How Processes of Science Create and Lose Sight: Paradoxes of Research’s Desire for Remedy, Repair, and Renewal

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium explores the historical sociological allure of science as remedies, repairs, and renewal of educational contexts; that is, the desire that research to improve experiences, outcomes, and equitable opportunities for all. The four papers critically explore the performative aspects of scientific processes in which educational contexts are created, and where the construction of truths take place, and continually paradoxes of ordering and differentiating people in the search for equity. Examined are how science creates spaces to “see” or act on educational contexts that paradoxically lost sight of performative aspects of its infrastructures. The papers cross multiple social spaces and draw on theoretical and methodological designs from science studies, visual cultures, sociologies of knowledge, and cultural histories of the present.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 6: Inquiry in the Social Context of Education

Chair

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Papers

• The Reading-Industrial Complex: Making reading a public and Educational Problem - Elin Sundström Sjödin, Mälardalen University

• Vincennes, the "Thinking Forest": Knowledge as a Self-Fashioning Practice in the Works of Foucault, Deleuze and Rancière. - Tomás Vallera, University of Lisbon; Jorge Ramos do Ó, University of Lisbon

• Fabricating Abjection in Playfulness: The Affective Governmentality of Joy in Children’s Play - Chushan Wu, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Social Scientific Expertise and the Adolescent of Modernity: International Diagnoses and Local Adjustments – Post War Australia - Julie E. McLeod, University of Melbourne

Discussant

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Adelphi University