This issue brings in important new themes as well as continuing ones recently aired in the Geophilosophy Special Issue (Volume 15, Issue 3, September 2022).

Catherine Robinson raises important questions about the use of the term ‘vulnerability’ when it comes to understanding children and young people. Critical of the turn to vulnerability in policy, she discusses how we might radically rethink vulnerability as a radical tool for research and policy.

Anders Petersen and Ole Jacob Madsen also reflect upon an aspect of youth policy, in this case, increasing cases of mental distress amongst Nordic youth. Looking at the struggle to become an achieving subject in the context of advanced and neoliberalism, they also discuss the class implications of this turn.

The article by María Jimena Mantilla contributes to understanding the growing prominence of therapeutic discourses in everyday life. It focuses on therapeutic culture in relation to mothering practices in Argentina, and analyses how cultural norms of personal growth are targeted specifically at new mothers.

Edgar Zavala-Pelayo explores practices of governance and thus subjectification within Jesuit missions in colonial South America. The paper explores the spatial-territorial subjectivities of the Jesuits as well as the discursive practices through which such subjectivities were formed, arguing for a continuum of subjectivities across the governed and the governors.

While algorithms play an increasingly important role in everyday subjectivity, the subjectivity of the digital workers themselves is often overlooked. Selim Gokce Atici gives us an inside view of a digital agency in Turkey, exposing the alienation and precarity that typically accompanies this kind of labour. Rendering worker subjectivity in terms of digital collectivities shows how the imaginary of class has to be rethought in relation to the practices of behavioural data modelling.

Commentary


In this section we discuss topical issues in a less formal way. In this issue this comprises a Geophilosophy Round Table with Joe Gerlach and authors from September 2022 (Volume 15, issue 3) the Geophilosophy special issue.

The comments were developed from an online discussion to launch the Geophilosophy Special Issue, (Volume 15, Issue 3) held on 14th December 2022. In what follows, Joe Gerlach offers an extended commentary on each of the papers, with responses from the contributors to the Special Issue. We decided to reproduce this commentary and responses from the authors as they bring added depth to the issue itself and help to move forward important discussions.

Finally, to mark the passing of Bruno Latour, we publish this appreciation of his life and work: The People of Ideas - What Latour Does to Philosophy, by Didier Debaise. It was originally published in French and translated into English by Francesco Pugliaro. We are grateful to Esprit for permission to publish the translation.