Biopolitical Neuroscience and New Education Professional Subjectivities in Chile
Biopolitical Neuroscience and New Education Professional Subjectivities in Chile
Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 15:28
Location: SJES028 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Oral Presentation
We are in the presence of the return of biology in social sciences and society (Brubaker, 2016; Meloni, 2019). Within it, neuroscience locates the brain as the biological underpinning of culture, citizenship, and society (Damasio et al., 2007). In education, this comprises a new biopolitical rationality seducing educational actors’ subjectivities and guiding new problematisations of their professional selves (Haye et al., 2018). Neuroscience has expanded into the realm of education through the mobilisation of numerous actors, funds, research, journals, markets, mass media, books, and their unrelenting efforts to draw out its implications for teaching, learning, and policy (Vidal & Ortega, 2017).
Drawing on extensive mapping of actors, programmes and discourses of neurosciences in education and on 18 interviews with educators actively participating in the emerging field of neuro-education in Chile, we developed a post-Foucauldian approach to explore the influence and subjectifying force of neuroscience’s translation into the professional field of education. We extend Foucauldian scholarship by developing a distinction between expertise and professionalisation and the concept of pedagogies of brain awareness (Rose, 2013).
We demonstrate empirically how neuroscience discourses have expanded and attracted education professionals via a privatisation process of ‘organisational recalibration’ (Ball, 2009) oriented to selling policy solutions and improvements for schools and educational professionals in order to make them amenable to performativity demands. We also identify the historical displacement of the centrality of psychological discourses of the self in the formation and lifelong learning projects and of educators by a new centrality of the medical professions and gazes into the education professional field. Through our interviews, we point out neuro-educational discourses’ capacity to become a puissant regime of professional subjectification by reconfiguring the language, thinking and feeling of education, pedagogy, and responsibility and expanding educators’ sense of agentic capacity amidst the production of epistemic unequal relationships.
Drawing on extensive mapping of actors, programmes and discourses of neurosciences in education and on 18 interviews with educators actively participating in the emerging field of neuro-education in Chile, we developed a post-Foucauldian approach to explore the influence and subjectifying force of neuroscience’s translation into the professional field of education. We extend Foucauldian scholarship by developing a distinction between expertise and professionalisation and the concept of pedagogies of brain awareness (Rose, 2013).
We demonstrate empirically how neuroscience discourses have expanded and attracted education professionals via a privatisation process of ‘organisational recalibration’ (Ball, 2009) oriented to selling policy solutions and improvements for schools and educational professionals in order to make them amenable to performativity demands. We also identify the historical displacement of the centrality of psychological discourses of the self in the formation and lifelong learning projects and of educators by a new centrality of the medical professions and gazes into the education professional field. Through our interviews, we point out neuro-educational discourses’ capacity to become a puissant regime of professional subjectification by reconfiguring the language, thinking and feeling of education, pedagogy, and responsibility and expanding educators’ sense of agentic capacity amidst the production of epistemic unequal relationships.