![]() Using insights from social representations theory and methods aligned with metaphor analysis, we investigate the meanings of epigenetics rooted in the use of metaphors and commonplaces that are circulating in current popular parlance and that are used to promote academic theories and ideas as well as tangible products and services. In this article we concentrate on two normally distant domains within the public sphere: the advertising of alternative health products and services, and the promotion of alternative approaches to social science, especially around how social science deals with the 'biosocial'. Initial findings from epigenetics research held the promise of changing how we think about health and illness, evolution and heredity speculations about how individuals and populations could begin to control such processes through epigenetics were then picked up in the public realm. It came to public attention around the turn of the millennium when the human genome began to be deciphered. While the NAPLAN test is not claimed to cause physical and psychical injury, we argue that standardised test conditions, in these singular events, are inextricably entwined with the formation of particular students’ schooled subjectivities.Įpigenetics is a multifaceted field within genetics and genomics which focuses on discovering mechanisms involved in gene expression and regulation. We ask, after Deleuze and Guattari, What can a NAPLAN test do? Exploring the entangled corporeal (physical and embodied) and incorporeal (psychic and subjectivating) wounds effected in and through these events, we analyse the dynamic constitution and reconstitutions of ‘at risk’ categorisations. These events erupted in two qualitative studies of students’ schooling experiences: a study of students’ experiences of NAPLAN and a study of students’ experiences of student voice at school. This article takes as its point of departure two intensely affective events associated with the NAPLAN test day itself. Previous analyses of the effects of NAPLAN have been generated outside of the test situation: frequently through attitudinal surveys and qualitative interviews. ![]() Standardised testing regimes, including the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia, have impacted on relationships between and within schools, and on teachers’ work and on pedagogies. The brain/code/spaces of education proposed by Pearson and IBM are intended to optimize human cognition as a technique of human capital development in order to enhance the performance of education systems to secure comparative advantage in a globalizing policy space, exemplifying new forms of neurocomputational governance and capital. This describes environments that possess brain-like functions of learning and cognition performed by computational processes. To examine the technological and neurobiological means by which a learner is made up through technologically-mediated educational environments, we advance the idea of 'brain/code/space' as a conceptual framework. These emerging forms of neurocomputation are examined as technologies designed to function according to neuroscientific understandings of the brain, and to impress themselves on the cerebral lives of learners by being embedded in educational spaces. ![]() The article provides an original analysis of current 'brain-based' R&D by the edu-business Pearson to apply artificial intelligence in education, and by the computing company IBM to develop cognitive systems for learning. The novel practices and environments produced by these technologies require new forms of 'biosocial' analysis to unpack their implications for education, learning and governance. Recently, technologies based on neuroscientific insights into brain function and structure have been promoted for application in education.
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