Schooling and science education are embedded within larger socio-cultural, political and economic contexts, influenced by global flows of capital, labor, ideas, and images. In this article we consider the ways in which ethnography traces the web of interactions (circuits), in a rural community and the ways that science inquiry was associated with character education. Our discussion examines the relationship between social fields, habitus, and meritocracy under new and ever-changing neoliberal conditions. These macro-level forces play out in everyday practices in the community and reveal schools, as well as science education, as sites for struggle.