Critical Educational Psychology E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 505

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The first textbook of its kind, Critical Educational Psychology is a forward-thinking approach to educational psychology that uses critical perspectives to challenge current ways of thinking and improve practice.

Leseprobe

BPS Textbooks in Psychology

BPS Blackwell presents a comprehensive and authoritative series covering everything a student needs to complete an undergraduate degree in psychology. Refreshingly written to consider more than North American research, this series is the first to give a truly international perspective. Written by the very best names in the field, the series offers an extensive range of titles from introductory level through to final year optional modules, and every text fully complies with the BPS syllabus in that topic. No other series bears the BPS seal of approval!

Each book is supported by a companion website, featuring additional resource materials for both instructors and students, designed to encourage critical thinking and providing for all your course lecturing and testing needs.

For other titles in the series, please go to http://psychsource.bps.org.uk

Critical Educational Psychology

EDITED BY

ANTONY WILLIAMS

University of Sheffield, UK

TOM BILLINGTON

University of Sheffield, UK

DAN GOODLEY

University of Sheffield, UK

TIM CORCORAN

Deakin University, Australia

This edition first published 2017 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Antony Williams, Tom Billington, Dan Goodley and Tim Corcoran to be identified as the authors of this work and of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

Paperback ISBN: 9781118975947

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: al_1033 / Gettyimages

CONTENTS

Contributors

Introduction

Educational Psychology: Towards a human science

Psychology in education: Building blocks for reconstruction

Structure of the book

Getting On With It

Notes

References

Part I: Reflexive Foundationalism: Critical Psychological Resources

1: Psychology and Education: Unquestionable Goods

Preface

Notes

References

2: Ontological Constructionism

Questioning Ontology

Justifying a Rationale

Conclusion

References

3: What Use Is a Story? Narrative, in Practice

Stories of Experience

Identity: Knowing who we are

Working with stories: Doing narrative practice

Mapping the influence

Re-membering and re-authoring

Conclusion

References

4: Post-Conventionalism: Towards a Productive Critical Educational Psychology

Post-conventionalist starting points

Post-conventionalism and children’s embodiment

Post-conventionalism, pedagogy and the school

Conclusions

References

5: Psychoanalysis

Introduction

Psychoanalytic assumptions about self and others

Defence against anxiety

Projection

Transference

Countertransference

Containment

Notes

References

Part II: Ethics and Values in Practice

6: Critical Educational Psychology and Disability Studies: Theoretical, Practical and Empirical Allies

Introduction

What is critical educational psychology?

What is critical disability studies?

Connecting Themes

Conclusions and future connections

Acknowledgement

References

7: Thinking Critically About Professional Ethics

Professional codes of ethics and conduct

So what’s the problem?

Ethics and Power

Ethical dilemmas

Summary

Note

References

8: The Ethical Demand in an Impossible Profession

An ethical vocabulary for the ‘everyday’

Troubling Educational Psychology: ‘M’

Resistance is never futile

Conclusions

Note

References

9: EP Becoming Phronimos: The Virtue of Phronêsis in Educational Psychology

Introducing Mark, 
his family and the EP

Chapter summary

References

10: Traversing the Expert Non-Expert Binary: The Fluid and Contested Nature of Expertise

A philosophical starting point

Interaction 1

Interaction 1: Traversing the expert non-expert binary

Interaction 2

Interaction 2: Traversing the expert non-expert binary

Interaction 3

Interaction 3: Traversing the expert non-expert binary

References

11: Joining the Q: What Q Methodology Offers to a Critical Educational Psychology

Q in brief

Q as an ethical methodology

Examples from Sheffield University

Acknowledgement

References

12: Are We All Psychologists Now?

The Job Psychologists Do

Psychology as Ideology

From Psychology to Psychologisation

Note

References

Part III: Putting Critical Psychological Resources to Work in Educational Psychology

13: Epidemic or Psychiatrisation? Children’s Mental Health in a Global Context

The Globalisation of ADHD

The Side Effects of Psychiatrisation

Psychotropic Childhoods: ADHD examined

References

14: The Teacher’s Role in Supporting Student Mental Health and Well-being

The Study

Repertoire 1: Mental Health as Illness

Repertoire 2: Mental Health as Well-being

Repertoire 3: Mental health and behaviour

Control and Responsibility

Dilemmas and Tensions

Listening to the Teachers

Implications for Practice

The Role of the Educational Psychologist

References

Appendix

15: Towards Restorative Justice

Introduction

Dominant Discourses on Difficult Behaviour

Restorative Justice

Bridging between Discourses

Conclusions

References

16: Faith and Educational Psychology: Empowering Islamic Perspectives of Muslim Parents

Muslim Communities in the UK

Limitations of Educational Psychology

Commonality and Diversity Among Muslim Communities

Islamic Concept of Disability

Is a Psychological Offer Universal?

Language

Chapter Summary

References

17: Gender, Non-normativity and Young Women who Have Been Excluded

Gender, Systems and Structures

Subjective Being and the Lived Body

Stacey’s experience

Ontological concerns of the body

Voice, Control and Silencing

Conclusions

References

18: A Mindful Educational Psychology Practice

A Radical Approach to Continuing Professional Development

What is Mindfulness?

Narrative Approach to Mindfulness

Freeing from Oppressive Discourses and Manifesting Values

Conclusion

References

19: Some Reflections on Educational Psychology Practice

Critical Issues

What are Educational Psychologists Dreaming About?

Will I Still Be Needed Tomorrow?

Chapter Summary

References

20: Finding Attunement and Promoting Positive Attachments

Examples From Educational Psychology Practice

Target, Monitoring and Evaluation in VIG

Vignette Reflections

Conclusion

Note

References

21: Social Theatre for Social Change: The Relevance of Performance Art in Educational Psychology

Social Theatre in the UK

Alice in No-man’s Land

Silent Echoes

Evidence and Political Agenda

Conclusion

Note

References

22: ‘Being’ Dyslexic in Higher Education: Reflections on Discourse and Identity

Dyslexia? What is it, anyway?

Why does it matter?

What different ways of ‘being’ dyslexic are there?

Why do these different conceptions of DYSLEXIA matter?

Discourse, being and choice

Chapter Summary

References

23: A Future? Why Educational Psychologists Should Engage with a Critical Neuroscience

Epistemological Choices

Critical Neuroscience

James’s ‘quest’ for the ‘conditions’

References

Further Reading and Resources

Index

EULA

List of Illustrations

Chapter 11

Figure 11.1

Participant engaged in a Q sort using a grid

Figure 11.2

Factor array for an ‘idealised’ sort for YPF2 (YPF2 ‘Happy assistants – happy to assist adults in their work’)

Chapter 14

Figure 14.1

The hierarchy of control and responsibility

Chapter 15

Figure 15.1

Wachtel and McCold’s social discipline window

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

1

Pages

vii

viii

ix

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

13

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

131

132

133

134

135

137

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

166

167

168

169

170

171

172

173

174

175

176

177

178

179

180

181

182

183

184

185

186

187

188

189

190

191

192

193

194

195

196

197

198

199

200

201

202

203

204

205

206

207

208

209

210

211

212

213

214

215

216

217

218

219

220

221

222

223

224

225

226

227

228

229

230

231

232

233

235

236

237

238

239

240

241

242

243

244

245

246

Contributors

Ansgar Allen is a Lecturer of Education at the University of Sheffield and author of Benign Violence: Education in and beyond the Age of Reason (2014, Palgrave).

Catherine Beal currently works as an educational psychologist (Complex Needs Service, East North East Leeds, and Youth Offending Sector). She has experience within mainstream and specialist settings with young people described as complex/vulnerable and those who demonstrate challenging behaviour or have specialist therapeutic needs. Catherine works directly with young people, provision and systems development. Her qualifications include a Doctorate in Educational and Child Psychology, University of Sheffield, National Programme for Specialist Leaders in Behaviour and Attendance (NPSL-BA) and she is currently completing a Diploma in Narrative Therapy.

Pat Bennett worked previously as an Associate Tutor, and is now an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Sheffield. She is a Chartered Educational Psychologist working in both local authority and private practice.

Tom Billington is Professor of Educational and Child Psychology at the University of Sheffield and Director of the existing research Critical Educational Psychology Centre for the Human.

Dawn Bradley is a Chartered Educational Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. Before training to be an educational psychologist, Dawn taught in a young offenders institute for young men and has also taught in mainstream schools at secondary level. Dawn trained to be an educational psychologist in 2005 at the University of Sheffield, where she completed her Doctorate in Educational Psychology in 2012. Dawn is a member of the Divisions of Child and Educational Psychology and Counselling Psychology as well as being registered as a practitioner psychologist with the Health and Care Professions Council. As an applied psychologist, Dawn is particularly interested in working with vulnerable, marginalised and excluded children and young people. From a methodological perspective she is particularly interested in qualitative, feminist and relational research with her interests sitting more generally within the wider frame of social justice.

Harriet Cameron is Academic Director for the Specialist SpLD Tutorial Service within the English Language Teaching Centre at the University of Sheffield. She has worked with students with specific learning difficulties within higher education for over 10 years. Prior to this, Harriet worked as a school teacher and as a teacher of academic English to overseas students studying at university. She has a master’s degree in Applied Psychology and a doctorate in Critical Educational Psychology with a focus on dyslexia. Her particular interest is in how dyslexia and other learning differences are discursively and ideologically constructed, and how a better understanding here may assist students to reflect critically on their learning identities.

Tim Corcoran is Associate Professor and Academic Director for Professional Learning at the School of Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has extensive experience in educational psychology as a school psychologist and researcher/academic. His work has involved teaching, research and professional practice in Australia, the UK, Singapore and Iraq. He edited Psychology in Education: Critical Theory Practice (2014, Sense Publishers), an international collection of contributions examining critical approaches to educational psychology. More recently he co-edited Disability Studies: Educating for Inclusion (2015, Sense Publishers) and Joint Action: Essays in Honour of John Shotter (2016, Routledge).

Sahaja Davis is a mindfulness practitioner and teacher. He lectures at the University of Sheffield and is Honorary Lecturer at Manchester University. In addition, Sahaja is a senior practitioner educational psychologist at Leeds City Council.

Niall Devlin is a Senior Educational Psychologist, Wakefield Metropolitan District Council. He gained his Doctorate in Educational Psychology at University of Newcastle following an MSc. Niall has a wide range of experience as a practising educational psychologist, having worked in numerous local authorities in the north of England.

Penny Fogg is an Educational Psychologist for Bradford EPS and also a Lecturer in Educational Psychology at the University of Sheffield. Her substantive experience is as a generic educational psychologist working with families and schools. Penny’s areas of specialism relate to the social and emotional well-being of children who have experienced relationship trauma, and working with parents to improve their relationships with their children. Penny qualified as an educational psychologist at Manchester University in 2004 and has also been a teacher, both in mainstream and special schools.

Dan Goodley is Professor of Disability Studies and Education at the University of Sheffield.

Nick Hammond is Senior Educational and Child Psychologist at Norfolk County Council, a trained social theatre practitioner and film maker. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Nick is Honorary Lecturer at the University of Manchester and delivers regular workshops to universities and at conferences.

Victoria Harold has worked as an educational psychologist since qualifying in 2006 from the University of Manchester, prior to which she worked as a primary teacher. Victoria gained a BSc in Psychology (University of Leeds), a PGCE (Manchester Metropolitan University), an MSc in Educational Psychology (University of Manchester) and most recently an EdD in Educational Psychology (University of Sheffield).

Martin Hughes has taught on the Doctor of Educational and Child Psychology course since 2008 and is currently the Professional Practice Programme Director. Previously, he taught in a secondary school for five years and since training in 1988, has been recognised as a Chartered Psychologist, gaining experience in Essex, Nottinghamshire and in Singapore, working for the Ministry of Education. Martin currently works part-time for Sheffield City Council as one of the Principal Educational Psychologists where he has been responsible for a large multidisciplinary service as well as managing a multidisciplinary team.

Majid Khoshkhoo is a senior practitioner, educational psychologist, early years. He also works as a Lecturer and Senior Associate Lecturer for the Open University. He gained his Doctorate in Educational Psychology at University of Sheffield following an MSc and prior to that a BSc Hons Psychology. Majid has a wide range of experience, including working in electronics, computing and data analysis, teaching and training.

Daniela Mercieca is a practising educational psychologist and Senior Lecturer within the Department of Education Studies at the University of Malta. Her research interests are in problematising the assumptions that underpin educational practice with children and deconstructing situations in which decisions are made concerning children’s well-being in schools.

Duncan P. Mercieca is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Education Studies at the University of Malta. His research draws on French post-structuralist philosophers to think through educational issues.

China Mills is a Lecturer in Critical Educational Psychology at the School of Education, University of Sheffield. China carries out research into global mental health and the intersections of mental health and poverty, using post-colonial and psycho-political methodologies.

Helen Monkman works in Wakefield as an educational psychologist. She gained her Doctorate in Educational Psychology (University of Sheffield) following an MSc (University of Sheffield) and prior to that a BSc Hons Psychology (University of Nottingham). Helen previously taught in numerous schools and has a long-standing professional interest in the nuances of language and discourse.

Kathryn Pomerantz is Deputy Principal Educational Psychologist working for Derbyshire County Council. She is the former Academic Director of the Doctor of Educational and Child Psychology initial training course for educational psychologists at the University of Sheffield. Kathryn is a qualified practitioner in video interaction guidance (VIG); she actively uses this technique in her work with parents/carers and with staff in schools. She also provides supervision to professionals training to become VIG practitioners.

Samana Saxton currently works as Senior Educational Psychologist with Kirklees LEA, having first worked as an educational psychologist at Leeds Psychology Service after qualifying. Prior to this, Samana worked as a religious education teacher in a mainstream secondary school in Leeds. Samana gained a BSc in Psychology (University of Leicester), a PGCE (Leeds University) and DEdCPsy (University of Sheffield). Samana is particularly interested in working with multicultural communities.

Antony Williams is Lecturer in Educational and Child Psychology at the University of Sheffield where he is Academic Director of the professional training programme in Educational and Child Psychology.

Introduction

Tom Billington, Antony Williams, Dan Goodley and Tim Corcoran

Educational Psychology: Towards a human science

Many of us have committed our working lives ostensibly to help young persons who are experiencing difficulties of one kind or another. For many who work as educational psychologists, it can be more than a job, it can be our life’s work, not only a professional commitment but a highly principled activity underpinned by a seemingly solid foundation in psychological knowledge.1

What a cruel twist then when we can find the humanity of our concerns constantly challenged, not merely by the difficult social, economic and political circumstances in which as practitioners we ply our trade but by the very psychological discourses upon which are we are supposed to base our work. For those sociocultural arenas in which we operate are dominated by discursive repertoires of quantification and ableism in which young people can be subjected to batteries of tests, schools ranked in terms of a host of performance indicators and curricula are narrowed in ways that reduce educational success to individual achievement. Meanwhile, as we know from studies of ableism and disablism, young people find themselves faced with ever more pressurising assessment procedures that demand student autonomy and make it easier to mark out those students who disrupt these educational practices (Goodley, 2014). As a profession we have too often been required only to contribute to particular processes in which individual young people are singled out for special attention in ways which are not so straightforward as might at first seem to be the case, and as targets of psychological models which position them as deficient human beings, a position from which it becomes almost impossible to escape. These are the root conditions of a disabling educational psychology: one in which we become complicit in the constitution of the individualised problems and failings of education.

This book is the product of (mainly) practitioners associated during the past 15 years or so with the School of Education at the University of Sheffield, all of whom share a belief in the potential of educational psychology to contribute to the public good but who believe too that some of the practices historically associated with its performance are not only flawed but potentially damaging. In this book we are searching for alternative ways in which we can support educational psychologists in their efforts to engage more ethically, critically yet scientifically with those people who are the recipients of our practice. The familiar vision of the therapeutic dyad invokes a scene set in a school office where the practitioner intervenes with a student. But as we envisage it, critical educational psychology takes place in a variety of settings and includes all stakeholders in education – from headteachers and their staff, to students and their families – as well as policies and regulations that seek to define our work’s agenda.

The book clearly does not come from nowhere: it has a history; and that history has local, national and international antecedents. The origins of educational psychology in the United States can be found in the works of William James, G.S. Hall, Edward Thorndike and John Dewey while the history of educational psychology in the UK is inexorably linked to the appointment in 1913 by the City of London of Cyril Burt as the country’s first educational psychologist. All these men [sic] and others too (e.g., Binet in France) were confronted by a problem which we still share today, what should be done with those young
people who, for one reason or another, struggle to thrive in schools? A century ago, the mass schooling systems, then only recently created by the newly industrialised societies, were themselves struggling to accommodate many young people and it seemed only natural that the new science of psychology be enlisted to help with the new social phenomena. We are now at a vantage point from which we can survey the hundred years of subsequent practice and can reflect on the successes and failures of educational psychology during that time and its contributions to the social (and political) problem bestowed on us.

Certainly, many of us would like to think that through our work we have been contributing to improved circumstances for many individual young people, their families and their teachers but, while this will undoubtedly often be the case, as authors in this book we share some concerns. We do not intend to side-step a suspicion long held in critiques of educational psychology that arguably its most notable achievement during the 20th century was its development of the technical means, systems and individual practices by which selected individuals could be positioned as defective, deviant or as a member of a transgressive category; for example, as a disability or in special need. This would clearly be a challenging critique for us and indeed such an analysis is itself reductionist as well as an affront to the commitments of the many practitioners and scholars who have dedicated themselves to the needs of the disadvantaged or those in distress. Unfortunately, the focus of our work, however well intentioned, has ushered in practices which function politically in respect of the kinds of gendered, racialised, dis/abled populations being targeted for scrutiny.

It is thus important to state from the outset that as authors in this book we are challenged by the epistemological roots of our discipline, and unite in unequivocal opposition against much of what Burt (1913) chose to focus on in his work: that is, his insistence on the concept of a fixed and innate intelligence; the straightforward biological hereditability of that intelligence; the consequent need for human selection; and the ableist, class-, gendered- and race-based explanations for human difference. Burt was a eugenicist and while this begs more detailed and sensitive historical and contextual analysis, we are opposed to all those practices which uncritically align with such ideological positions. Indeed we have explored elsewhere the non-science of Burt which, in our view, owes more to a technological entrepreneurship than to a science of the human (Billington & Williams, 2015).

While we do not claim in this book to be the only educational psychologists who recoil at images of the person constructed by a Burtian dystopia, our motivations are to be found directly in the research and practice of many other educational psychologists associated with the University of Sheffield during the past 15 years, and likewise with a longer tradition in the School of Education, of scholars who have shared our concerns for social justice in education, especially within the field of inclusive education and disability studies (Armstrong, Armstrong & Barton, 2000; Barton, 2001; Barton & Clough, 1998; Barton & Oliver, 1997; Carr, 1995; Moore, Beazley & Maelzer, 1998). Educational psychology at Sheffield also has a context within the wider university. William Henry Hadow (vice chancellor at Sheffield between 1919 and 1930) was the principal author of six highly influential reports for the British government on a range of educational matters and from 1923 onwards he was chair of consultative committees whose reports were to influence British educational policy for a large part of the 20th century.

Specifically in respect of this book, Hadow was the author of the very first UK government ‘Report…on psychological tests of educable capacity’ (Hadow, 1924). This document set the agenda to this day, not only for the performance of educational psychology in British schools but actually for the whole system of selection in British schools which has haunted, in particular, the secondary mass schooling system ever since. Cyril Burt was allowed to write some of the appendices and in some instances his name presents as joint author for the whole report. However, it is not only the subsequent disrepute which he brought upon our profession for the fraudulent use of test results that leads us to distance ourselves from his work here (Hearnshaw, 1979; Mackintosh, 2013) but also the wish to overcome the reluctance of our profession to sustain an effective critique in respect of the scientific bases of such work. Psychological ‘tests’ were Burt’s way of invoking the power of scientific discourse, relying on a culture of measurement of young people which has underpinned many professional practices, and purporting to be (erroneously in our view) a science of the human. It is important to state at the outset our belief that, while undoubtedly there are many circumstances when psychological tests can be used genuinely to identify levels of need, misconceptions have arisen that the tests are scientific in the same sense that a natural scientist would use the word. Indeed, it is our position that psychological tests are not scientific in that sense but the product of technological endeavours, subject to economic and political forces, which construct human subjects according to their own ideological image and likeness, for example, as either ‘normal’ or deficient.

First, therefore, psychological ideas or indeed tests cannot be anything other than a product of the social conditions in which they were constructed. Any devices such as tests are technologies, infused with social and cultural bias (typically constructed in the past by white males from a particular Western cultural and political caste) and continue to propagate restricted and reductionist psychological discourses in relation to specific aspects of human functioning 
(Corcoran, 2016). These ableist discourses became established in the early years of our discipline, manifest in such concepts as mental deficiency, hereditability and in attempts to fix intelligence as something static. As critical educational psychologists, however, we maintain:

that the (mis)use of such concepts continues to misrepresent and undermine the potentialities of human subjects;

that the aetiology of human functioning is a complete reversal from that popularly circulated – rather, as human organisms our development is defined by the ‘conditions’ (James, 1890) of our environment (i.e., we are

a priori

‘relational beings’ (Gergen, 2009));

that psychology’s tendency to individualise invites a reduction of the complexities of being-in-the-world to simplistic psychological categories.

Psychological tests do not reveal the nature of the person but a view of the person from a particular vantage point, sometimes providing descriptions which the persons themselves might not recognise, either now or perhaps even in the future.

Second, many of the ideas and practices generated under the banner of educational psychology, while seemingly based on the kinds of methods derived from the natural sciences, bear a likeness to science only insofar as they use numbers, statistics and mathematical formulae. Our claims to science are flawed since, in our efforts to attain the status accorded to the natural sciences, we have sought as psychologists initially to mimic only the research methods used and in the process created our own discrete world of non-human methodologies which are unable to capture the phenomena of persons. We are thus concerned about the dangers of a ‘logical positivism [which has] elevated discussions about the scientific method above empirical science itself’ (Costa & Shimp, 2011, p. 26). It is our contention that the experimental natural sciences appear to be more successful in remaining focused on the phenomena to be considered while educational psychologists have often been encouraged in research or practice which:

prioritises methodology over the phenomena to be studied (a practice known as methodolatry, expanded on with wit and verve by C. Wright Mills (1970));

adopts methods that are ill-suited to recognise the phenomena under scrutiny (i.e., the study of the human);

investigates and reinvestigates versions of persons it has itself constructed (e.g., as evidenced in the development of the psychological industry around the label of autism: Runswick-Cole, Mallett & Timimi, in press).

Psychology in education: Building blocks for reconstruction

Since William James first began to delineate the boundaries of a positivistic psychology (1890), there have been many psychologists who have been alert to the theoretical omissions of educational psychology. Initially Dewey (1916), later Vygotsky (1978), then Bruner (1991), for example, each in their own way, envisaged a psychology of the person which was impossible to contain within discourses of isolated individuals. Dewey was convinced of the importance of the social environment on human mind and behaviour and Vygotsky too focused on explanations more obviously rooted in the social world while Bruner arguably emphasised the more expressly human. Deweyan ideas about school and social reform, neo-Vygotskian ideas about learning and language as well as Brunerian narrative approaches have encouraged many psychologists and social scientists to aspire to less disabling forms of practice by demanding that analyses become more sensitive to the dynamic, intrinsically social possibilities within human beings and their situations (White & Epston, 1990; Berliner, 1992; Reissman, 2002; Daniels et al., 2009).

In 1974, Bruner joined with Martin Richards, Ryan, Shotter, Harré, Ingleby and the Newsons to produce The Integration of the Child into the Social World, which, along with Reconstructing Social Psychology, published the same year, sought to articulate the fundamentally social (and hence also political) nature of human development. In the UK the emergence of these publications alongside a growing interest in the recently translated works of Vygotsky led to critical stirrings within UK educational psychology, most clearly articulated by Reconstructing Educational Psychology (Gillham, 1978). Changing the Subject (Henriques et al., 1984) and Children of Social Worlds (Bruner, 1986), the follow-up to The Integration of the Child into the Social World, reflected the growing interest in, and understanding of, the fundamental importance of the social world when contemplating children, childhood and the gaze we bring to bear on them. The mid-1980s was also a time when we heard the term ‘psy-complex’ (Ingleby, 1985; Rose 1985), which had been coined to develop critiques of the influence of psychological knowledge and which were informed by Foucault’s introduction of the genealogical method. Critical thinkers drew upon strands of psychology, psychoanalysis, 
linguistics and semiotics to examine the structuring influence of language. Two seminal works published in 1987, Potter and Wetherell’s Discourse and Social Psychology and Billig’s Arguing and Thinking, signalled an increasing appreciation of the power and influence of language in structuring what we accept as reality (see also Hollway, 1989; Parker, 1992). It is upon the work of these critical thinkers, their colleagues and the resources they have provided that we seek to build this book.

Critical psychology can help us to recognise the ways in which educational and other authorities not only regulate – which is not necessarily a problem – but also effectively exclude – which is a problem, especially given a growing unease as to the quality of the ‘science’ on which (politicised) decisions are being justified. There are many resources now that psychologists and their services can use when constructing professional practices which are not only sensitive to social, cultural and political variables but also provide the means of achieving a more scientific discipline. Erica Burman’s (2008) utilisation of deconstruction as a tool for critiquing development narratives together with her exploration of a feminist agenda reaffirm the potentially debilitating nature of many current theoretical preferences and practices in childcare and educational arenas. Isaac Prilleltensky emphasises critical approaches and the possibility of community solutions (Fox, Prilleltensky & Austin 2009; Nelson & Prilleltensky 2005) while Ben Bradley (2005) similarly employs critiques of psychological paradigms to provide alternatives in respect of professional training. There are increasing numbers of psychologists working in education globally who are developing a more critical psychological research and practice – for instance, Newman and Holzman (1993); Bird (1999); Neilsen & Kvale (1999); Billington (2000); Sloan (2000); 
Gallagher (2003); Kincheloe (2006, 2008); Corcoran (2007); Goodman (2010); Goodley (2011, 2014); Mercieca (2011); Martin and McLellan (2013); Vassallo (2013); Williams (2013); Sugarman (2014); and Todd (2014).

This renaissance of enthusiasm for the potential in our discipline is in marked contrast with an unjustifiably complacent neo-Burtian educational psychology, which rested on an intellectually limited personal agenda, ‘It is my personal conviction that the main outlines of our human nature are now approximately known, and that the whole territory of individual psychology has, by one worker or another, been completely covered in the main’ (Burt, in Hearnshaw 1979, p. 49). It is to Hadow’s credit that he was clearly suspicious of such grandiose claims and there are several examples where, in 1924, he provides more cautious analysis relating to the narrowness of the psychological landscape being envisaged. As co-authors of this book we want to find ways of re-engaging with the hopeful possibilities for educational psychology first realised by both James and Dewey in order to construct a canvas upon which we can create new forms of social activity, re-envisage its scientific credentials and find ways of speaking ethically to an emerging globalisation of the process of psychologisation. Indeed, as scholars at the University of Sheffield, we have found ourselves pushed into (not unwillingly we might add) transdisciplinary contexts in which we seek to talk of the human in ever more complex ways. The establishment of a new research centre – The Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman) – came from a number of conversations and collaborations with colleagues across faculties of science, medicine, the humanities and social sciences about the kinds of intellectual projects that can be made to respond to not only rapid expansions in technology, but also an epidemic of psychological knowledge about what it means to be a valued or marked human being.2 This book, then, is timely not least in reminding educational psychology to think carefully about the ways in which it marks, values, pathologises or expands humanity.

Structure of the book

This book is delivered in three parts. The first part focuses on introducing the theoretical resources that we suggest can be drawn upon in situating a critical psychological practice. These theoretical starting points are diverse, but have in common the fact that they are all in differing ways reflexive foundations on which to build a psychological practice. They envision both ourselves as practitioners and those with whom we work as thinking, speaking subjects with agency, who thus offer the potential to appreciate a complex subjectivity ‘in which a sense of agency is tangled up in cultural forms’ (Parker, 1997, p. 12), which is a starting point for a potentially emancipatory practice. It would be naive to suggest that practice with emancipatory potential is limited to the theoretical resources we offer or that a practice grounded in these approaches will necessarily offer such potential. However we do suggest that the theoretical approaches in Part I may be drawn upon and, indeed, produce in their application a more complex subjectivity than has often been offered. A vision of the human, as Parker (1997) recognises, is one that takes seriously both the intentions and desires of the individual and the operation of social structures and discourse which structure the spaces in which we all live and work. As such Part I begins with Allen’s questioning of the assumptions that permeate both education and psychology. In exploring how psychology and education define and thereby limit our freedom, Allen asks whether or not they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Chapters 2 to 5 introduce constructionist (Corcoran), narrative (Fogg), post-conventionalist (Goodley) and psychoanalytic (Williams) theoretical resources for the construction of a critical educational psychology practice.

Part II focuses on ethics and values in practice. In this part, Goodley and Billington explore connections between critical educational psychology and critical disability studies. The ethics of practice are then interrogated in three chapters which examine in differing ways how ethical concerns are inherent in everyday practice (Bennett; Devlin; Mercieca & Mercieca). Chapter 10 (Beal) explores the notion of expertise in practice, calling for a recognition of the multiple and diverse forms of expertise that are required for psychologists and clients to produce empowering working alliances. Martin Hughes then introduces Q methodology, presenting the approach from an ethical and practical perspective. Part II concludes with a chapter that asks: Are we all psychologists now? In posing the question, Williams introduces the concept of psychologisation and its ongoing shaping of modern Western culture, suggesting that in the age of the psychologised subject the role of the critical educational psychologist may be that of the psychologist willing and able to critique the ideological function of psychological knowledge in any particular situation.

Part III contains a series of chapters that put the critical theoretical resources to work in practice. These chapters are written in the main by practitioners who focus on specific arenas of practice, including mental health (Mills; Monkman), school behaviour policies (Harold), faith and educational psychology (Saxton) and the role of gender in school-based exclusion practices (Bradley). Further chapters critically explore mindfulness (Davis), the use of stories in practice (Khoshkhoo), video interactive guidance (Pomerantz), social theatre (Hammond), dyslexia diagnosis (Cameron) and the growing influence of neuroscience (Billington).

Getting On With It

In the groundbreaking text Changing the Subject, Couse Venn (1989) posed the following question: What is the subject of psychology? His answer, and one with which we agree, is the living human subject. Educational psychology has for a hundred years understood its subject as a young person who will require some kind of intervention. In practice, this subject has quickly become known in terms of available psychological discourses of the isolated and static individual, assessed and probed according to practices which, ultimately, demand the improvement of the subject in relation to a narrow understanding of their deficiency.

What could be the subject of educational psychology? Critical psychology intervenes to advise: ‘Rather than “telling it like it is”, the challenge for the [critical educational] psychologist is to “tell it as it may become”’ (Gergen, 1992, p. 27). This affirmative, forward looking and inherently reflexive statement demands that as educational psychologists we look for opportunities to construct practices which potentially empower children and young people, not as individuals disconnected with the (social) world but as social living beings, and look for occasions when we could work as allies with them, their families and the educational professionals that seek to support them.

Yet such potential alliances require us to remain mindful of the potential dangers of psychology; a discipline that has been historically built on the construction of a model of human subjects who are inherently flawed, lacking or deficient. Whether researchers or practitioners we aspire to a criticality which involves:

identifying the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions which populate the landscape of educational psychology;

exposing the kinds of human subject constituted and restricted through these discursive knowledges;

identifying ideas, practices and support mechanisms which enable children and young people to successfully resist and move beyond any such oppressive regimes and navigate more successfully their educational lives.

Our work at Sheffield and in this book is intended to develop and support communities dedicated to resisting the psychopathologisation of human difference, wherever in the world educational practice exists.

Notes

1

. As this is a BPS textbook, reference throughout is made to educational psychology, inferring inclusion of both educational and school psychology.

2

. See the following link:

http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/faculty/social-sciences/ihuman

References

Armstrong, F., Armstrong, D. & Barton, L. (Eds.) (2000).

Inclusive education: Policy, contexts and comparative perspectives

. London: David Fulton.

Barton, L. (Ed.) (2001).

Disability, politics and the struggle for change

. London: David Fulton.

Barton, L. & Clough, P. (Ed.) (1998).

Articulating with difficulty: Research voices in special education

. London: Paul Chapman.

Barton, L. & Oliver, M. (Eds.) (1997).

Disability studies: Past, present and future

. Leeds: The Disability Press.

Berliner, D.C. (1992). Telling the stories of educational psychology.

Educational Psychologist,

27, 143–152.

Billig, M. (1987).

Arguing and thinking: A rhetorical approach to social psychology

. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Billington, T. (2000).

Separating, losing and excluding children: Narratives of difference

. London: Routledge Falmer.

Billington, T. & Williams, A. (2015). Education and psychology: Change at last? In I. Parker (Ed.),

Routledge handbook of critical psychology

. London: Routledge.

Bird, L. (1999). Towards a more critical educational psychology.

Annual Review of Critical Psychology

, 1(1), 21–33.

Bradley, B.S. (2005).

Psychology and experience

. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bruner, J.S. (1986).

The culture of education

. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J.S. (1991). The narrative construction of reality.

Critical Inquiry

, 18(1), 1–21.

Burman, E. (2008).

Deconstructing developmental psychology

(2nd edn). Hove: Routledge.

Burt, C. (1913). The inheritance of mental characters.

The Eugenics Review

, 4, 168–200.

Carr, W. (1995).

For education: Towards critical educational inquiry

. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Corcoran, T. (2007). Counselling in a discursive world.

International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling,

29(2), 111–122.

Corcoran, T. (2016). What results from psychological questionnaires? In P. Towl & S. Hemphill (Eds.),

Locked out: Understanding and tackling school exclusion in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

(pp. 71–88). Wellington: NZCER Press.

Costa, R.E. & Shimp, C.P. (2011). Methods course and texts in psychology: ‘Textbook science’ and ‘tourist brochures’.

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

, 31(1), 25–43.

Daniels, H., Edwards, A., Engestrom, Y. & Ludvigsen, S. (Eds.) (2009).

Activity theory in practice: Promoting learning across boundaries and agencies

. London: Routledge.

Dewey, J. (1916).

Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education

. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Fox, D., Prilleltensky, I. & Austin, S. (Eds.) (2009).

Critical psychology: An introduction

. London: Sage.

Gallagher, S. (2003).

Educational psychology: Disrupting the dominant discourse

. New York: Peter Lang.

Gergen, K.J. (1992). Toward a postmodern psychology. In S. Kvale (Ed.),

Psychology and postmodernism

(pp. 17–30). London: Sage.

Gergen, K.J. (2009).

Relational being

. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gillham, B. (Ed.) (1978).

Reconstructing educational psychology

. London: Croom Helm.

Goodley, D. (2011).

Disability studies: An interdisciplinary introduction

. London: Sage.

Goodley, D. (2014).

Dis/ability studies: Theorising disablism and ableism.

London: Routledge.

Goodman, G.S. (2010).

Educational psychology reader: The art and science of how people learn

. New York: Peter Lang.

Hadow, W.H. (1924).

Report of the consultative committee on psychological tests of educable 
capacity

. London: HMSO.

Hearnshaw, L. (1979).

Cyril Burt: Psychologist

. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. & Walkerdine, V. (1989).

Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity

. London: Methuen.

Hollway, W. (1989).

Subjectivity and method in psychology: Gender, meaning and science

. London: Sage.

Ingleby, D. (1985). Professionals as socializers: The ‘psy complex’.

Research in Law, Deviance and Social Control

, 7, 79–109.

James, W. (1890).

Principles of psychology

. Vols. 1 & 2. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

Kincheloe, J.L. (2006). A critical politics of knowledge: Analyzing the role of educational psychology in educational policy.

Policy Futures in Education

, 4(3), 220–235.

Kincheloe, J.L. (2008).

Critical pedagogy primer

. New York: Peter Lang.

Mackintosh, N.J. (2013). The Burt affair: 40 years on.

Educational & Child Psychology

, 30(3), 13–32.

Martin, J. & McLellan, A.-M. (2013).

The education of selves: How psychology transformed students

. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mercieca, D. (2010).

Beyond conventional boundaries: Uncertainty in research and practice with children

. Rotterdam: Sense.

Mills, C.W. (1970).

The sociological imagination

. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moore, M., Beazley, S. & Maelzer, J. (1998).

Researching disability issues.

Buckingham: Open University Press.

Neilsen, K. & Kvale, S. (1999). Current issues in apprenticeship.

Nordisk Pedagogik,

17(3), 160–169.

Nelson, G. & Prilleltensky, I. (Eds.) (2005).

Community psychology: In pursuit of liberation and well-being

. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Newman, F. & Holzman, L. (1993).

Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary scientist

. London: Routledge.

Parker, I. (1992).

Discourse dynamics: Critical analysis for social and individual psychology

. London and New York: Routledge.

Parker, I. (1997). Discourse analysis and psycho-analysis.

British Journal of Social Psychology

, 36, 479–495.

Potter, J. & Wetherell, M. (1987).

Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour

. London: Sage.

Riessman, C.K. (2002). Doing justice: Positioning the interpreter in narrative work. In W. Patterson (Ed.),

Strategic narrative: New perspectives on the power of personal and cultural storytelling

. Lanham, MA, and Oxford: Lexington Books.

Rose, N. (1985).

The psychological complex: Psychology, politics and society in England 1869–1939

. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Runswick-Cole, K., Mallett, R. & Timimi, S. (Eds.) (in press).

Re-thinking autism: A critique of the autism industry

. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Sloan, T. (Ed.) (2000).

Critical psychology: Voices for change.

London: Palgrave.

Sugarman, G. (2014). Neo-Foucaultian approaches to critical inquiry in the psychology of education. In T. Corcoran (Ed.),

Psychology in education: Critical theory-practice

. Rotterdam: Sense.

Todd, L. (2014). Critical dialogue, critical methodology: Bridging the research gap to young people’s participation in evaluating children’s services. In G. Porter, J. Townsend & K. Hampshire (Eds.),

Children and young people as knowledge producers

. London: Routledge.

Vassallo, S. (2013).

Self-regulated learning: An application of critical educational psychology

. New York: Peter Lang.

Venn. C. (1989). The subject of psychology. In J. Henriques et al. (Eds.),

Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity

(pp. 115–147). London: Methuen.

Vygotsky, L. (1978).

Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes

. Eds. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

White, M. & Epston, D. (1990).

Narrative means to therapeutic ends

. New York: Norton.

Williams, A. (2013). Critical educational psychology: Fostering emancipatory potential within the therapeutic project.

Power and Education

, 5(3), 304–317.

Part IReflexive Foundationalism: Critical Psychological Resources

In this section of the book, contributors consider the theoretical foundations required to conceptualise the notions of  ‘education’,  ‘psychology’  and  ‘critical’.  The authors recognise the need to continually re-create our foundations, precisely because we find existing ones unsatisfactory. What results is a reflective or creative foundationalism, in which values are lived out and discussions of ethics and values can never be separated from and are inherent to every act.

1Psychology and Education: Unquestionable Goods

Ansgar Allen

Preface

Both psychology and education are defended as if they were unquestionable goods. Psychology is associated with the notion that psychological knowledge itself is intrinsically beneficial. Educational activity is similarly associated with the notion that education itself is basically good. This chapter seeks to unsettle the presumed good of each field. It explores how psychology and education define and thereby delimit our freedom to ask whether or not they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

1.

Educators often claim that education is under attack. As educators, they believe this is something they are compelled to defend, if only by complaining on its behalf. The collective response is so automatic that one might assume they shared a clear conception of the object under protection. They do not. Though the educational good educators are so sensitive about does achieve widespread support being repeatedly invoked as an entity worthy of protection, this educational good is also uniquely ungraspable. As defenders of a good they cannot precisely discern, educators focus on their presumed attackers by way of a distraction.

2.

Occasionally education is defended against the popular effects of psychology, or ‘psychologisation’. This is the unwelcome (some would say excessive) attribution of psychological ideas to educational problems. But psychologisation is not in itself a problem for education. It is not an imposition, even if it is sometimes imposed. Education willingly adopts psychological understandings or practices or, at least, it does so ‘unconsciously’ and without hesitation.

3.

‘Education’ is a vague signifier. Nobody seems to know what it is; they can only tell you what education sometimes does. Since those activities that traditionally coalesce around this signifier have indeed done quite a bit (of damage, some would say), we might well consider the likely ‘educationalisation’ of psychology. This would accompany the psychologisation of education as its reflection.

4.

Mass schooling – the great educational achievement of the modern state – has been a major contributor to the educationalisation of psychology. This is because psychology emerged in part as a product of 19th-century developments in schooling. From the outset these institutions served as laboratories. They furnished would-be psychologists with captive populations from which to extract data, defining many of the problems psychology set out to answer as well as the purposes those investigations would serve.

5.

While schools served as laboratories, they also functioned like prisons; prisons in turn resembled schools. Both prisons and schools share a heritage and continue to trade techniques. In 1791 Jeremy Bentham published a design for a prison, which could also serve as a school. This circular building was organised around the superintending ‘eye’ of its central observation tower. Bentham called it ‘The Panopticon’.

Many years later, Michel Foucault explored the greater political significance of Bentham’s architectural scheme in Discipline and Punish (1991 [1975]). The ‘panoptic gaze’ described in that book captured the imagination of many, eventually becoming a rather tired metaphor overused in critiques of both education and psychology. As Foucault himself soon recognised, ‘the principle of visibility’ that governed the panopticon was already ‘archaic’ insofar as it attached so much importance to observation. By contrast, the ‘procedures of power resorted to in modern societies are far more numerous and diverse and rich’ than those of panoptic surveillance (Foucault, 1996 [1977], pp. 236, 227). Education resorts to far more than panoptic surveillance; it forms us in many other ways too. So if you shake your fist at the unseemly spread of CCTV cameras1, make sure you also take a critical look at the wider education of the fist that does the shaking.

Still, when approached with caution, the panopticon makes an important point about the educationalisation of psychology. Before psychology existed in any systematic form, an institution was designed whose principles could be applied to ‘work-houses, mad-houses, lazarettos, hospitals and schools’ as well as to prisons. Bentham recalls a certain ‘King of Egypt’2 who ‘thinking to re-discover the lost original of language, contrived to breed up two children in a sequestered spot, secluded from the hour of their birth, from all converse with the rest of humankind’. Suitably inspired, Bentham declares that a panoptic school, run on similar lines, ‘might afford experiments enough that would be rather more interesting’. Perhaps a ‘foundling-hospital’, at the very least, could be run along these experimental lines, isolating individuals and examining their development under controlled conditions (Bentham, 1843 [1791], p. 64).

Insofar as Bentham’s principles were extended to early 19th-century schools, one might say that the experimental school he envisaged was, broadly speaking, in operation and generating data long before experimental psychology was founded. The so-called father of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), was not yet born.

6.

The typical case of an exchange between education and psychology is located in the early history of mental testing. Mental testing, we discover, was the byproduct of our proudest modern educational commitment, which goes like this:

Education for all it says.

The schools that were established to fulfil this beguilingly simple (if not deludedly cheerful) ideal offered much more than instruction. They generated norms of conduct and performance, organising behavioural space in ways that established the implicit standards against which variations between children could be measured. Within these normative confines a new category of child arrived. Though appearing fully functional at first sight, this child did not seem able to benefit from instruction. This was the so-called ‘feeble-minded’ child who was to be located at the outer limits of the normal.

Alfred Binet was appointed to a commission in 1904 that sought to perfect the distribution of such borderline cases. Many children were now located on these artificial borders of normality. Without an accurate test, it was hard to decide whether or not they would be better off in the so-called ‘special’ schools that had been established to mop up the problematic remainder of the school population. Following the arrival of universal schooling and the new problem of borderline children, the separation of this school-age population became an urgent necessity. The response was to use criteria of separation that were directly educational and behavioural (see Rose, 1999, pp. 141–142). In effect, here we have a landmark case in the educationalisation of psychology.

7.

We could not object to schools as scientific laboratories if they were not at the same time institutions designed to domesticate their populations through the knowledge they accumulate. Today’s schools continue to experiment with the formation and distribution of subjects and subjectivities. In this respect they inform psychology and set its agenda. They also connect psychology to instruments of government.

During the huge expansion of 19th-century schooling, two distinct regimes of power were devised: roughly speaking, these can be divided into the disciplinary supervision of bodies in the early 19th-century monitorial school and the pastoral care of souls in the mid-19th-century moral training school. Initially the techniques these schools developed were aimed at the working poor, the dispossessed and the colonised. These potentially dangerous populations were to be aligned with the newly defined needs of 19th-century industrial societies and their protectorates. Each regime of power borrowed from established religious practices, drawing respectively from medieval monasticism and the Christian pastorate. Developed in partial isolation, these regimes were combined towards the end of the 19th century in the modern classroom. This institutional space was to become a uniquely domesticating site for the formation of individual subjects (see Allen, 2013, 2014).

It should be clear, then, that the manipulation of bodies and the inspection of souls (including self-inspection) was a banal fact of institutional life long before psychology, as a scientific specialism, was established.

8.

This is not a matter of precedence, however. A genealogy of psychology and education reveals that they interpenetrate to such an extent that you cannot be for one, and against the other. The psychologisation of education and the educationalisation of psychology must be set within a broader context.

9.

This context is that of modernity. To take the long view, and at the risk of being overly schematic, one might define this period as one in which religious practices were secularised. These practices set the limits for what it meant to live a good life. When religious practices were borrowed from and extended, they were adapted to the needs of the modern context. Roughly, the good life was redefined as living well within a modern state, which itself was to become acclimatised to the demands of an emergent capitalism.

The so-called masses were to be formed so that they would act appropriately in two domains. They were to be disciplined at the level of production, so that they worked well, diligently and without demur; and they were to be trained at the level of consumption, so that they could consume well (where the formation of good workers preceded the formation of good consumers). In other words, when workers are not at work they cannot be allowed to escape capital. In their spare time they must pay back into the system that has exploited them by buying its products and accepting the needs it defines as their own.3

In late modernity, commodification has been taken one step further as individuals are encouraged to turn themselves into articles of commerce. Individuals are expected to modify themselves and market themselves as flexible and adaptable workers in response to the uncertain demands of the marketplace. Psychological discourses and educational practices perform an important role here, conditioning everyday life so that it accords with these demands, educating individuals to live within these confines. Everyday life has been proletarianised in the sense that we are induced to commodify our relations with one another by turning them into strategic opportunities.

10.

Academics are not immune to this. The effects of institutional ranking by research output, impact and environment, and of an increased pressure to secure funds from an ever-diminishing ‘pot’, separate researchers from an intellectual engagement with their work. Research time is instrumentalised according to its methods, outputs, or what it may lead to in the future, and work commitments are increasingly measured against their likely returns in terms of esteem factors and future prospects (or, at the very worst, in a campaign for retention). One’s relationships and links are commodified as potentially lucrative network-building opportunities, to be sold in one’s own research bids, or sold to other bidders. High-flying academics are co-opted as key stakeholders in bids they have not written, for no other reason than that they are well established and connected to other stakeholders.