Infrastructuring Bio-Edu-Data Science
Dr Ben Williamson, Chancellor's Fellow, Centre for Research in Digital Education + Edinburgh Futures Institute
This seminar took place on 7th June 2023
Event recording (Media Hopper Create)
Abstract
Technological transformations in molecular genomics have begun to affect knowledge production in education. Interdisciplinary teams are cohering into large-scale scientific consortia, working across a range of methods, technologies, expertise, biomaterials, and datasets with the aim of identifying the genetic dimensions of ‘educationally-relevant’ traits, behaviours, and outcomes. This presentation presents findings from a project investigating the synthesis of biology, education and data science, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I examine the emerging ‘knowledge infrastructure’ of educational genomics research, attending to the organisational associations, epistemic architecture, and scientific apparatuses implicated in the generation of genomic understandings from masses of bioinformation. While scientists claim to be ‘opening the black box of the genome’ and its association with educational outcomes and behaviours, the aim of this presentation is to open the black box of educational genomics as a source of emerging scientific authority in educational research and knowledge production.
Williamson, B., Kotouza, D., Pickersgill, M. et al. Infrastructuring Educational Genomics: Associations, Architectures, and Apparatuses. Postdigit Sci Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00451-3
Biology, data science, and the making of precision education