The mental health and well-being of university staff and students in the UK are reported to have seriously deteriorated. Rather than taking this ‘mental health crisis’ at face value, we carry out network and discourse analyses to investigate the policy assemblages (comprising social actors, institutions, technologies, knowledges and discourses) through which the ‘crisis' is addressed. Our analysis shows how knowledges from positive psychology and behavioural economics, disciplinary techniques driven by metrics and data analytics, and growing markets in digital therapeutic technologies work as an ensemble. Together, they instrumentalise mental health, creating motivational ecologies that allow economic agendas to seep through to subjects who are encouraged to monitor and rehabilitate themselves. Mental health’ as a problem for UK universities has come to be largely defined through the outcomes of ‘resilience’ and ‘employability’ and is addressed through markets that enable training, monitoring, measuring and ‘nudging’ students and staff towards these outcomes.
Confronting mass lay‐offs, wage cuts, increasingly precarious conditions, unpaid work, employer violence, and mass unemployment, workers in Greece have organized strikes, workplace occupations, action outside workplaces, and attempts at self‐management. These practices, and their strengths and limitations in the context of the crisis, are analyzed using secondary data, ethnographic, and documentary material. Contrasting the tactics located externally to the workplace, such as protests and blockades, to practices of self‐management, I argue that the former may better represent the contemporary face of labor activism in Greece. This is because these tactics, despite their limitations, reflect most directly the growing expulsion of workers from a secure wage relation. Attention to the specific obstacles encountered by irregular immigrant workers and women in female‐dominated occupations also highlights the important dimension of visibility in tactics external to the workplace. Further, the locus of these tactics in the sphere of circulation allows their connection with broader social claims and communities of struggle.
Confronting mass lay-offs, wage cuts, increasingly precarious conditions, unpaid work, employer violence, and mass unemployment, workers in Greece have organized strikes, workplace occupations, action outside workplaces, and attempts at self-management. These practices, and their strengths and limitations in the context of the crisis, are analyzed using secondary data, ethnographic, and documentary material. Contrasting the tactics located externally to the workplace, such as protests and blockades, to practices of self-management, I argue that the former may better represent the contemporary face of labor activism in Greece. This is because these tactics, despite their limitations, reflect most directly the growing expulsion of workers from a secure wage relation. Attention to the specific obstacles encountered by irregular immigrant workers and women in female-dominated occupations also highlights the important dimension of visibility in tactics external to the workplace. Further, the locus of these tactics in the sphere of circulation allows their connection with broader social claims and communities of struggle.
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