Concepts for Understanding Competing Ideas of Life in Education Policy and Practice

• In Event: 28.090 - MTCC Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: 28.090-1 - Biosocial Futures: The Policy Implications of the Life Sciences in Education

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this paper is to develop concepts to understand and conduct future research into the contemporary advancements of molecular biology (and the life sciences more generally) and their applications in education policy and practice (e.g., ‘brain-based learning’).

Perspective(s): The term ‘critical life studies’ was coined by Jami Weinstein and Claire Colebrook (2017) in their book ‘Posthumous Life’. This book posits that the idea of life, namely recent postgenomic advancements in the life sciences, is the new “framing problem” of today. Educators and educational institutions face the increasing likelihood that the future of education will be profoundly reshaped by the contemporary technological, biological and scientific advancements made in the life sciences (Williamson, 2016; Youdell, 2017). These advancements will not only demand the critical re-thinking of the residual historical images of biology and education (e.g., eugenics, Gould, 1981), but will further demand new concepts for educational policy and practice. These concepts will relate to: (a) frameworks for implementing advancements in the life sciences within educational institutions and organizations; and, (b) frameworks that govern the social, cultural and political challenges these new advancements bring to educational institutions (i.e., responsible policy regulations). The issue, then, is precisely how theory, research and practice in life sciences inform and implicate educational policy and practice, and vice versa. What is at stake is how “each of these fields meets an insurmountable hurdle when faced with the problematic of life,” and a “certain inability of going further separately” (Weinstein & Colebrook, 2017, p. 4).

Methods: In order to develop new concepts, the paper employs an exegetical approach, one that conducts a “close reading of a philosophical or literary text with an eye more toward explication and understanding of its complex meanings than analysis or critique” (Burbules & Warnick, 2006, p. 491).

Materials: In addition to the sources listed in this proposal, concepts will be developed in relation to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze (2001) and his distinction between ‘life’ - as a powerful and productive force - and ‘living’ - practices that harness and govern this powerful force.

Results: The concepts proposed will articulate competing conceptions of life as a kind of quasi-continuum; whereas one pole of the continuum enunciates historical ideas of ‘biosociality’ (Hacking, 2006; Rabinow, 1996, 2008) that refer to life as latent destiny (e.g., genetic or biological determinism), and, at the other pole, ‘biopolitics’ (Foucault, 2010; Lemke, 2011; Rose, 2007) that refer to life as possibility, opportunity, and the many different ways these opportunities are practiced (i.e., lived), managed, commercialized, and governed.

Significance: The significance of the paper is articulated within the tensions that arise when advancements in the life sciences provide powerful new ways to live for many and intersect with historical attempts that have used biology as the basis for exclusionary practices, and often radical exclusionary practices (e.g., eugenics).

Authors

• Taylor Webb, The University of British Columbia

• Kalervo N. Gulson, University of New South Wales

• Sam Sellar, Manchester Metropolitan University