Mark Fabian

I prosecute and defend the most serious sexual offences in our courts.

The overwhelming majority of offenders are British-born. Overwhelmingly the victim is someone known to them, either a partner or relative.

Anybody purporting to care about protecting women might start there.

🧵NEW: This is an unprecedented intervention.

Almost every single living, former head of the IDF, Mossad (Israeli foreign intelligence), Shin Bet (domestic intelligence) & Police Commissioner urges an end to Israel’s war in Gaza.

“This is an extremist government. It has taken us all hostage.”

1/

It's hard to engage with you because you dump a lot of replies at once in a very sure-of-yourself voice with few questions and at least a hint of critique or derision. Makes it seem tiring and risky to engage rather than nourishing or enlivening.

Mate outside of the US, banks are perfectly capable of handling online and peer to peer payments. We don't use venmo or PayPal at all in Australia, UK, China, France, etc, just your bank card. Its free for the consumer too. A bank would have 0 customers if it didn't offer this service. US is weird.

Just went paragliding in annecy. I can confirm that "psychological richness" is not good for everybody.

It's more important to get citizens involved in policymaking about their own good lives, and what they say doesn't easily map to any one academic theory or measure of wellbeing.

This is especially true when working in a specific policy area, like food systems, heritage, or social care.

I did a lot of work on wellbeing theory in my first book.

global.oup.com/academic/pro...

But since then I've mostly worked on wellbeing policy and I think the finer points of wellbeing theorising are largely redundant here.

Yes haha! Basically everything that's bad comes back to operationalism in psychology and the atheoretical way it is done in wellbeing studies.

& insistence on experiments.

What you're describing aligns with how people describe their wellbeing in a long cognitive interviewing project we are doing.

Hahahaha brutal

I think some people get famous because their citation counts are high. But this is because they are wrong and many people point this out.

I remember once astonishing a colleague’s husband when he naively asked why we (historians) couldn’t just look something up on the internet and we had to explain that WE are the ones who find the stuff and add it to the internet

I swear to God sometimes you try so hard to save a bug's life and they just will not cooperate.

Why wellbeing studies should not unify What's our theory of social change?

Wrote up some thoughts I was having before during and after the International Society for Quality of Life Studies conference last week:

profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/why-wellbe...

The field is at an intergenerational crossroads and more plural than ever. Let's proceed on all fronts at once.

Ironically, Let Them Theory would be valuable reading for crypto fascist wine mums trying to stop their children being queer, but will instead be invoked by those same crypto fascists when the queers implore them to act humanely.

Why wellbeing studies should not unify What's our theory of social change?

This report about the ISQOLS conference in Luxembourg by @markfabian.bsky.social is a good read. Especially fascinating about the changing of the guard and some of the elders of the field sounding like a broken record. Also congrats to Mark on the Young Scholar Award (you’re senior to me!).

thanks Anna :-)

Incidentally, this is why we should discourage people from writing pop books based on 5 year old science. Your critics haven't had time to write their responses yet.

The first critiques of "psychological richness" are only just starting to appear for example, but it's already out in the pop wild.

Once you notice this pattern you see it everywhere.

Commercialising 'science-backed' tools is big business.

The profit motive is indifferent to truth; what matters is whether it pays.

So once an incorrect idea is commercial, correcting it based on updated science is very hard.

"it shows what an absolute catastrophe Britain’s housing policy has been for the last four decades, how much it’s eaten away at our living standards and our ability to fund services through broad-based taxation."

A delightful analysis:

"Boomers bought houses at a time when saving a couple of pounds per day taking a packed lunch to work would give you a house deposit in eight years. For a millennial this would take two centuries.".

Incidentally, when I read the foundational texts in psychology, which I take to be Freud and Jung first and foremost, I see very little discussion of productivity and an overwhelming interest in mental illness.

Democratising Measurement: or Why Thick Concepts Call for Coproduction - European Journal for Philosophy of Science Thick concepts, namely those concepts that describe and evaluate simultaneously, present a challenge to science. Since science does not have a monopoly on value judgments, what is responsible research...

We desperately need to get more savvy about the value judgements that suffuse all science.

This is especially true of social scientists.

And even more true for anybody who wants to comment on policy issues.

Please at least dabble in philosophy of science, eg:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes - PubMed Eligibility for social security benefits in many advanced economies is dependent on unemployed and underemployed people carrying out an expanding range of job search, training and work preparation act...

The end point of this bias in how science is framed and pursued is this sort of thing in policy: coercing people with welfare sanctions to attend positive psychology classes in 'positive thinking' because this will make them more productive:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26052120/

The American, post-protestant, capitalist, etc. cultural biases just slap you in the face here.

Foucault laughing and clapping.

Are we doing psychological science here or just evangelising for American values?

What about happiness studies suggesting that overwork is bad?

*Productive*

We moved away from productivity, to curing mental illness (presumably so that they could get back to being *productive*).

ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/defaul...

I'm reminded of Seligman's 1999 presidential address to the APA, where he said:

"...since the end of World War II, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward...curing mental illness.".

Well-being at the cost of welfare: Learned helplessness and responsibility in positive psychology and American policy - Ian J. Davidson, 2025 In this article I trace the connected histories of well-being and welfare within contemporary American social science and policy. Focusing on the postwar concep...

This article offers a neat historical analysis of how early positive psychology perpetuated various often pernicious or at least problematic value judgements even as it tried earnestly to help people.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The field continues to do this.

Resistance Summer School is officially in Session! Columbia cancelled my class on Race and Media, but I'm teaching the people anyway.

Columbia canceled my class on Race and Media. But I decided to teach it anyway. So I built a school, instead.

500+ students online and in person.

My first independently operated course and lecture begins TONIGHT!

WE MOVE!!

karenattiah.substack.com/p/resistance...

“Nationwide launches phoneline to help people apply for benefits - as £23billion left unclaimed”

I don’t normally get excited about stuff banks do but this is genuinely excellent. So much goes unclaimed that people genuinely need. You can also use Turn2Us and EntitledTo

As it happens, I am slightly obsessed with the notion of craft!