸ Further, widely held uncritical notions of “objectivity”^9–11 and Eurocentrism¹² in science often lead to climate technoscientific saviorism.¹³ In this article, we contend that critical climate education through justice-oriented narratives...