Emotion regulation as affective neoliberal governmentality.

Emotion regulation is central in many therapy models, including couple and family therapy models. This article draws on poststructuralist governmentality studies and processual affect theory to offer insight into how the therapeutic concept of emotion regulation may reflect and support neoliberal affective forms of self-governance. We suggest that couple and family therapy-through using professional discourses and affect-oriented techniques or interventions-may be another site wherein neoliberal governmentality is implemented and extended in contemporary westernized neoliberalized societies. In facilitating emotion regulation, we argue that there is a risk that therapists may implicitly promote a neoliberal worldview that encourages clients to mobilize neoliberal techniques to become self-improving, entrepreneurial subjects, responsible for their happiness and well-being. Conditions of precarity associated with individualist, neoliberal capitalist ideologies and policies (e.g., unemployment, job insecurity, forced migration, wealth inequalities, mass incarceration, social isolation) generate emotional burdens for people to manage that professional techniques or interventions may normalize as clients' self-management tasks. We theorize emotion regulation as an affective governmentality tactic of power and suggest that couple and family therapy can offer points of resistance to individualization and responsibilization and opportunities for creating or affirming alternative subjectivities and affectivities.

Supply and demand: Brokerage as the new tango in home care.

The performance of home care globally is significantly impacted by the political reforms in the public and private sectors. This research investigated the Australian contexts of home care quality and the use of "brokerage" during times of change. The research utilised a qualitative post-structural approach to gather data about home care service provision through conducting semi-structured interviews of 10 Australian home care business leaders. What emerged in the discourse was how central to everyday practices was the need for business leaders to network and 'dance a political tango' to ensure quality in service provision. Illuminated was how the leaders pushed back against governmental and economic structures by using models of brokerage to compensate for economic and staffing deficiencies. This is essential for the ongoing improvement and performance of home care in the Australian social arena of caring for our most vulnerable consumers.

Nursing in the Capitalocene: An anarchistic approach to governmentality and pastoral care.

During the COVIDicine, many nurses awoke to the ways that the Healthcare-Industrial Complex (HIC) dictates the care we are able to provide. Using the Foucauldian concepts of pastoral power and governmentality, we explore the ways that nurses participate in upholding power structures within the HIC and reproducing them in our work, contributing to a carceral culture based on hierarchy and power dynamics. We also explore the ways nurses are both agentic in this system and subject to it, reluctant to make waves and lose our place within a system that can offer nurses safety and security in, and most importantly, a paycheck. This paper articulates a prefigurative anarchist approach to nursing praxis. Through the writing of Emma Goldman, we locate a historically founded philosophical basis for practical tactics that nurses can use to actualise this praxis. Both individually and as a collective, nurses can assert their own ethic and power through direct action, micro-insurgency and solidarity to build the world we know can be. Our only limitation is our imagination.

Distanciation as a technology of control in the UK hostile environment.

This article considers how distanciation, understood as the active production of different forms of distance as a method of control, is used to manage people racialised and criminalised as migrants within the UK's hostile environment. Analysing different policies introduced under the hostile environment agenda, as well as the more recent New Plan for Immigration, we argue distanciation is a key tactic that shapes these policies and their implementation as well as offers us insight into changing forms of governing migration. Drawing on the analysis of a wide range of policy documents, the paper attends to different forms of distanciation used as a method of control within the UK's wider hostile environment and then presents the results of a case-study of how distanciation is mobilised within the English National Health Service, under the Migrant and Visitor Cost Recovery Programme in particular, which was introduced in 2014 to ensure the NHS receives 'a fair contribution' from people racialised as migrants. Addressing different forms of distanciation such as - spatial, legal and emotional - we argue that the lens of distance can offer insights into how detachment - increasing distance between different agents in immigration law and border enforcement is an intentional design to control empathy, solidarity and resistance. Tracing ways these forms of distanciation are designed into legislative and administrative measures helps us better understand how hostile environment policies work as well as locating agencies and possibilities of resistance within different spaces, agents and subjects of bordering.

Cruel optimism, affective governmentality and frontline poverty governance: 'You can promise the world'.

Cruel Optimism' (Berlant, 2011) sustains neoliberalism by promising freedom and autonomy through adherence to and performance of competitive behaviours. As Brown (2003) observes, neoliberalism is a discourse which operates, not through repression or restriction, but through promising self-fulfilment and happiness. The role of emotion-management in poverty governance has been widely acknowledged. However, this has focused on cultivation of population-level punitive, negative emotions (such as shame, stigma, or resentment). It is widely acknowledged that welfare provision has been specifically targeted by neoliberal discourse, justifying intensifying interventions aimed at reshaping the subjectivities and aspirations of poor and marginalised individuals and households to serve the needs of deregulated markets. However, little attention has been paid to the importance of positive, hopeful emotion management in legitimising and effecting co-operation. Drawing on interviews with 54 workers in the Welsh homelessness system, I argue that workers systematically create and sustain optimism in their clients as a mechanism to enable them to survive within an increasingly hostile housing system, as part of a deliberate, if reluctant, strategy to cultivate empowered, 'ethical' welfare selfhood against a backdrop of citizen abandonment. A three-stage approach deployed by workers includes (1) destabilisation of expectations of state help (2) re-orientation, through cultivation of belief in neoliberal promise (3) development of maintenance strategies. Improving applicant capacity to perform neoliberal welfare citizenship was perceived as an urgent, moral and pragmatic necessity, and justified by care logics. I demonstrate how this extends not only our understanding of welfare implementation, but also shows how positive emotion-management generally, and Berlant's Cruel Optimism specifically, can be used to understand the practicalities of welfare governance.

Constituting link working through choice and care: An ethnographic account of front-line social prescribing.

Link worker social prescribing has become a prominent part of NHS England's personalisation agenda. However, approaches to social prescribing vary, with multiple discourses emerging about the potential of social prescribing and different interpretations of personalisation. The transformational promise of social prescribing is the subject of ongoing debate, whilst the factors that shape the nature of front-line link working practices remain unclear. Based on 11 months of in-depth ethnographic research with link workers delivering social prescribing, we show how link workers' practices were shaped by the context of the intervention and how individual link workers navigated varied understandings of social prescribing. Following the work of Mol, we show how link workers drew differentially on the interacting logics of choice and care and trace a multiplicity in front-line link working practices within a single intervention. However, over time, it appeared that a logic of choice was becoming increasingly dominant, making it harder to deliver practices that aligned with a logic of care. We conclude that interpreting personalisation through a logic of choice could potentially undermine link working practices that privilege care whilst obscuring the need for wider investment in health care systems and the social determinants of health.

The foundations of influencing policy and practice: How risk science discourse shaped government action during COVID-19.

COVID-19 demonstrated the complex manner in which discourses from risk science are manipulated to legitimize government action. We use Foucault's theory of Governmentality to explore how a risk science discourse shaped national and local government action during COVID-19. We theorize how national government policymakers and local government risk managers were objectified by (and subjectified themselves to) risk science models, results, and discourses. From this theoretical position we analyze a dataset, including observations of risk science discourse and 22 qualitative interviews, to understand the challenges that national government policymakers, risk scientists, and local government risk managers faced during COVID-19. Findings from our Foucauldian discourse analysis show how, through power and knowledge, competing discourses emerge in a situation that was disturbed by uncertainty-which created disturbed senders (policymakers and risk scientists) and disturbed receivers (risk managers) of risk science. First, we explore the interaction between risk science and policymakers, including how the disturbed context enabled policymakers to select discourse from risk science to justify their policies. This showed government's sociopolitical leveraging of scientific power and knowledge by positioning itself as being submissive to "follow the science." Second, we discuss how risk managers (1) were objectified by the discourse from policymakers that required them to be obedient to risk science, and paradoxically (2) used the disturbed context to justify resisting government objectification through their human agency to subjectify themselves and take action. Using these concepts, we explore the foundation of risk science influence in COVID-19.

Changing interventions in farm animal health and welfare: A governmentality approach to the case of lameness.

Lameness is a significant health and welfare issue in farmed animals. This paper uses a governmentality approach, which focuses on how a problem is made governable, to examine an emerging 'ecology of devices' introduced to intervene in, and attempt to reduce, on-farm incidence of lameness. These devices are associated with advisers who work with farmers on-farm; they enact lameness as a governable entity, are tools to assess the existence of lameness against established norms, and prescribe actions to be taken in response to evidence of lameness. In doing this they subjectify farmers and advisers into seeing and responding to lameness in particular ways. Using concepts of governmentality alongside other perspectives on the power relations and the simplifications and complexities involved in interventions in animal health and farm practice, the paper draws on in-depth research with advisers including vets and other paraprofessionals who work with farmers, and their cows and sheep. It explores how this set of devices introduces particular techniques and practices in lameness management, and produces farmer and adviser subjectivities. It then explores some of the problematics of this mode of governing lameness, including analysis of the limitations and unintended consequences of attempts to simplify lameness management. The paper concludes by arguing that its approach is valuable in analysing ongoing intensification of interventions in farming practices and in understanding the limits of such interventions and the unanticipated divergences from expected conduct.

Governing healthcare: the uses and limits of governmentality in the National Health Service in England.

Using examples from the National Health Service in England, this paper illustrates key features of contemporary healthcare governance: the way decisions are hidden in places that are 'in between' and 'out of reach'; the enrolment of doctors in governing; and the important role played by 'boring things', such as power point slides, flow charts, and forms. The essay shows how anthropological proximity and perspectives can extend and deepen understanding of contemporary political power. It does this firstly by showing the importance of agency in the operation of governmentality, and secondly by illuminating the limits of governmentality. The different elements of governing assemblages, such as global management experts, medical leaders, forms of knowledge and analytical technologies, are brought together through the strategic act of framing. Frames are contested and resisted, requiring more visible forms of control.

Colonial Biopolitics and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943.

An estimated 3 million people died due to the Bengal famine of 1943. The purpose of this article is to theorize the Bengal famine through the lens of colonial biopolitics. The colonial strategies and utilitarian principles by the British authorities exacerbated the Bengal famine. Utilizing Foucault's concept of biopolitics, I point out how the British viewed Indian bodies discursively. To reaffirm their sense of superiority, they reduced their Indian subjects to animal-like beings' incapable of controlling their own reproduction. In order to fulfil British goals, Indian people were forced to participate in the war effort. This paper situates the local and global politics of the famine as they were wrapped up in the geopolitics of World War II, during which the British colonial authorities were far more concerned about a Japanese invasion of South Asia than they were with the lives of people dying of hunger. The article highlights how the implementation of racist policies worsened the famine since it was a product of wartime priorities and calculations. I argue that the Bengal famine of 1943 is a historic tragedy of the colonial past, which was transformed into a socially constructed catastrophe by the British colonizers.Geographers have never studied the Bengal famine of 1943, and one of the principal purposes of this paper is to fill this void.

Paying attention to each other. An essay on the transnational intersections of industrial economy, subjectivity, and governance in East Germany's social-psychological training.

This article examines a little-known chapter both in the history of socialist labor relations and the history of psychology: Social Psychological Training (SPT) for industrial leaders in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Based on previously untapped archival sources, it uncovers the transnational genesis of SPT and its intricate relationships with Western "therapeutic culture" of the 1970s. Governmental perspectives are addressed, as well as the level of individual appropriation of SPT and possible unintended side effects of techniques that were drawn from the social psychological and therapeutical fields. This case study helps to explore the functions of psychological expertise in authoritarian political contexts, as well as the polyvalence of group methods of change, the effects of which could turn out repressive as well as liberating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The history of SPT solicits a polycentric view on therapeutic culture, capturing its diverse manifestations and interconnections between different societies and political economies.

The crying boss: Activating "human resources" through sensitivity training in 1970s Sweden.

This article examines the introduction of "sensitivity training" to 1970s Swedish work life. Drawing upon a range of empirical materials, I explore the politics that were involved in the process of translating and adapting this group dynamic method to the Swedish context and consider how its proponents argued for its value. By approaching sensitivity training as an attempt to govern, shape, and regulate both human beings and the work organizations of which they were a part, I argue that sensitivity training presents an unexpectedly early example of a governing rationality that has elsewhere been described and theorized as "neoliberal." The fact that sensitivity training was established in Swedish work life already in the early 1970s thus challenges the historiography of neoliberal modes of government, which have elsewhere been associated with a neoliberal shift in state policies occurring in the 1980s and 1990s. The article demonstrates how emotionally liberating practices in the late 1960s and early 1970s were embraced by some of the most politically influential actors in contemporary Swedish society, such as the corporate sector and the trade unions. As blue-collar trade unions and social democrats voiced increasingly far-reaching demands concerning workplace democracy and improved workplace conditions, advocates of sensitivity training presented their method as crucial to the process of "democratizing" and "humanizing" Swedish work life. Intimately associated with the new therapies of humanistic psychology, sensitivity training was used within the corporate sector to foster a more emotional and authentic leadership style that would embrace the values of emotional awareness, self-expression, and self-actualization. The crying boss emerged in this context as a key figure in the project of creating a "democratic" and psychologically satisfying organization. Yet, sensitivity training was also described as a means for companies to make better use of what was now asserted as their most important economic asset: the human being. From the outset, the idealistic vision of an emotionally liberated, democratic workplace was thus entangled with a specific kind of economic rationality, in which the emotionally liberated, self-actualizing individual emerged as a capital or asset that would be better utilized if the organization allowed-even encouraged-employees to engage in their own well-being and self-optimization.

Energy Communities and the Tensions Between Neoliberalism and Communitarianism.

The convergent development of (renewable) distributed electricity sources, storage technologies (e.g., batteries), 'big data' devices (e.g., sensors, smart meters), and novel ICT infrastructure matching energy supply and demand (smart grids) enables new local and collective forms of energy consumption and production. This socio-technical evolution has been accompanied by the development of citizen energy communities that have been supported by EU energy governance and directives, adopting a political narrative of placing the citizen central in the ongoing energy transition. But to what extent are the ideals that motivate the energy community movement compatible with those of neoliberalism that have guided EU energy policy for the last four decades? Using a framework inspired by Michel Foucault's idea of governmentality, we analyze the two political forms from three dimensions: ontological, economic and power politics. For the ontological and the economic dimensions, neoliberal governmentality is flexible enough to accommodate the tensions raised by the communitarians. In the dimension of power politics however, the communitarian logic does raise a fundamental challenge to neoliberal governmentality in the sense that it explicitly aims for a redefinition of the 'common good' of society's energy supply based on democratic premises.

The foucauldian approach to conservation: pitfalls and genuine promises.

Conservation biology is a branch of ecology devoted to conserving biodiversity. Because this discipline is based on the assumption that knowledge should guide actions, it endows experts with a power that should be questioned. The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) can be seen as a relevant conceptual resource to think these aspects of conservation biology through. I critically analyse the relevance of the Foucauldian approach to conservation. I argue that Foucauldian arguments are deeply ambiguous, and therefore useless for conservation purposes, unless they are supplemented with unsaid assumptions that are, depending on the case at hand, untenable, or at least at odds with basic assumptions underlying conservation biology. In any case, the prospects of using the Foucauldian approach for conservation purposes are deeply undermined. However, the Foucauldian reasoning contains some ideas that can be important and useful for conservation purposes, if they are duly clarified.

"Innovations" During COVID-19: Microfinance in Bangladesh.

In this study of microfinance institutions (MFIs) and their participants, we show how certain innovations made by MFIs during the COVID-19 pandemic enable further consolidation of NGOs in Bangladeshi society. The study is based on interviews conducted in 2020 with key personnel from three major NGOs in Bangladesh: Grameen, Sajida Foundation, and Brac (which is also the largest NGO in the world), as well as 20 interviews conducted in 2018 (before the pandemic) with microcredit recipients who use financial services. We observed that MFIs scaled up by taking on the function of relief provision, financial services became more entrenched, and NGO governance was bolstered as MFIs served as intermediaries between the state and people, even though, as the 2018 interviews reveal, microfinance participants were reticent about technology uptake.

A crisis in search of a narrative: Australia, COVID-19 and the subjectification of teachers and students in the national interest.

Force majeure circumstances, such as those witnessed in the COVID-19 pandemic, have been used to justify new technologies of governance as policy-makers around the world began to realise the magnitude of the problem and its political implications. In Australia, the coronavirus crisis focussed attention on the vital role education plays in society and was used as an opportunity by policy-makers to reinforce an agenda that, over the past two decades, has tied education policy-making to the economy and 'national interest'. Indeed, Australia's growing federal involvement, with respect to schooling policy was continued in the pandemic as the Australian Prime Minister (PM) created a national cabinet to deal with the crisis, consisting of the PM and state and territory leaders. However, despite the ongoing ambition of a national policy agenda pursued by federal policy-makers, fault lines appeared. Informed by Foucauldian notions of discourse, governmentality and biopolitics, this paper explores how Australia's federal Coalition government endeavoured to manage the population at the outset of the pandemic and subjectified teachers as responsible in the service of the economy. While COVID-19 was a crisis in search of a narrative, federal policy-makers experienced pushback as state and territory leaders assumed control and teachers refused subject positions.

Governing the Discourse of Internationalization in the USA: The Influence of Higher Education Professional Associations.

Higher education professional associations (HEPAs) are well-established agents of knowledge production and have been influential in shaping higher education policies and practices. In the context of US international higher education, HEPAs have contributed to the rise of 'internationalization' as a discursive practice. Proposing an analytical framework that takes up Foucauldian analysis of discourse and studies in governmentality, this paper examines a corpus of ACE and NAFSA reports in order to trace the emergence of internationalization and its lines of transformation as both a regime of truth and a regime of practice in the context of US higher education over the last 30 or so years. The findings of this study illustrate that since its emergence in the 1980s, HEPAs have participated in the transformation of internationalization from a discourse of exchange to a discourse of competition.

Advance care planning in discussion: a solution or challenge with pitfalls?

OBJECTIVES: Care planning should define care at the end of life in advance. At a later stage, when patients are no longer able to do this themselves, it should serve as a guideline for health care. The aim of this article is to give a first insight into the discussions around this social instrument. STUDY DESIGN: The study design was comparing the arguments of proponents and critics. METHODS: This is a critical discourse analysis. RESULTS: A discussion of proponents and critics shows how closely this social instrument is interwoven with the areas of biopolitics, economics and governmentality. CONCLUSIONS: Further research should address the question of what quality assurance can look like.

The reasonable patient - A Swedish discursive construction.

The aim of this study was to analyse how the patient is constructed and socially positioned in Swedish patient information. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis methodology was utilised on a sample of 56 online patient information texts about cancer containing a total of 126,711 words. The findings show an overarching discourse of informed consent guided by specific features to produce a patient norm that we name "the reasonable patient", who is receptive to arguments, emotionally restrained and makes decisions based on information. Through the discourse of informed consent, the norm of the reasonable patient emerges, apparently to even out the imbalance of power between patient and professional, but in reality, more likely to construct a patient who is easily controlled and managed. When the self-responsibility towards health is incorporated into the everyday domestic spaces via digital health technologies, the ideas and concepts of the patient role need to be reconsidered based on these new conditions. We conclude that it is important for nursing researchers to broaden the research on patients to include the relationship of power created through language. This study demonstrates both methodological and empirical possibilities to do so.

Which lives are worth saving? Biolegitimacy and harm reduction during COVID-19.

Despite the promise to save every life, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed social and racial inequalities, precarious living conditions, and engendered an exponential increase in overdose deaths. Although some lives are considered sacred, others are deliberately sacrificed. This article draws on the theoretical work of Foucault and scholars who further developed his concept of biopolitics. While biopolitics aims to ameliorate the health of populations, Foucault never systematically accounted for the unequal value of lives. In the name of saving the biological lives of people who use drugs (PWUD) during the pandemic, the harm reduction movement has emphasized the need for safe supply, decriminalization, and housing; governments have started implementing these measures, which were previously rejected as utopian and unrealistic. Paradoxically, the use of drugs itself, and therefore the increased risk of death from overdose or other medical sequelae, is the only way PWUD can achieve enough visibility to be recognized as a life worth saving. The humanitarian rationale of harm reduction concerns itself with the biological life and stipulates social and political rights in the name of its sacredness. This is what anthropologist Fassin and others called biolegitimacy-the recognition of life reduced to its physiological, biological essence.