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The purpose of this paper is to critically discuss how the psy-sciences have been, and continue to be, typified by some critics, as colonizers and are credited with Imperialistic motivations. However, rarely are these critiques developed beyond a pejorative characterisation.

This paper reviews the criticisms of psychiatry as colonial and outlines the tensions in taking different frames of reference in the mental health field, before going on to suggest theoretical and research perspectives arising from postcolonial theory that might advance these critical positions more coherently and the implications of doing so.

This study suggests an engagement with humanities-based methods and fields such as postcolonial scholarship.

This argument is timely, especially given recent controversies over the publication of DSM5, the scaling up agenda for mental health in the Global South and increased attention to the agenda of Big Pharma.

Postcolonial intersections with psy-science remains a relatively undeveloped area in the critical literature.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to recent work that interrogates the affective conditions in standardizing processes taking place in schools by asking: what are the relations between affect and biopower, when standardizing processes take place in schools, and how can we better understand the constitution of affective spaces and atmospheres that enable some transformative potentials while preventing others?

The main argument is that professional standards for teachers and school leaders create ambivalent (i.e. both positive and negative) affective spaces and atmospheres in schools that require one to look for the ways in which biopower works affectively through specific technologies. This ambivalence produces not only governable and self-managed teachers and school leaders who simply implement professional standards, but also affective spaces and atmospheres that might subvert the normalizing effects (and affects) of standards.

While attention has been directed to the involvement of affectivity in standardizing processes, what has been theorized less in the field of professional capital is the entanglement of affect and biopower in the spread of professional standards. Engaging with recent work surrounding the affective turn in the social sciences and humanities, the encounter between affect and biopower opens methodological, ethical and political possibilities to examine the affective impact of standards on the professional capital of teachers and school leaders. The analysis displaces emotions from their dominant positionality in discourses about professional standards, reinvigorating theoretical explorations of the affective spaces and atmospheres that co-constitute subjectivities, organizations, governance and social practices in standardizing processes.

The spatiotemporal and organizational arrangements of schools while undergoing standardizing processes constitute crucial constellations for ethical and political reproduction of affective relations. Thus, the destabilizing and inventive potentials of affects, spaces and atmospheres – to name a few conceptual resources – are extremely important in exposing the normalizing as well as resisting aspects of standardizing processes.

Attempts to reanalyze the concept of empowerment as it relates to management. Tracing the origins and nature of management, outlines a case for viewing empowerment as part of a larger system of management control innovations, or cocktails of control. Does not seek to debunk or dismiss empowerment as simply founded on control, and so unworthy of serious analysis. Instead, using the concept of governance, attempts to analyze how managers use the rhetoric of empowerment to secure control. From here analyzes the limits to managerial control, founded on empowerment. Offers observations and conclusions for future research on empowerment.

This chapter posits that we underestimate the way in which our immersion in the ‘social logic’ of capitalist consumption constrains our attempts to understand and respond to the ecological crises at both a personal and political level – and that both dimensions of our response are bound together.

Survey of literature on psychology, well-being and mindfulness.

How has the culture of capitalism – its psychic investment in colonizing our attention – compromised our ability to respond meaningfully to the challenges of sustainable development? In an acknowledgement of a certain closure around such themes within Western thought, I look to a point of exteriority in Peter Hershock’s work, drawing on China’s Chan Buddhist philosophy, for intimations of a worldview that challenges the West’s over-commitment to forms of ‘control’ in favour of a cultivation of mindful and careful awareness – and an offering of unconditional attention.

Draws attention to a new phase of ‘enclosure’ in the cultural processes of capitalism.

Original introduction of a critical approach to mindfulness in the debate on well-being.

This paper aims to offer a commentary on Psychologically Informed Services: A Good Practice Guide, a recently published operational guidance document on developing psychologically informed environments (PIEs) in services for homeless people.

The paper is an invited opinion piece and comment, based on the specialist experience and viewpoint of the author as a rehabilitation psychiatrist, a medical historian of the therapeutic community movement, and a member of the “enabling environments” development group.

The new operational guidance is welcomed, with some provisos. Specifically, the author is concerned that, in the prevailing commissioning culture, and the individual pathology‐based presumptions of the “medical model”, a focus on the “psychological” may be taken to mean a stress on individual psychology and therapeutic techniques derived from individual therapy. This may distract attention from the need to work with the whole social environment, with peer support and with recognition of the importance of informal interactions, as opportunities for growth, if services are to work with the whole person.

Services that wish to develop as PIEs need to take care to work with the whole person, and their social selves, and to develop enabling environments that recognise and work with the importance of all relationships.

Between 2008 and 2011 academic teaching staff from Leeds Beckett University (UK) and Chainama Hills College of Health Sciences (Zambia) worked together on a Development Partnership in Higher Education (DelPHe) project funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) via the British Council. The partnership focused on “up-scaling” the provision of mental health education which was intended to build capacity through the delivery of a range of workshops for health educators at Chainama College, Lusaka. The project was evaluated on completion using small focus group discussions (FGDs), so educators could feedback on their experience of the workshops and discuss the impact of learning into their teaching practice. This chapter discusses the challenges of scaling up the mental health workforce in Zambia; the rationale for the content and delivery style of workshops with the health educators and finally presents and critically discusses the evaluation findings.

The purpose of this paper is to sketch out what one can see as the emerging “therapeutic turn” in a wide range of areas of contemporary social life including education, especially in relation to understandings of vulnerability and social justice, and then poses the question of what emotional regime has accompanied the emergence of this “therapization” movement, making emotional life in schools the “object-target” for specific technologies of power.

The psychologization of social problems has been very much in evidence in the development of educational policies and practices – an approach which not only pathologizes social problems as individual psychological deficiencies or traits, but also obscures the recognition of serious structural inequalities and ideological commitments that perpetuate social injustices through educational policy and practice. In the present paper, the author adopts a different perspective, that of the history, sociology and politics of emotions and affects to show how and why the therapization of social justice is part of the conditions for the birth of particular forms of biopower in schools.

There is an urgent need to expose how psychologized approaches that present social justice as an individualizing responsibility are essentially depoliticizing vulnerability by silencing the shared complicities. It is argued, then, that it is crucial to pay attention to the political and structural dimensions of vulnerability.

Attending to the emotional regime of therapization of social justice has important implications to counter forms of biopower that work through processes of normalization.

The purpose of this paper is to question the taken for granted assumptions that underpin a liberal or lay view of consumer empowerment implicit to this special edition. In particular, the idea that it benefits consumers to have more choice is questioned.

The key constructs of Michel Foucault – disciplinary power, governmentality and technologies of self – are used to argue that people can never escape from the operation of power. Rather it is shown how power operates to produce consumers.

The liberal view of the empowerment of consumers through choice is questioned. Rather we suggest the opposite; that choice is a disciplinary power and that more and more choice can lead to choice paralysis. The contemporary phenomenon known as blogging is described as a Foucauldian technology of self. Managerial implications are discussed.

The value of a Foucauldian inspired theory of empowerment is that it represents a more sophisticated understanding of the fluidity of power relationships between producers and consumers than can be captured by a liberal view of power and empowerment.