Robert Stearn

Bio: Robert Stearn is an academic researcher from Birkbeck, University of London. The author has contributed to research in topics: Workfare & Psychological intervention. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 127 citations.

Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes.

Abstract: Eligibility for social security benefits in many advanced economies is dependent on unemployed and underemployed people carrying out an expanding range of job search, training and work preparation activities, as well as mandatory unpaid labour (workfare). Increasingly, these activities include interventions intended to modify attitudes, beliefs and personality, notably through the imposition of positive affect. Labour on the self in order to achieve characteristics said to increase employability is now widely promoted. This work and the discourse on it are central to the experience of many claimants and contribute to the view that unemployment is evidence of both personal failure and psychological deficit. The use of psychology in the delivery of workfare functions to erase the experience and effects of social and economic inequalities, to construct a psychological ideal that links unemployment to psychological deficit, and so to authorise the extension of state—and state-contracted—surveillance to psychological characteristics. This paper describes the coercive and punitive nature of many psycho-policy interventions and considers the implications of psycho-policy for the disadvantaged and excluded populations who are its primary targets. We draw on personal testimonies of people experiencing workfare, policy analysis and social media records of campaigns opposed to workfare in order to explore the extent of psycho-compulsion in workfare. This is an area that has received little attention in the academic literature but that raises issues of ethics and professional accountability and challenges the field of medical humanities to reflect more critically on its relationship to psychology.

Revolting subjects: social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain

Abstract: from topic, providing both stand-alone chapters and a logical, progressive structure through the volume. It is neither too wide nor too narrow in time or geography, making it an excellent and enduring choice for libraries internationally. Yuill has produced an academic book that is not light on history, theory, examples or argument, but is yet eminently readable and accessible for students, practitioners in social care and health, policy-makers and people facing the issues in their own families and communities alike. There may well be a couple of editorial slips in referencing here and there, but Assisted Suicide is still by far the best book on this subject in many years; the author should be proud of this important volume that brilliantly and eloquently tackles injustice and prejudice around assisted suicide. In hardback, it will also provide a useful tool of defence against the next medic who tries to use the Liverpool Care Pathway when I am in hospital.

The amazing bounce-backable woman: Resilience and the psychological turn in neoliberalism

Abstract: This article examines the growing prominence accorded to the idea of ‘resilience’ as a regulatory ideal, locating it in the context of a ‘turn to character’ in contemporary culture which we see as ...

Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences

Abstract: This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, minds, and environments requires a delicate, playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done. This book is open access under a CC-BY license and funded by The Wellcome Trust.