Representational Politics in the Learning Sciences: Foundations, Limits, and Alternatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this conceptual paper we interrogate the use and misuse of representational politics within the learning sciences community, including our research, our professional society, and our departments.We argue that representational politics are a necessary but insufficient strategy for advancing equity and justice, and that in many cases they act as a detour that moves us away from more impactful strategies to address harm.To do this, we outline the philosophical underpinnings of representational politics and work through the limitations of these strategies when implemented in our field.We argue that the learning sciences should focus equity and justice strategies around collective liberation approaches rooted in historicized analysis of power and a commitment to solidarity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.044 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.162 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".