Pedagogy of Anesthesia: the performance society and the systemic production of critical paralysis

Abstract

This article proposes using the construct Pedagogy of Anesthesia to analyze how educational systems produce subjects who are institutionally included yet deprived of the tools to question the mechanisms of their own exclusion or privilege. The central hypothesis is that this critical paralysis constitutes the system’s inherent mode of operation. This is a theoretical-analytical essay that articulates five levels: the performance society (Han), social reproduction (Bourdieu), governmentality (Foucault), neuroscience, and phenomenology. Within the Brazilian context, it incorporates the work of Arroyo and Gomes, as well as the critique of coloniality as a form of anesthesia predating modernity. It proposes empirical indicators and distinguishes between de-anesthesia as revelation and as the production of subjectivity. The use of generative artificial intelligence (Claude, Anthropic) was limited to linguistic review and ensuring argumentative consistency. Authorship and intellectual responsibility rest entirely with the author.

Keywords
Pedagogy of Anesthesia; critical paralysis; performance society; social reproduction; neuroscience and education

Resumo

O artigo propõe utilizar o constructo Pedagogia da Anestesia para analisar como sistemas educacionais produzem sujeitos incluídos institucionalmente, mas privados das ferramentas para questionar os mecanismos de sua própria exclusão ou privilégio. A hipótese central é que essa paralisia crítica constitui o modo próprio de funcionamento do sistema. Trata-se de ensaio teórico-analítico que articula cinco níveis: sociedade do desempenho (Han), reprodução social (Bourdieu), governamentalidade (Foucault), neurociência e fenomenologia. No contexto brasileiro, integra Arroyo, Gomes e a crítica à colonialidade como anestesiamento anterior à modernidade. Propõe indicadores empíricos e a distinção entre desanestesia como revelação e como produção de subjetividade. O uso de inteligência artificial generativa (Claude, Anthropic) foi restrito à revisão linguística e consistência argumentativa. Autoria e responsabilidade intelectual são integralmente do autor.

Palavras-chave
Pedagogia da Anestesia; paralisia crítica; sociedade do desempenho; reprodução social; neurociência e educação

Resumen

Este artículo propone utilizar el constructo pedagogía de la anestesia para analizar cómo los sistemas educativos producen sujetos incluidos institucionalmente, pero privados de las herramientas necesarias para cuestionar los mecanismos de su propia exclusión o privilegio. La hipótesis central plantea que esta parálisis crítica constituye el propio modo de funcionamiento del sistema. Se trata de un ensayo teórico-analítico que articula cinco niveles: la sociedad del rendimiento (Han), la reproducción social (Bourdieu), la gubernamentalidad (Foucault), la neurociencia y la fenomenología. En el contexto brasileño, incorpora a Arroyo, a Gomes y la crítica a la colonialidad como anestesia previa a la modernidad. Propone indicadores empíricos y la distinción entre la desanestesia como revelación y como producción de subjetividad. El uso de la inteligencia artificial generativa (Claude, Anthropic) se limitó a la revisión lingüística y a la coherencia argumentativa. La autoría y la responsabilidad intelectual recaen íntegramente en el autor

Palabras clave
Pedagogía de la anestesia; parálisis crítica; sociedad del rendimiento; reproducción social; neurociencia y educación

Introduction

There is a recurring phenomenon in contemporary educational systems that various research traditions converge to document: critical ethnography, following Arroyo (2014), records it as a pattern of institutional invisibilization; the sociology of education, drawing on the narratives gathered by Bourdieu (2012) in The Weight of the World, recognizes it as a lived expression of symbolic violence; the phenomenology of the school experience, in the lineage of Merleau-Ponty (2011), records it as the bodily sedimentation of a relationship with knowledge, that Charlot (2000) describes as structurally foreclosed to certain subjects. Distinct traditions, distinct epistemes, distinct research programs, yet a common phenomenon: the student who directs a gaze at the teacher that expresses neither doubt, resistance, nor incomprehension, but rather acquiescence. Not the acquiescence of one who has understood and accepted, but that of one who has understood, without ever having managed to name it, that such knowledge was not produced for them, that such institutional architecture was not designed for their body, and that the promise of the future articulated by the school is structurally addressed to others. What this acquiescence reveals is neither a cognitive deficit nor individual passivity. It is the product of an active process of institutional production.

In this sense, the subject did not arrive at school anesthetized; they were anesthetized by it, by its curricular mechanisms, its assessment practices, its rituals of selective recognition, and its unequal distribution of epistemic legitimacy. Acquiescence is, therefore, evidence of systemic efficacy rather than individual failure: it is the sign that the mechanism worked, not that something went wrong. Understanding this requires shifting one’s gaze from the subject to the conditions of their production, leading us to question not why certain students fail to learn, but why certain institutional architectures systematically produce an inability to learn, framing it as an incapacity inherent to the learner. This shift is, in itself, an act of de-anesthesia, as it reverses the direction of the diagnosis: where the system saw a deficit, the construct sees production; where it saw deviation, it sees regularity; where it saw an exception, it sees a rule. This is what this essay proposes to examine: the critical paralysis as a systemic effect produced by pedagogical configurations that include the subject within the institution while simultaneously blocking their capacity to perceive, name, and question the mechanisms of that inclusion.

It is this student perspective that this article designates as anesthetized: not devoid of experience, but incapable of transforming it into questioning. Anesthesia is not a condition exclusive to the excluded; it is a systemic state that permeates the entire educational field, producing, at varying scales and intensities, the same critical paralysis: the inability to perceive, name, and question the mechanisms that constitute subjects as included or excluded, or as positioned advantageously or disadvantageously within an order whose rules precede any individual trajectory. It is precisely this configuration that frames the guiding question of this essay: How do the processes that produce subjects, simultaneously present in the educational system and deprived of the tools to interrogate the conditions of that presence, articulate with one another, from the neurobiological to the ethical-ontological level? The specific contribution of this work lies in its multi-level theoretical articulation, integrating critical sociology, governmentality, phenomenology, and neuroscience, and in its proposal of distinctions and indicators that broaden our understanding of contemporary educational reproduction.

The use of the term “Pedagogy of Anesthesia” is an attempt to name something that existing categories capture only partially, given that the concepts of “reproduction” in Bourdieu and Passeron (2014), “governmentality” in Foucault (2008), and the “burnout society” in Han (2015) illuminate specific dimensions of the problem without accounting for the entire chain. The construct designates precisely this chain of mediations: the one that connects the symbolic violence of social structures to the neurobiological mechanisms where prejudice operates before consciousness can intervene; traverses the curricular mechanisms that govern conduct in an almost imperceptible way; becomes sedimented in experiences of naturalization, through which the arbitrary takes on the appearance of necessity, and culminates in the ethical blockage that prevents recognizing the face of the other as a call that precedes any theory.

Naming the anesthesia is the primary condition for its reversal; de-anesthesia is not an alternative program, but a possibility that emerges when the mechanism is made visible. The Freirean tradition, by formulating the concept of conscientization and denouncing banking education as a mechanism of domestication (Freire, 2019), paved the way for this essay. What this construct adds, however, is an analytical expansion along three fronts: the articulation with the neurobiological dimension, which Freire did not incorporate; the recognition of the spectral and domain-specific nature of the anesthesia, which does not operate uniformly across all subjects or fields; and the analysis of the heir’s anesthesia, a dimension that the pedagogy of the oppressed, centered on the pole of oppression, did not address with the same analytical resolution, precisely because the heir experiences the system not as violence, but as merit.

In the Brazilian context, this configuration takes on contours that European analysis alone cannot capture. For this reason, the contribution by Miguel Arroyo (2014) to the construct is not merely illustrative but structural: by mapping the “other subjects” whom the school system has historically rendered invisible—Black, Indigenous, and peripheral bodies; bodies bearing the marks of coloniality and exploitation—Arroyo demonstrates that educational exclusion in Brazil is not an incidental mishap, but the legacy of a national project that never included everyone within its horizon of humanity. What this analysis adds to the construct of the Pedagogy of Anesthesia is decisive: Arroyo’s “other subjects” are those for whom anesthesia operates not only through the Bourdieusian mechanism of naturalized symbolic violence but also through a prior, deeper layer: the ontological denial of their status as epistemic subjects. Schools not only reproduce inequalities of cultural capital but also replicate the colonial hierarchy that defines which bodies are recognized as legitimate bearers of knowledge. When Arroyo proposes “other pedagogies,” he is not suggesting mere methodological variation, but rather a rupture with the universalizing pretension that the concept identifies as a central mechanism of anesthesia: the imposition of a specific, arbitrary cultural agent—White, European, and literate—as the universal condition for legitimate knowledge. Without Arroyo’s perspective, the Pedagogy of Anesthesia risks diagnosing critical paralysis without naming its colonial genesis, thereby reproducing, through omission, the very erasure it seeks to expose.

Nilma Lino Gomes (2017) adds a dimension that complements Arroyo’s theory and deepens the construct: by analyzing the Black movement as an educator, Gomes demonstrates that historically anesthetized subjects are not merely objects of diagnosis but producers of counter-knowledges that constitute, in themselves, modalities of de-anesthesia. By forging epistemic categories based on the experience of racialization, and by producing knowledge about itself that hegemonic knowledge neither produced nor could produce, the Brazilian Black movement enacts precisely what this essay theorizes as de-anesthesia-production: it does not reveal a subject that existed prior to the struggle, but rather one that is born within and through the process of breaking away from colonial anesthesia. This carries a direct analytical consequence: de-anesthesia is not an operation granted to the excluded by the educational system, but an epistemic achievement that subjects produce against the system, and often outside of it.

Simultaneously, Gomes demonstrates that the discourse of diversity can function as a sophisticated anesthetizing mechanism when it celebrates difference without confronting the structures that transform it into hierarchy, includes bodies without redistributing power, and acknowledges cultures without questioning the criteria that relegate them to a subordinate status. What Nancy Fraser (2009) analyzes as the dissociation between redistribution, recognition, and representation finds particularly acute expression in the Brazilian educational landscape: inclusion without the redistribution of cultural capital and without effective political representation for the included subjects constitutes a sophisticated form of anesthetization, perhaps the most effective one, because it presents itself wearing the mask of progress.

Guiding question and objective

The question guiding this investigation is: How do the processes that produce subjects, simultaneously included in the educational system and deprived of the critical and metacognitive tools to question the mechanisms of their own exclusion or privilege, articulate themselves across different analytical levels, ranging from the neurobiological to the ethical-ontological, and encompassing the structural, the microphysical, and the experiential? The hypothesis that I maintain—adopting the first person here because epistemic neutrality is itself a mechanism of anesthesia—is that the production of critical paralysis does not constitute a failure or deviation of the contemporary educational system, but rather its very mode of operation: an anomaly only from the perspective of the discourse the system produces about itself, yet a constitutive regularity from the perspective of critical analysis. Exclusion is not a bug; it is a feature¹.

The objective is to construct an interpretive framework capable of making visible this chain of mediations that operates silently, producing paralysis as a systemic effect rather than an individual deficit. Furthermore, the aim is to offer analytical indicators that allow for its empirical operationalization, turning the construct not merely into a diagnosis of what exists, but into a guide for what can be investigated and transformed, not through decree or targeted pedagogical intervention, but through the articulation between the raising of consciousness and the transformation of the material conditions that sustain it. In this process, the de-anesthesia itself must be understood not as the revelation of a subject that had always existed and was merely awaiting a critical gesture to emerge, but rather as the production of a subject that did not exist prior to that gesture, a distinction the essay develops as one of its most fertile epistemological horizons.

Methodological paths

This is a theoretical-analytical essay of a conceptual nature, situated within the tradition of critical essay writing. The primary commitment is to construct an interpretive framework rather than produce firsthand empirical evidence. However, the prospect of empirical investigation remains present as a requirement posed by the construct itself. Throughout the text, the term is capitalized (Pedagogy of Anesthesia) when referring to the proposed theoretical construct and lowercase (pedagogy of anesthesia) when used predicatively to describe the phenomenon the construct names.

The methodological procedure can be characterized as a multi-level theoretical articulation. It differs from eclecticism through its explicit organizing principle. Each theoretical tradition is employed to illuminate a specific level of the phenomenon, operating within its own register without attempting a synthetic fusion. Bourdieu is not simply “added” to Damásio as if they spoke the same language; Bourdieu operates at the level of social structures and embodied dispositions, whereas Damásio operates at the level of neurobiological mechanisms. It is precisely the mediation between these levels that the Pedagogy of Anesthesia seeks to render intelligible.

An epistemological clarification demanded by analytical rigor is in order: the neuroscientific claims invoked in this essay operate within the realm of mechanistic plausibility rather than direct causal evidence. This means that the neurobiological mechanisms described, such as amygdala activation, prefrontal impairment due to chronic stress, and suppression of the default mode network, are biologically consistent with the social processes analyzed and lend explanatory coherence to the construct. However, they do not constitute empirical proof of the entire causal chain. A clarification must be made: the text does not assert that “this pedagogical practice activates a specific brain region.” Rather, it posits that “it is not biologically plausible for this practice to foster deep learning, given what we know about principles of brain function,” a stance that is epistemically distinct and more defensible. Translating findings from controlled laboratory studies to the complexity of the structurally determined school environment requires mediation. This essay focuses on empirical field research guided by analytical indicators, while emphasizing that such research cannot replace the translation of laboratory studies.

Furthermore, we acknowledge the methodological limits inherent in neuroimaging: the problem of reverse inference (Poldrack, 2006), the impossibility of inferring cognitive states from neural activation patterns, and criticisms regarding the direct pedagogical application of laboratory research, including the prevalence of pedagogical neuromyths among teachers (Bowers, 2016; Dekker et al., 2012). Neuroscience does not legitimize the construct; rather, it illuminates it from an analytical level beyond the reach of the social sciences.

In accordance with the SciELO Network guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific communication, the generative AI tool Claude (Anthropic) is declared here as employed, but restricted to auxiliary functions such as linguistic review, internal consistency checks, and critical dialogue. The tool did not generate analytical content autonomously. The conception of the construct, the argumentative architecture, and all theoretical choices are the sole responsibility of the author.

Multi-level articulation through the convergence of constraints

The most serious objection to a multi-level theoretical architecture is not thematic but epistemological: How is it possible to mobilize authors with incompatible ontologies of the subject without falling into syncretism, the arbitrary juxtaposition that aggregates perspectives in the hope that the whole will be more coherent than the parts? The answer proposed by this essay is methodological.

The principle guiding this articulation is neither synthetic fusion nor thematic complementarity, but the convergence of analytical constraints. Each theoretical tradition operates within its own register—sociological, genealogical, neurobiological, or cultural—and, in doing so, constrains the space of what is explanatorily possible at its specific level. Bourdieu (2012) constrains the space of socially structured dispositions; Han (2015) constrains what is subjectively bearable within the historical configuration of late capitalism; Damásio (1996) delimits what is biologically viable as a decision-making process; Foucault (2019) delimits what is institutionally operable through power-knowledge apparatuses. The Pedagogy of Anesthesia designates, precisely, those pedagogical configurations that simultaneously violate all these constraints; it is this convergence of violations, rather than a fusion of theories, that justifies the multi-level architecture.

This principle finds precedent in what Margaret Archer (1995) terms as analytical dualism—the rejection of both upward conflation (dissolving structure into agency) and downward conflation (dissolving agency into structure)—and in what Roy Bhaskar (1997) develops as stratified critical realism—the idea that reality operates across ontologically distinct strata (biological, psychological, social, cultural) whose operating laws are mutually irreducible, yet whose effects combine to produce concrete phenomena. The essay is thus situated within the field of critical realism as its governing epistemic orientation: phenomenology serves as a subjective anchor; critical sociology provides structural analysis; neuroscience offers delimited support; yet it is stratified realism that provides the grammar for articulating the relationships between these strata.

A further clarification is required regarding Han’s distinct status within this architecture. Unlike Bourdieu, who works with analytical categories amenable to empirical operationalization, or Damásio, whose assertions are experimentally testable, Han produces a cultural diagnosis of a genealogical nature, closer to Nietzsche and Heidegger than to any positive social science. His contribution to the construct is not explanatory in the causal sense. However, rather interpretive: Han identifies the subjective regime that renders anesthesia self-administered, pinpointing the performance imperative as the specific historical form through which contemporary domination operates without an identifiable external oppressor.

Being and the body: Phenomenology and the neuroscience of identity

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2011) adds a dimension to the phenomenological tradition that proves crucial for its articulation with neuroscience: the body. For him, the body is not an instrument of consciousness; it is consciousness itself, embodied, situated, and perceptual. The subject is neither a thing nor a substance but a field of experiences, a being-in-the-world constituted through contact with the other and with reality. The body bears the sedimented history of our experiences, a philosophical intuition that finds a plausible mechanistic correlate in Damasio’s concept of the somatic marker and which, for those working with neurophysiological data, shifts from metaphysical speculation to measurable evidence.

Jean-Paul Sartre (2011) takes a radical stance by asserting that human beings are condemned to be free and that no pre-existing human nature defines them. Freedom is always exercised within a situation, and situations are permeated by power relations that delimit the realm of the possible. The Sartrean bad faith, that flight from the anguish accompanying the responsibility of choice, finds its institutional mechanism for mass production in the pedagogy of anesthesia: individuals need not choose bad faith personally; it suffices for the system to create conditions in which bad faith appears to be the only reasonable response. From this perspective, de-anesthesia is the act of refusing institutionalized bad faith, which requires conditions that anesthesia itself systematically denies, as we shall see in the section “Critical tensions and contemporary challenges.”

António Damásio (1996) provides mechanistic support, through the lens of neurobiology, for what Merleau-Ponty had philosophically intuited: reason does not operate independently of the body and emotions. The concept of the somatic marker revolutionizes our understanding of decision-making. Before the prefrontal cortex deliberates rationally, the body has already signaled its stance through emotional states that function as cognitive compasses. If emotions are constitutive of the cognitive process, and if there is no meaningful learning without the affective engagement that mobilizes memory systems, then a school that ignores the emotional dimension of knowledge, treating content as information to be deposited into empty vessels and assessing performance without considering the affective conditions under which it occurs, is not merely pedagogically ineffective; it is working against the very structure of the brain it seeks to educate. The pedagogy of anesthesia finds its initial neuroscientific basis here: the act of anesthetizing can be understood as the blocking of the affective channels through which deep learning becomes possible, a concept that the relation to knowledge, as theorized by Charlot (2000), also allows us to understand through the lens of the subjectivity invested in the act of learning.

Stanislas Dehaene (2020) systematizes the findings of recent decades of neuroscientific research into four pillars of learning: attention, active engagement, error feedback, and consolidation through sleep. These are not pedagogical preferences but neurobiological conditions. Translating these laboratory findings into real-world school settings requires methodological caution: experimental control conditions are rarely replicated in the daily life of schools, which is shaped by structural factors that cognitive neuroscience protocols do not account for. What these pillars offer is a framework of biological consistency: practices that systematically contradict these principles cannot biologically foster deep learning, an argument that serves as a supplement to, not a substitute for, sociopolitical analysis.

The pressing question is an uncomfortable one: To what extent do hegemonic pedagogical architectures systematically violate these pillars? Lectures that exceed the limits of sustained attention, passivity as the norm, assessments that punish error rather than using it as formative information, and schedules that compromise sleep in the name of a “holistic education” that integrates nothing. Daniel Siegel (2020), in his work on the relational mind, suggests that the brain develops through relationships, lending mechanistic plausibility to the hypothesis that secure bonds are a prerequisite for learning. Environments characterized by exclusion and chronic stress tend to alter brain architecture, impairing emotional regulation, sustained attention, and complex thinking.

Vinod Menon (2023), in his work on the Default Mode Network (DMN), demonstrates that this brain network—active during rest, introspection, and daydreaming—is fundamental to creativity and the construction of a sense of self. The DMN requires periods of undirected activity, which Domenico De Masi (2000) termed creative idleness. Contemporary schooling, permeated by a neoliberal governmentality that turns every minute into an opportunity for measurable “learning,” systematically suppresses these moments. Thus, by suppressing idleness, the neurobiological conditions for creativity and self-reflection are suppressed; ultimately, the possibility of de-anesthesia is suppressed.

Power, difference, and otherness

Elizabeth Phelps et al. (2000) demonstrated that amygdala activation correlates with implicit measures of racial evaluation, even in subjects who explicitly reject racism. Prejudice, rather than being a conscious choice, manifests as an automatic neurobiological response. These findings, generated in controlled laboratory settings, cannot be mechanically transferred to the everyday school environment. They do, however, offer mechanistic plausibility to the hypothesis that prejudice operates below the threshold of consciousness and resists purely discursive interventions, with pedagogical implications that this section explores. Through repeated exposure to negative associations present in the culture, the brain has been trained to respond with fear or aversion to certain bodies; yet, it can also unlearn this association, provided it undergoes specific, sustained interventions that operate not merely at the level of conscious discourse, but at the level of automatic associations. The pedagogy of anesthesia overlooks this dimension: it treats prejudice as a moral problem to be solved by raising awareness, as if providing information were enough to bring about transformation. Lectures on diversity operate at the cortical level, whereas implicit bias resides in subcortical circuits. De-anesthesia requires intervention at both levels.

The neurodiversity paradigm, as systematized by Fung (2021), proposes a shift in how we understand neurological differences. While the medical model operates based on a deficit logic, the social model of neurodiversity inverts this perspective, viewing these differences instead as natural variations in brain function. The source of exclusion lies not in the neurodivergent individual, but in an institutional architecture that presupposes a specific type of cognitive functioning as the universal standard.

Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (2014) showed that all pedagogical action is, objectively, a form of symbolic violence, an imposition of an arbitrary culture by an arbitrary power. Schooling is not a neutral space for the transmission of universal knowledge. This alleged neutrality is a fiction that decolonial critique has taught us to recognize as European, White, male, and ableist in its origins. Cultural capital is not distributed democratically but inherited, passed down from generation to generation as an invisible legacy that shapes destinies and subjectivities, a fact demonstrated by Bourdieu and Passeron (2018) as they document how students from the dominant classes inherit not only economic resources but also forms of knowledge and dispositions that yield an academic return that is indirect yet decisive.

Those who do not possess it arrive at school already in debt to a cultural heritage that was never theirs. Furthermore, as Bourdieu (2012) documents in The Weight of the World, the school institution tends to be perceived as a sham, a source of collective disappointment for those who are formally included yet symbolically absent. Distinction operates as a mechanism: to include without redistributing cultural capital, and without recognition or representation (Fraser, 2009), is to invite someone to a game where the rules were written to ensure the guest’s defeat. Michel Foucault (2019) proposed an analysis that allows us to understand curricula as networks of power-knowledge, in which power functions and is exercised in a reticular manner. Within this web, individuals do not merely circulate; they are constantly positioned both to exercise power and to be subjected to its effects. Curricula transmit knowledge, produce subjects, shape conduct, and define what counts as legitimate knowledge versus what must be silenced.

The concept of governmentality (Foucault, 2008) enables us to understand how curricula, assessments, and educational policies function as techniques of governance that do not rely on direct repression. The Pedagogy of Anesthesia is a specific form of governmentality: it governs by producing a state of critical passivity and a naturalized acceptance of the established order. It is not fear that compels the anesthetized subject to obey; rather, the subject cannot even formulate the question regarding the conditions of their own subjugation, because the very possibility of asking that question has been rendered unthinkable.

Alfredo Veiga-Neto (2007) shows that curricula function as “machines of governmentalization,” devices that produce modes of subjectivity compatible with specific rationalities of governance. The anesthetized subject is produced through everyday micro-practices operating below the threshold of conscience. Consequently, de-anesthesia cannot be merely discursive. It requires intervention in the very devices, practices, and materialities that generate the modes of being demanded by power.

Emmanuel Levinas (2008) proposes ethics as first philosophy, prior to ontology, epistemology, and politics. The face of the other addresses me before any theory; responsibility for the other precedes freedom itself. The Pedagogy of Anesthesia operates through totalization: it reduces the other to diagnostic categories (the “student with difficulties,” the “special” student, the “at-risk” student), measures them against standards that are not their own, and judges them by criteria that exclude them from the outset. Levinasian ethics serves as an antidote to this violence, demanding that the encounter with the face precedes and conditions any assessment. School can be, and often is, a space for the systematic production of well-intentioned barbarism; yet it is also—and herein lies the possibility of de-anesthesia—a space where the encounter with the face can interrupt the machine.

Martin Heidegger (2012) demonstrates that being-with (Mitsein) is an innate, constitutive, and inescapable structure. We always already exist with others; coexistence is an ontological condition, not a moral choice. Inclusion is not a political concession but the recognition of a condition that fundamentally constitutes us. A world that does not make room for everyone is a world mutilated in its ontological structure.

Neural violence and the performance society

The articulation between Bourdieu and Han, which might seem problematic given the distance between their theoretical programs, rests on the shared structure of their central arguments: both describe mechanisms of domination that operate beyond agents’ intentionality. Bourdieu does so with the concept of habitus as a structured and structuring structure, while Han does so with the performance culture, an imperative that presents itself as freedom. In both cases, domination requires no external agent because it has been internalized as a disposition, a desire, and a project of the self. What Han adds to Bourdieu—and this is the specific contribution justifying this connecting link—is the characterization of the contemporary subjective regime that intensifies Bourdieusian mechanisms: in the performance society, class habitus operates not merely by reproducing positions, but by producing subjects who self-destruct in pursuit of a position the system denies them. From this perspective, the anesthesia of the heir and the anesthesia of the excluded are two sides of the same internalized violence. This is why Han serves as a connecting link rather than merely a component: without the diagnosis of the performance society, Bourdieu explains reproduction but not voluntary self-exploitation; Foucault explains the governance of conduct but not the regime in which the subject governs themselves while believing they are liberating themselves; neuroscience describes cognitive impairment caused by chronic stress but fails to identify the historical configuration that produces it as a way of life. Han provides the articulation that makes visible what none of these isolated frameworks can see: the specific contemporary form in which anesthesia has become self-administered, and, consequently, more resistant to any intervention operating at a single level.

Byung-Chul Han (2015, 2017) proposes an analysis of new forms of domination that extend and shift Foucaultian theory. It must be acknowledged that the later Foucault, in his analyses of technologies of the self, the hermeneutics of the subject, and the care of the self, had already shifted the focus from external discipline to the processes by which the subject constitutes itself as an object of governance. Han radicalizes this shift by diagnosing a historical mutation that Foucault’s context did not yet allow one to observe in its fully realized form: contemporary violence has become “neural.” It operates without an identifiable external oppressor, dispenses with surveillance because the subject monitors itself, and dispenses with punishment because the subject punishes itself when failing to meet internalized goals.

The imperative of “you can” has replaced the imperative of “you must.” However, it is more totalitarian, for there is no one to rebel against when oppression has been internalized as a project of self-realization. What Dardot and Laval (2016) analyze as the extension of neoliberal competitive rationality to all spheres of life, Han diagnoses as a mutation of the subjective regime: the performance subject is simultaneously its own victim and its own oppressor, voluntarily self-exploiting and self-destructing while believing it is realizing itself. From this perspective, depression is not an individual illness but the somatic expression of systemic violence transformed into choice.

The specificity of Han’s diagnosis, and the reason why the “performance society” serves as the central axis of this analysis, lies in its revelation of a historical mutation in the mechanism of domination. While Foucault described the production of docile bodies through discipline and Bourdieu described the reproduction of embodied dispositions through field and habitus, Han identifies the emergence of a regime in which violence has dispensed with the external oppressor, having been converted into a project of subjectivation. The performance subject does not resist domination because they experience it as expanded freedom. This is the most advanced form of anesthesia: not one that prevents the subject from seeing what oppresses them, but one that makes the subject desire their own oppression. The pedagogy of anesthesia in the performance era produces not only subjects who do not question, but also subjects who voluntarily surrender to the process that anesthetizes them, confusing productive exhaustion with growth, conformity with maturity, and paralysis with responsibility.

Han’s diagnosis finds mechanistic consistency in the neurobiology of stress: chronic self-exploitation, that state of constant demand and never-sufficient satisfaction characterizing the performance subject, continuously activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. This results in prolonged exposure to cortisol, which, at chronic levels, impairs hippocampal plasticity, emotional regulation, and the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex (McEwen, 2007). A brain chronically exhausted by performance loses capacities such as reflection, temporal perspective, and tolerance for ambiguity, which constitute the neurobiological preconditions for de-anesthesia. We do not claim direct causality, merely mechanistic plausibility: the subjective regime Han describes is biologically consistent with the type of cognitive impairment that would render critical paralysis not only socially produced but also neurologically sustained.

Zygmunt Bauman (2008) demonstrates that liquid modernity shifts the responsibility for structural failures onto the individual subject. Solidarity becomes a cost to be minimized: when everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, the other is a competitor rather than a companion. The pedagogy of anesthesia feeds on this logic: it transforms structural problems into individual deficits and inherited inequalities into differences of merit. The student who fails is not seen as the victim of a system that reproduces inequalities, but rather as responsible for their own failure. It is by obscuring the perception of structural determinants that this anesthesia operates, producing subjects who accept their position as just, deserved, and inevitable.

Gaudêncio Frigotto (2010) adds a crucial point: educational exclusion in Brazil cannot be understood apart from the dynamics of exploitation that structure class society. In Frigotto’s work, the pedagogy of anesthesia acquires a dimension of political-economic critique: critical paralysis is functionally necessary for exploitation to continue without organized resistance.

Critical tensions and contemporary challenges

A theory that claims to be critical must subject itself to self-critique. This essay presents internal tensions, which are outlined as fertile ground for future research, including the challenges contemporary technologies pose to this construct.

Generative AI introduces a new dimension to the dynamics of anesthesia, one that the classic formulations of Bourdieu, Foucault, and Han could not have anticipated. The problem lies not in the technology itself but in how it is integrated into educational and formative processes. When used as a cognitive shortcut, as machines that generate answers while bypassing the work of thinking, generative AI systems function as devices of digital governmentality: they produce subjects who systematically delegate the work of epistemic elaboration, cultivate cognitive heteronomy, and naturalize dependency as efficiency. Recommendation algorithms that guide educational platforms intensify this process through a logic of personalization that crystallizes differences in origin, offering more of the same to those who have already demonstrated a certain profile. This automated segregation operates without the awareness or intention of any identifiable human agent, producing informational environments that, as Baudrillard (1991) anticipated, simulate reality without referring to it.

However, as Jacques Derrida (2005) demonstrated when rereading Plato’s Phaedrus, writing is phármakon, simultaneously poison and remedy. The same logic applies to generative AI: when the subject uses it as an epistemic interlocutor, formulating questions, confronting answers, exercising metacognition over the process, the technology can function as a tool for de-anesthesia, democratizing access to resources previously restricted to elites and freeing up cognitive time for higher-order reflection. From this perspective, the distinction between the delegative and epistemic uses of generative AI is a distinction between reproduction and resistance; education that fails to foster cognitive sovereignty in digital environments produces subjects vulnerable to the former. The open empirical question remains: Under what specific conditions, with which training protocols, and within what institutional frameworks does generative AI function as a de-anesthesia tool? This essay maintains that “we are a project, not a destiny.” At the same time, it incorporates neurobiological findings demonstrating how exclusion alters brain architecture. The tension is palpable: If exclusion produces measurable neurobiological effects, at what point does Sartre’s “condemned to be free” encounter its material limits?

This is no abstract academic issue, for it strikes at the very heart of the possibility of any critical pedagogy. The hypothesis I propose, which remains to be empirically tested, is that Sartrean freedom operates within the interstices of neurobiological determination: the brain is plastic; traces can be reconfigured and new connections established, yet this requires specific conditions, such as time, secure relationships, and appropriate interventions, that the pedagogy of anesthesia systematically denies.

Anesthesia blocks the conditions necessary for the exercise of freedom. Carl Rogers (2009) proposes a pedagogy grounded in “unconditional positive regard,” yet tension arises when we juxtapose Rogers with Han: How can we demand unconditional acceptance from teachers who are themselves, “performance subjects” (Han, 2015, p. 25) engaged in self-exploitation, exhausted by workweeks exceeding 60 hours, rendered precarious by temporary contracts, and subjected to the same ranking logics? The contemporary Brazilian teacher operates under conditions of systematic neural violence. Demanding “authenticity” and “unconditional acceptance” without transforming working conditions is not merely naivety; it is an act of additional violence masquerading as humanist discourse. Student’s de-anesthesia presupposes the teacher’s de-anesthesia, and the latter presupposes material conditions that are not currently in place.

Dermeval Saviani (2013), in systematizing historical-critical pedagogy, acknowledges this tension: the teacher is simultaneously an exploited worker and an agent of potential transformation. There is room for maneuvers, openings, and contradictions that can be exploited; yet exploiting them requires objective conditions that hegemonic educational policies systematically deny. Teacher’s de-anesthesia is not a matter of individual goodwill, but of collective struggle for conditions that make critical reflection materially possible.

However, de-anesthesia faces limits that the construct must make explicit, lest it reproduces the voluntarism it denounces. The first limit is neurobiological: if chronic stress compromises precisely those functions, such as reflection, temporal perspective, and tolerance for ambiguity (McEwen, 2007), that would be prerequisites for critical reflexivity, then the subjects most in need of de-anesthesia are precisely those whose life conditions render it neurobiologically less accessible. De-anesthesia cannot merely be an invitation to awaken; it must, rather, restore the material and biological conditions that make awakening possible. The second limit concerns positional asymmetry: if the anesthesia of the heir is the deepest because it is the most highly rewarded, then systemic de-anesthesia depends on reaching precisely those subjects who do not perceive suffering as an effect of the system—because the system was designed for them—and who are, therefore, structurally the most resistant to it. The excluded individual may experience moments of rupture; the heir inhabits the absolute doxa. De-anesthesia is, therefore, necessarily asymmetrical in its mechanisms and conditions of possibility.

The third limit is epistemological and, perhaps, the most fundamental: the anesthesia metaphor suggests the existence of a slumbering subject waiting to be awakened, a blocked, true consciousness that de-anesthesia would restore. However, this essay’s multi-level analysis shows that anesthesia constitutes the subject; thus, there is no pre-anesthetic position to be recovered. De-anesthesia does not reveal a subject who existed prior to the critical act but rather produces one. This distinction between de-anesthesia as revelation and de-anesthesia as production is consistent with the processual ontology employed in the essay (drawing on Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and neuroplasticity itself) and establishes the most fertile epistemological horizon for the continuation of this inquiry.

De-anesthesia as production

The distinction between de-anesthesia as revelation and de-anesthesia as production requires the construct to move beyond diagnosis and formalize its positive pole with the same rigor applied to anesthesia, not as a normative promise, but as a process with its own structure, mechanism, and verifiable criteria. While anesthesia operates by collapsing difference into a threat, blocking what might be termed the operator of encounter between asymmetric cognitive or cultural systems, de-anesthesia operates through the precise inversion of this mechanism: difference ceases to be processed as a danger to be neutralized and begins to function as an epistemic resource that only the encounter can enable.

The verification criterion is external to the subject and, in principle, falsifiable: a genuine encounter between asymmetric systems produces an epistemic resource superior to the sum of what each system would generate in isolation; what neither system contained prior to the encounter emerges exclusively from the space between them, in what Levinas (2008) terms the irreducible ethical structure of the face-to-face, which precedes any deliberate pedagogical program. However, Foucaultian vulnerability persists in an irreducible form: the very concept of de-anesthesia can be captured by the apparatus of power as a new mode of subjection, wherein the subject who “de-anesthetizes” themselves according to institutionally defined criteria reproduces, under the guise of liberation, the very logic the construct sought to name (Foucault, 2008). What this limit reveals is not the fragility of the construct, but the necessity of understanding de-anesthesia as an asymptotic process initiated by an encounter with a sufficiently irreducible difference, rather than a state attainable through individual decision, so that the anesthetizing system cannot collapse it without visible cost: it is the epistemic fracture, not choice, that opens up the possibility.

In concrete pedagogical practice, de-anesthesia is recognized not by the intention behind the encounter, but by the product that only the encounter generates. When teacher and student, given the real asymmetries in their trajectories, bodies, and relationships with knowledge (Charlot, 2000), arrive together at an understanding that neither possessed beforehand nor could have produced in isolation, de-anesthesia has taken place. This occurs not because the class was dialogic in a formal sense, nor because of mutual goodwill, but because what Heidegger (2012) calls being-with (Mitsein), the primordial ontological structure of coexistence, found the conditions necessary for its pedagogical actualization. This mechanism unfolds through four identifiable movements: the suspension of the automatic defensive collapse, rarely voluntary, and typically forced by a reality that defies available categories; the construction of a common language that did not pre-exist in either of the interacting systems; the recognition of the other’s asymmetry as a resource rather than a threat to be neutralized; and, finally, a process of irreversible mutual constitution, what Levinas (2008) terms responsibility for the other, which precedes one’s own freedom, wherein the encounter becomes constitutive of the subject, and betraying the other becomes indistinguishable from betraying oneself. De-anesthesia is not merely a sentimental openness to the other; it is the structural condition allowing the encounter to generate something that the mere sum of closed systems never could.

The three limits described—neurobiological, positional, and epistemological—converge on a consequence that the construct must incorporate: anesthesia and de-anesthesia are not discrete states between which the subject shifts with diagnostic precision; rather, they constitute a continuous, multidimensional, and unstable spectrum. The same subject may operate with a high capacity for de-anesthesia in a specific epistemic domain, treating cultural difference, for instance, as a genuine resource, while remaining deeply anesthetized in another, such as regarding gender difference or generational asymmetry, without engaging in any conscious processing. The synaptic plasticity that neurobiologically underpins de-anesthesia is domain-specific; there is no such thing as global de-anesthesia. There are cognitive dispositions that develop, weaken, and reactivate in varying ways depending on the type of difference at play, the subject’s history of exposure, and the institutional conditions of the encounter, a fact documented by Siegel (2020), who shows that the relational mind is constituted by situated bonds rather than abstract, transferable capacities.

The chronic stress imposed by the performance regime compromises precisely these dispositions: according to McEwen (2007), prolonged exposure to cortisol degrades executive functions, reflection, temporal perspective, and tolerance for ambiguity, all of which are neurobiological prerequisites for activating the operator of encounter. This entails a direct pedagogical consequence: there is no such thing as a de-anesthetized teacher who can de-anesthetize anesthetized students; rather, there is the pedagogical relationship as a field of spectral tension, where degrees of openness and closure vary according to domain, moment, and the perceived cost of the encounter. The operational question shifts from “Is this subject anesthetized?”, a binary question that reproduces the diagnostic logic of exclusion, to “In which domains, with what type of difference, and under what conditions is this subject able to activate the operator of encounter?”, a question that opens up an inquiry where the former merely closed with a judgment.

The inversion revealed by Han completes the Bourdieusian analysis: while the excluded, in moments of rupture, can perceive the system’s violence because it has instilled in them a lasting sense of non-belonging, the heir to cultural capital lives within the most absolute doxa precisely because the system has worked in their favor. Their state of anesthesia is the deepest because it is the most richly rewarded; their critical paralysis is the most resilient because it masquerades as insight. The performance society amplifies this mechanism: the self-exploiting heir not only reproduces the structure but renders it invisible to themselves by experiencing it as merit. This inversion carries methodological implications: the pedagogy of anesthesia cannot focus solely on the excluded; rather, it must permeate the entire social fabric, especially reaching those who are unaware they are asleep because their slumber is rewarded as wakefulness.

Pedagogy of Anesthesia is operationally defined as a systemic configuration in which pedagogical, curricular, and assessment practices, under the guise of technical neutrality, tend to produce, whether intentionally or not, the critical paralysis of subjects: an inability or difficulty in perceiving, naming, and questioning the structural mechanisms underlying their own exclusion or privilege. This construct denotes not the malevolent intent of individual agents, but rather an emergent effect of institutional configurations that can operate independently of the intentions of those within them.

Five indicators allow for the empirical identification of the Pedagogy of Anesthesia: (1) the naturalization of individual merit—discourses and practices attributing success or failure exclusively to individual traits; (2) the systematic violation of neuroeducational pillars—pedagogical architectures that contradict evidence regarding attention, active engagement, feedback, and consolidation; (3) the suppression of creative idleness—the elimination of unstructured time necessary for activating the DMN; (4) ranking-oriented curricula—the reduction of education to measurable performance metrics, neglecting critical and metacognitive development; and (5) uncritical use of cognitive technologies—the incorporation of generative AI without the development of metacognition and algorithmic literacy.

The construct does not apply to contexts in which pedagogical practices explicitly address the structural conditions underlying knowledge production and failure, and in which systematic policies for redistributing cultural capital go beyond mere physical inclusion. These indicators can guide studies through the document analysis of curriculum policies, ethnographic observation of practices, semi-structured interviews, and, where ethically authorized, psychophysiological protocols.

Final considerations

The specific contribution of the construct can be summarized in five points: (1) it integrates the neurobiological dimension that Bourdieu does not incorporate; (2) it proposes that governmentality also operates through neurobiological mechanisms; (3) it adds an analysis of generative AIs; (4) it theorizes the “pathology of success” as a possibly deeper form of paralysis; and (5) it introduces the concept of “critical paralysis” as a specific contribution, understood not merely as reproduction (there is movement), disciplining (there is apparent freedom), or exhaustion (there is productivity), but as a dormant presence, activity without consciousness, inclusion without recognition, and movement without transformation. The trajectory of this essay allows for the formulation of an integrated understanding of the Pedagogy of Anesthesia as a device operating at interconnected levels: neurobiological, structural, microphysical, experiential, and ethical-ontological. The articulation between these levels reveals what one-dimensional analyses cannot see: how symbolic violence can find a plausible mechanistic correlate in neural circuits, how the cultural arbitrary is inscribed upon the body, and how exclusion is metabolized into conformity.

If exclusion runs counter to our biology (we are neurobiologically constituted for relationship), our being (being-with is a primordial structure), and our ethics (the face of the other addresses us prior to any theory), why does it persist? Because it is not a dysfunction to be corrected, but a mode of operation serving power configurations that benefit from critical paralysis.

The research agenda emerging from this essay includes the documentary analysis of policies and materials to identify indicators of naturalization; ethnography of classroom practices to reveal the micromechanisms behind the daily production of anesthesia; narratives from teachers and students that provide access to lived experiences; and, where ethically authorized, measurement protocols to investigate biological correlates.

The multi-level perspective helps explain why targeted interventions often fail: policies addressing only one level tend to be neutralized by the system’s resilience. However, fissures do exist, and they must be identified with the same rigor applied to identify mechanisms of reproduction. Teachers’ micro-resistances, counter-hegemonic practices emerging within the interstices of institutional structures and pedagogies that reject neutrality and name power dynamics, represent acts of de-anesthesia. These gestures do not require macro-level structural transformation to begin operating, though they do depend on it to become consolidated. Effective de-anesthesia would require coordinated interventions across multiple scales, ranging from transforming the material conditions of teaching work to reformulating curricular frameworks, while also creating time and space for critical reflection.

These gestures, however, only function as de-anesthesia in the strict sense when the encounter they produce generates something that neither of the isolated systems contained; when the asymmetry between teacher and student, between curriculum and lived experience, between hegemonic episteme and what Arroyo (2014) terms the knowledges of “other subjects” historically and systematically rendered invisible by the school, is not suppressed by pedagogical good intentions but preserved as a condition of the encounter. The symbolic violence described by Bourdieu and Passeron (2014) operates precisely through the suppression of this productive asymmetry. By imposing a cultural arbitrariness as universal, it not only excludes but erases the conditions that would make a genuine encounter possible. De-anesthesia is not a destination but a spectrum in constant negotiation with the material, institutional, and subjective conditions that render it more or less possible, in each domain, with each type of difference, each time anew.

There is, however, a limitation that the construct itself must acknowledge: the Pedagogy of Anesthesia, as formulated here, operates using categories from the Western critical tradition, such as reproduction, governmentality, and the performance society, which, while powerful, may reproduce the very logic of convergence they seek to denounce. By distinguishing confluent thought (that seeks to homogenize and integrate through assimilation) from transfluent thought (that preserves the singularity of flows without forcing them into a common channel), Antônio Bispo dos Santos (2015) offers an analytical key that illuminates a dimension of anesthesia beyond the reach of Bourdieu and Foucault: coloniality as a form of anesthetization that precedes and conditions European modernity. The Brazilian school is not merely a device for class reproduction or a machine for neoliberal governmentality; it is also the heir to a colonial project that induced anesthesia through the forced convergence of knowledges, bodies, and modes of existence. In this sense, what Afro-Brazilian research groups are developing as an epistemic alternative to the epistemologies of convergence may constitute not only a future horizon for this research program but also a necessary epistemological correction to its most structural blind spot.

Inclusion is not about accommodating the different within the same, nor inserting the excluded into the very structures that excluded them by offering a subordinate position; rather, it is about transforming the conditions that exclude, dismantling the mechanisms that produce paralysis, and creating spaces where difference can exist as difference without being converted into a deficit. The guiding question of this essay asked how the processes that produce subjects, simultaneously included in the educational system and deprived of the tools to question the mechanisms of that inclusion, articulate with one another, ranging from the neurobiological to the ethical-ontological level.

The path taken allows us to argue that these processes articulate as a chain of mediations: where the symbolic violence of social structures finds a plausible mechanistic correlate in neural circuits compromised by chronic stress; where curricular governmentality produces behaviors without appearing to govern; where the performance regime converts domination into a project of self-realization; where lived experience sediments the arbitrary as necessity; and where an ethical blockage prevents recognizing the face of the other as a call to respond. Critical paralysis is the system’s inherent mode of operation, an anomaly only from the perspective of the discourse the school produces about itself, yet a constitutive regularity from the perspective of critical analysis.

De-anesthesia, as this article sought to demonstrate, is not the revelation of a dormant subject, but the production of a subject that did not exist prior to the encounter with a difference sufficiently irreducible to fracture the system sustained by anesthesia. Exclusion is architecture; de-anesthesia is practice; and genuine inclusion is the transformation of the conditions that produce difference as inequality.

Acknowledgments

Andréia da Silva Quintanilha Sousa (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte – UFRN): for the conceptual provocation regarding de-anesthesia, through existential questions that challenged the construction of the central argument.

Kátia Silva Cunha (Federal University of Pernambuco – UFPE): for the critical reading of the manuscript and the formulation of relevant questions regarding the dialogue between the authors cited in the theoretical framework.

Marília Marinho de Lucena (Federal University of Pernambuco – UFPE): for collaborating on the article’s neuroscientific foundation and conceptually verifying the theoretical constructs in light of neuroscience.

AFFECTIO Research Group (Federal University of Pernambuco – UFPE/National Council for Scientific and Technological Development – CNPq): for the collective debates on the concept of the Pedagogy of Anesthesia, which contributed to refining the article’s conceptual architecture.

• Use of AI:
  During the preparation of the article, the author used the Claude tool (Anthropic) – the Claude Sonnet 4 model – between February and April 2026 for formatting and for the structural and linguistic review of the text, with the aim of: (i) adjusting the register and verifying internal coherence; (ii) formatting bibliographic references according to APA style; (iii) cross-checking in-text citations against the reference list; (iv) verifying bibliographic data (publisher, year, edition) against verifiable sources; and (v) engaging in critical dialogue to identify logical weaknesses and discuss potential argumentative revisions.
  The author declares that no artificial intelligence tools were used to generate original content and that the final text was reviewed, validated, edited, and supervised. The author ensures the originality, accuracy, and ethical integrity and assumes full responsibility for the content of the publication.
• Textual review:
  Bibliographic standardization (APA 7^th Ed.), preparation, and textual review in Portuguese: Reinaldo Rodrigues [e-mail]
  English Version: Henrique Akira Ishii [e-mail]
• 1
  The expression draws on software development vocabulary: a bug denotes an unintentional system error, while a feature denotes intended and implemented functionality. This semantic transfer is deliberate: educational exclusion is not viewed as a malfunction to be corrected, but rather as the expected outcome of an institutional architecture functioning exactly as designed. This shifts the focus of any intervention onto the individual rather than the structural conditions, which are themselves structurally insufficient.

Data availability

The content underlying the research text is contained within the manuscript.

References

• Archer, M. S. (1995). Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge University Press.
• Arroyo, M. G. (2014). Outros sujeitos, outras pedagogias (2^a ed.). Vozes.
• Baudrillard, J. (1991). Simulacros e simulação (M. J. da Costa Pereira, Trad.). Relógio d’Água.
• Bauman, Z. (2008). A sociedade individualizada: Vidas contadas e histórias vividas (J. Gradel, Trad.). Jorge Zahar.
• Bhaskar, R. (1997). A realist theory of science (2^a ed.). Verso.
• Bourdieu, P. (Org.). (2012). A miséria do mundo (M. S. S. Azevedo et al., Trad., 9^a ed.). Vozes.
• Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (2014). A reprodução: Elementos para uma teoria do sistema de ensino (R. Bairão, Trad., 7^a ed.). Vozes.
• Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (2018). Os herdeiros: Os estudantes e a cultura (I. R. Valle & N. Valle, Trad., 2^a ed.). Editora da UFSC.
• Bowers, J. S. (2016). The practical and principled problems with educational neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(5), 600–612. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000025
  » https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000025
• Charlot, B. (2000). Da relação com o saber: Elementos para uma teoria (B. Magne, Trad.). Artes Médicas Sul.
• Damásio, A. (1996). O erro de Descartes: Emoção, razão e o cérebro humano. Companhia das Letras.
• Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2016). A nova razão do mundo: Ensaio sobre a sociedade neoliberal. Boitempo.
• De Masi, D. (2000). O ócio criativo (L. Manzi, Trad.). Sextante.
• Dehaene, S. (2020). How we learn: Why brains learn better than any machine… for now. Penguin.
• Dekker, S., Lee, N. C., Howard-Jones, P., & Jolles, J. (2012). Neuromyths in education: Prevalence and predictors of misconceptions among teachers. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 429.
• Derrida, J. (2005). A farmácia de Platão (R. da Costa, Trad., 3^a ed.). Iluminuras.
• Foucault, M. (2008). Segurança, território, população: Curso dado no Collège de France (1977–1978) (E. Brandão, Trad.). Martins Fontes.
• Foucault, M. (2019). Microfísica do poder (R. Machado, Trad., 9^a ed.). Paz e Terra.
• Fraser, N. (2009). Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world. Columbia University Press.
• Freire, P. (2019). Pedagogia do oprimido (84^a ed.). Paz e Terra.
• Frigotto, G. (2010). Educação e a crise do capitalismo real (6^a ed.). Cortez.
• Fung, L. K. (Ed.). (2021). Neurodiversity: From phenomenology to neurobiology and enhancing technologies. American Psychiatric Association Publishing.
• Gomes, N. L. (2017). O movimento negro educador: Saberes construídos nas lutas por emancipação. Vozes.
• Han, B.-C. (2015). Sociedade do cansáço (E. P. Giachini, Trad.). Vozes.
• Han, B.-C. (2017). Topologia da violência (E. P. Giachini, Trad.). Vozes.
• Heidegger, M. (2012). Ser e tempo (M. S. C. Schuback, Trad., 14^a ed.). Vozes.
• Levinas, E. (2008). Totalidade e infinito: Ensaio sobre a exterioridade (J. P. Ribeiro, Trad., 3^a ed.). Edições 70.
• McEwen, B. S. (2007). Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation: Central role of the brain. Physiological Reviews, 87(3), 873–904. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00041.2006
  » https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00041.2006
• Menon, V. (2023). 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis. Neuron, 111(16), 2469–2487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.04.023
  » https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.04.023
• Merleau-Ponty, M. (2011). Fenomenologia da percepção (C. A. R. de Moura, Trad., 4^a ed.). Martins Fontes.
• Phelps, E. A., O’Connor, K. J., Cunningham, W. A., Funayama, E. S., Gatenby, J. C., Gore, J. C., Banaji, M. R. (2000). Performance on indirect measures of race evaluation predicts amygdala activation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(5), 729–738. https://doi.org/10.1162/089892900562552
  » https://doi.org/10.1162/089892900562552
• Poldrack, R. A. (2006). Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(2), 59–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.12.004
  » https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.12.004
• Rogers, C. R. (2009). Tornar-se pessoa (M. J. do C. Ferreira, Trad., 6^a ed.). WMF Martins Fontes.
• Santos, A. B. dos. (2015). Colonização, quilombos: Modos e significações. INCTI/UnB.
• Sartre, J.-P. (2011). O ser e o nada: Ensaio de ontologia fenomenológica (P. Perdigão, Trad.). Vozes.
• Saviani, D. (2013). Pedagogia histórico-crítica: Primeiras aproximações (11^a ed.). Autores Associados.
• Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3^a ed.). Guilford Press.
• Veiga-Neto, A. (2007). Foucault & a educação (2^a ed.). Autêntica.

Edited by

• Editors in charge:
  Associate Editor: Pedro Angelo Pagni https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7505-4896
  Editor-in-Chief: Helena Sampaio https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1759-4875

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 Aug 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  06 Apr 2026
• Accepted
  17 June 2026