Session Information
28 SES 14 B, Educational Sciences as Agential: Reading Numbers and Distributing Difference
Symposium
Contribution
Our proposed symposium explores diversity as not a transcendental concept but something produced as a domain of knowledge articulated through educational practice and research, in the theories and daily language of education and its goals. Put differently, educational research is seen as part of producing and naturalizing particular kinds of knowledge and facts about the world and people. This process of valuation and naturalization, in Europe and beyond, entails that values, politics of knowledge, and the creation of diversities become invisible in this process (Latour, 1987, 1993).
Drawing on science and technology studies (Dussauge, Helgesson & Lee, 2015; Latour, 1987, Popkewitz, 2020; Sundström Sjödin, 2019), the papers of this symposium approach different layers of practices that explore how science becomes mode of reasoning about diversity and differences in children, teaching, and society. In particular we use literacy and Literature reading as examples for understanding how truths and facts about an educational content are created, valued and naturalized through its systems of knowledge. How do truths and facts about educational phenomena, content, teaching, and learning – once they are stabilized and naturalized – order, classify and differentiate people? (Latour, 1993; Hamilton, 2012).
The symposium specifically contributes with knowledge on how both the infrastructure and the social inscriptions of ‘numbers’ act as truth telling practices that generate notions of differences as diversity, and how the valuations generated in the sciences circulate in science based public and political debate (Popkewitz, 2022; Sundström Sjödin, 2019; see also Edwards, Ivanič, & Mannon, 2009; Graff, 2010; Hamilton, Maddox & Addey, 2015). Our shared focus is on how these numbers become entangled in processes of value-making about people and things, and how science operates phenomenally as a policy and pedagogical knowledge about what is “reasonable” (and not reasoned) people in the ordering of society. The valuations are in no way innocent. Productive in the governing of modernity, its modes of giving intelligibility to the self and others, and in how social commitments are enacted concretely in the discourses for political reforms and interventions with a direct impact on society and individuals (Popkewitz, 2022).
The symposium includes four papers commented by a discussant from the field. The papers take two different intersecting avenues. One is papers that historicize the notion of “truth” through examining how science performs agentially; that is, examining how the infrastructures of science generate patterns of recognition and expectations of experience by which “truth” is constituted through the rules and standards applied to the objects of reflection and action (Popkewitz, 2020). The other avenue highlight research–school–society interractions that enact certain values on educational content such as literacy and literature reading, which entails specific educational effects and diversities.
References
Dussauge, I., Helgesson, C-F., & Lee, F. (Eds.) (2015). Value practices in the life sciences and medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edwards, R., Ivanič, R., & Mannion, G. (2009). The scrumpled geography of literacies for learning. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30(4), 483–499. Graff, H. J. (2010). The literacy myth at thirty. Journal of Social History, 43(3), 635–661. Hamilton, M. (2012). Literacy and the politics of representation. London & New York: Routledge. Hamilton, M, Maddox, B & Addey, C (Eds.) (2015). Literacy as Numbers: Researching the Politics and Practices of International Literacy Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Popkewitz, T. (2020). The impracticality of practical research: A history of sciences of change that conserve. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Popkewitz, T. (2022). International assessments as the comparative desires and the distributions of difference: infrastructures and coloniality, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education; DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2021.2023259. Sundström Sjödin, E. (2019). Creating the valuable: Reading as a matter of health and successful parenthood. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(1), 46–60.
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