Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

126 N. Hodgson
and political literacy are versions of or constitutive of “emotional intelligence” and
“active citizenship”. But as Nikolas Rose has indicated, a form of numeracy in relation
to ourselves is also a central component for the mode of citizenship required
today: “Democracy... depends on the delicate composition of relations of number
and numeracy enabling a calculated and calculating government to be exercised
over persons and events to be governed” (Rose, 2000, p. 232). The examples of
the focus and means of gathering statistics concerned with citizenship, happiness
and well-being illustrate the way in which statistics operate to enable a permanently
calculable environment or system at all and between levels: our bodies, our minds,
our relationships to others, our homes, our consumption activities, our political participation.
In an analysis of democratic citizenship, then, it is necessary not to be
concerned with the definition of citizenship or of happiness that is being used but to
the ways in which we are asked to calculate and account for ourselves in terms of
particular renderings of them. It is the “mundane practices of pedagogy, of accounting,
of information and polling, and to the mundane knowledges and ‘grey sciences’
that support them” (Rose, 2000, p. 232) that are more instructive for analysing how
we are made subjects today.
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