Inclusion without Potential: Disability and the Biopolitics of Neuro-logical Human Capital Investments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parents challenged Canada’s National Children’s Agenda (NCA)—a policy umbrella for neoliberal investments in early childhood introduced in 1999—for mobilizing a brain-focused conceptualization of child development they felt excluded children with disabilities. This conceptualization cast early brain formation as a critical developmental stage and investment phase for human capital development at the population level, assembling a linkage between brain-economy-population that I term the “neuro-logical” model. Although studies show that political efforts to invest in human capital through early childhood reproduce inequality for many, few have considered the exclusionary effects on children with disabilities. To elucidate the inclusion/exclusion of disability, I examine how developmental differences were discursively incorporated in attempts to mobilize and operationalize the neuro-logical model in policy between 1994-2011. Drawing on Lemke’s approach to Foucauldian biopolitics, I conceptualize the NCA as an effort to assemble knowledge and strategies for optimizing life at the population level, and read the neuro-logical model as a strategy to calibrate biopolitics to both emergent neuroscientific “truths” and rapid social and economic change. Using a critical interpretive, “anthropology of policy” methodology that analyzes policy as both discourse and governmental technique, I analyze the neuro-logical model through relevant documentary sources. While the NCA was rhetorically about investing in all children, it was more directly about investing in normal and normalizable brain development as a means to optimize population vitality and ensure global economic competitiveness. I develop the argument that the possibilities for including disability as a form of developmental difference were inscribed in the neuro-logical model itself. Specifically, cognitive impairments that were considered permanent were positioned as the non-normalizable remainder in the investment agenda. Framing the investment in early childhood in neuroscientific terms obscured both the discursive reproduction of disabled children’s marginality and the deflection of alternate conceptualizations of human value, child potential, and inclusion. This thesis contributes to theorizing how models of normal and normalizable child development shape the discursive incorporation of children with disabling differences, with implications for policy, theory, and practice. Ethnographically rich policy research is needed to investigate how policy models are reproduced or transformed through local implementation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".