Health and pathology: a brief history of the biopolitics of US mathematics education

Science class as clinic: Why histories of segregated instruction matter for health equity reforms today

“…As for research, scholars across science education, population health, and STEM higher education have contested the formulation of disparities and offered alternative research agendas to address structural racism and related injustices (Bailey et al, 2017; McGee, 2020; Parsons, 2011). Toward this end, historicizing offers an underutilized methodology to reckon with how taken‐for‐granted health or environmental crises reinscribe modes of sorting and regulating populations that traverse time periods (Ziols & K. Kirchgasler, 2021), subject‐area boundaries (Ziols & Ghosh, 2022), and national borders (Zheng, 2021). For instance, Ideland (2018) notes how the same socio‐scientific curriculum appeared in a middle‐class monoethnic Swedish school as a means to transmit disciplinary knowledge, but in a “multicultural” school as an “opportunity to discipline the students' behavior—teaching them to eat properly, exercise, [and] sleep at the right time” (p. 16), even as those students themselves contested expectations that they required a “more scientifically rational (and moral) way of living” (p. 17).…”

“…What are the consequences when science education uncritically adopts biomedical or lifestyle paradigms-presenting health disparities as problems of pedagogical differentiation rather than political will? Finally, I do not treat race as a static category, but chart how racializing distinctions of us/them or self/Other (Stoler, 2016) are reconfigured through notions of health and pathology (Ziols & K. Kirchgasler, 2021). We cannot talk about a clinical gaze without addressing how interrelations of medicine with colonialism shaped suppositions of healthy bodies and minds (Fanon, 1978;Seth, 2018), and how shifting classifications of race, ethnicity, or culture have historically intertwined with constructs of deprivation, disadvantage, and debility (Mckiernan-González et al, 2014;Puar, 2017;Ryan Hatch, 2022).…”

“…Here, I take up a caution already raised: to not assume efforts toward social transformation or public health are inherently just or benevolent (Bullock, 2020; Raveendran & Bazzul, 2021). Recent studies show how cultural norms of healthy living have historically divided students into groups matched with separate, unequal instructional tiers in science (K. Kirchgasler, 2018), mathematics (Yolcu & Popkewitz, 2019; Ziols & K. Kirchgasler, 2021) and literacy (Ziols & Ghosh, 2022). I build on this work to map key shifts in a pedagogical intervention space quarantining groups as not yet prepared for daily life, let alone for scientific or medical training.…”

Creativity as a Racializing and Ableizing Scientific Object: Disentangling the Democratic Impulse From Justice-Oriented Futures

“…For example, today’s brain-localizing studies have largely inverted 19th-century concerns with predicting and controlling interiors (e.g., conduct and capacity) from studies of surfaces (e.g., physiognomy) to directing attention toward interiors (e.g., brain scans) to predict causal changes in surfaces (e.g., creative behavior; see also, Baker, 2020). This premise, that creativity corresponds to structural and/or functional aspects of biology and brain matter risks presuming relationships that have historical antecedents in phrenology and scientific racism (e.g., Gulson & Baker, 2018; Winston, 2020; Ziols & Kirchgasler, 2021). To be sure, the neurosciences today are not symmetric with the past (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013), and brain-based studies may also offer new and important perspectives on many topics of concern.…”

“…What is notably absent is an account of the connection between public education and systems of mass incarceration that continue to disproportionately impact marginalized communities (e.g., Skiba et al, 2014). This is particularly a concern when art in formal learning environments “emerged in relation to the issue of the deviant child, the immigrant or the children of the poor” (Martins, 2013, p. 71) and therapeutic efforts to prevent mental illness through schooling have been disproportionately directed toward those assigned peripheral status (see also Ziols & Kirchgasler, 2021).…”