The Giftedness Project – A brief note

There has been some recent mediatisation of my research on giftedness. I have had a few emails, queries and comments which I would like to address briefly here.

Firstly, it bears repeating that my research is not psychological and it is not empirical. For this project at least, I am not and will not be looking at ‘real’ gifted children, nor will I ever pretend that I am. I am looking at representations; I am analysing media, science, educational and literary discourses. This is quite a different endeavour of course to looking at ‘real’ people, but doubtlessly it should be clear that it is quite a normal method when doing what can be qualified as cultural studies, cultural sociology, and literary or discourse analysis.

Therefore, I am not in any way saying that children who display unusual, sometimes extraordinary abilities at certain tasks ‘don’t exist’. That would be absurd. What I am interested in is the interpretation that a given society makes of these perceived differences in abilities. This interpretation, and the narratives that surround it, are structured by social, political, economic, cultural forces.

I have been accused of wanting to ‘equalise’ everything and everyone. If this is a political accusation, I will happily take it. However, if it is an accusation from the angle of psychology research – accusing me of saying that ‘everyone is the same’ – I would direct the reader to the paragraph above. I have said no such thing.

Next, it is important to stress that I am exploring, voraciously, the particular stories and anecdotes of people who have been qualified as ‘gifted’ (or ‘pushy’). However, again, for this particular project my interest lies in the more general stories a society tells itself around a specific concept. Those stories may be extremely different to personal histories and they may also appear rather to contradict than to support them.

Finally, I would like readers to bear in mind that I am barely a third of the way through my planned research project. The recent surge of curiosity for my work is connected to one public engagement talk, on just one subpart of a complex and rich work-in-progress. I have been blogging about this project in part to figure it out myself, as is common practice now among academics.