Jessica Pykett
Biographic Data
| ID | 178477 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica Pykett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica |
| FAMILY NAME | Pykett |
| SIGNATURE | PYKETT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0036-9639 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 56 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 409 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
The WHO has ratified pandemic agreement
On 20 May 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the Pandemic Agreement at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. After nearly three years of negotiations and after failing to adopt it in 2024, this is a decisive step towards more combined efforts to address future pandemics. The final text of the treaty highlights the need for equitable access to pandemic-related health products and aims to improve the ability of international health re…
Polygenic scores as bio-social policy instruments
The use of genetic data has proliferated in social and behavioural genomics research, leading to proposals for genetically-informed social policy. In particular, in the domain of ‘educational genomics’, researchers using ‘polygenic scores’—summary statistics used to calculate social outcomes from genetic data—have generated scientific knowledge claims about the potential to predict educational outcomes from biological samples. These polygenic sco…
Ethics-policy advisory ecosystems
The organisational practices, status and role of policy-focussed ethics advisory committees are significant in relation to scientific advances, societal transformations and crisis situations. Existing research has explored the effectiveness, de/politicisation and deliberative aspects of national ethics bodies, but their role in wider ecosystems of policy advice is neglected. It is sometimes argued that ethics committees have little impact on prac…
Algorithmic futuring
Futures of education are increasingly defined through predictive technologies and methods. We conceptualize ‘algorithmic futuring’ as the use of data-driven digital methods and predictive infrastructures to anticipate educational futures and animate actions in the present towards their materialization. Specifically, we focus on algorithmic futuring in the education technology investment industry, and the role of predictive infrastructures of valu…
Sociodigital futures of education
As EdTech industries grow in reach and power it is imperative to motivate conditions for ethical challenge and contestation, always remaining attentive to the kinds of education futures that dominant imaginaries of technology foreclose. In this paper, we explore how the multiple lenses of reparations, sovereignty, care and democratisation can offer resources for envisaging alternative sociodigital futures of education. We identify how these ideas…
Attention as an object of knowledge, intervention and valorisation
Innovations in mobile neuromonitoring and brain–computer interfaces are increasingly used to inform understandings of human brains and behaviours while also catalysing imaginaries of neuroscientifically measured and enhanced economic productivity. In this paper, we focus on neurotechnologies that claim to capture, monitor, measure and train learners’ attention. We analyse a corpus of relevant scientific, governance, and commercial texts to explor…
Virtual flying carpets and digital disaster rooms
Around the world we are seeing the emergence of new institutions and organisations offering immersive speculative environments which deploy virtual and mixed realities to give participants a ‘live experience’ of the future. Often (but not exclusively) found in an emerging network of ‘museums of the future’, the distinctive affordances of these mixed reality environments have yet to be fully grasped in terms of their implications for public partic…
Brokering the brain
Educational neuroscience has expanded its influence since the 1990s, positioned as advancing new forms of intervention in educational policy and practice. Simultaneously, the gap between the neuroscience lab and the classroom has preoccupied educational debate. Yet, little is known about the discursive practices by which educational neuroscience seeks to translate science into application. In this paper, we analyse the translational knowledge bro…
Entanglements of Dis
Infrastructuring Educational Genomics
Technoscientific transformations in molecular genomics have begun to influence knowledge production in education. Interdisciplinary scientific consortia are seeking to identify ‘genetic influences’ on ‘educationally relevant’ traits, behaviors, and outcomes. This article examines the emerging ‘knowledge infrastructure’ of educational genomics, attending to the assembly and choreography of organizational associations, epistemic architecture, and t…
Active and healthy ageing in urban environments
Urban age-friendly initiatives strive to promote active and healthy ageing by addressing urban influences that impact individuals as they age. Collaborative community partnerships with multi-level stakeholders are crucial for fostering age-friendly initiatives that can transform urban community health. Employing a citizen social science (CSS) approach, this study aimed to engage older adults and stakeholders in Birmingham, UK, to (i) identify key…
Be Happy
Psychological science is increasingly influencing public policy. Behavioral public policy (BPP) was a milestone in this regard because it influenced many areas of policy in a general way. Well-being public policy (WPP) is emerging as a second domain of psychological science with general applicability. However, advocacy for WPP is criticized on ethical and political grounds. These criticisms are reminiscent of those directed at BPP over the past d…
Mental health monitoring apps for depression and anxiety in children and young people
Ethical moments and institutional expertise in UK Government Covid-19 pandemic policy responses
Background: The emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic has required a rapid acceleration of policy decision making, and raised a wide range of ethical issues worldwide, ranging from vaccine prioritisation, welfare and public health ‘trade-offs’, inequalities in policy impacts, and the legitimacy of scientific expertise. Aims and objectives: This paper explores the legacy of the pandemic for future science-advice-policy relationships by inves…
Employing citizen science to enhance active and healthy ageing in urban environments
Engaging older residents in problem definition and solution-building is key to the success of place-based initiatives endeavouring to increase the age-friendliness of urban environments. This study employed the Our Voice framework, engaging older adult citizen scientists (n = 14) and community stakeholders (n = 15) across the city of Birmingham, UK. With the aim of identifying urban features impacting age friendliness and co-producing recommendat…
The Role of Urban Environments in Promoting Active and Healthy Aging
Promoting active and healthy aging in urban spaces requires environments with diverse, age-friendly characteristics. This scoping review investigated the associations between urban characteristics and active and healthy aging as identified by citizen science (CS) and other participatory approaches. Using a systematic scoping review procedure, 23 articles employing a CS or participatory approach (participant age range: 54-98 years) were reviewed. …
Stressing the ‘body electric’
This article explores histories of the science of stress and its measurement from the mid 19th century, and brings these into dialogue with critical sociological analysis of emerging responses to work stress in policy and practice. In particular, it shows how the contemporary development of biomedical and consumer devices for stress self-monitoring is based on selectively rediscovering the biological determinants and biomarkers of stress, human f…
Understanding the ‘degree awarding gap’ in geography, planning, geology and environmental sciences in UK higher education through peer research
This paper draws on critical race theory to analyse testimonies from students that help explain why minoritised ethnic communities studying geography, planning, geology and environmental sciences in the UK, have a lesser chance of being awarded a ‘good’ degree (i.e. an upper second- or first-class), in comparison to White British people. There are very low levels of ethnic diversity across these subject areas. We conducted peer research, includin…
Urban precarity and youth mental health
Why is emotional data failing to produce more humane cities? Urban governance and the (interdisciplinary) problem of wellbeing
The city is often highlighted as the key space in which our emotions and personal mental health can be shaped. Globally, place-based approaches to promoting urban health and happiness have become commonplace. Initiatives and policies improving urban and regional wellbeing operate at a range of scales, from global alliances of NGOs and supranational health bodies, to regional, local, and community action. This paper critically reviews the spatial …
Spatialising happiness economics
Happiness has become a high‐profile goal for national governments, city authorities, and technology developers finding new ways to map and measure emotions through happiness economics, urban management, and digital emotion‐sensing. This paper advances critical geographical analysis of the neglected rationales, mechanisms, and implications of promoting the emotion of happiness. Researchers, policy‐makers, and publics alike are intrigued and troubl…
Developing a Citizen Social Science approach to understand urban stress and promote wellbeing in urban communities
This paper sets out the future potential and challenges for developing an interdisciplinary, mixed-method Citizen Social Science approach to researching urban emotions. It focuses on urban stress, which is increasingly noted as a global mental health challenge facing both urbanised and rapidly urbanising societies. The paper reviews the existing use of mobile psychophysiological or biosensing within urban environments—as means of ‘capturing’ the …
Urban Emotion Sensing Beyond ‘Affective Capture’
The use of mobile sensor methodologies in urban analytics to study 'urban emotions' is currently outpacing the science required to rigorously interpret the data generated. Interdisciplinary research on 'urban stress' could help inform urban wellbeing policies relating to healthier commuting and alleviation of work stress. The purpose of this paper is to address-through methodological experimentation-ethical, political and conceptual issues identi…
From Urban Stress to Neurourbanism
Urbanicity has long been associated with stress, anxiety, and mental disorders. A new field of neurourbanism addresses these issues, applying neuroscience laboratory methods to tackle global urban problems and promote happier and healthier cities. Exploratory studies have trialed psychophysiological measurement beyond laboratories, capitalizing on the availability of biosensing technologies to capture geo-located physiological markers of emotiona…
Questioning post-political perspectives on the psychological state
Behavioural public policy is associated with the rising influence of psychological and behavioural sciences on systems of government. Related policies are based on the assumption of human irrationality and use a series of often unconsciously oriented policy tools to pursue varied public policy goals. This paper argues that existing critical analyses of behavioural public policy can be categorized as post-political in their orientation. Post-polit…
Governing temptation
This paper critically examines new modes of behaviour change promoted by the contemporary British state, providing a critique of libertarian paternalism as an emergent form of government in the UK. We analyse the multivalent principles and mechanisms associated with libertarian paternalism. We consider the contribution of Foucauldian theories of governmentality and psychological power within human geography to a critical analysis of libertarian p…
Governing Irrationality, or a More Than Rational Government? Reflections on the Rescientisation of Decision Making in British Public Policy
It appears that recent debates within human geography, and the broader social sciences, concerning the more-than-rational constitution of human decision making are now being paralleled by changes in the ways in which public policy makers are conceiving of and addressing human behaviour. This paper focuses on the rise of so-called Behaviour Change policies in public policy in the UK. Behaviour Change policies draw on the behavioural insights being…
Framing the Good Citizen
This article interrogates the norms of good citizenship invoked in and across different social domains, using the example of citizenship education in the UK as one field in which good citizenship is constituted. It is possible to make visible the political struggle inherent in the mechanisms of framing the good citizen by unpacking the differences between citizenship as acts, status and virtues. This is a necessary step in assessing good citizens…
Psychological governance and behaviour change
A suite of ‘behaviour change’ policies has become evident in United Kingdom public policies, informed by insights from the psychological and behavioural sciences. In this article we use Foucauldian conceptions of governmentality and psychological techniques of governance – along with interview and documentary research on contemporary public policy – to examine how such policies re-imagine and address the limitations of neoliberalism, as well as t…
Geography and neuroscience
Geographers are increasingly interested in understanding the significance of developments in neuroscience, psychology and the behavioural sciences. Indeed, consideration of these disciplines has arguably shaped the trajectories of human geography since at least the 1960s, but its "neural turn" has only recently been acknowledged. This paper provides an original analysis of the intersections of research on neuroscience and geography. With referenc…
Neuroliberalism
Focusing on the rise of the behavioural sciences within the design and implementation of public policy, this paper introduces the concept of neuroliberalism and suggests that it could offer a creative context within which to interpret related governmental developments. Understanding neuroliberalism as a system of government that targets the more-than-rational aspects of human behaviour, this paper considers the particular contribution that geogra…
From Urban Stress to Neurourbanism
Urbanicity has long been associated with stress, anxiety, and mental disorders. A new field of neurourbanism addresses these issues, applying neuroscience laboratory methods to tackle global urban problems and promote happier and healthier cities. Exploratory studies have trialed psychophysiological measurement beyond laboratories, capitalizing on the availability of biosensing technologies to capture geo-located physiological markers of emotiona…
(Re)Inhabiting awareness
This paper opens up a dialogue between mindfulness and the discipline of geography. As a meditative practice that cultivates ‘present-centred non-judgmental awareness’, we claim that the practices and insights of mindfulness have important implications for various forms of geographical enquiry. This paper argues that mindfulness can inform geographical practices in relation to epistemology and methodology, and contribute towards geographically in…
Learning to be Global Citizens
The ethics of everyday consumption has become a key concern for social and environmental justice campaigning by NGOs in the United Kingdom. Schools are a prominent site for such campaigns, where, alongside other 'controversial issues' and initiatives such as citizenship education, the problematisation of consumption practices has developed its own distinctive set of pedagogical devices. This paper questions the analytical framing of education as …
Neurocapitalism and the new neuros
Neuroeconomics, behavioural economics and picoeconomics have recently come to widespread popular attention, informing both public policy and commercial applications in UK and USA in particular. From neuroeducation and neuromarketing to so-called ‘nudge’-inspired public policies, the resurgence of broadly behavioural accounts of economic theory has far-reaching consequences for how we both understand and intervene in human rationality. While econo…
Citizenship Education and narratives of pedagogy
This paper argues that the concept of the ‘pedagogical state’ (Hunter 1994, Kaplan 2007) can be employed to better understand the cultural practices of governing through pedagogical means, and the evolving pedagogical relationship between state and citizen. The introduction of statutory Citizenship Education lessons in secondary schools in England in 2002 is used as a case study through which to develop the idea of the pedagogical state. It is ar…
Personalization and de-schooling
`Personalized learning' has become a popular term within education policy and practice in England, and is part of wider moves towards the `personalization' of public services and the promotion of personal responsibility within social policy discourse — including education, welfare, health and adult social care. In analysing personalization in education policy as a discursive formation, this paper visits some of the tensions, ambiguities and appar…
Making citizens governable? The Crick Report as governmental technology
This paper considers the recent introduction of Citizenship Education in England from a governmental perspective, drawing on the later work of Foucault to offer a detailed account of the political rationalities, technologies and subjectivities implicated in contemporary education policy in the formation and governance of citizen‐subjects. This is understood in terms of making citizens ‘governable’, but importantly not unproblematically ‘governed’…
The New Maternal State
Policies explicitly aimed at changing people's behaviour and recasting state–citizen relations are becoming prevalent in the UK. New political rationalities of “co‐production”, “personalisation” and ‘soft” or “libertarian paternalism” seek to cultivate a relationship between the adaptive state and the active citizen which is increasingly pedagogical. Informing these new pedagogies of governing is research from behavioural economics, psychology an…
The Geographies of Soft Paternalism in the UK
Soft paternalism or libertarian paternalism has emerged as a new rationality of governing in the UK under New Labour, denoting a style of governing which is aimed at both increasing choice and ensuring welfare. Popularized in Thaler and Sunstein’s best‐selling title, Nudge, the approach of libertarian paternalism poses new questions for critical human geographers interested in how the philosophies and practices of the Third Way are being adapted …
Geography, libertarian paternalism and neuro-politics in the UK
This Commentary explores what the implications of the emergence of a putative 'nudgeocracy', and associated forms of neurologically-infused policy development, mean for human geographical research. Drawing on a 3-year research project into the rise of libertarian paternalism within the British polity, and our involvement in the recent House of Lords Behaviour Change Inquiry (House of Lords 2011 Behaviour change report[HL paper 179] Stationary Off…
Behaviour Change policies in the UK
Introduction
Making Citizens in the Classroom
This paper considers the construction of young people's experiences in city schools through a new curriculum subject, Citizenship Education, in secondary schools in England. It demonstrates how citizen identities are constructed through discursive practices in the classroom and are shaped by geographies of education. The place-based identities formed within urban schools both reflect and refute the inequalities inherent in the selective education…
Interventions in the political geography of 'libertarian paternalism
Geographies of brain culture
This article outlines the strategic alignment of novel modes of emotional and psychological governance characteristic of 'brain culture' with intensified forms of workplace performance management within specifically neoliberal organisational cultures. We introduce the recent emergence of positive psychology-based workplace training programmes in the UK human resources field as a new empirical site for the study of cultural geographies of educatio…
Employing citizen science to enhance active and healthy ageing in urban environments
Engaging older residents in problem definition and solution-building is key to the success of place-based initiatives endeavouring to increase the age-friendliness of urban environments. This study employed the Our Voice framework, engaging older adult citizen scientists (n = 14) and community stakeholders (n = 15) across the city of Birmingham, UK. With the aim of identifying urban features impacting age friendliness and co-producing recommendat…
Spatialising happiness economics
Happiness has become a high‐profile goal for national governments, city authorities, and technology developers finding new ways to map and measure emotions through happiness economics, urban management, and digital emotion‐sensing. This paper advances critical geographical analysis of the neglected rationales, mechanisms, and implications of promoting the emotion of happiness. Researchers, policy‐makers, and publics alike are intrigued and troubl…
Questioning post-political perspectives on the psychological state
Behavioural public policy is associated with the rising influence of psychological and behavioural sciences on systems of government. Related policies are based on the assumption of human irrationality and use a series of often unconsciously oriented policy tools to pursue varied public policy goals. This paper argues that existing critical analyses of behavioural public policy can be categorized as post-political in their orientation. Post-polit…
Attention as an object of knowledge, intervention and valorisation
Innovations in mobile neuromonitoring and brain–computer interfaces are increasingly used to inform understandings of human brains and behaviours while also catalysing imaginaries of neuroscientifically measured and enhanced economic productivity. In this paper, we focus on neurotechnologies that claim to capture, monitor, measure and train learners’ attention. We analyse a corpus of relevant scientific, governance, and commercial texts to explor…
Making citizens governable? The Crick Report as governmental technology
This paper considers the recent introduction of Citizenship Education in England from a governmental perspective, drawing on the later work of Foucault to offer a detailed account of the political rationalities, technologies and subjectivities implicated in contemporary education policy in the formation and governance of citizen‐subjects. This is understood in terms of making citizens ‘governable’, but importantly not unproblematically ‘governed’…
Personalization and de-schooling
`Personalized learning' has become a popular term within education policy and practice in England, and is part of wider moves towards the `personalization' of public services and the promotion of personal responsibility within social policy discourse — including education, welfare, health and adult social care. In analysing personalization in education policy as a discursive formation, this paper visits some of the tensions, ambiguities and appar…
Making Citizens in the Classroom
This paper considers the construction of young people's experiences in city schools through a new curriculum subject, Citizenship Education, in secondary schools in England. It demonstrates how citizen identities are constructed through discursive practices in the classroom and are shaped by geographies of education. The place-based identities formed within urban schools both reflect and refute the inequalities inherent in the selective education…
Framing the Good Citizen
This article interrogates the norms of good citizenship invoked in and across different social domains, using the example of citizenship education in the UK as one field in which good citizenship is constituted. It is possible to make visible the political struggle inherent in the mechanisms of framing the good citizen by unpacking the differences between citizenship as acts, status and virtues. This is a necessary step in assessing good citizens…
Governing temptation
This paper critically examines new modes of behaviour change promoted by the contemporary British state, providing a critique of libertarian paternalism as an emergent form of government in the UK. We analyse the multivalent principles and mechanisms associated with libertarian paternalism. We consider the contribution of Foucauldian theories of governmentality and psychological power within human geography to a critical analysis of libertarian p…
Learning to be Global Citizens
The ethics of everyday consumption has become a key concern for social and environmental justice campaigning by NGOs in the United Kingdom. Schools are a prominent site for such campaigns, where, alongside other 'controversial issues' and initiatives such as citizenship education, the problematisation of consumption practices has developed its own distinctive set of pedagogical devices. This paper questions the analytical framing of education as …
Citizenship Education and narratives of pedagogy
This paper argues that the concept of the ‘pedagogical state’ (Hunter 1994, Kaplan 2007) can be employed to better understand the cultural practices of governing through pedagogical means, and the evolving pedagogical relationship between state and citizen. The introduction of statutory Citizenship Education lessons in secondary schools in England in 2002 is used as a case study through which to develop the idea of the pedagogical state. It is ar…
Introduction
Analysis of rural transformation development in China since the turn of the new millennium
Mindspace
Interventions in the political geography of 'libertarian paternalism
The Geographies of Soft Paternalism in the UK
Soft paternalism or libertarian paternalism has emerged as a new rationality of governing in the UK under New Labour, denoting a style of governing which is aimed at both increasing choice and ensuring welfare. Popularized in Thaler and Sunstein’s best‐selling title, Nudge, the approach of libertarian paternalism poses new questions for critical human geographers interested in how the philosophies and practices of the Third Way are being adapted …
Governing Irrationality, or a More Than Rational Government? Reflections on the Rescientisation of Decision Making in British Public Policy
It appears that recent debates within human geography, and the broader social sciences, concerning the more-than-rational constitution of human decision making are now being paralleled by changes in the ways in which public policy makers are conceiving of and addressing human behaviour. This paper focuses on the rise of so-called Behaviour Change policies in public policy in the UK. Behaviour Change policies draw on the behavioural insights being…
Neurocapitalism and the new neuros
Neuroeconomics, behavioural economics and picoeconomics have recently come to widespread popular attention, informing both public policy and commercial applications in UK and USA in particular. From neuroeducation and neuromarketing to so-called ‘nudge’-inspired public policies, the resurgence of broadly behavioural accounts of economic theory has far-reaching consequences for how we both understand and intervene in human rationality. While econo…
The New Maternal State
Policies explicitly aimed at changing people's behaviour and recasting state–citizen relations are becoming prevalent in the UK. New political rationalities of “co‐production”, “personalisation” and ‘soft” or “libertarian paternalism” seek to cultivate a relationship between the adaptive state and the active citizen which is increasingly pedagogical. Informing these new pedagogies of governing is research from behavioural economics, psychology an…
Geography, libertarian paternalism and neuro-politics in the UK
This Commentary explores what the implications of the emergence of a putative 'nudgeocracy', and associated forms of neurologically-infused policy development, mean for human geographical research. Drawing on a 3-year research project into the rise of libertarian paternalism within the British polity, and our involvement in the recent House of Lords Behaviour Change Inquiry (House of Lords 2011 Behaviour change report[HL paper 179] Stationary Off…
Changing Behaviours
Changing Behaviours charts the emergence of the behaviour change agenda in UK based public policy making since the late 1990s. By tracing the influence of the behavioural sciences on Whitehall policy makers, the authors explore a new psychological orthodoxy in the practices of governing. Drawing on original empirical material, chapters examine the impact of behaviour change policies in the fields of health, personal finance and the environment. T…
Behaviour Change policies in the UK
Psychological governance and behaviour change
A suite of ‘behaviour change’ policies has become evident in United Kingdom public policies, informed by insights from the psychological and behavioural sciences. In this article we use Foucauldian conceptions of governmentality and psychological techniques of governance – along with interview and documentary research on contemporary public policy – to examine how such policies re-imagine and address the limitations of neoliberalism, as well as t…
The Geographies of Policy Translation
This paper examines the emergence of libertarian paternalism or ‘nudge’ as a rationale of government in the UK and charts the way in which this development has been enabled by, and has enabled, a process of policy translation. We examine: the reasons for the emergence of libertarian paternalism in the UK; the processes that have enabled libertarian paternalism to become a significant way of framing policy in the UK for both the New Labour and the…
The art of choosing and the politics of social marketing
Social marketing is an increasingly popular method by which governments and public bodies deploy marketing principles and techniques in order to achieve ‘social goods’. This paper examines the close relationship between public sector social marketing, a policy mantra focused on ‘behaviour change’ and the political agenda of ‘libertarian paternalism’. Drawing on interview data with policy strategists, think tank professionals, social marketing adv…
Representing Attitudes to Welfare Dependency
This article outlines the recent circulation of media images and discourse relating to characters pre-figured as 'welfare dependents' and reaction to Benefits Street. The article provides a brief overview of sociological analyses of such representations of apparently spiralling 'cultures of dependency' and proposes an alternative relational geography approach to understanding existing welfare dynamics. It describes a shift from putative welfare d…
Reclaiming public action from theories of securitization
This commentary engages with the critique of ‘idealist–cynicism’ offered in Barnett’s article. It outlines the geographical misconceptions of critical research in security studies identified by Barnett and summarizes the alternative approaches offered as a counterpoint. The commentary points towards the need for further elaboration on the precise account of mechanisms of subjectification on offer here and speculates about the problems posed by Ba…
Emotional States
What is the political allure, value and currency of emotions within contemporary cultures of governance? What does it mean to govern more humanely? Since the emergence of an emotional turn in human geography over the last decade, the notion that our emotions matter in understanding an array of social practices, spatial formations and aspects of everyday life is no longer seen as controversial. This book brings recent developments in emotional geo…
Recontextualising the brain
Sociology (43 works) · Political science (41 works) · Politics (29 works) · Law (26 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Economics (20 works) · Law (17 works) · Social science (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Public relations (13 works)