Book review: Revolutionary routines: the habits of social transformation by Carolyn Pedwell

In Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, Carolyn Pedwell examines how social change can be enacted through everyday habits and routinised practices, arguing that such ‘minor’ gestures may be just as transformative as major events. This exploration of the conditions of political possibility is an important endeavour, write Alice Menzel and Jessica Pykett, and will be of particular interest to those concerned with social justice. Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation. Carolyn Pedwell. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2021

Book review: Revolutionary routines: the habits of social transformation by Carolyn Pedwell

In Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, Carolyn Pedwell examines how social change can be enacted through everyday habits and routinised practices, arguing that such ‘minor’ gestures may be just as transformative as major events. This exploration of the conditions of political possibility is an important endeavour, write Alice Menzel and Jessica Pykett, and will be of particular interest to those concerned with social justice

Book review: Revolutionary routines: the habits of social transformation by Carolyn Pedwell

In Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, Carolyn Pedwell examines how social change can be enacted through everyday habits and routinised practices, arguing that such ‘minor’ gestures may be just as transformative as major events. This exploration of the conditions of political possibility is an important endeavour, write Alice Menzel and Jessica Pykett, and will be of particular interest to those concerned with social justice. Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation. Carolyn Pedwell. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2021

From Urban Stress to Neurourbanism:How Should We Research City Well-Being?

Urbanicity has long been associated with stress, anxiety, and mental disorders. A new field of neurourbanism addresses these issues, applying neuroscience laboratory methods to tackle global urban problems and promote happier and healthier cities. Exploratory studies have trialed psychophysiological measurement beyond laboratories, capitalizing on the availability of biosensing technologies to capture geo-located physiological markers of emotional responses to urban environments. This article reviews the emerging conceptual and methodological debates for urban stress research. City authorities increasingly favor new data-driven and technology-enabled approaches to governing smart cities, with the aim that governments will be enabled to pursue evidence-based urban well-being policies. Yet there are few signs that our cities are undergoing the transformative, structural changes necessary to promote well-being. To face this urgent challenge and to interrogate the technological promises of our future cities, this article advances the conceptual framework of critical neurogeography and illustrates its application to a comparative international study of urban workers. It is argued that biosensing data can be used to elicit socially and politically relevant narrative data that centers on body-mind-environment relations but exceeds the individualistic and often behaviorist confines that have come to be associated with the quantifying technologies of the emerging field of neurourbanism

Representing Attitudes to Welfare Dependency: Relational Geographies of Welfare

This article outlines the recent circulation of media images and discourse relating to characters pre-figured as ‘welfare dependents’ and reaction to Benefits Street. The article provides a brief overview of sociological analyses of such representations of apparently spiralling ‘cultures of dependency’ and proposes an alternative relational geography approach to understanding existing welfare dynamics. It describes a shift from putative welfare dependency, to dependency on geographically uneven employment opportunities, low-wage dependency and dependency on a new migrant division of labour. It then contrasts this relational geography approach with the increasingly behaviourist overtones of contemporary welfare reform, which began under New Labour and have accelerated under the Coalition government since 2010. Such policies are in part reliant on the aforementioned media images in securing public acceptance. The article concludes by speculating on the apparent importance of Benefits Street in marking the possible ‘end times’ for the welfare state as we knew it. </jats:p

Infrastructuring educational genomics:Associations, architectures and apparatuses

Technoscientific transformations in molecular genomics have begun to influence knowledge production in education. Interdisciplinary scientific consortia are seeking to identify ‘genetic influences’ on ‘educationally relevant’ traits, behaviors, and outcomes. This article examines the emerging ‘knowledge infrastructure’ of educational genomics, attending to the assembly and choreography of organizational associations, epistemic architecture, and technoscientific apparatuses implicated in the generation of genomic understandings from masses of bioinformation. As an infrastructure of datafied knowledge production, educational genomics is embedded in data-centered epistemologies and practices which recast educational problems in terms of molecular genetic associations—insights about which are deemed discoverable from digital bioinformation and potentially open to genetically informed interventions in policy and practice. While scientists claim to be ‘opening the black box of the genome’ and its association with educational outcomes, we open the black box of educational genomics itself as a source of emerging scientific authority. Data-intensive educational genomics does not straightforwardly ‘discover’ the biological bases of educationally relevant behaviors and outcomes. Rather, this knowledge infrastructure is also an experimental ‘ontological infrastructure’ supporting particular ways of knowing, understanding, explaining, and intervening in education, and recasting the human subjects of education as being surveyable and predictable through the algorithmic processing of bioinformation