No abstract

Self-help promises the chance of being ''better''. Across multifarious platforms, including books, apps and television shows, it offers hope that we can be our own agents of change for a happier life. Critical research troubles this premise, arguing that the recurring trope of the individualistic ideal-self found in self-help literature is at the expense of seeking solutions in collective, feminist, or otherwise politicised activism. Self-help is also problematically gendered, since women are often positioned as particularly in need of improvement, an understanding further intensified by postfeminist sensibility. These issues are examined conceptually before introducing 10 articles on self-help published in Feminism & Psychology across three decades and brought together as a Virtual Special Issue to offer a significant body of work for scholars and students alike.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Time is a powerful but under‐examined element in healthy lifestyle advice, particularly in the promise of stable states of future health achievable through sustained lifestyle change. But such linear, sequential time frames reinforce notions of rational choice, personal control, and responsibility despite common experiences of diet and exercise regimens as non‐linear, effortful, and difficult to maintain. An over‐simplification of time thus contributes to the logic of blame when people fail to achieve healthy lifestyle goals, producing spoiled health identities and abject bodies as people struggle to sustain what can be unsustainable. Addressing these problems, we argue that Deleuze's philosophy offers tools to develop an alternative approach in health promotion. Deleuze affords a conceptualisation of multidimensional, embodied, and affective temporalities of health, which give rise to plural subjectivities and disrupt linear models of time. This framework affords a recognition of multiple time frames, such as histories and imagined futures that form part of a living present and shape lifestyle behaviours and identities. Deleuzian concepts that tie into his philosophy of time and form his process ontology, including monism and rhizomes, affect, becoming, and assemblages, are discussed in relation to health promotion. The article concludes that Deleuze offers a critical theory of time that enables a mapping of the ways that people embody multiplicity, non‐linearity, and fluidity as they negotiate healthy lifestyle advice. His concepts illuminate ways in which people can be oppressed and limited by discourses of healthy living, but also point to new, more affirmative directions for health promotion and healthy lifestyle advice.

In response to persistent systemic gendered and racial exclusions in the sciences, unconscious or implicit bias training is now widely established as an organizational intervention in Higher Education (HE). Recent systematic reviews have considered the efficacy of unconscious bias training (UBT) but not the wider characteristics and effects of the interventions themselves. Guided by feminist scholarship in critical psychology and post‐structuralist discourse theory, this article critically examines UBT across STEMM and in HE institutions with a discursive analysis of published studies. Drawn from systematic searches in 4 databases, we identify three types of UBT reported in 22 studies with considerable variation in intervention types, target groups, and evaluation methods. Guided by limited cognitive problematizations of unconscious bias as a problem located inside individual minds, interventions follow established patterns in neoliberal governmentality and make available specific feeling rules and subject positions. These current Equality, Diversity & Inclusion practices present a new technology of power through which organizations may regulate affect and behavior but leave structural inequalities and barriers to inclusion intact.

No abstract