Attention Biopolitics

'Attention as an object of knowledge, intervention and valorisation: exploring data-driven neurotechnologies and imaginaries of intensified learning' by Dimitra Kotouza, Martyn Pickersgill, Jessica Pykett and Ben Williamson in (2025) Critical Studies in Education comments 

Innovations in mobile neuromonitoring and brain–computer interfaces are increasingly used to inform understandings of human brains and behaviours while also catalysing imaginaries of neuroscientifically measured and enhanced economic productivity. In this paper, we focus on neurotechnologies that claim to capture, monitor, measure and train learners’ attention. We analyse a corpus of relevant scientific, governance, and commercial texts to explore how they reconfigure learners’ attention as an object of knowledge, intervention, and valorisation. We demonstrate that outcomes- driven neuroscience research and technological development tends to split attention into optimal and undesirable forms: externally versus internally oriented, and synchronised versus unsynchronised with others, which become the variables of intervention to optimise attention. Commercial wearables, in turn, envelop desirable forms of attention under logics of brain control, social discipline, and valorisation. This process is enacted within an international context of speculation on neurotechnology investments and their anticipated outcome of enhancing future human productivity. Circumscribing desirable forms of learner attention and subjectivity, these technologies provide expanded means to mould and monitor learners’ attention towards performativity regimes of economised education governance while enabling profit-making based on learners’ activity.

They note 

Neurotechnological research and development has received billions of dollars of state funding across the world in recent decades via large-scale brain science projects. This reflects, and further intensifies, a focus on neuroscience as an object of significant social and political investment and concern (Pickersgill, 2023). Today, the increasing portability of neuroimaging and its integration with software allow analysing and visualising ‘millisecond-by-millisecond’ brain data thought to reflect cognitive processes (Davidesco et al., 2021, p. 650). These advances have been hailed as capable of ‘unlocking the secrets of how the human brain works’ (Mathieson et al., 2021, p. 8). 

One focus among many has been the field termed ‘educational neuroscience’. While this has for some years asserted that its epistemic products can provide new insights to teachers (Howard-Jones et al., 2021), well-funded neurotechnological advances enable neuroscience to propose going beyond these founding ambitions. Combined with learning analytics and AI, technologies are anticipated by some proponents to deliver algorithmically personalised education alongside various other tools to enhance learning capacity (Davidesco et al., 2021, p. 650; Edelenbosch et al., 2015). 

Within the US especially, the notion of ‘attention’ in education is emphasised through research, policy, and economic infrastructures that promote neurotechnologies to measure, monitor, and enhance learners’ attentiveness. Research in this area involves tried- and-tested techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) – which visualises brain electrical activity – and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique to represent blood flow as a means of generating information about brain activity. Learners’ attentional control is increasingly presented as a datafied object of knowledge and intervention in the broader context of concern around ADHD and digital distraction. Using fMRI, cognitive neuroscience is said to have revealed the ‘attention networks’ in which children with diagnoses of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) are thought to have a ‘deficit’ (Posner, 2013, p. 15). Further, various attention-targeting neurotechnologies currently in development promise to improve attention and address ADHD symptoms. Indeed, the relevance of cognitive neuroscience to education has often been advocated in the context of rising levels of ADHD diagnoses and parental concerns that ‘typically developing children’ will not be able to resist the temptations of the ‘digital age’ (Posner, 2013, p. 14). Perhaps ironically, then, social anxieties around attention have shaped interest in, and a market for, neurotechnological interventions within education. Such developments resonate with broader trajectories of governance. Since the 1980s, educational governance internationally has been increasingly guided by economic theories of human capital (Roberts-Holmes & Moss, 2021). This ‘economisation of education’ renders it as the process of individuals acquiring skills and personal qualities to form a productive workforce (Connell, 2013). Subsequently, it also involved economists’ interest in ‘the neuroscience of human capability formation’ (Heckman, 2007, p. 13250). Education is repeatedly submitted to what Foucault (2008, p. 247) has called a ‘permanent economic tribunal’, in which governance structures – such as OECD’s international student assessment – metricise, standardise, and compare schools and educational systems, subjectifying through the proliferation of numbers (Grek & Ydesen, 2021). 

Under this regime, the learning process has become an object not only of economic management but also of the scientific management of learning. This is expressed, for instance, as policy interest in the ‘learning sciences’ and most prominently in educational neuroscience (De Vos, 2016; Pykett & Disney, 2016). Internationally, organisations like the OECD and UNESCO have generated policy- influencing agendas for educational transformation around the promises of neuroscience and neurotechnology. For the OECD, optimised human cognitive performance – figured as ‘brain capital’ – is thought necessary for long-term productivity and economic prosperity, and is to be measured and improved by neuroscientific instruments (OECD, 2021; Smith et al., 2021). Educational neurotechnology, in this policy discourse, is imagined as having an ‘immense potential to improve student learning and cognition’ (UNESCO, 2023, p. 6). 

Anticipatory enthusiasm about the possibilities of neurotechnology in education redoubles existing socio-cultural fascination with the neurological and its attendant subjectivities (De Vos, 2016; Pickersgill et al., 2011; Pykett & Disney, 2016; Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013; Vidal & Ortega, 2017). Neuroscience is expected to help ‘stretch’ children and provide tools to improve their learning outcomes, not least by finding therapeutic solutions to increasing rates of ADHD diagnoses (Cortese et al., 2023). Coupled with the growing market in learning analytics – which monitor university students’ data traces and use algorithms to assess engagement, predict performance and help and prevent lapses and drop-outs (Kotouza et al., 2021) – these technologies enable new ways to directly monitor, assess, and train attention in educational settings. This leads us to ask: what might be the implications for the shaping (and reduction) of students into attentive and productive learner subjects? More specifically, what aspects of this subjectivity are targeted via scientific and economic forms of control, and in what ways? 

This article is a step towards answering such questions, by concentrating on the production of knowledge and technology in neuroscience that addresses attention in education. It is informed by critical studies of the implications of neurotechnologies for knowledge production, governance and contemporary forms of economic organisation (e.g. Pickersgill, 2023), as we outline conceptually in the following section. Specifically, by building on such theorisations of the epistemic, interventionist and economic dimensions of neuroscience, we explore how ‘attention’ is (re)configured as: (a) an object of knowledge, by examining how concepts of attention and distraction have shifted in educational neuroscience studies; (b) an object of intervention, by looking at how those concepts are operant within emerging neurotechnologies used to measure, monitor, and enhance learners’ attention; and (c) an object of valorisation, by tracing how attention neurotechnologies enable learners’ attentional activity to enter, in different forms, circuits of valorisation.

Unjust Enrichment

'Is there an Unjust Enrichment Disaster in Australia' by Luke Bennett and Sagi Peari in (2023) 50(2) University of Western Australia Law Review 240 comments

 Australia presently stands at the crossroads with respect to restitutionary claims. The recent vehement critique of the classical unjust enrichment formula for grasping the nature of those claims deserves attention. It has ignited a new wave of scepticism, challenging the fundamentals of the formula and the very notion of unjust enrichment as a legitimate ground of liability in private law. Does this critique, made primarily in the UK context, apply to Australia? To answer this question this article presents the critique and contemplates whether it applies to the Australian landscape.

 The authors argue

Professor Peter Birks’ four-stage formula of unjust enrichment has been widely accepted as the normative framework for grasping the nature of the restitutionary claims. This formula asks the following four questions:

1. Has the defendant been enriched? 

2. Was the enrichment at the plaintiff’s expense? 

3. Was the enrichment unjust? 

4. Do any defences apply?

The formula requires demonstrating that a plaintiff transfers some economic value/benefit to the defendant (aka ‘enrichment’). The ‘at the plaintiff’s expense’ element requires establishing a causal link between the defendant’s enrichment and the plaintiff. The ‘justice’ element in the formula has been perceived as referring to a broad range of factors or causative events recognised by law, such as mistake or undue influence. Finally, once the plaintiff establishes the first three elements of the formula, the defendant could argue that one of the defences applies. For example, the defendant could argue that they changed their position by spending the received value in good faith. Consider a trivial scenario of a mistaken payment according to which A confuses one of the numbers during an online bill payment process, erroneously paying $100 to C, instead of B. In order to meet the first three elements in this formula, A would need to show that C received the value (i.e. $100) from A and this benefit took place within the context of one of previously recognised unjust factors (i.e. mistake). C on their part could argue that they innocently spent the $100, what could amount to their ‘change of position’. 

The Birks’ four-stage formula has been firmly endorsed by the United Kingdom’s (UK) highest courts. Following a wave of academic and judicial support, unjust enrichment has also been recognised as a separate cause of action in other jurisdictions, such as Canada, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand, Germany, France and China. While some differences are present amongst the systems, it is clear that the core notion according to which defendant’s unjustified enrichment provides the normative basis for understanding the nature of the restitutionary claims, has been gaining overwhelming support. The law of unjust enrichment claims its distinctive place alongside the traditional categories of private law, such as property, contract and torts. The recognition of unjust enrichment is therefore critical to facilitating the internal rationality and coherency of private law. 

However, unjust enrichment’s role in Australia is somewhat complicated. Australia’s jurisprudence hesitates on this point. Despite the early recognition of unjust enrichment in the seminal Pavey decision, the High Court remained hesitant to substantively engage with and apply the unifying formula; primarily influenced by the reasoning of Justice Gummow and the Farah decision where the brakes on the emerging unjust enrichment jurisprudence were firmly pressed, holding that ‘it was not the place of lower courts to develop or recognise novel forms of claims based on unjust enrichment reasoning that might render established equitable doctrine otiose’. Overall, ‘to read the High Court’s references to unjust enrichment is to appreciate the impressive range over which judicial prose can express disapproval’. 

As it currently stands in Australia, unjust enrichment is not itself a cause of action, but instead functions as an analytical framework for structuring restitutionary claims. The distinction between ‘cause of action’ and ‘analytical framework’ is an obscure one that has only furthered conceptual uncertainty regarding the scope and nature of restitutionary claims in Australia. A solid framework is required to ensure these claims are not based on ‘idiosyncratic notions of what is fair and just’. 

Against this background, the recent vehement critique of the Birks’ four- stage formula by University of Oxford academic, Professor Robert Stevens, deserves attention. Presented in the powerful 2018 article titled The Unjust Enrichment Disaster and more recently in The Laws of Restitution monograph (2023, Oxford University Press), the critique has ignited a new wave of scepticism, challenging the fundamentals of the four-stage formula and the very notion of unjust enrichment as a legitimate ground of liability in private law.29 Clearly, the effect of Stevens’ critique goes beyond fostering increased academic discourse. Thus, Lord Andrew Burrows, a former academic frankly acknowledged that the critique was influential in, and provided the foundation for, the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Sempra Metals Ltd in Prudential Assurance Ltd in the UK. 

This article has two goals. First, it involves a presentation and examination of the Stevens’ critique. Second, it considers the relevancy of those to the Australian jurisprudence. Accordingly, Part II presents the negative and positive aspects of Stevens’ argument, traces Stevens’ examples made primarily within UK jurisprudence and discusses the possible concerns that have been and could be raised against Stevens’ views. Part III examines the key restitutionary decisions in Australia and contemplates whether Stevens’ argument (and the concerns expressed against it) applies to the Australian landscape. Part IV offers some concluding remarks.

Mortality

'Representations of Immortality and Institutions in 21st-Century Popular Culture' by Devaleena Kundu and Bethan Michael-Fox in Kate Woodthorpe, Helen Frisby, and Bethan Michael-Fox (eds), Death and Institutions: Processes, Places and the Past (Bristol University Press, 2025) 161-175 comments 

This chapter examines how death and institutions intersect in four 21st-century popular cultural representations of immortality. While the routes to immortality in the four texts examined are varied, the chapter shows how powerful and elite institutions are positioned as central in all of these cultural representations of immortality on screen and in literature. Considering one film documentary – Freeze Me (2006), two television series – Torchwood: Miracle Day (2011) and Upload (2020–) – and one narrative fiction novel – Death at Intervals (2008), the chapter shows how a range of popular cultural narratives produced between 2005 and 2020 effectively function as spaces through which to negotiate shifting ‘real life’ anxieties about the medical and political institutionalization of death in the early 21st century. Questions about whether institutions can be trusted and about the roles they play in deciding what life and death are, as well as who gets to live and die, come to the fore across this range of popular cultural examples, demonstrating how popular cultural texts can function as spaces through which to negotiate sociocultural concerns about mortality. The chapter shows how the institutions that feature in these four texts take on a shadowy form with often nefarious motivations and ties to economic and social privilege.