Forero Duarte, Juan;
(2025)
An integral intervention: The enchantment and ethics of STEM Education among public servants in Colombia.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis studies STEM Education in Colombia. It explores how different types of actors in Colombia design and disseminate public policies that prioritise the usage of technology in education in relation to the moral pursue of a ‘collective good.’ Through 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside educational innovation labs, capacity-building workshops, policymaking meetings, and promotional events, plus interviews with policymakers, international consultants, private contractors, mid-level state managers, and teachers, the thesis asks what ‘work’ does moralisation do to establish STEM Education as national policy in Colombia, and what can that process tell us about the persistence of technologybased solutions in education as a neoliberal form of governance. The question is based on the observation that the public servants who identify themselves as ‘STEM enthusiasts’ celebrate the social potential of technology whilst critiquing approaches that rest on technical solutionism alone. The thesis examines the emic concept of ‘integral intervention’ (intervención integral) as a heuristic to approach these ambivalences. An integral intervention is one that weds imperatives of a systematic, technical state solution and ethical-political exhortations to work for a marginalised other. By analysing the various ways and moments in which STEM Education becomes an integral intervention, I argue that the promises of technology transforming the country’s public education system are not only sustained by political 'branding’ and fetishisations of STEM but also through the revaluing of STEM's limitations as a way to value the actors' practices of sacrifice and care towards the public good. The thesis sheds new light on how technology keeps being an enchanting promise in state-making projects in Latin America and beyond. It also proposes the notion of ‘techno-moral valuing' to generate a dialogue with critical studies of technology education, policy, and politics.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | An integral intervention: The enchantment and ethics of STEM Education among public servants in Colombia |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10205443 |
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