Parental care sustains social life, yet the activity it requires is not always recognised as movement or progress within neoliberal moral economies. Drawing on body maps and interviews with eight UK-based academics, most of whom were mothers, this article examines how ideals of productivity and self-direction shape experiences of parenthood. Whereas pre-parenthood maps tended to depict a whole figure in motion, maps of parenthood or pregnancy more often portrayed the figure as still or divided, contrasting with interview accounts of parenting as intensive, demanding and fulfilling. To interpret this tension, I engage Adriana Cavarero’s postural geometries and develop the concept of new verticality. While Cavarero’s distinction between uprightness and inclination helps explain the moral value attached to autonomy and self-command, I argue that neoliberalism has extended what is required of the upright subject. Autonomy alone is insufficient; individuals must demonstrate continued productivity and progress. New verticality describes this expectation and offers a way of understanding why participants could experience parental care as intensely active and fulfilling while questioning whether they were moving forward in socially recognised ways.
Psychotherapy contains assumptions about what counts as therapeutic knowledge. Reflection is valuable, but it becomes hierarchical when embodied, symbolic, and relational changes are recognized only after conscious monitoring or verbal formulation. Drawing on dual-process theory, network neuroscience, embodied cognition, play scholarship, and neurodivergent lived-experience research, this paper treats reflection as distributed and coordinated with perception, action, affect, memory, and interaction. Play is proposed as a heterarchical epistemic practice through which procedural, representational, participatory, and reflective knowing may operate together without making articulated insight their final criterion. Sensorimotor, symbolic, and relational play are developed as overlapping clinical forms of therapeutic knowledge. Ethical implications centre accessibility, voluntariness, client authority, uptake, and consequence, and a composite vignette illustrates how these commitments can guide neuroaffirming practice without assigning fixed meanings to movement, symbols, or refusal.
As a critical-theoretical contribution to the study of algorithms in everyday life, this paper examines online gambling as a key case for understanding how digital platforms may actively produce new forms of subjectivity. It argues that the online gambling subject emerges from a complex ‘algorithmic apparatus of subjectivation’ that fuses psychoanalytic dynamics of desire with Deleuzian architectures of control. This theoretical synthesis integrates findings from empirical literature with insights from psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the critique of technology to reveal how a platform’s algorithms may functionalize a gambler’s existential void. The paper introduces several original conceptual tools for this analysis, including algorithmic capture, governed randomness, and the duty of friction. It also deploys four core conceptual operators: algorithmic temporality, which collapses the future into an eternal present; somatic synchronization, where the body’s rhythms are modulated by the platform; the algorithmic production of lack, where desire is optimized over satisfaction; and affective labor, where engagement becomes a form of data work. Alongside these operators, the paper introduces desynchronization as a practice of resistance. This psychosocial approach suggests that the resulting condition can be analyzed not simply as a behavioral disorder, but as a potential crisis of meaning, freedom, and reality, emerging at the intersection of capital, algorithmic modulation, and desire.
The article is a discussion of agential realist theory of Karen Barad in a context of its hypothetical integration in a drawing, where psychoanalytical theory of each of Jacques Lacan and Bracha Ettinger are also referenced. Such divergent theories are brought together through a common concern for subject; that of the author as artistic agency and the drawing’s materiality. The author is imagined as a voice of an index card medium of the drawing, along with its other mediums argued as analogous to the theories. Consideration of theory is therefore proposed situated in and coming through the drawing itself. An unforeseen anomaly concerning the index cards offers a conclusion to the discussion as an example of which Barad’s causal relation between discursive practice and the intra-workings of indeterminate materiality supports Lacan’s theory of unconscious truth.
Traditional sociological frameworks for understanding organized cruelty and structural violence frequently rely on the metaphor of predation or the concept of dehumanization. This article argues that such paradigms are theoretically insufficient for capturing the systemic, metabolic, and ecological nature of modern domination. Drawing upon decolonial theory, developmental systems theory (DST), and multispecies feminism, we propose a shift in the analytic optic: from predation to parasitism. We posit that the dominant mode of ‘Western’ social organization operates as a parasitic pathology defined by the logic of diskin, the strategic severing of sympoietic bonds to facilitate extraction. Engaging with Catherine Malabou's concept of destructive plasticity, we explore how the human neocortex serves as the interface where these parasitic logics are bio culturally encoded. Tracing the genealogy of this parasitism from its extracellular phase in colonial primitive accumulation to its intracellular internalization in the neoliberal subject, we argue that resistance requires a politics of enkin: a therapeutic, immunological praxis of re-weaving relational webs in the damaged landscapes of the Chthulucene.
