Problematizing Modern Instrumental Mindfulness

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Bringing Into Focus Obscured and Understudied Curricular Perspectives (Table 29)

Abstract

Educational institutions can be dehumanizing spaces where people suffer greatly. Administration, faculty, students, and staff are all subject to varying degrees of suffering. There is however, a structural basis to this suffering that perpetuates itself due to the entrenched, unquestioned ways in which institutions operate. Contemplative practices have been appropriated by the medical/therapeutic industry as a self-help tool for bolstering wellness for the individual. This dovetails conveniently with the aims of neoliberal corporate capitalist principles by which modern educational institutions operate that pathologizes stress as an individual failure. Contemplative practices have great potential to be engaged in a critical analysis of the structural, systemic, institutional forces and the ways in which they cause harm.

Author

• Muga Miyakawa, Simon Fraser University