Bernadette Baker

Bernadette M. Baker is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and is affiliated with several centers, including East Asian Studies, South Asia Studies, European Studies, Institute for Regional and International Studies, the Robert F. & Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, the Disability Studies Initiative, and the Public Humanities. She works in the fields of curriculum history, philosophy of education, and global studies and their intersection with a wider curriculum studies discipline. Her research deploys primarily postfoundationalist, historical, exonationalist, and interview-based approaches to the interrogation of reality claims within the politics of knowledge/wisdom. She has published widely in educational philosophy, curriculum studies, history of education, disability studies, and cultural studies journals. Her current projects involve assessment of the opportunities, risks and ethics in artificial intelligence, the changing technologies of self in relation to big data, mindfulness based stress reduction in education and in neuroscience, and conceptions of mind-body in different caring professions including complementary integrative health professions and educational policymaking. Her graduate seminars draw on Western, Eastern, Indigenous and Global South analytical traditions – including the very problem of the spatializing effects of power embedded in naming, the metaphysics of presence, and classificatory regimes. Seminars are designed to bring diverse perspectives on reality claims to curriculum studies, planning, and theory, to the politics of explanation, and to the inclusion/exclusion of practices, reforms, and solutions. Her previous monograph, (Cambridge University Press 2013), titled William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-imperial Discourse received the American Educational Research Association Curriculum Studies (Division B) Outstanding Book Award, as did her 2001 publication titled In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History, and the Child. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to Finland and past Secretary of AERA’s Division B.