Mark Whitehead
Biographic Data
| ID | 3677286 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Whitehead |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Whitehead |
| SIGNATURE | WHITEHEAD M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aberystwyth University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6499-4719 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 587 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Situating and pluralising the digital involuntary
In this paper we revisit the Ricœur-inspired concept of the digital involuntary. First, we consider its implications for how we understand the changing nature of consciousness in a time of deepening A.I. influence on our lifeworld. Second, we explore the importance of moving beyond a concern for individual freedom to consider collectivised responses to the digital involuntary. Third, we consider how questions of digital freedom can be situated so…
What is artificial about artificial intelligence? A provocation on a problematic prefix
New figurations of freedom: Ricoeurian perspectives on the digital society
In the face of innovations triggered by advances in digital technology, biomedicine, and behavioural/neurological research, the analysis of power relations has moved into substantially new territory. Attempts to chart this new territory in terms of ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, ‘sensory power’, ‘post-liberal government’, or ‘neuroliberalism’ have emphasized different dimension of emerging systems of power. These power …
Flattened futures: (Strangely) governing uncertain AI futures in the UK and the Netherlands
Incidental governmentality: Big tech and the hidden rationalities of government
This paper proposes and explores the idea of incidental governmentality. We argue that incidental governmentality offers a creative context to critically scrutinise the changing rationalities of government in the age of Big Tech and digital surveillance. Incidental governmentality exhibits the same pastoral character as biopolitics: as governmental power is realised through the provision of life affirming public goods and services including impro…
Corporate governmentality: Building the empirical and theoretical case
This paper develops a theoretical framework for interpreting novel (if not unprecedented) corporate involvement in the spaces of health, welfare and prosperity from an adapted Foucauldian perspective. By tracing how corporations’ social interventions have moved beyond corporate social responsibility, we build a theoretical case for interpreting emerging social interventions as exercises in governmentality, or, more specifically, corporate governm…
Behavioural Expertise: Drift, Thrift and Shift under Covid-19
Many government responses to the coronavirus-pandemic have been marked by attempts at expertization and scientization. Particularly, politico-epistemological authority is being given to the behavioural science community consulting government. This article critically scrutinizes this most recent wave of behavioural expertization. Taking developments in the UK and the Netherlands as our case-studies, we shed light on the disparate ways in which beh…
Questioning post-political perspectives on the psychological state: Behavioural public policy in the Netherlands
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…
Bounded interdisciplinarity: Critical interdisciplinary perspectives on context and evidence in behavioural public policies
A behavioural public policy movement has flourished within the global policy realm. While this movement has been deemed interdisciplinary, incorporating behavioural science theories and methods in a neoclassical economics-governed policy process, this paper analyses the bounded form of interdisciplinarity that characterizes it. We claim that an engagement is missing with the broader sweep of social sciences, which share similar concerns but deplo…
Neuroliberalism: Cognition, context, and the geographical bounding of rationality
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…
Politics done like science: Critical perspectives on psychological governance and the experimental state
There has been a growing academic recognition of the increasing significance of psychologically - and behaviourally - informed modes of governance in recent years in a variety of different states. We contend that this academic research has neglected one important theme, namely the growing use of experiments as a way of developing and testing novel policies. Drawing on extensive qualitative and documentary research, this paper develops critical pe…
Environmentalism
This entry introduces the recent history and geography of environmentalism, a term which encompasses the range of political arguments and personal actions that are taken to justify and enable the protection and transformation of the environment. Attention is given here to the metaphysical, ethical, and political dimensions of environmentalism and to the key ideas that have informed its emergence and diversity, including ecocentrism, technocentris…
Environment and the State
This entry explores the nature of the relationship between states and the environment. In doing so it analyzes the history of state–environmental relations in different geographical contexts and introduces key theoretical frameworks that can help us understand these relations in new ways. Particular emphasis is given to the role of the state in managing environmental externalities and the ways in which environmental issues challenge the form and …
(Re)Inhabiting awareness: Geography and Mindfulness
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…
What could ‘mindful capabilities’ be? A comment on Mabsout's ‘mindful capability’ (2015)
The Geographies of Policy Translation: How Nudge Became the Default Policy Option
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…
Environmental Transformations: A Geography of the Anthropocene
"From the depths of the oceans to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, the human impact on the environment is significant and undeniable. These forms of global and local environmental change collectively signal the arrival of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This is a geological era defined not by natural environmental fluctuations or meteorite impacts, but by collective actions of humanity. Environmental Transformations offers a conci…
Environmental Transformations: A Geography of the Anthropocene
From the depths of the oceans to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, the human impact on the environment is significant and undeniable. These forms of global and local environmental change collectively appear to signal the arrival of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This is a geological era defined not by natural environmental fluctuations or meteorite impacts, but by collective actions of humanity. Environmental Transformations offer…
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…
Proximity, acceptance and hopeful ontologies
This commentary considers how we might define a classic paper and suggests that ‘ N ot at our seaside’ helpfully challenges the grounds on which we confer status onto papers in the modern academy. Particular attention is given in this commentary to the role of ‘ N ot at our seaside’ in pre‐empting geographical work on the spatial and cultural ‘othering’ of nature. The commentary concludes by reflecting on the positive ontologies of Philo's paper …
Changing Behaviours: On the Rise of the Psychological State
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…
Neoliberal Urban Environmentalism and the Adaptive City: Towards a Critical Urban Theory and Climate Change
This paper explores the potential contribution of critical urban theory to the intellectual and political debates surrounding climate change. While it is possible to identify an emerging strand of critical enquiry concerning the role of cities in facilitating climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, this paper argues that the full implications of critical urban theory to climate change studies have yet to be realised. In this paper, c…
Cities, Urbanisation and Climate Change
Behaviour Change policies in the UK: An anthropological perspective
From Above: War, Violence and Verticality
The arrival of the aerostatic balloon at the end of the nineteenth century ushered in a new perspective on the battlefield, taking over from the mount - the hill at the edge of the field of combat - and the fortified tower positioned within it. Since then there has been no perspective more culpable in war, violence, and security than the aerial one. This book explores the aerial view in new depth and clarity. It draws in vivid detail on studies o…
Governing temptation: Changing behaviour in an age of libertarian paternalism
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…
Transition Urbanism and the Contested Politics of Ethical Place Making
This paper explores the contested construction of more relational urban imaginaries within a movement that is simultaneously committed to enhanced systems of care for distant places/others, and intensified regimes of (re)localisation. Transition Culture initiatives explore ‘how to prepare for a carbon constrained, energy lean world’ and stem from a concern for a post peak‐oil global future. While the radical political openness of Transition Cultu…
Introduction: Air-target
Why does the air-target and its associated practices matter? This special section is about the politics, practices and ethics surrounding the target and efforts to subvert or circumvent them. Since Eyal Weizman's groundbreaking essay on the 'politics of verticality' in 2002, there have been numerous attempts to critically open up the aerial gaze, but rarely have they come together for sustained analysis and critique, to explore the implications o…
In the shadow of hierarchy’: Meta‐governance, policy reform and urban regeneration in the West Midlands
This paper explores the relationship between political hierarchy and the complex webs of political organization associated with urban governance. Deploying the concept of meta‐governance and a study of urban policy reform in the West Midlands region of England, this paper claims that state and governmental hierarchies continue to have a crucial role in coordinating the activities of governance regimes in the UK. This paper concludes by considerin…
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…
Between the Marvellous and the Mundane: Everyday Life in the Socialist City and the Politics of the Environment
In a recent essay on modernisation and ecology, Latour claimed that the environmental movement had lost important ground within political debate. He argued that this reversal in political fortunes had in part emerged out of an internal tension within the environmental movement itself-a tension between overinflation and banalisation. In this paper I analyse the nature of the purported processes of overinflation and banalisation within contemporary…
Neoliberal Urban Environmentalism and the Adaptive City: Towards a Critical Urban Theory and Climate Change
This paper explores the potential contribution of critical urban theory to the intellectual and political debates surrounding climate change. While it is possible to identify an emerging strand of critical enquiry concerning the role of cities in facilitating climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, this paper argues that the full implications of critical urban theory to climate change studies have yet to be realised. In this paper, c…
Technological trajectories: Old and New Dialogues in Geography and Technology Studies
Dixon, D. P., Whitehead, M. (2008). Technological trajectories: old and new dialogues in geography and technology studies. Social and Cultural Geography, 9 (6), 601-611
(Re)Analysing the Sustainable City: Nature, Urbanisation and the Regulation of Socio-environmental Relations in the UK
The sustainable city has now become a leading paradigm of urban development throughout the world. Although the practices, discourses and ideologies associated with the sustainable city have been widely disseminated, analyses of sustainable urban development remain surprisingly anodyne. Drawing upon the insights of regulation theory, this paper attempts to develop a critical engagement with the sustainable city as a space of socio-ecological regul…
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…
Negotiating the Networks of Space, Time and Substance: A Geographical Perspective on the Sustainable Citizen
This paper provides a critical geographical analysis of the emerging ideals associated with sustainable citizenship. We argue that the principles behind sustainable citizenship force us to think through the full range of geographical factors which frame citizenship and yet which are routinely overlooked in both geographical and non-geographical work on the citizen. We take the sustainable citizen to be both an epistemological challenge to existin…
Neuroliberalism: Cognition, context, and the geographical bounding of rationality
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…
(Re)Inhabiting awareness: Geography and Mindfulness
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…
Politics done like science: Critical perspectives on psychological governance and the experimental state
There has been a growing academic recognition of the increasing significance of psychologically - and behaviourally - informed modes of governance in recent years in a variety of different states. We contend that this academic research has neglected one important theme, namely the growing use of experiments as a way of developing and testing novel policies. Drawing on extensive qualitative and documentary research, this paper develops critical pe…
Cities, Urbanisation and Climate Change
The architecture of partnerships: Urban Communities in the Shadow of Hierarchy
Partnerships have offered Britain's New Labour government a pre-existing structure for urban policy delivery that appears ideally suited to the discourses of the Third Way it supports. This article considers why the New Labour government has adopted partnerships so enthusiastically and what it is about partnerships that now means they are such a fundamental part of urban policy initiatives. Through an analysis of the architecture of eight urban p…
Love Thy Neighbourhood-Rethinking the Politics of Scale and Walsall's Struggle for Neighbourhood Democracy
Despite its apparent irrelevance as a scale or space of sociocultural organisation, the neighbourhood is back on the political agenda. At an international level, the neighbourhood-or, more specifically, the 'global neighbourhood'-is being promoted as a moral space through which to manage the complex economic, political, and ecological problems of the planet. Mirroring this process at a national level, in the United Kingdom the neighbourhood has b…
From Above: War, Violence and Verticality
The arrival of the aerostatic balloon at the end of the nineteenth century ushered in a new perspective on the battlefield, taking over from the mount - the hill at the edge of the field of combat - and the fortified tower positioned within it. Since then there has been no perspective more culpable in war, violence, and security than the aerial one. This book explores the aerial view in new depth and clarity. It draws in vivid detail on studies o…
The Geographies of Soft Paternalism in the UK: The Rise of the Avuncular State and Changing Behaviour after Neoliberalism
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…
The Wood for the Trees: Ordinary Environmental Injustice and the Everyday Right to Urban Nature
This article explores the potential for a more ordinary sense of urban environmental justice. While great progress has been made over the last 30 years in connecting environmental politics to the everyday concerns of urban residents, this article claims that the urbanization of environmentalism has produced a very narrow sense of what everyday forms of justice may be. Drawing on a Lefebvrian-inspired interpretation of everyday life, this article …
Spatializing the ecological leviathan: Territorial Strategies and the Production of Regional Natures
This paper explores a dual absence — the absence of the state within contemporary geographical analyses of nature; and the absence of nature within contemporary explorations of state power. We argue that the modern state continues to play a crucial role in framing social interactions with nature, while nature is still vital to states within their realization of different forms of material and ideological power. In order to reconnect analyses of t…
Behaviour Change policies in the UK: An anthropological perspective
Cold Monsters and Ecological Leviathans: Reflections on the Relationships between States and the Environment
The relationship between state administrations and environmental issues has been an enduring concern of geographers, environmentalists, philosophers, sociologists and political scientists for a considerable length of time. This article provides a critical review of approaches to the study of state-environment relations across of a range of different disciplines. While states have been criticised as either ineffectual, unjust, or even irrelevant m…
Interventions in the political geography of 'libertarian paternalism
From Moral Space to the Morality of Scale: The Case of the Sustainable Region
Contemporary work on the links between geography and morality tends to focus on the spatial aspects of moral conduct. This paper argues that in addition to geographical space, geographical scale also plays a crucial role in the construction and maintenance of moral frameworks. Focusing on the emergence of the sustainable region in the UK, this paper argues that purportedly sustainable spaces, like the region, contain distinctive moral codes of so…
(Re)Analysing the Sustainable City: Nature, Urbanisation and the Regulation of Socio-environmental Relations in the UK
The sustainable city has now become a leading paradigm of urban development throughout the world. Although the practices, discourses and ideologies associated with the sustainable city have been widely disseminated, analyses of sustainable urban development remain surprisingly anodyne. Drawing upon the insights of regulation theory, this paper attempts to develop a critical engagement with the sustainable city as a space of socio-ecological regul…
In the shadow of hierarchy’: Meta‐governance, policy reform and urban regeneration in the West Midlands
This paper explores the relationship between political hierarchy and the complex webs of political organization associated with urban governance. Deploying the concept of meta‐governance and a study of urban policy reform in the West Midlands region of England, this paper claims that state and governmental hierarchies continue to have a crucial role in coordinating the activities of governance regimes in the UK. This paper concludes by considerin…
Love Thy Neighbourhood-Rethinking the Politics of Scale and Walsall's Struggle for Neighbourhood Democracy
Despite its apparent irrelevance as a scale or space of sociocultural organisation, the neighbourhood is back on the political agenda. At an international level, the neighbourhood-or, more specifically, the 'global neighbourhood'-is being promoted as a moral space through which to manage the complex economic, political, and ecological problems of the planet. Mirroring this process at a national level, in the United Kingdom the neighbourhood has b…
Negotiating the Networks of Space, Time and Substance: A Geographical Perspective on the Sustainable Citizen
This paper provides a critical geographical analysis of the emerging ideals associated with sustainable citizenship. We argue that the principles behind sustainable citizenship force us to think through the full range of geographical factors which frame citizenship and yet which are routinely overlooked in both geographical and non-geographical work on the citizen. We take the sustainable citizen to be both an epistemological challenge to existin…
Between the Marvellous and the Mundane: Everyday Life in the Socialist City and the Politics of the Environment
In a recent essay on modernisation and ecology, Latour claimed that the environmental movement had lost important ground within political debate. He argued that this reversal in political fortunes had in part emerged out of an internal tension within the environmental movement itself-a tension between overinflation and banalisation. In this paper I analyse the nature of the purported processes of overinflation and banalisation within contemporary…
A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo‐Coded World ‐ by John Pickles
Spatializing the ecological leviathan: Territorial Strategies and the Production of Regional Natures
This paper explores a dual absence — the absence of the state within contemporary geographical analyses of nature; and the absence of nature within contemporary explorations of state power. We argue that the modern state continues to play a crucial role in framing social interactions with nature, while nature is still vital to states within their realization of different forms of material and ideological power. In order to reconnect analyses of t…
The Nature of the State: Excavating the Political Ecologies of the Modern State
The twin categories of the state and nature collectively embody some of the most fundamental reference points around which our lives and thinking are organized. Despite their combined significance, however, the complex relationships that exist between modern states and nature remain under-theorized and are relatively unexplored. Through a detailed study of different sites, moments, and framing strategies The Nature of the State challenges the way…
Spaces of Sustainability: Geographical Perspectives on the Sustainable Society
Spaces of Sustainability is an engaging and accessible introduction to the key philosophical ideas which lie behind the principles of sustainable development. This topical resource discusses key contemporary issues including global warming, third world poverty, transnational citizenship and globalization. Combining the latest research and theoretical frameworks Spaces of Sustainability offers a unique insight into contemporary attempts to create …
The architecture of partnerships: Urban Communities in the Shadow of Hierarchy
Partnerships have offered Britain's New Labour government a pre-existing structure for urban policy delivery that appears ideally suited to the discourses of the Third Way it supports. This article considers why the New Labour government has adopted partnerships so enthusiastically and what it is about partnerships that now means they are such a fundamental part of urban policy initiatives. Through an analysis of the architecture of eight urban p…
Cold Monsters and Ecological Leviathans: Reflections on the Relationships between States and the Environment
The relationship between state administrations and environmental issues has been an enduring concern of geographers, environmentalists, philosophers, sociologists and political scientists for a considerable length of time. This article provides a critical review of approaches to the study of state-environment relations across of a range of different disciplines. While states have been criticised as either ineffectual, unjust, or even irrelevant m…
Domesticating technological myth: Gender, exhibition spaces and the clean air movement in the UK
This paper explores the relation between technologies and the reconfiguration of gender relations in the British home. Drawing on Haraway's concept of technological myth, and Barthes' reflections on the modern myth-making process, analysis considers how the promotion and animation of new smokeless technologies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain was under-girded by a reconstituted vision of the British home and the woman's pla…
Technological trajectories: Old and New Dialogues in Geography and Technology Studies
Dixon, D. P., Whitehead, M. (2008). Technological trajectories: old and new dialogues in geography and technology studies. Social and Cultural Geography, 9 (6), 601-611
The Wood for the Trees: Ordinary Environmental Injustice and the Everyday Right to Urban Nature
This article explores the potential for a more ordinary sense of urban environmental justice. While great progress has been made over the last 30 years in connecting environmental politics to the everyday concerns of urban residents, this article claims that the urbanization of environmentalism has produced a very narrow sense of what everyday forms of justice may be. Drawing on a Lefebvrian-inspired interpretation of everyday life, this article …
Governing temptation: Changing behaviour in an age of libertarian paternalism
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…
Hollow Sustainabilities? Perspectives on Sustainable Development in the Post-socialist World
The primary purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of recent work that analyzes the nexus of post-socialist transition and sustainability. Beyond this broad aim, the paper also proposes two analytical insights. First it argues against binary thinking within work on transition and sustainability. This binary is marked on the one side by those who celebrate the new opportunities that transition offers to hard-wire sustainability into…
Transition Urbanism and the Contested Politics of Ethical Place Making
This paper explores the contested construction of more relational urban imaginaries within a movement that is simultaneously committed to enhanced systems of care for distant places/others, and intensified regimes of (re)localisation. Transition Culture initiatives explore ‘how to prepare for a carbon constrained, energy lean world’ and stem from a concern for a post peak‐oil global future. While the radical political openness of Transition Cultu…
Interventions in the political geography of 'libertarian paternalism
The Geographies of Soft Paternalism in the UK: The Rise of the Avuncular State and Changing Behaviour after Neoliberalism
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…
Introduction: Air-target
Why does the air-target and its associated practices matter? This special section is about the politics, practices and ethics surrounding the target and efforts to subvert or circumvent them. Since Eyal Weizman's groundbreaking essay on the 'politics of verticality' in 2002, there have been numerous attempts to critically open up the aerial gaze, but rarely have they come together for sustained analysis and critique, to explore the implications o…
State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British atmosphere’, by Mark Whitehead (2009): a critical review
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: On the Rise of the Psychological State
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…
Sociology (39 works) · Political science (38 works) · Politics (31 works) · Law (30 works) · Economics (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (17 works) · Environmental ethics (14 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Geography (14 works)