Dyscalculia, neuroscience and time: Rethinking the biopolitics of the body

• In Event: Integrating Disability Studies and Critical Mathematics Education; Emerging Perspectives

Abstract

Through the lens of inclusive materialism, our talk will focus on the ways that neuroscience research has been taken up in the study of dyscalculia, a mathematics learning disability that has grown in popularity and diagnosing over the past decade. Inclusive materialism maps the diverse materialities at work in school mathematics, to the ways in which bodies are assembled as a form of biopower. Rather than simply treat the body as the inert matter onto which culture projects images and identities, we emphasize the non-discursive material force of bodies. Attention to the force and potentiality of the body helps us study the lived experience of mathematics students in new ways, allowing us to rethink the nature of mathematical learning disabilities such as dyscalculia. In addition, attention to the ways in which bodies are taken to be different or deficient helps us better understand how abled bodies are produced out of certain material-discursive practices, such as the conceptualization of number as being primarily about cardinality and the concomitant identification of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) as the hot seat of brain activity correlating to numerical tasks. The experimental emphasis on cardinality forecloses on the temporality and potentiality of human bodies.
We recognize that neuroscience research will play an increasingly important role in the diagnosing and framing of mathematics learning disabilities, and not just dyscalculia, which is likely to further entrench deficit approaches to disability research. Rather than abandon the neuron and dismiss all neurocognitive research, we want to invest in the possibility of neurocognitive research that does not serve the computational dream of a control society. We argue, therefore, that we can work against this trend by rethinking the biopolitics of the body. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1988), we will offer new questions that can help us build more complex models of bodily activity, so that we do not become trapped in overly simplistic models of stimulus-response, and so that we do not continue current tendencies to isolate particular neuron as needing to be tapped, evaluated and managed in the quest for able-bodies mathematics learners. Neurons are bodies, as well as being parts of human bodies, and we need to find inclusive ways of studying how they participate in learning events. In doing so, we will focus specifically on how the question of time, and its role in the way we think about and with bodies, can shed new light on disability and the slow-firing neurons (or the longer circuitous synaptic connections) of a dyscalculic IPS. In order to do so, we propose disrupting the way we tend to think of human bodies as physical objects (some more animate than others), which typically directs our attention to how bodies are individuated and possess particular abilities and disabilities. Instead, we will suggest that bodies are temporal through and through, and that there is nobody that is not ultimately an event or interval of time.

Authors

• Nathalie Sinclair, Simon Fraser University

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Manchester Metropolitan University