Tomas Matza
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 119896 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Tomas Matza |
| NOMBRES | Tomas |
| APELLIDO | Matza |
| FIRMA | MATZA T |
| AFILIACIONES | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0774-7070 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 11 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 159 |
| OBRAS COMO AUTOR | 11 |
| OBRAS COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2009 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Interscalar health
This article explores the utility of the ‘planetary health’ framework for identifying and solving problems of social-environmental health and wellbeing. While we value the planetary health agenda, we question the framework’s efficacy in producing health. We outline three problems that it shares with other kinds of ‘globalocentric thinking’: an over-emphasis on quantitative styles of reasoning, the compression of needs and erasure of the (politica…
Beyond “Good Politics, Unspecified”
“Politics” has long been a source of attachment in anthropological analysis—as an ethnographic object and as a signal of virtue. Yet politics often remains black boxed. Why? Explanations that appeal to person-centered meanings in ethnography are only partial. This article points to an unspecified core at the center of the anthropology of politics: the presuppositions and commitments of the author. Terming this “politics, unspecified,” I propose a…
Emotional warfare? Track two diplomacy and the emotionalisation of the Cold War
This article discusses a series of US citizen exchanges to the USSR that were termed track two, or citizen, diplomacy. The track two model was meant to address the freeze in high-level diplomatic engagements at a time of heightening tensions between rivals. Intriguingly, track two diplomacy was explicitly emotionalised – that is, linked to a psychologically informed approach to conflict resolution and contact. I focus on two sets of diplomatic de…
Collaboration and critique
What is the place for critical ethnography in global health and other related forms of international intervention? This essay explores this question through my experience collaborating with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) working to improve children's well-being in El Salvador and with a team of quantitatively oriented researchers evaluating the NGO's project. I adopt as an analytic lens one of the metrics the researchers used - the Battelle…
Global Ambitions
Experimental design and metrics have become increasingly common in international assistance, as donor agencies have demanded rigorous forms of evaluation and monitoring. This article contributes to debates about the effects of an "evidence-based turn" on interventions and recipients by exploring two questions: What constitutes evidence when it comes to everyday practices of aid at global scales? How are the goals of assistance affected? The artic…
Shock Therapy
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia witnessed a dramatic increase in psychotherapeutic options, which promoted social connection while advancing new forms of capitalist subjectivity amid often-wrenching social and economic transformations. In Shock Therapy Tomas Matza provides an ethnography of post-Soviet Saint Petersburg, following psychotherapists, psychologists, and their clients as they navigate the challenges of post-Soviet life.…
The Will to What
The return of the psychological in the post-Soviet period has not only rewired the will and its relationship to psychological models of the feeling subject but also helped affix subjectivity to expectations of successful or unsuccessful self-transformation in competitive conditions. For-profit therapies conjure a self-disciplining will as leverage on willfulness that is aimed at future market success. By contrast, public assistance deems the inte…
Putting Foucault to Work
Is there a single area of intellectual inquiry in the humanities and social sciences where the work of Michel Foucault is not taken seriously? Discipline, biopolitics, governmentality, power/knowledge, subjectivation, genealogy, archaeology, problematization-these are just a few of the many Foucaultisms that have been adopted in fields such as philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, political science, history, literary studies, area studies…
"Good individualism"? Psychology, ethics, and neoliberalism in postsocialist Russia
Psychologists working in Russia's cities have found it both desirable and profitable to offer "psychological education" to the children of the elite. I examine two characterizations of this work-as a form of neoliberal subjectivation and as a post-Soviet project focused on progressive sociopolitical reform. Exploring the tensions between them illuminates the historical specificity of self-work in Russia, its relation to commerce and biopolitics, …
The Old Faith and the Russian Land
Moscow's Echo
This essay examines the practices and politics of self-help in Russia. It interrogates the status of "neoliberalism" in Russia as it relates to the remaking of subjectivity 17 years after the collapse of communism by analyzing a radio talk show called For Adults about Adults hosted by a psychotherapist. An analysis of host-caller exchanges reveals a deployment of robust neoliberal technologies. The talk show not only incites autonomous, responsib…
Moscow's Echo
This essay examines the practices and politics of self-help in Russia. It interrogates the status of "neoliberalism" in Russia as it relates to the remaking of subjectivity 17 years after the collapse of communism by analyzing a radio talk show called For Adults about Adults hosted by a psychotherapist. An analysis of host-caller exchanges reveals a deployment of robust neoliberal technologies. The talk show not only incites autonomous, responsib…
"Good individualism"? Psychology, ethics, and neoliberalism in postsocialist Russia
Psychologists working in Russia's cities have found it both desirable and profitable to offer "psychological education" to the children of the elite. I examine two characterizations of this work-as a form of neoliberal subjectivation and as a post-Soviet project focused on progressive sociopolitical reform. Exploring the tensions between them illuminates the historical specificity of self-work in Russia, its relation to commerce and biopolitics, …
Putting Foucault to Work
Is there a single area of intellectual inquiry in the humanities and social sciences where the work of Michel Foucault is not taken seriously? Discipline, biopolitics, governmentality, power/knowledge, subjectivation, genealogy, archaeology, problematization-these are just a few of the many Foucaultisms that have been adopted in fields such as philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, political science, history, literary studies, area studies…
The Will to What
The return of the psychological in the post-Soviet period has not only rewired the will and its relationship to psychological models of the feeling subject but also helped affix subjectivity to expectations of successful or unsuccessful self-transformation in competitive conditions. For-profit therapies conjure a self-disciplining will as leverage on willfulness that is aimed at future market success. By contrast, public assistance deems the inte…
Emotional warfare? Track two diplomacy and the emotionalisation of the Cold War
This article discusses a series of US citizen exchanges to the USSR that were termed track two, or citizen, diplomacy. The track two model was meant to address the freeze in high-level diplomatic engagements at a time of heightening tensions between rivals. Intriguingly, track two diplomacy was explicitly emotionalised – that is, linked to a psychologically informed approach to conflict resolution and contact. I focus on two sets of diplomatic de…
Collaboration and critique
What is the place for critical ethnography in global health and other related forms of international intervention? This essay explores this question through my experience collaborating with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) working to improve children's well-being in El Salvador and with a team of quantitatively oriented researchers evaluating the NGO's project. I adopt as an analytic lens one of the metrics the researchers used - the Battelle…
Moscow's Echo
This essay examines the practices and politics of self-help in Russia. It interrogates the status of "neoliberalism" in Russia as it relates to the remaking of subjectivity 17 years after the collapse of communism by analyzing a radio talk show called For Adults about Adults hosted by a psychotherapist. An analysis of host-caller exchanges reveals a deployment of robust neoliberal technologies. The talk show not only incites autonomous, responsib…
The Old Faith and the Russian Land
"Good individualism"? Psychology, ethics, and neoliberalism in postsocialist Russia
Psychologists working in Russia's cities have found it both desirable and profitable to offer "psychological education" to the children of the elite. I examine two characterizations of this work-as a form of neoliberal subjectivation and as a post-Soviet project focused on progressive sociopolitical reform. Exploring the tensions between them illuminates the historical specificity of self-work in Russia, its relation to commerce and biopolitics, …
Putting Foucault to Work
Is there a single area of intellectual inquiry in the humanities and social sciences where the work of Michel Foucault is not taken seriously? Discipline, biopolitics, governmentality, power/knowledge, subjectivation, genealogy, archaeology, problematization-these are just a few of the many Foucaultisms that have been adopted in fields such as philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, political science, history, literary studies, area studies…
The Will to What
The return of the psychological in the post-Soviet period has not only rewired the will and its relationship to psychological models of the feeling subject but also helped affix subjectivity to expectations of successful or unsuccessful self-transformation in competitive conditions. For-profit therapies conjure a self-disciplining will as leverage on willfulness that is aimed at future market success. By contrast, public assistance deems the inte…
Shock Therapy
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia witnessed a dramatic increase in psychotherapeutic options, which promoted social connection while advancing new forms of capitalist subjectivity amid often-wrenching social and economic transformations. In Shock Therapy Tomas Matza provides an ethnography of post-Soviet Saint Petersburg, following psychotherapists, psychologists, and their clients as they navigate the challenges of post-Soviet life.…
Collaboration and critique
What is the place for critical ethnography in global health and other related forms of international intervention? This essay explores this question through my experience collaborating with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) working to improve children's well-being in El Salvador and with a team of quantitatively oriented researchers evaluating the NGO's project. I adopt as an analytic lens one of the metrics the researchers used - the Battelle…
Global Ambitions
Experimental design and metrics have become increasingly common in international assistance, as donor agencies have demanded rigorous forms of evaluation and monitoring. This article contributes to debates about the effects of an "evidence-based turn" on interventions and recipients by exploring two questions: What constitutes evidence when it comes to everyday practices of aid at global scales? How are the goals of assistance affected? The artic…
Emotional warfare? Track two diplomacy and the emotionalisation of the Cold War
This article discusses a series of US citizen exchanges to the USSR that were termed track two, or citizen, diplomacy. The track two model was meant to address the freeze in high-level diplomatic engagements at a time of heightening tensions between rivals. Intriguingly, track two diplomacy was explicitly emotionalised – that is, linked to a psychologically informed approach to conflict resolution and contact. I focus on two sets of diplomatic de…
Interscalar health
This article explores the utility of the ‘planetary health’ framework for identifying and solving problems of social-environmental health and wellbeing. While we value the planetary health agenda, we question the framework’s efficacy in producing health. We outline three problems that it shares with other kinds of ‘globalocentric thinking’: an over-emphasis on quantitative styles of reasoning, the compression of needs and erasure of the (politica…
Beyond “Good Politics, Unspecified”
“Politics” has long been a source of attachment in anthropological analysis—as an ethnographic object and as a signal of virtue. Yet politics often remains black boxed. Why? Explanations that appeal to person-centered meanings in ethnography are only partial. This article points to an unspecified core at the center of the anthropology of politics: the presuppositions and commitments of the author. Terming this “politics, unspecified,” I propose a…
Sociology (9 obras) · Political science (8 obras) · Politics (7 obras) · Law (5 obras) · Ethnography (4 obras) · Law (4 obras) · History (3 obras) · Media studies (3 obras) · Psychology (3 obras) · Anthropology (2 obras)