Here is an interesting post by Jessica Pykett at the Soft Paternalism blog, on attending a seminar on the ethics of behaviour change by the House of Lords Inquiry into behaviour change initiatives in government. This is one of the few projects I know of that is engaging with this whole field in a critical way (I think too of Nikolas Rose‘s ongoing genealogy of psy-disciplines, extending now into work on neurosciences). Lots of geography, of course, is utterly complicit with this behaviour change agenda – one that is re-shaping how social sciences are understood in the public realm, to the detriment to the broadly ‘ethnographic’ dispositions of a great deal of critical-theoretically inclined social science.
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