Professor Mark Whitehead

ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2019

Professor Mark Whitehead

ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2019

ISRF Mark Whitehead

Mark Whitehead is a Professor of Human Geography at Aberystwyth University whose research interests span urban studies, sustainability, and the impacts of the psychological sciences on public policy. His is the Co-Director of the Aberystwyth Behavioural Insights Interdisciplinary Research Centre, which brings together researchers from across the social sciences with an interest in the connections between politics, psychology of human behaviour.

His early research focused on the changing forms of urban policy under the New Labour government in the UK. His subsequent work has spanned various aspects of political and environmental studies with a particular concern for the changing nature of state power. In a recent project, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Mark was involved in developing the first comprehensive account of the rise of psychological forms of government in the UK state. This project resulted in the recent publication of the book Changing Behaviours: On the Rise of the Psychological State (Edward Elgar, 2013).

Re-Thinking Freedom in a Neuroliberal Age

This project explores the ways in which a series of prominent, and interconnected developments are challenging established conventions concerning what it is to be free within liberal societies. In the context of developments within the behavioural sciences, new systems of psychologically inspired government, and the rise of big data and smart infrastructures, this project considers how science, politics, and technology are combining to disrupt the principles and experience of freedom in the 21st Century. These developments present fresh empirical problems to the extent that they: 1. could enable the provision of smarter systems of real-time government (from both the public and private sectors), which might enhance citizens’ individual and collective wellbeing; but 2. are associated with the curtailing of certain freedoms in relation to the editing of choice, the resetting defaults, and the deepening of personalised data surveillance.

In light of the novelty of these interconnected empirical developments, this project seeks to break with existing explanatory frameworks and methodologies. Theoretically this project deploys the concepts of neuroliberalism, internalities and actually lived freedoms in order to challenge existing theories of liberal freedom. While existing accounts of government and freedom within liberal societies are based on the idea of harm-to-others and externalities, it is argued that the idea of internalities (those things that cause harm-to-self and others) provides critical context to rethink the relations between government and freedom. This project also challenges the often-abstract moral inquiries into liberal freedom, by focusing on actually lived freedoms (negotiated forms of freedom that emerge out of the complexities of everyday life). In order to explore changing forms of actually lived freedoms, this project deploys an innovative interdisciplinary methodology involving a ‘distributed ethnography’. This methodology will be applied to the study of the design and experience of emerging smart city and quantified self and community developments.

Research Outcomes

Contacting Fellows

If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].