Bernadette Baker
Biographic Data
| ID | 3592238 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bernadette Baker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bernadette |
| FAMILY NAME | Baker |
| SIGNATURE | BAKER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1864-9863 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
A human-animal problematic and the production of pedagogical clearings in the classroom
This paper springboards from entanglements involving humanisms, classroom teaching, and eco-disaster. Drawing on Derrida’s l’animot, Marchesini’s theriomorphism and animal epiphany, and Rice and Rud’s blurring, we mine the deep potentials in postfoundationalist approaches to distinction-making and violence in regard to a human-animal problematic. The approaches taken via these different “theoretical” engagements suffuse autoethnographic-style acc…
Signature of Attention: Historical Ambiguities and Elisions in Contemporary Psychological Framings of Attending
In contemporary contexts of digitalization, proliferating media, and generative AI, various “life hacks” are regularly recommended to disconnect and resist distraction, ranging from meditation to getting back to nature to unplugging. This paper traces contemporary concerns over “the attention crisis” into a longer signature — the frequently elided field of signification today referred to as “spiritual,” a signature which links attention to theori…
AI, Concepts of Intelligence, and Chatbots: The “Figure of Man,” the Rise of Emotion, and Future Visions of Education
Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been implemented across all levels of education, with the rapid developments of chatbots and AI language models, like ChatGPT, demonstrating the urgent need to conceptualize the key debates and their implications for a new era of learning and assessment. This adoption occurs in a context where AI is dramatically remapping “the human,” the purposes of schooling, and pedagogy. Focus of Stud…
In the trading zone: The eco and the techno at the limits of ‘the human’ and compulsory schooling
This paper examines what is at stake in the trading zone, where Eco and Techno movements meet, especially in regard to the attributes generally posited as unique to “the human” and upon which compulsory schooling has been historically founded. It offers a thought experiment and investigation into how the simultaneity of Eco and Techno movements highlight what is at stake in schooling’s reliance on attributes such as consciousness and intelligence…
Inside Out: Head‐Based Ontologies, Vision, and Temporality in the First Neuroturn
Since the early 1800s, mainstream Western discourses that entwined racializing and ableizing discourses have involved, among other things, particular notions of temporality and ways of privileging scopic regimes that presume surface‐depth relations mediated by a theory of time and materiality. In this essay, Bernadette Baker analyzes the link between the production of visual surface‐depth relations, the theorization of time, and the conception of…
A picture speaks a thousand words? Vision, visuality and authorization
Images of brains circulate today as rationales for decision-making and selectivity in policies, curriculum, preservice teacher education and inservice professional development. The excitement over brain-based research, its visual reach and authorizing role accompanies longstanding debates in which the status attributed to biology, physiology and allied psychological approaches has been considered prejudicial. This article traces a series of dislo…
The anatomy of our discontent: From Braining the Mind to Mindfulness for Teachers
This paper offers an overview of contemporary inscriptions of mindfulness, their conditions of possibility, and examples of the braining of mind on which contemporary neuro-meets-contemplative turns are dependent. We examine key nineteenth-century events integral to the formation of Biologies Old, in which historic debates over ‘the death of God’ in Western worldviews forge a space of finitude dedicated to fleshy materiality and the relocation of…
New biological rationalities in education
To show is to know? The conceptualization of evidence and discourses of vision in social science and education research
The demand for evidence in particular forms shapes contemporary educational policy, curriculum studies' debates over the politics of knowledge "versus" wisdom, and research into classroom practice. This paper provides a genealogical trace that examines the arbitrary and historical linkage of discourses of vision (especially when vision becomes visuality) and the conceptualization of evidence (especially when evidence becomes empiricism-as-density…
Technologies of Self and the Cultivation of Virtues: Technologies of Self and the Cultivation of Virtues
Journal Article Technologies of Self and the Cultivation of Virtues Get access Robert Hattam, Robert Hattam Correspondence: Rob Hattam, School of Education, University of South Australia, GPO Box 2471, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bernadette Baker Bernadette Baker Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Sc…
William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-Imperial Discourse
In the past few decades, the humanities and social sciences have developed new methods of reorienting their conceptual frameworks in a 'world without frontiers'. In this book, Bernadette M. Baker offers an innovative approach to rethinking sciences of mind as they formed at the turn of the twentieth century, via the concerns that have emerged at the turn of the twenty-first. The less-visited texts of Harvard philosopher and psychologist William J…
Provincializing Curriculum? On the Preparation of Subjectivity for Globality
An essay review of“On the Origins of the Educational Terms Class and Curriculum”(Hamilton, D. Hamilton, D. (1989/2009). On the origins of the educational terms class and curriculum. In B. Baker (Ed.), New curriculum history (pp. 3–20). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. [Google Scholar] In B. Baker, Ed., New Curriculum History,pp. 3–20. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense, 1989/2009)andSiam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation(Winichakul, …
Governing the Invisible: Psychical Science and Conditions of Proof
New Curriculum History
"Rereading the historical record indicates that it is no longer so easy to argue that history is simply prior to its forms. Since the mid-1990s a new wave of research has formed around wider debates in the humanities and social sciences, such as decentering the subject, new analytics of power, reconsideration of one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space, attention to beyond-archival sources, alterity, Otherness, the invisible, and more. In…
Normalizing Foucault? A Rhizomatic Approach to Plateaus in Anglophone Educational Research
This paper offers a rhizomatic reading of Foucault scholarship in anglophone educational research. It delineates unique parameters of an educational field, the conditions of receptivity for Foucault's work, and identifies three temporary plateau-formations that have erupted in educational research. Indebted to (non-formulaic) principles of connectivity and heterogeneity, multiplicity, and asignifying ruptures the analysis brings to notice the rec…
Hypnotic Inductions: On the Persistence of the Subject: A Response to James Marshall
As for "Normalizing Foucault?" I draw upon of the problematization of the possessive, where such grammatical forms are to be understood through a reading strategy that places them beyond the individual and outside discourses of ownership
Animal Magnetism and Curriculum History
This article elaborates the impact that crises of authority provoked by animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis in the 19th century had for field formation in American education. Four layers of analysis elucidate how curriculum history’s repetitive focus on public school policy and classroom practice became possible. First, the article surveys external conditions of possibility for the enactment of compulsory public schooling. Second, “internal…
Torsions Within the Same Anxiety? Entification, apophasis, history
In Anglophone educational research in the United States, the name Foucault has been more pointedly celebrated in some subfields such as curriculum studies relative to its more noticeable censorship in subfields such as history of education. This paper illustrates how such differential epistemological politics might be accounted for through reapproaching the challenges to historiography that Histoire de la Folie (Madness and Civilization) raised. …
The apophasis of limits: Genius, madness, and learning disability
The rock struck Aeneas on the groin where the hip turns in the joint that is called the ‘cup‐bone’. The stone crushed this joint, and broke both the sinews. (Homer/Murray, c.800 BCE/1999 Homer. c.800 BCE/1999. Iliad, Edited by: Murray, A. T. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar], V, 303ff. verse 32) For health and sickness, goodness or badness, the proportion or disproportion between soul and body themselves is more important th…
State-formation, teaching techniques, and globalisation as aporia
This paper conjoins Derrida's analysis of aporia and boderlines with Foucault's genealogical sensibilities to rethink the attribution of recent events in education to globalisation. Three analytical domains are linked to historicise student-teacher interaction: studies of pedagogical techniques, sociological analyses of the state, and philosophical conceptions of Being and desire. This confluence of domains makes apparent multiple efforts to tran…
The functional liminality of the not-dead-yet-students, or, how public schooling became compulsory: A glancing history
This paper redefines the focus for narrating histories of education in the USA through a ‘glancing history’. It highlights the important role played by ‘not-dead-yet students’ who occupied a liminal place on the scale of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Traditional histories of education have been more singularly focused on the advent and dynamics of public schooling, ignoring the functionality of such child subjects to publi…
Plato's Child and the Limit-Points of Educational Theories
The Hunt for Disability: The New Eugenics and the Normalization of School Children 1
This paper is an attempt to reconsider issues of sameness, difference, equality, and democracy in present public school systems. It focuses on the question of (dis)ability and the implications of rethinking (dis)ability as an ontological issue before its inscription as an educational one concerning the politics of inclusion. The everyday dividing, sorting, and classifying practices of schooling are reconsidered through an analysis of old and new …
(Ap)pointing the Canon Rousseau's Émile , Visions of the State, and Education
The Dangerous and the Good? Developmentalism, Progress, and Public Schooling
In light of numerous critiques of developmentalism, this article examines whether developmentalism has been a dangerous way to think about human life. It traces the emergence of different kinds of developmental discourse, locates the discursive preconditions for developmentalism's dominance in education, and examines the conjuncture between developmentalism and progressivism in shaping the limits of education's discursive field since the late 19t…
To show is to know? The conceptualization of evidence and discourses of vision in social science and education research
The demand for evidence in particular forms shapes contemporary educational policy, curriculum studies' debates over the politics of knowledge "versus" wisdom, and research into classroom practice. This paper provides a genealogical trace that examines the arbitrary and historical linkage of discourses of vision (especially when vision becomes visuality) and the conceptualization of evidence (especially when evidence becomes empiricism-as-density…
The Dangerous and the Good? Developmentalism, Progress, and Public Schooling
In light of numerous critiques of developmentalism, this article examines whether developmentalism has been a dangerous way to think about human life. It traces the emergence of different kinds of developmental discourse, locates the discursive preconditions for developmentalism's dominance in education, and examines the conjuncture between developmentalism and progressivism in shaping the limits of education's discursive field since the late 19t…
New biological rationalities in education
Technologies of Self and the Cultivation of Virtues: Technologies of Self and the Cultivation of Virtues
Journal Article Technologies of Self and the Cultivation of Virtues Get access Robert Hattam, Robert Hattam Correspondence: Rob Hattam, School of Education, University of South Australia, GPO Box 2471, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bernadette Baker Bernadette Baker Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Sc…
The anatomy of our discontent: From Braining the Mind to Mindfulness for Teachers
This paper offers an overview of contemporary inscriptions of mindfulness, their conditions of possibility, and examples of the braining of mind on which contemporary neuro-meets-contemplative turns are dependent. We examine key nineteenth-century events integral to the formation of Biologies Old, in which historic debates over ‘the death of God’ in Western worldviews forge a space of finitude dedicated to fleshy materiality and the relocation of…
Provincializing Curriculum? On the Preparation of Subjectivity for Globality
An essay review of“On the Origins of the Educational Terms Class and Curriculum”(Hamilton, D. Hamilton, D. (1989/2009). On the origins of the educational terms class and curriculum. In B. Baker (Ed.), New curriculum history (pp. 3–20). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. [Google Scholar] In B. Baker, Ed., New Curriculum History,pp. 3–20. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense, 1989/2009)andSiam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation(Winichakul, …
Animal Magnetism and Curriculum History
This article elaborates the impact that crises of authority provoked by animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis in the 19th century had for field formation in American education. Four layers of analysis elucidate how curriculum history’s repetitive focus on public school policy and classroom practice became possible. First, the article surveys external conditions of possibility for the enactment of compulsory public schooling. Second, “internal…
The apophasis of limits: Genius, madness, and learning disability
The rock struck Aeneas on the groin where the hip turns in the joint that is called the ‘cup‐bone’. The stone crushed this joint, and broke both the sinews. (Homer/Murray, c.800 BCE/1999 Homer. c.800 BCE/1999. Iliad, Edited by: Murray, A. T. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar], V, 303ff. verse 32) For health and sickness, goodness or badness, the proportion or disproportion between soul and body themselves is more important th…
The functional liminality of the not-dead-yet-students, or, how public schooling became compulsory: A glancing history
This paper redefines the focus for narrating histories of education in the USA through a ‘glancing history’. It highlights the important role played by ‘not-dead-yet students’ who occupied a liminal place on the scale of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Traditional histories of education have been more singularly focused on the advent and dynamics of public schooling, ignoring the functionality of such child subjects to publi…
Making History, Making Humans
Normalizing Foucault? A Rhizomatic Approach to Plateaus in Anglophone Educational Research
This paper offers a rhizomatic reading of Foucault scholarship in anglophone educational research. It delineates unique parameters of an educational field, the conditions of receptivity for Foucault's work, and identifies three temporary plateau-formations that have erupted in educational research. Indebted to (non-formulaic) principles of connectivity and heterogeneity, multiplicity, and asignifying ruptures the analysis brings to notice the rec…
State-formation, teaching techniques, and globalisation as aporia
This paper conjoins Derrida's analysis of aporia and boderlines with Foucault's genealogical sensibilities to rethink the attribution of recent events in education to globalisation. Three analytical domains are linked to historicise student-teacher interaction: studies of pedagogical techniques, sociological analyses of the state, and philosophical conceptions of Being and desire. This confluence of domains makes apparent multiple efforts to tran…
Plato's Child and the Limit-Points of Educational Theories
The History of Curriculum or Curriculum History? What is the Field and Who Gets to Play on it
The field of curriculum history is a relatively recent phenomenon in the study of education. How the genesis of the field has been reviewed and constructed by historians is reflective of the ways in which the field constructs the objects of study that comprise its content and emphases. This paper explores some of the tensions inherent to labelling and describing the construction of the curriculum history field within the contexts of Australian, E…
The Dangerous and the Good? Developmentalism, Progress, and Public Schooling
In light of numerous critiques of developmentalism, this article examines whether developmentalism has been a dangerous way to think about human life. It traces the emergence of different kinds of developmental discourse, locates the discursive preconditions for developmentalism's dominance in education, and examines the conjuncture between developmentalism and progressivism in shaping the limits of education's discursive field since the late 19t…
Making History, Making Humans
(Ap)pointing the Canon Rousseau's Émile , Visions of the State, and Education
The Hunt for Disability: The New Eugenics and the Normalization of School Children 1
This paper is an attempt to reconsider issues of sameness, difference, equality, and democracy in present public school systems. It focuses on the question of (dis)ability and the implications of rethinking (dis)ability as an ontological issue before its inscription as an educational one concerning the politics of inclusion. The everyday dividing, sorting, and classifying practices of schooling are reconsidered through an analysis of old and new …
Plato's Child and the Limit-Points of Educational Theories
The functional liminality of the not-dead-yet-students, or, how public schooling became compulsory: A glancing history
This paper redefines the focus for narrating histories of education in the USA through a ‘glancing history’. It highlights the important role played by ‘not-dead-yet students’ who occupied a liminal place on the scale of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Traditional histories of education have been more singularly focused on the advent and dynamics of public schooling, ignoring the functionality of such child subjects to publi…
State-formation, teaching techniques, and globalisation as aporia
This paper conjoins Derrida's analysis of aporia and boderlines with Foucault's genealogical sensibilities to rethink the attribution of recent events in education to globalisation. Three analytical domains are linked to historicise student-teacher interaction: studies of pedagogical techniques, sociological analyses of the state, and philosophical conceptions of Being and desire. This confluence of domains makes apparent multiple efforts to tran…
The apophasis of limits: Genius, madness, and learning disability
The rock struck Aeneas on the groin where the hip turns in the joint that is called the ‘cup‐bone’. The stone crushed this joint, and broke both the sinews. (Homer/Murray, c.800 BCE/1999 Homer. c.800 BCE/1999. Iliad, Edited by: Murray, A. T. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar], V, 303ff. verse 32) For health and sickness, goodness or badness, the proportion or disproportion between soul and body themselves is more important th…
Normalizing Foucault? A Rhizomatic Approach to Plateaus in Anglophone Educational Research
This paper offers a rhizomatic reading of Foucault scholarship in anglophone educational research. It delineates unique parameters of an educational field, the conditions of receptivity for Foucault's work, and identifies three temporary plateau-formations that have erupted in educational research. Indebted to (non-formulaic) principles of connectivity and heterogeneity, multiplicity, and asignifying ruptures the analysis brings to notice the rec…
Hypnotic Inductions: On the Persistence of the Subject: A Response to James Marshall
As for "Normalizing Foucault?" I draw upon of the problematization of the possessive, where such grammatical forms are to be understood through a reading strategy that places them beyond the individual and outside discourses of ownership
Animal Magnetism and Curriculum History
This article elaborates the impact that crises of authority provoked by animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis in the 19th century had for field formation in American education. Four layers of analysis elucidate how curriculum history’s repetitive focus on public school policy and classroom practice became possible. First, the article surveys external conditions of possibility for the enactment of compulsory public schooling. Second, “internal…
Torsions Within the Same Anxiety? Entification, apophasis, history
In Anglophone educational research in the United States, the name Foucault has been more pointedly celebrated in some subfields such as curriculum studies relative to its more noticeable censorship in subfields such as history of education. This paper illustrates how such differential epistemological politics might be accounted for through reapproaching the challenges to historiography that Histoire de la Folie (Madness and Civilization) raised. …
Governing the Invisible: Psychical Science and Conditions of Proof
New Curriculum History
"Rereading the historical record indicates that it is no longer so easy to argue that history is simply prior to its forms. Since the mid-1990s a new wave of research has formed around wider debates in the humanities and social sciences, such as decentering the subject, new analytics of power, reconsideration of one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space, attention to beyond-archival sources, alterity, Otherness, the invisible, and more. In…
Provincializing Curriculum? On the Preparation of Subjectivity for Globality
An essay review of“On the Origins of the Educational Terms Class and Curriculum”(Hamilton, D. Hamilton, D. (1989/2009). On the origins of the educational terms class and curriculum. In B. Baker (Ed.), New curriculum history (pp. 3–20). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. [Google Scholar] In B. Baker, Ed., New Curriculum History,pp. 3–20. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense, 1989/2009)andSiam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation(Winichakul, …
William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-Imperial Discourse
In the past few decades, the humanities and social sciences have developed new methods of reorienting their conceptual frameworks in a 'world without frontiers'. In this book, Bernadette M. Baker offers an innovative approach to rethinking sciences of mind as they formed at the turn of the twentieth century, via the concerns that have emerged at the turn of the twenty-first. The less-visited texts of Harvard philosopher and psychologist William J…
Technologies of Self and the Cultivation of Virtues: Technologies of Self and the Cultivation of Virtues
Journal Article Technologies of Self and the Cultivation of Virtues Get access Robert Hattam, Robert Hattam Correspondence: Rob Hattam, School of Education, University of South Australia, GPO Box 2471, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bernadette Baker Bernadette Baker Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Sc…
To show is to know? The conceptualization of evidence and discourses of vision in social science and education research
The demand for evidence in particular forms shapes contemporary educational policy, curriculum studies' debates over the politics of knowledge "versus" wisdom, and research into classroom practice. This paper provides a genealogical trace that examines the arbitrary and historical linkage of discourses of vision (especially when vision becomes visuality) and the conceptualization of evidence (especially when evidence becomes empiricism-as-density…
The anatomy of our discontent: From Braining the Mind to Mindfulness for Teachers
This paper offers an overview of contemporary inscriptions of mindfulness, their conditions of possibility, and examples of the braining of mind on which contemporary neuro-meets-contemplative turns are dependent. We examine key nineteenth-century events integral to the formation of Biologies Old, in which historic debates over ‘the death of God’ in Western worldviews forge a space of finitude dedicated to fleshy materiality and the relocation of…
New biological rationalities in education
A picture speaks a thousand words? Vision, visuality and authorization
Images of brains circulate today as rationales for decision-making and selectivity in policies, curriculum, preservice teacher education and inservice professional development. The excitement over brain-based research, its visual reach and authorizing role accompanies longstanding debates in which the status attributed to biology, physiology and allied psychological approaches has been considered prejudicial. This article traces a series of dislo…
Inside Out: Head‐Based Ontologies, Vision, and Temporality in the First Neuroturn
Since the early 1800s, mainstream Western discourses that entwined racializing and ableizing discourses have involved, among other things, particular notions of temporality and ways of privileging scopic regimes that presume surface‐depth relations mediated by a theory of time and materiality. In this essay, Bernadette Baker analyzes the link between the production of visual surface‐depth relations, the theorization of time, and the conception of…
In the trading zone: The eco and the techno at the limits of ‘the human’ and compulsory schooling
This paper examines what is at stake in the trading zone, where Eco and Techno movements meet, especially in regard to the attributes generally posited as unique to “the human” and upon which compulsory schooling has been historically founded. It offers a thought experiment and investigation into how the simultaneity of Eco and Techno movements highlight what is at stake in schooling’s reliance on attributes such as consciousness and intelligence…
AI, Concepts of Intelligence, and Chatbots: The “Figure of Man,” the Rise of Emotion, and Future Visions of Education
Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been implemented across all levels of education, with the rapid developments of chatbots and AI language models, like ChatGPT, demonstrating the urgent need to conceptualize the key debates and their implications for a new era of learning and assessment. This adoption occurs in a context where AI is dramatically remapping “the human,” the purposes of schooling, and pedagogy. Focus of Stud…
Sociology (20 works) · Law (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Pedagogy (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)