2026/03/19 by Edward Ademolu · 1 voice
Computer Science · Neuroscience · #Digital Education and Society #Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations #Neuroscience, Education and Cognitive Function
paper · doi:10.1080/07294360.2026.2643244
openalex publication_date 2026/03/19 · openalex created_date 2026/03/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Compassionate pedagogy is increasingly promoted as a humanising response to contemporary pressures in higher education, yet the cognitive assumptions that make compassion institutionally operative remain underexamined. This paper theorises compassion as a governing affective order that shapes what counts as credible difficulty and who can appear as a legitimate subject of support. Drawing on critical disability scholarship and a neurodivergent standpoint, it argues that compassionate governance relies on neuro-ableist norms of emotional readability and narrative coherence, converting cognitive difference into procedurally legible vulnerability and, in turn, vulnerability into recognisable deficit. The paper introduces benevolent pathology to describe a regime in which credibility is routed through medicalised grammars of impairment and sustained through routine administrative acts. Synthesised in a schematic model, this process operates as a sorting mechanism that distributes care and misrecognition over time. While grounded in systems where access to support is organised through individual disclosure, therapeutic classification, and administrable evidence, the analysis identifies a wider risk: when legitimacy depends on narrated injury, compassion functions less as an ethic of care than as a technology of governance. The paper concludes by proposing a design-justice pivot that embeds cognitive plurality into ordinary pedagogical arrangements rather than exceptional accommodation.