Building Critical Knowledge of Neuroengineering: Sociology at the Test of Interdisciplinary Teaching

Sociological perspectives are increasingly being integrated into STEM education to provide students with a broader understanding of the historical, social and institutional conditions embedded in technologies and practices. Interdisciplinary teaching, however, implies a greater challenge: that of addressing the epistemic differences and power relations that characterise the disciplines involved. In the case of biomedical engineering, the focus of this paper, hegemonic positivist paradigms can turn interdisciplinarity into a form of colonisation. Thus, a constructivist approach to technoscientific knowledge, which for us was rooted in feminist epistemologies, is needed to support students in reflexively engaging with situated knowledges, and recognising epistemic injustices.

Based on a three-year teaching experience in the course "Neuroengineering and Active Ageing", within the interdisciplinary initiative "Big Global Challenges" (Politecnico di Torino), the paper explores the integration between sociology and neuroengineering. The course consisted of lectures and group work designed to enable students to critically analyse neurotechnological devices through different disciplinary lenses. The number of participants ranged from 50 to 150 (30-40% international students).

To foster student reflexivity, the course pursued four main objectives: i) Historicising knowledge through a Foucauldian genealogy of neuroscience; ii) De-naturalising biomedical frameworks through the interactionist concept of medicalisation; iii) De-individualising the need for technological fixing through a historical materialist perspective on ableism; iv) Deconstructing techno-solutionist discourses around health data and technologies by analysing their non-neutrality and the way they reinforce existing social structures.

The paper provides insights into the learning process and its outcomes, based on the teachers' experiences, the students' feedback (questionnaire) and their essays. The course prompted reflections on normative models of functioning (ageing) bodies, their embeddedness in technology and the coloniality of biomedical knowledge. Nevertheless, some tensions emerged, and technosolutionism was sometimes restored to deal with the difficulty of imagining more just neurotechnological practices beyond capitalist realism.