6 December 2023, 17:30 (room G-160).
My talk will focus on the interdisciplinary “trend” dealing with the impact of the “inequality paradigm” on knowledge and practices regarding child-rearing and education. More specifically, it will examine the problematic of the relation of knowledge on the development of children and associated child-rearing and educational practices, on the one hand, and phenomena associated with socioeconomic inequality, so rampant today in the United States and other nations, on the other hand. Following historian of the human sciences Roger Smith, I intend to deal with this problematic within the framework of a history of human science approach concerned with modes of being human under various sociocultural and historical circumstances. More especially, I want to investigate what it means to be human—along the lines elaborated by theorists Michel Foucault and Wendy Brown under the conditions fostered by the neoliberal policies promulgated in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Dennis Bryson received his B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research in New York City. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Irvine; his specialization was twentieth-century United States cultural and intellectual history. Dr. Bryson’s book Socializing the Young: The Role of Foundations, 1923-1941 was published by Greenwood Publishing in 2002. He is now working on the personality and culture school and its sponsorship by the Social Science Research Council.