This annual lecture commemorating the academic work of Tony Watkins will take place on Thursday May 3rd at 6 pm in Edith Morley (formerly HUMSS Building) room 44.
The eminent critical psychologist Dr Jan De Vos will speak on ‘Digitalizing childhood: leading the child via its synapses to a psychologized virtuality’
Dr De Vos explains that the lecture will consider the following:
There is a substantial overlap between the discourses and the practices of neuro-education (attempting to ground education/parenting in neuroscience) and the digitalisation of education (schooling or parenting). An illustrative example is IBM’s “learning analytics” and its, mainly, metaphoric, recourse to neuro-terms, speaking of “neuromorphic hardware”, “brain-inspired algorithms”, “neurosynaptic chip”. One can furthermore observe that “learning platforms” most centrally address psycho-social issues such as empathy and social skills: this is at play on the discernible and visible level (of for example the virtual architecture of the platform) but also on the more hidden level of the algorithms and codes that give form to and direct the interactions. Education and schooling, seemingly, are psychologized via digitalization. Also in the field of the so-called “parenting apps” one can discern how digitalization connects to the (neuro)psychological: the app “Vroom”, for example, advertises with the claim “Vroom turns shared moments into brain building moments”. Or, digital technology turns human interactions into an issue of brain-regions and brain chemistry: the digital app neurologizes childhood and parenting.
In this lecture I will explore how the child (and its parents and educators), is led to the digital via a rationale which understands childhood from the (psycho)neurological paradigm. Digitalization, thus, as the heir of (neuro)psychologization?
