What is it about?

Is school-based mindfulness meditation ideologically neutral? The paper argues that it is not. By medicalizing the curriculum, mindfulness meditation tightens neoliberalism's grip on young people.

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Why is it important?

The paper identifies curricular medicalization as the process connecting mindfulness in education to neoliberalism. Extant critical-theoretic studies have failed to make this link.

Perspectives

I wrote this article in the hope that people who jump on the popular bandwagon of presenting mindfulness meditation as a social panacea might think about getting off at the next stop. I think that the article will help mindfulness proponents to reflect on the wider social context into which mindfulness initiatives are currently being subsumed.

Professor James Reveley
University of Wollongong

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This page is a summary of: Neoliberal meditations: How mindfulness training medicalizes education and responsibilizes young people, Policy Futures in Education, March 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1478210316637972.
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