Browsing by Author "da Silva Gonçalves, Janina"

In this thesis, I look at the subjectification of students of higher education in writings about students' mental health and wellbeing. My research is situated in feminist poststructuralist studies and aims to shift the focus of the discussion on students' mental health from the individual towards a more societal perspective. Informed by post-methodological theories of inquiry, my approach to both data and writing can be characterised as drifting. The data of the research consists of the "Stories" section of the website of Nyyti ry, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting student mental health and wellbeing. The section contains stories that students have written of their everyday life. This data is enhanced by autoethnographic elements since also I am a university student to whom matters of mental health and wellbeing come close to home. Neoliberal higher education and the psy-complex serve as the context of my research. Together, they shape the circumstances and provide the discourses that students draw from in order to grasp the possibilities and limits of their lives. I ask how the ideal student subject is constituted in the stories, how the psy-discourse functions together with neoliberalism, and how the students make use of the psy-discourse. I have read the data discursively with the concepts of power and subject, inspired by a Foucauldian power analytical approach and studies on governmentality. In the research, I have used the concepts of subjectification and subjectivity to inquire upon how the students make sense of the problems and solutions related to studying and how they make themselves comprehensible within and with the help of the psy-discourse. I looked at self-help as a form of neoliberal and psychological governance that guides subjects to work on themselves. In the stories of the students, I read the (re)production and questioning of the active and entrepreneurial employee citizen. The students did not accept the neoliberal ideal as a given. Some recognised the role of the society as the producer of these pressures and questioned performance-centric ideals. The ideal subject was challenged with tools provided by the psy-discourse and in this way the discourse was made to serve the needs and ends of the students themselves. However, the solutions mostly remained on an individual level. I conclude my thesis by asking how we could (re)build the study environment into one that would provide means for people with varying dis/abilities and needs to get by and even flourish. I suggest that this requires the critical questioning of our ideals as well as a reorganisation of societal and institutional circumstances.