Neuroscience, biopolitics and new professional subjectivities in education

While neuroscience increasingly influences education globally, little attention has been paid to neuroeducation's capacity to reshape teacher professionalisation and subjectivities, particularly in the Global South. To address this gap, we conducted fieldwork in Chile using three main methods: semi-structured interviews, archival documentation and a novel mapping of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and master's programmes in neuroscience and education for teachers. This mapping focused on the justifications, aims and expertise behind these programmes, as well as their discursive activity across different spaces. Building on biopolitics and further developing the notion of pedagogies of brain awareness, our analysis demonstrates neuroscience's growing ascendancy in teacher professionalisation and the emergence of a new professional subjectivity. Pedagogies of brain awareness highlight the conditions, discursive logics, practices and subjective orientations that have been constructed around the brain and its affordances. We argue that the new subjectivities manifested by pedagogies of brain awareness are enabled by performativity-driven marketisation and privatisation in education, a pathologising style of problematisation, responsibilisation and epistemic inequalities that overlook socio-historical epistemologies. These dynamics ultimately curtail teachers' critical subjectivation capable of interrogating neuro-discourses within a broader constellation of power and pedagogical knowledges, and undermine the project of transdisciplinary collaboration.