Educational Research and the Temporalities of Enclosure

All of the arguments around the emancipatory and autonomogenic promise of education, from Kant and Rousseau to the present day, have taken place under the spatio-temporal logics of enclosure. What (Deleuze in Cultural Theory: An Anthology, 139–142, 1992) terms ‘disciplinary societies’, operating through institutions of enclosure—schools, hospitals, factories, barracks, archetypally, prisons—are essential to the notion of individual subjectification. As educational institutions and experiences become increasingly permeative and fluid, rather than being marked by campus walls and school bells, Deleuze argues that we have increasingly become ‘dividuals’, ceaselessly divided between educational and other entailments. Drawing on the post-historical Hegelian account of time presented by (Kojève in Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the phenomenology of spirit. Cornell University Press, 1969) in which human historical time is engendered by desire, and desire begun in the future, at the telos of the historical struggle for recognition (Lundie in School leadership between community and the state: The changing civic role of schooling. Springer Nature, 2022), this chapter seeks to explore the relationship between time, enclosure, differentiation and education. In contrast to computational time, measured in operations per second, human time can only be understood relative to acts of work, the transformation of the world, relative to some end. The reduction of human learning to measures of information transfer derived from machine learning with assessment as authentication fundamentally misrepresents this reality (Lundie in Studies in Philosophy and Education 35:279–291, 2017b). The challenge of an un-differentiated time as theorised by Deleuze’s critique of the societies of control, can thus be understood as a challenge of un-differentiated work (Lundie in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 44(4):624–634, 2023), the consequence of being beyond the telos of history. The chapter then goes on to identify specific challenges which this crisis of differentiation and enclosure poses for education and educational research. Beginning in the critique of the reduction of human learning to ahistorical ‘processing speed’, the author presents insights from the field of Human Computer Interaction studies as to how best to understand the human temporality aspects of these interactions with respect to large-scale standardized tests and other digitally gathered and analysed data, preserving the affordances of technology, without allowing it to reinscribe (Hartong in European Educational Research Journal 15:523–536, 2016) human education in ways that distort its ends. Drawing on the author’s experiences with ethnographic research (Conroy et al. in Does religious education work?: A multi-dimensional investigation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013; Lundie in School leadership between community and the state: The changing civic role of schooling. Springer Nature, 2022) the chapter also applies this critique of post-enclosure education to draw out insights for the boundedness of ecologically rich approaches to capturing the phenomenality of education. Recognising the uses (Feinberg in Studies in Philosophy and Education 34:149–157, 2015) and abuses (Duneier, 2011) of ethnography in the philosophy of education due to its attentiveness to rich description of the human relationality involved in educative experiences at close quarters, the illusory demarcations of domain which restrict much educational ethnography, in contrast to the uses of the method by anthropologists, are first explored. Recognising that ethnography of education suffers from a boundedness problem which is identical to the problem of enclosure affecting contemporary education institutions, and the insufficiency of facile attempts to translate this same boundedness to the digital domain (Kozinets in Netnography: The essential guide to qualitative social media research, 2019), the chapter concludes by offering a manifesto for a more expansive post-enclosure ecology of education. Such an ecology must be more attentive to the role of teleology in differentiating human time than to the spatio-temporalities of institutions of enclosure.