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The biopolitics of the quantified self: Sensor technologies and worldly sensibility
Book chapter

The biopolitics of the quantified self: Sensor technologies and worldly sensibility

Elizabeth de Freitas, Matthew X. Curinga, Maggie MacLure, David Rousell, Laura Trafí-Prats and Sarah E. Truman
Posthuman Social Science and Computational Culture: Essays on Methodology, Theory and Practice, pp.70-82
Routledge, 1st
2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003538769-6
Appears in  Recent Faculty of Education Publications

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Abstract

Biosocial research is at the vanguard of a radical and problematic reconfiguring of education research, merging research methodologies from the life sciences and the social sciences (Williamson et al., 2024; Youdell, 2016; Youdell & Lindley, 2019). Such research is increasingly being advocated at national policy levels, responding to scientific developments and paradigm shifts in various disciplines. 1 Many contemporary biosocial interventions, however, are being harnessed to highly conventional and reductionist models of learning, conceived in terms of faster or more effective transit through pre-defined stages. Biotechnologies and “biopedagogies” are being used with children and adults to track and modify attention, engagement, decision-making, emotional states, motion, performance, and creativity (Williamson, 2016). The sensor technologies that are central to this kind of research carry serious ethical implications as they permit new levels of intervention into the bodies, mental states and conduct of individuals and groups (Nafus, 2016). Moreover, behaviour interventions are typically grounded in normative assumptions based on control or correction of bodily phenomena that irritate dominant notions of proper conduct (e.g. “fidgeting,” repetitive gestures, noises, agitation, or the turbulence of crowds). Deployments of biotechnologies to track such behaviour are easily, and often rightly, critiqued on ethical and pedagogical grounds (Gillborn, 2016).

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