International assessments as the comparative desires and the distributions of differences: infrastructures and coloniality

ABSTRACT

The Organization of Economic, Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (OECD’s PISA) is explored as a site of science as an actor managing a social life. Its calculations form at the interstices of multiple historical lines as a comparative reason about nations, societies, and populations. That reason is explored as (1) the affective structuring of desires; (2) the inscription of comparative principles that differentiate and distributes differences; (3) a particular modern ‘homeless’ consciousness of a global knowledge entangled with (4) cybernetics theory and the school alchemy, translations of the science and mathematics into the territory of schooling; and (5) ranking, charts and graphs that produce a visual culture through numbers as objects of desire. The analysis brings into view the affective structure of an imperial presence of empirical facts that differentiates people under banners of future progress, modernization, and the good life.

KEYWORDS:

• Science studies
• the politics of knowledge
• international large scale educational assessments
• coloniality
• affect theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This intellectual project draws on my work and collaboration with Sverker Lindblad and Gun-Britt Wärvik, Gothenburg University, and Daniel Pettersson the University of Gävle, to study international assessments as an object to understand the changing relation of science, society, and policy, funded by the Swedish Research Council. Their patience with me as well as continual seriousness of thought and intellectual insights are continually felt. I also thank Luis Miguel Carvalho for his review and thoughtful comments that hopefully are adequately responded to in this version.

2 For convenience, PISA and OECD’s acronyms are used interchangeably.

3 I draw the notion of center of calculation and space of action from Latour (1987). Latour uses the terms to speak of the entangled complexities related to Action Network Theory as generative terms about science in its social (intra)actions. I have picked up this generative quality from this work and intellectually play with it in a manner that is different from Latour. My interest is more focused on the onto-epistemic qualities produced-knowledge systems generated, the comparative reasoning inscribed, and the principles generated about people and the distribution of differences.

4 The notion of desires and potentialities as part of the infrastructure of education science is discussed in Popkewitz (2020).

5 The notion of location-less logic is used in Savage (2010), although my use is historically broader in its nuances as related to the notion of ‘homeless’ consciousness (see, e.g., Popkewitz, Pettersson, & Ksiao, 2021). 

6 Its student sample included approximately 100 countries for PISA’s 2018 assessment.

7 The United Nations was most prominent among these organizations but also included The European Common Market. Originally The Organization of Economic, Cooperation, and Development (OECD) (http://www.oecd.org/about/members-and-partners/ accessed 10 July 2020).

8 Research and Development (R&D) explicitly links science to policy and reform-oriented practices.

9 https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/ np. Accessed April 14, 2021.

10 http://www.oecd.org/fr/education/launch-of-pisa-2018-results-paris-december-2019.htm (accessed July 5, 2020). 

11 For discussion of the limits and misrecognition of the practices of science, statistics, and numbers, see, e.g. Daston (2019); Hacking (1999, 2004).

12 The notion of science and technology, however, involves different assemblages and connects in, for example, the US, China, and Japan (e.g. Nye, 1999; Zhao, 2021).

13 A historical analysis in statistical reasoning, see Hacking (1990).

14 Gaussian curves often function to represent the probability density function of a normally distributed random variable with an expected value (Wikipedia 2021). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_function (Accessed 14 September 2020).

15 http://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2015-results-volume-iii-9789264273856-en.htm.

16 The phrase is used by Weinberger (2017) to a provocative one to talk about the US Defensive Department research. It captures much of the analysis of the center of calculation but through a very different set of theoretical procedures.

17 This is discussed in relation to education in Popkewitz (2020); Popkewitz et al. (2021).