Search results for "mentality"

Transforming subjectivities in psychiatric care

2009

Accepted version of an article in the journal: Subjectivities. The definitive publisher-authenticated version: Transforming subjectivities in psychiatric care, Subjectivity, Vol. 27, 195–216 , 2009, Palgrave Macmillan is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.6 This paper is based upon ethnographic fieldwork in a Norwegian psychiatric unit practicing a psycho-educational treatment of young adults diagnosed with schizophrenia. An aim of the programme is that patients learn to detect and monitor their 'symptoms' in order to obtain 'insight into their own illness', thus transforming themselves into self-governed and self-responsible subjects who are able to cope with life outs…

Introduction - Immigration, governmentality, and integration assemblages

2012

Enterprising refugee women: Analyzing postfeminist governmentality in an organizational context

2023

This study examines a model project initiated by a German Federal Ministry in the middle of the vast increase in forced migration to Germany after 2015. The project aimed at facilitating the integration of female refugees into German society by way of ‘empowering’ them to become self-employed. A business counseling agency with a feminist orientation was commissioned to design and run the project. Interpellating refugee women as subjects of entrepreneurial self-actualization to enact gender equality, the project embodies a tangible example of postfeminist governmentality. Combining recent research on postfeminism with analytics of governmentality, the study directs its analytical gaze to the…

Neoliberal Governmentality and Knowledge Production in Higher Education: Genealogy of a Subjective Configuration

2015

En este artículo, se parte de la consideración de que cualquier interrogación sobre las condiciones de posibilidad de una investigación crítica debe hacerse teniendo en cuenta el proceso de mercantilización del conocimiento, impulsado por la incorporación de los modos de gubernamentalidad neoliberal en la universidad. Proceso este que redefine el valor y el uso que se le da al conocimiento producido y redefine también las subjetividades de los colectivos universitarios: formas de entender el conocimiento y configuraciones subjetivas que promueven modos instrumentales de relacionarse con el conocimiento en un escenario individualizador y competitivo. Por ello, se considera políticamente rele…

Basel Bank Limiting Policies as Foucauldian Power/Knowledge: Risk as Assemblages, The Case of Basel Bank Limiting Policies as Discourses

2023

I intend to write about Basel bank's limiting technologies from the point of view of trust, coming from the fact that banks have to adjust their risk understanding tools and test them constantly. It is not always known what exactly causes a risk. I am interested in risk-understanding technologies which do not govern this in advance but only require passing certain risk tests. Therefore, I will research the idea of Basel’s bank limiting technologies as assemblages that want connections only with other specified assemblages. For example, certain risk levels must be adjusted to form a harmonious whole that passes these tests. I will argue that by understanding Basel’s bank limiting technologie…

Believe It or Not – No Support for an Effect of Providing Explanatory or Threat-Related Information on Conspiracy Theories’ Credibility

2021

Past research suggests that certain content features of conspiracy theories may foster their credibility. In two experimental studies (N = 293), we examined whether conspiracy theories that explicitly offer a broad explanation for the respective phenomena and/or identify potential threat posed by conspirators are granted more credibility than conspiracy theories lacking such information. Furthermore, we tested whether people with a pronounced predisposition to believe in conspiracies are particularly susceptible to such information. To this end, participants judged the credibility of four conspiracy theories which varied in the provision of explanatory and threat-related information. Intere…

In the name of security : Governmentality apparatus in a multilingual mine in Arctic Finland

2021

This critical sociolinguistic study explores how mining work is governed in the name of security in a mine in Arctic Finland. Although the mining industry is dominated by multinational corporations, mines themselves tend to be concentrated in peripheries where a mobile and multilingual workforce is recruited. Mining is a high-risk business: industrial accidents and environmental damage can be severe. Discursive practices play a crucial role in risk management. In this study, the nexus of language, security, and production in mining work is analyzed by applying the Foucauldian concept of 'governmentality'. The data comprise ethnographic observations, work-related documents, and interviews co…

Turning experience into expertise : technologies of the self in Finnish participatory social policy

2017

This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants’ self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault’s conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, contrary to the projects’ emancipatory promise of providing the service users the freedom to reconstruct themselves, the projects entail practices that curb the participants’ way of ‘knowing themselves’. They require the service users to reframe thei…

‘The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)’: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy

2018

Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and ‘empowering’ social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organisations. I illustrate how practices of governing and resistance are intertwined and mutually dependent in a much subtler and more practical manner than allows the often-used analytical dichotomy between domi…

Making the case for policy : persuasiveness in higher education, science and technology policy discourse

2015

Policy texts present problems, propose solutions to those problems and persuade multiple audiences of the legitimacy of the proposed problems and solutions. The rhetorical analysis of two decades of higher education and science and technology discourse in Finland, Germany, UK, Portugal and USA highlights the discursive elements that contribute to persuasiveness of policy, construe it as rational and logical, and create a sense of urgency in bringing it about. I argue that the analytical and hortatory registers of policy discourse foreground competitive and hierarchical relations of countries and their higher education systems. By construing certain state of affairs and courses of action as …