MapUKHE at Centre for Research in Digital Education, University of Edinburgh

Dr Dimitra Kotouza from the MapUKHE team was at the Centre for Research in Digital Education, University of Edinburgh on 9 December 2021. She gave a talk entitled ‘The Rise of Digital and Analytics Approaches to Student Mental Health in the UK’.

Abstract

I present methodological observations and findings from our research on the production of policy and interventions addressing the ‘mental health crisis’ in UK HE. First, I discuss how we have combined network analysis and discourse analysis to identify policy assemblages (comprising social actors, institutions, technologies, knowledges and discourses) through which the problem of ‘mental health’ is constructed and addressed. Second, I focus on the latest emerging market that enacts these policies, learning analytics for mental health. The latter enables policy agendas to seep through from the higher levels of governance, aiming to reduce the costs of social reproduction, down to the everyday level of individual students who are encouraged to monitor, rehabilitate, and enhance themselves as employable subjects.