Solidarity, Science Education, and ‘Anticipatory Dis-obedience’ in the Trumpocene

Professor Sara Tolbert, Professor of Science Education Monash University, will be speaking about her work - all are welcome to attend.

This event will be held in the Sir William Bragg Building LT (2.37).

Please use this RSVP form to register your interest.

In what scholars call the "Trumpocene," science denialism flourishes alongside right-wing populist rhetoric encouraging wilful forgetting of historical injustices (Colebrook, 2019; Resano, 2024; Tolbert; 2025). While the scientific establishment's typical response has been to double down on claims of objectivity and political neutrality, this stance has become increasingly untenable as scientists find themselves targets of authoritarian pressure. Drawing on the concept of 'anticipatory obedience’ (Ball, 2025), I examine how scientific institutions' historical positioning as apolitical – -aimed at maintaining their own power and legitimacy – has left them vulnerable to current attacks. Their past appropriation of equity initiatives as forms of 'false generosity' rather than authentic commitments now enables easy capitulation to demands for removing equity and diversity language from funded projects (Tolbert, Frausto Aceves, & Torres Olave, 2024).

Rather than continuing this pattern of anticipatory obedience, science education needs new forms of resistance that acknowledge both its own role in power relations and the complex dynamics driving science denialism. This includes examining how legitimate grievances about democratic participation and growing socioeconomic and educational inequalities intersect with white masculine identity performances that reject expertise to maintain status and (the illusion of) power in the face of precarity.

The path forward requires building genuine solidarity alliances with existing justice movements while fostering science education that acts to democratise and empower rather than generate trust in an ‘exclusive authority.’ This means moving beyond simply presenting and analysing scientific evidence to examining how power operates through scientific claims, while helping students understand how scientific knowledge, alongside other forms of knowledge, can inform meaningful democratic participation in addressing systemic inequities. In conclusion, I discuss how ‘anticipatory dis-obedience’ must be accompanied by a commitment to social movement-building: Only by embracing wall-to-wall solidarity can science educators resist both authoritarian pressure and the isolation of science and science education from broader sociopolitical concerns.

References

Ball, P. (8 February, 2025). Chemistry World, available online at https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/scientific-institutions-have-a-long-history-of-anticipatory-obedience/4020931.article.

Colebrook, C. (2019). Slavery and the Trumpocene: It's Not the End of the World. Oxford Literary Review, 41(1), 40-50.

Resano, D. (2024). Transnational readings in the Trumpocene: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Chris Beckett’s America City. Open Research Europe, 4(214), 214.

Tolbert, S. (2025). Unforgetting ‘old’materialisms: ecofeminist education for the Trumpocene. Environmental Education Research, 1-9.

Tolbert, S., Aceves, A. F., & Torres-Olave, B.  (2023). From false generosity to true generosity: Theorizing a critical imaginary for science education. In S. Tolbert, M. Wallace, M. Higgins, & J. Bazzul (Eds.), Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene, Volume 2 (pp. 163-184). Springer International Publishing.