Human technologies, affect and the global psy-complex

Abstract

Minds, behaviours and psyches are increasingly and explicitly problematized within social, economic, health, welfare, education and development policy, in both the global North and global South. While this shift is new, it also builds on a long colonial history of the constitution and governance of the ‘psy’. This special section considers these developments through critically engaging with them as human technologies whereby certain cognitions, affects and behaviours come to be made knowable, calculable and amenable to technological interventions and quantification. Starting with the concept of human technologies, this special section also seeks to extend it, troubling the prevailing account of technology’s role as governmentalization by placing this particular power/knowledge nexus in relation to other historical and current forms of power such as gender, race and coloniality. In this introduction to the special section, ‘Human technologies, affect and the global psy-complex’, we outline the conceptual and empirical contributions the collection of papers seeks to make.

Keywords:

• human technologies
• affective technologies
• psy-complex
• governmentality
• gender
• coloniality

Acknowledgements

This special section was significantly shaped by discussions at a writing workshop and event held at City, University of London in March 2019. As well as the authors included in this special section, we'd especially like to thank the following participants for their insightful and thoughtful feedback: Amrita Banerjee, Andrew Hoang, Priya Sharma, and Fernando A. Valenzuela; and many thanks to Nikolas Rose for speaking at the event. We also thank the British Academy for supporting the special section development as well as the anonymous paper reviewers and the Editorial Board at Economy and Society for your kind assistance in seeing this project published.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the British Academy’s Tackling the UK’s International Challenges Fund [IC2\100163, 2018–19].

Notes on contributors

Elise Klein

Elise Klein is a Senior Lecturer of Public Policy at the Crawford School, Australian National University. Her research focuses on development policy with a specific interest in work, redistribution, decoloniality and care.

China Mills

China Mills is a Senior Lecturer of Public Health, in the School of Health Sciences, at City, University of London. She researches the policies and practices of global mental health, with a focus on suicides linked to welfare reform, border imperialism and corporate practices.

Asha Achuthan

Asha Achuthan is Assistant Professor at the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. Asha has been doing research and teaching in the field of Women’s/Gender Studies for the past decade. Her present work explores the contexts of gender and biomedicine, feminist histories of medicine in the colony and feminist queer politics. She has published in the areas of gender diversity in science institutions, interdisciplinarity in higher education, and sexuality and the nation.

Eva Hilberg

Eva Hilberg is Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. Eva’s work traces the politics of knowledge circulating in the global bioeconomy and analyses the inscription of new priorities into the global health agenda, for instance by means of digital technology. She completed her PhD in International Relations at the University of Sussex, focusing on the normalization of biomedical knowledge by means of intellectual property rights, and the exclusion of patients from this field of politics.