Wednesday, 23 March 2016

From Technologies of Self to Discourses of Vision: The Conditions of Possibility for Educational Neuroscience

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.