The "I" in Brain-Based Research? Flash Point Epistemology, Neugenics, and an Old but New Boundary Object

• In Event: New Events and Their Implications for Analyzing Social Contexts of Education: Facing Crises, Technology, and Difference

Abstract

In educational policy, teacher education, and curriculum-making the prevalence of brain images and brain scanning as a research approach in learning sciences has proliferated. The 1990s was rightly called the “decade of the brain” (Littlefield & Johnson, 2014), with the overt influence of imaging stemming from how scans tie into existing trajectories that link fields, nations and populations. This includes the biologization and digitalization of behavioral and psychological processes, the way images seem to provide visual proof for the existence of material substrates of behavioral mechanisms, the claim that the basis of the mind is biological, the effort to reify the brain as a locus of control, as the "I and as a site of neurological, neuropharmacological, and neurosurgical intervention and as a site of self-improvement (de Rijke & Beaulieu, 2014). Together, such trajectories have been taken as an indicator of a broader neuroturn (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013).

Education has now started to attend to the political implications of such a turn and its circulation of images (Baker & Saari, 2017). In this presentation, we first analyze the prevalence of brain images as a “boundary object” that enables movements, disciplines, institutions, programs, populations, and nations to be linked and “selves” reconfigured. Our “data sets” here are a variety of recent educational policies, teacher education guides, and curriculum design texts from OECD countries that deploy brain images in their rationales for selecting pedagogies, policies and curricula.
We elaborate the boundary object that the brain has become via a science and technology studies and postcolonial studies theoretical frameworks. In this case, we develop an analytics called Flashpoint Epistemology in regard to the production, manipulation, and circulation of digitized brain images across scientific end pedagogic discourses and institutions. Here, we draw upon our own research, as well as the work of de Rijke & Beaulieu (2014) to identify suites of networked technologies, database logics, and interfaces that are rapidly transforming technologies of self and the production of Otherness. Integral here are the unresolved, subtle and deep reanimations of what Duster (2003) calls neugenics (the new eugenics).

In the second part, we analyze some of the conceptual/methodological challenges within the largely sociological literature from a more philosophical framework. Here, we draw upon provocations from three different theorists of technology and difference - Tegmark (2017), Stiegler (2015, 2014) and Lazzarato (2014) - paying particular attention to differences in “technics” between hospital, clinical, artificial intelligence, and laboratory-based studies relative to public education settings. We offer some concluding thoughts about visual essentialism in compulsory education, in the authoritativeness of the image under the rubric of science, and in the potential of crisis, technology and difference to recombine to produce new narratives about an ontology and selfhood of "I." By underscoring the ways in which knowledge, consciousness and competency are being redefined, including what and who is thought to “have” them, we offer new pathways for considering 21st century futures of education.

Authors

• Bernadette Baker, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Antti Saari, University of Tampere