Antti Saari

Emotionalities of rule in pedagogical mindfulness literature

Abstract Since the turn of the millennium, mindfulness discourses have penetrated various areas of governing health, well-being, and happiness. A recent sub-genre of popular mindfulness literature is teaching and parenting. This sub-genre includes technologies of the self that inculcate responsible, autonomous subjects who control their own emotions and are present, authentic, and available. The article uses the concept of the fold to analyze the way mindfulness discourses aid in constituting a notion of a private sphere of subjective autonomy in teaching and parenting while also demonstrating that subjectivity is an area of governmental intervention in neoliberal rule.

Positive Education as Translation and Conquest of Schooling

Since the turn of the millennium, positive psychology has become a significant part of contemporary psy-complexes around the world. In this chapter, we explore how the practicality of positive psychology is established through a certain regime of truth that introduces conditions on how happiness can be discerned and acted upon in schools. Using Michel Callon’s theory of translation, we examine how positive psychology translates rationalities of rule into psychological discourses, and how positive psychology is, in turn, translated into interventions in schools. As a case in point, we analyse the Australian Geelong Grammar School (GGS) model of positive education, which is the best known example of embedding principles of positive psychology in schools.

The rhetoric of the ‘digital leap’ in Finnish educational policy documents

This article discusses the rhetorical strategies in Finnish educational policy documents dealing with digitalization. The documents argue that the national education system is in dire need of digital technologies in order to modernize its pedagogy and secure national economic competitiveness. Finnish municipalities, schools and teachers have high levels of autonomy in implementing curricula, so there is a challenge to them to adopt digitalization at all levels of education.

The Anatomy of Our Discontent: From Braining the Mind to Mindfulness for Teachers.

ABSTRACT This paper offers an overview of contemporary inscriptions of mindfulness, their conditions of possibility, and examples of the braining of mind on which contemporary neuro-meets-contemplative turns are dependent. We examine key nineteenth-century events integral to the formation of Biologies Old, in which historic debates over ‘the death of God’ in Western worldviews forge a space of finitude dedicated to fleshy materiality and the relocation of bios. We also examine what emerges in the wake of such debates, including how Biologies New and a transcendence/immanence horizon continues to reverberate through popular, contemporary recommendations for mindfulness in teaching.