Jessica Pykett is a social and political geographer with research interests in governance, knowledge practices, policy innovation and political subjectivities. Her research has focused on affective and emotional techniques of governance, and the influence of neuroscience and behavioural science on public policy and economic theory. Current work is on the intersections of neuroscience and geography, concepts of urban stress and urban wellbeing, and political technologies of emotional regulation. She has organised and chaired several international seminars on the these themes, on vitalist methodologies and embodied technologies. Her research traces the sociodigital futures imagined and deployed in research, applications and governance within these fields.
Her books include A Modern Guide to Wellbeing Research (forthcoming with B.Searle and M.Alfaro-Simmonds, Edward Elgar), Neuroliberalism. Behavioural Government in the 21st Century (with M.Whitehead R.Jones, R.Lilley and R.Howell, Routledge, 2017), Brain Culture (Policy Press, 2015), Emotional States (with E.Jupp and F.Smith, Routledge, London), Changing Behaviours, On the Rise of the Psychological State (with R.Jones and M.Whitehead, Edward Elgar 2013), and Re-educating Citizens. Governing Through Pedagogy (Routledge, London). She is working currently on a new book, Governing Global Emotions which considers how digital emotion sensing technologies are changing our ideas about what emotions are, and asks what problems are these technologies trying to solve.