In parts of Europe and north America,
educational neuroscience has become a popular, fast-moving discourse and
interdisciplinary research field. Since the early 2000s, it has been recognized
and sponsored by supranational organizations such as the OECD and national
agencies like the NSF. New Ph.D. programs, university centers and journals are now
well-established while the prefix neuro- has become a ubiquitous one in popular
culture. One strand of educational neuroscience, brain-based learning (BBL),
draws heavily upon imaging technologies such as PET, fMRI and EEG to represent
areas of the brain thought involved in particular activities and capacities.
Some of this research positions the brain as causal, as the primary factor to
be considered in the design and enactment of educational work.
This
presentation maps some conditions of possibility for belief in neurological
foundationalism. It elaborates two major intersecting forces at the heart of BBL
narratives: i) the changing relations between an inward turn and the subject in
genealogies of truth-telling (subjectivation, soul and selfhood), including the
impact of cultures of human dissection, and 2) strategies of visibilization and
the braining of the mind amid biologisation of the child (from squeezing to
scanning). The modernist entwinement of both trajectories, technologies of self
and discourses of vision, generates assemblages that provoke questions about
the political nature of ‘data,’ of first- and third-person perspectives, and
claims regarding conceptions of truth, knowledge and reality in western social
sciences. In particular, such questions seem to have been incited and modified
by the ever-changing and elusive play and role of images in the art of
persuasion, from religious iconography to digital futures. In addition to the challenges
that the role attributed to ‘the image’ provokes within educational systems,
the presentation will consider the difficulties at a broader level for humanism,
as well as for more recent claims to non-philosophy and non-representational
theory.
