This paper explores how knowledges being generated in bioscience might be brought into productive articulation with the sociology of education in ways that help us to better understand learning and which might have potential to identify new ways to intervene in inequalities (Youdell and Lindley 2018). 

The paper poses a series of pressing questions: 

• Is sociology of education equipped to understand the many influences on learning and their interactions, ranging from considerations of macro- forces such as policy and money through to micro forces such as biochemical flows? 
• Why and in what ways might sociology of education, molecular biology, analytical chemistry, epigenetics or neuroscience need each other? 
• Can emerging transdisciplinary, ‘biosocial’ approaches enable new ways of researching and understanding pressing educational issues? 

The paper’s response to these questions is underpinned by a recognition of complexity; the multiple forces, orders and scales at which education, inequalities and learning is generated. It draws Karen Barad’s (2008) account of the entanglement of phenomena that are frequently treated, in science and sociology alike, as discreet and potentially of different orders and her argument for an understanding of and methodological orientation towards intra-action; apparently discreet phenomenon are fundamentally enfolded such that they are understood to intra-act, not inter-act. It also draws on Elizabeth de Freitas’ (2017) call to creative ‘experimentation’ to develop ‘more-than-human worldly sensibilities’ and understand the ‘profoundly relational and materially distributed’ nature of education and learning (de Freitas 2017:292). Finally, it engages with Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi's a (2017) distinction between apparently transdisciplinary work that leaves old disciplines and hierarchies in place, and encounters between disciplines that are reconfigurations of epistemologies, methodologies and ontologies. 

The transdisciplinary research of my group, brings together collaborators from across fields: sociology of education; molecular biology and biochemistry; cognitive neuroscience; mass spectrometry; fMRI imaging; and EEG. The particular nature of the encounter advocated here suggests a transdisciplinarity that includes: the knowledge frameworks that underpin our thinking and our enquiry; the questions we ask; our methodology; research design; and analytic approach. Ultimately, it is a transdisciplinary that transforms the factors that we understand to be important and the sorts of approaches to education that we might go on advocate. Working in this way means being constantly caught in these trans-disciplinary processes; moving between conceptualisations and methods which themselves shift in the process. Rather than pursuing a new transdiscipline – a new field, a noun, a name for a known thing, we engage in transdisciplinarity as in-process, as metamorphosis (Malabou 2009) or even a queering – a doing, a verb, transdisciplining.

The paper concludes that, critical, transdisciplinary biosocial approaches lead to central education research concepts –learning, inequality, the human, -- undergo metamorphosis, challenging us to understand these as phenomena produced through the intra-action of a multiplicity of forces and processes that are at once social and biological. These accounts promise to produces new understandings that have the potential to enable policy makers, school leaders and educators to think in new ways about their approaches to education, potentially transforming how we organise the settings in which children learn, the pedagogies used to facilitate learning, and the kinds of emotional atmospheres and relationships for learning that we engender.

Aronsson, L. and Lenz Taguchi, H. (2017) Mapping a collaborative cartography of the encounters between the neurosciences and early childhood education practices, Discourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39(2):1-16 Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Duke University Press. de Freitas, E. (2017). The biosocial subject: sensor technologies and worldly sensibility. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(2), 292-308. Lens Taguchi, H. (2016). Deleuzo-Guattarian Rhizomatics: Mapping the Desiring Forces and Connections between Educational Practices and the Neurosciences. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman Research Practices in Education (pp. 37-57). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Malabou, C. (2009). Changing Difference. Cambridge: Polity. Youdell, D and Lindley, M (2019) Biosocial Education: the biological and sociological entanglements of learning. London: Routledge.