International Studies of the Sociologies of the Knowledge of Science, Visual Cultures and Affective Economies in Education, Part II

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire of Western modernity that science provides the elixir for enabling the good life in a just and equitable society, not least the digital society. The desire of activating the good life and people haunts emergence of the 19th century sciences of learning and curriculum that travels through the New Education Movement and American Progressive Education (Author 1, 2023). The lure of science in finding the good life and correction social wrongs are embodied in the current debates about scientific evidence and digital futures.
This historical allure of science is embedded in the CIES theme of the ethical concerns when envisioning education in an increasingly digitalized world; that is, the desire that research will help to improve experiences, outcomes, and equitable opportunities for all, including those already at the margins. This panel is part of an international project in the Cultural Politics of the Sciences of Education and Teacher Education. It is directed to how science produces “vision” and its performativity through international studies of its visual cultures, affective economies, and in making reading as a public and education problem. Underlying the symposium is to consider science as sites that contribute to the construction of truths that continually embodies paradoxes of ordering and differentiating and distributing differences of people. The methodologies of the papers are draw from science and technology studies and the sociology of the politics of knowledge to examine how the educational phenomena are produced through the infrastructures of research and the ways in which values and politics of knowledge become invisible in this process (Latour, 1987).
The larger project involves international researchers examining the education sciences through three theoretical, sociological, and historical themes:
1) The sciences related to curriculum studies generate patterns of recognition and expectations of experience that gives “sight” as the distinctions and classification in the ordering of policy, pedagogy, and the curriculum of the school.
(2) The object of the sciences and its construction of knowledge is what the philosopher and historian of science, Ian Hacking (2002) suggests as the practice in creating kinds of people, for example the lifelong learner, the adolescent, and the disadvantaged child.
(3) The science of the curriculum, teaching, and learning inscribes a comparative reasoning that generate and distribute differences in the characteristics and capacities of people (Author 1, 2020). The paradoxes of the social and psychological sciences in education are studied as double gestures: Producing the good life in making successful, motivated, creative, and literate people are gestures enacting the dark side of the matter: the disadvantaged, the illiterate, the marginalized and the dysfunctional (Author 1, 2008; Author 2, 2018).
The epistemic and methodological approaches of the papers provide ways to consider the study of education and its commitments through a method of “unthinking” the doxa of the present as a mode of thinking about the present and alternatives in questions of equity and justice.
We propose a double symposium, part I and II, with three papers each, followed by extended comments by two discussants, who are scholars of educational philosophy, the history of education and of science and technology studies. Author 1 (presenting in Part I) will function as chair in both sessions, and they will make sure that enough time is allocated for an including discussion at the end of both parts for all participants. We aim for a two-part panel to ensure enough allocated time for presenters, discussants, and general discussion. However, we are prepared for arranging the two parts as one, with shorter presentations if needed.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Elin Sundström Sjödin

Individual Presentations

• Making up the Multicultural Student through the Fabrication of Race and Racialization of Difference in South Korea - Michael Shimoura, The University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ji Hyun Hwang, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Imagining Bloom: Visualizations of Bloom’s Taxonomy in Educational Research and Beyond - Tatiana Mikhaylova; Daniel Pettersson, University of Gavle

• Modernist Pedagogy and Psycho-Technologies: The Scientific Assemblage of the Aesthetic Individual and the Artist-Without-Genius - Wiktoria Szawiel, Institute of Education, University of Lisbon; Ana Lúisa Fernandes Paz

Discussant

• Thomas S Popkewitz, Uinversity of Wisconsin-Madison