Abstract

Minds, behaviours and psyches are increasingly and explicitly problematized within social, economic, health, welfare, education and development policy, in both the global North and global South. While this shift is new, it also builds on a long colonial history of the constitution and governance of the ‘psy’. This special section considers these developments through critically engaging with them as human technologies whereby certain cognitions, affects and behaviours come to be made knowable, calculable and amenable to technological interventions and quantification. Starting with the concept of human technologies, this special section also seeks to extend it, troubling the prevailing account of technology’s role as governmentalization by placing this particular power/knowledge nexus in relation to other historical and current forms of power such as gender, race and coloniality. In this introduction to the special section, ‘Human technologies, affect and the global psy-complex’, we outline the conceptual and empirical contributions the collection of papers seeks to make.

摘要

在全球北方和全球南方，思想、行为和心理在社会、经济、健康、福利、教育和发展政策中越来越明显地成为问题。虽然这种转变是新的，但它也建立在“心理”的宪法和治理的悠久殖民历史之上。本专题通过批判性地将这些发展视为人类技术来考虑这些发展，从而使某些认知、影响和行为变得可知、可计算并适合技术干预和量化。从人类技术的概念开始，这个特殊的部分也试图扩展它，通过将这种特殊的权力/知识联系与其他历史和当前的权力形式（如性别、种族和殖民主义）联系起来，扰乱了对技术作为政府化作用的普遍看法。在“人类技术、影响和全球心理复合体”这一特殊部分的介绍中，我们概述了论文集试图做出的概念和实证贡献。