In this article, Stephanie Daza draws on Gayatri Spivak's theorizing to help make visible how education is shaped by an elusive conceptual apparatus of neoliberal scientism. She begins with an example of high-stakes learning and global competition as commonsensical policy practice at an elementary school. Then Daza develops an analysis that shows the possibilities of a Spivakian theoretical approach as an interpretive practice for education, and teacher education specifically.

During the past decade, the “script” concept, indicating how technologies prescribe human actions, has acquired a central place in STS. Until now, the concept has mainly functioned in descriptive settings. This article will deploy it in a normative setting. When technologies coshape human actions, they give material answers to the ethical question of how to act. This implies that engineers are doing “ethics by other means”: they materialize morality. The article will explore the implications of this insight for engineering ethics. (...) It first augments the script concept by developing the notion of technological mediation. After this, it investigates how the concept of mediation could be made fruitful for design ethics. It discusses how the ambition to design behaviorinfluencing technologies raises moral questions itself and elaborates two methods for anticipating technological mediation in the design process: performing mediation analyses and using an augmented version of constructive technology assessment. (shrink)