Introduction

How resonant and mouldable are we as subjects to the aspirations and governing practices of others? In this chapter, we outline our conceptual approach, based on a combination of theoretical notions of governmentality and ethnographies of institutional discourse, to provide some answers to this question. We argue that the malleability of human subjectivity may have been overestimated in the governmentality literature, because of the relative inattention to the subjectivity-formation of concrete individuals. We argue that by combining these approaches, and through detailed empirical analyses, we can add nuance to existing theoretical notions of the ways in which our subjectivities are calibrated and re-formatted in specific settings, under specific knowledge regimes, and contemporary ways of governing our ‘selves’. In conclusion, we introduce the contributions of the empirical chapters of this volume.