This paper explores how social justice orientated education research might engage with emerging ideas and approaches from the new biological sciences, and suggests a biosocial future for empirical education research that connects molecular biology – epigenetics, nutrigenomics and neuroscience – with sociology of education. In beginning to consider what the biosocial means for education the paper works through two pressing questions ‘what happens when we learn?’ and ‘are relationships important in the classroom?’, bringing together emerging evidence across sociology, pedagogy, molecular biology and neuroscience. The paper shows how what we ask, how we go about doing research, and the sorts of answers that we might offer all shift with a biosocial orientation. While valid concerns continue to be raised by critical education researchers over some of the directions of research in the biological sciences and the policy uses of this, this paper advocates collaborative, inter-disciplinary research across social and biological sciences. Such biosocial research, it is argued, has the potential to develop hybrid conceptual frames; pose new types of questions; envisage research methodologies and methods in new ways; and offer profound new insights into the making of inequality.
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