A commentary on encountering austerity; the experiences of four men living in a London hostel.

An edited transcript from a conversation between Nina Garthwaite, a former receptionist at a homeless hostel in London and four of the hostel residents: Mick Hatter, Jon Jonn, Stewart Maxwell and Frank Benson. In it, they reflect on a series of discussions held in 2015 and 2016 chaired by Dr. Lynne Friedli, a freelance researcher with a special interest in mental health and social justice. These discussions covered topics from welfare benefits, housing, politics, work, rest and everything in between. Reflecting on these discussions, the men critique the institutional structures that frame their experience of homelessness and joblessness. They argue that these institutions are failing the individuals that they claim to serve. They also reflect on their encounters with academia through this project. They question whether academic research adequately engages with those experiencing austerity first hand. Finally, they question whether it is sufficient to research and discuss these issues without a corresponding focus on action. The paper includes commentaries by Lynne Friedli and Nina Garthwaite, reflecting on the discussion and the use of personal stories, as well as the complex ethical issues involved in bringing together academic and non-academic voices. These include the impact of structural inequalities, power relations, the intersection of class and gender and the power dynamics that flow from the radically different positions of the authors and participants in relation to homelessness and employment and precarity.

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

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.