Call for Papers: AAG 12-16th April, 2011, Seattle
Geographies of the psychological state
Co-organised by Rhys Jones, Jessica Pykett and Mark Whitehead, Aberystwyth University
Our aim in this session is to examine the way in which psychology and psychological insights have been used as tools of government. In particular, we explore how a geographical perspective can enable us to comprehend and critique the political use of psychology.
Geography has had a long-running engagement with the psychological sciences. Behavioural geographers, feminist geographers, environmental geographers, and those interested in non-representational geographies have used psychological insights in order to understand the perceptual environment, the decision-making process, the emotional and psycho-social dynamics of the self, and the non-cognitive or pre-cognitive determinants of action. At the same time, historical, political and economic geographers have engaged with the spatial and socio-economic contexts within which the political power of the state has been articulated.
Dialogue between these two areas of geographical enquiry, however, has been limited to date. Perhaps most telling has been the way in which Foucault’s highly influential work has been taken up by geographers to interrogate themes such as the governance of mental health, the dynamics of psychological power and the state’s deployment of psychological knowledges in the management of individuals and populations. It is clear that new frontiers of governance are continually being opened up by the state in its efforts to use psychological insights to influence populations. Witness, for instance, the fact that Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge (which makes numerous references to psychological experiments), has been appointed as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs within the Obama administration. The UK’s Cabinet Office, too, has recently published a ‘think-piece’ entitled Mindspace, in which it seeks to use insights from psychology as a way of improving policy-making, and the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee recently launched an inquiry into behaviour change in public policy.
This session seeks, therefore, to engender constructive dialogue between a range of theoretically diverse subfields in order to examine more fully the role of geography in understanding the intersection between the psychological sciences and state power. We welcome papers that examine a range of different political uses of psychological insights and especially ones that address the following questions:
• How are psychological insights used and taken up by governments?
• What infrastructures of governing are required in order to mobilise these psychological insights, and to what ends?
• How do psychological insights intersect with geographical concepts of time and space?
• What are the major points of agreement and distinction between geography’s different engagements with psychology, and how does this affect the kind of contributions and critiques that geographers can offer in matters of state knowledge, techniques of governing and evaluations of public policy?
• What is the potential for reviving a behavioural geography which can adequately respond to its critics, whilst providing new grounds from which to challenge the contemporary resurgence of forms of behavioural governance?
We would like to convene both a paper session and a panel discussion to address these questions.
If you are interested, please submit your abstract to Jessica Pykett at [log in to unmask] by 15th October.
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