Normative validity and the quantified academic self

The process of ‘normative validity’ (Biesta, 2013), in which that which can easily be measured is valued, leaves out the more challenging aspects of learning and research, so that ‘the indicator of quality becomes the definition of quality’ (2013). This paper and presentation will convey a provocative critique of the quantified academic self, as well as the Humanist legacy which supports our student’s and our own reduction to discrete, quantifiable entitles. As even more reductionist evaluative methodologies emerge, the online analytics and hyperbolic metrics of Big Data, issues of evaluation and ontology are arguably of increasing cultural urgency, making it ever more urgent to ask ourselves whether the hard-and-fast metrics, which educators and technologists are currently bombarded with, are in any way reconcilable with an evaluation of what happens when students and academics engage with research? In this reductionist environment, developing a Posthumanist approach is arguably the challenge of our times, but it also has the potential to replicate humanism’s privileging of a Euro-centric, anthropocentric epistemology. On the other hand, a Posthuman epistemology might challenge us to consider what Braidotti calls ‘life beyond the self’, and more radically still, ‘life beyond the species’ (Braidotti, 2013). This paper will illustrate by practice what it might mean to attempt to undo ‘the nature-culture divide’ (186) and other ontological divides, to consider virtual entities, animals, codes, networks and flows of energy (190) within the accelerated academy, at the same time it will connect normative validity to the Cognitivist and Constructivist paradigms which underpin the most dominant models of how adults learn, and how we measure academic achievement within the neo-liberal University