Rethinking Freedom for Contemporary Psychology

The purpose of this paper is to rethink the topic of freedom for contemporary psychology. Freedom, within psychological research today, is a neglected, even slightly old-fashioned term. In this paper, we explore the practical, normative, and political dimensions of freedom as a psychological concept. We begin by tracing out key understandings of freedom from political theory, before discussing how thinkers such as Skinner, Maslow, Fromm and May understood the different dimensions of freedom. We then discuss a governmental perspective on freedom, drawn from the work of Nikolas Rose, before finally turning to the sociocultural psychology of L. S. Vygotsky. We contend that freedom is not merely the absence of constraints but a complex interplay between agency, responsibility, and social connections. Our paper argues that the modern emphasis on negative freedom, characterized by reduced interference and obligations, has resulted in a paradoxical situation where individuals feel overwhelmed and seek escape from freedom. By revisiting the insights of Erich Fromm and other scholars, we emphasize the need for positive freedom, which involves voluntary connections with others and active participation in shaping society. We argue that psychology's mandate should be to facilitate the exploration of alternative avenues that lead to flourishing and self-actualization. <br/

Making space with data: Data politics, statistics and urban governance in Denmark

In this article we engage with the contemporary data moment by exploring how particular data practices – consisting of census data and statistics - have become embroiled in the making of urban space and governance in Denmark. By focusing on the controversial case of Danish “ghettos” - a state-sanctioned list of marginalised urban areas– we show how Danish data practices of routinely collecting and aggregating extensive census data have become central to ascribing particular urban neighbourhoods as ghetto areas. These data practices spatialise residential housing areas as problematic and influence Danish urban governance. We explore how new forms of data practices for monitoring urban areas arise, and argue that these practices help to maintain the spatialisation of the “ghetto list”. They do so by drawing multiple forms of data together, that visualise and monitor “at risk” areas making them governable and amenable to physical changes. Finally, we show how the state uses data practices to make citizens (and municipalities) accountable; yet, this accountability cuts both ways, as citizens and municipalities also use data to hold the state accountable. We end with a discussion of how our analysis of data practices has implications for how we imagine the scalar hierarchy of the state and the politics of data

Encounters between social work and STS

From the introduction: This special issue was motivated by a series of productive ‘encounters’ between a diverse group of researchers and practitioners working in and between the fields of social work and STS - most notably the ‘Introducing STS and Social Work’ sessions at the Danish STS conference in 2016

Niche Sociality: Approaching Adversity in Everyday Life

How should sociologists understand the everyday lives of those living in adversity, coping with the experience of structural violence? In this article, focusing on the urban experience, we suggest a perspective on ‘everyday life’ that can encompass corporeal, mental, relational and social dimensions, which we term ‘niche sociality’. First, we use Gibson’s niches and affordances to enrich the post-representationalist understanding of human beings as embodied/cultural/environmentally embedded organisms. Second, we enrich Gibson’s niches and affordances with theories for ‘small-scale’ sociality drawn from social practice theory and interaction ritual chains. Third, we illustrate the productivity of these ideas throughout the article, by grounding our conceptual work in empirical examples that analyse the everyday lives and mental life of migrant workers in Shanghai. Niche sociality, we argue, is a way of framing the experience of the everyday, a perspective that could – perhaps should – provoke novel ecosocial studies of adversity