Audit cultures engulf most educational enterprises and programmes. They stimulate regulatory frameworks to which uncritical educationalists conform. White Mindfulness teacher training programmes embrace audit culture and use competency-based education in efforts to standardise training. Further requirements for attaining teaching status, including regular retreat attendance at predominantly White institutions, regulates the Mindfulness Industry. These approaches frame the education, assimilation, and domestication of mindfulness teachers who, when they conform, become part of the systemic reinforcement of normative values. This chapter reviews the Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching Assessment Criteria (MBI:TAC or TAC), a primary instrument of White Mindfulness used to measure teacher competency. The TAC fits mindfulness into a corporatised education and training system. This critical appraisal builds on the inquiry into White Mindfulness’ embodiment of whiteness, now seen in its pedagogical architecture. In contrast to a conformist, corporatist frame presented by new public management, this chapter launches a challenging inquiry into the possibility of combining audit and social justice aspirations. It draws on a South African example concerned with transformation of the education system post-apartheid. This reveals possibilities that return to questions of incentive, purpose, and desire as well as solidarity and allyship. Is White Mindfulness sufficiently inspired to address issues of social justice?

Chapter 2 profiles prospective migrants around the world. Based on global polling, this chapter answers three related questions: What are the demographic and psychological attributes of prospective migrants? Do prospective migrants hold more liberal democratic values than their countrymen? And do prospective migrants prefer democratic destinations? Demographically, prospective migrants are likely to be younger, educated, socially connected, and open-minded adults. And crucially, they hold less authoritarian and more democratic political values than their countrymen.

This means that if they depart, the society they leave behind will not only become older, less educated, and more insular; it means that it will also become less democratic and more authoritarian in its orientation. Based on a conjoint survey design in five countries in the Middle East and North Africa, this chapter later finds that demigrants’ initial destination preferences draw them to democracies that reflect the political and civic values they hold, even if this means sacrificing their material well-being to some extent. Not only are many authoritarian countries being depleted of people with democratic values, these individuals are inclined to self-sort into a dichotomized world of free, democratic destinations and increasingly authoritarian holdouts.

This chapter brings into focus an underlying theme of the book – the structured antithesis between male and female attitudes to animals, which was induced by social conditioning; especially by the values attaching to aggressive masculinity in the context of empire and, in contrast, the sequestered domesticity and gentleness expected of middle-class women. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s conduct books for women interpreted ‘separate spheres’ as including special female responsibilities for the protection of domestic animals, while Eliza Brightwen’s Wild Nature Won by Kindness and other titles elided domestic and religious ideals with the notion of taming and gentling wild creatures. The nationwide Band of Mercy movement for children promulgated this feminised ideal of tenderness towards animals, often in conflict with the pugnacious ethos in which boys were reared. However, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) transcended such gendered and class divides, as a work expressive of the Quaker ideal of sympathetic insight into the minds of animals as fellow-creatures of God.

This contribution draws on rhythmanalysis and the political economy of assemblage to provide a framework for understanding the productive spatiotemporal effects of physical violence on urban rhythms. The chapter explores how Buenaventura, Colombia's biggest port city, is transformed both by the growth in container turnover, and through recurring, spatial and temporal practices of violence. What role does violence play in the relation between trade-driven acceleration through the port, and the aquatic, tidal rhythm that historically shaped the city? The contribution mobilises the notion of disruption to analyse the frictions emerging between infrastructural nodes of acceleration, inhabitants’ movements and urban space. The author argues that while recurring violence provides urban rhythm itself, social movements may employ the temporal instrument of disruption as a means both of political articulation and transformation within the logics of accelerated accumulation and in a context marked by violent rhythms and forced mobility.

The fourth chapter analyses the airtime sellers’ and delivery riders’ relations to managers and dispatchers. In this way, the chapter decentres from the state as ‘rule-maker’ and monopoly of symbolic and physical violence, to overcome dichotomous views on (in)formal spheres of work. Rather, the chapter looks at regulatory practices. Law-like arrangements combine with personalized trust relations to organize relations of domination at work, which can put workers at risk of precarity. The comparative analysis points to the relevance of ‘ideas of the state’, i.e. how actors perceive and think of the state as a set of political practices (Abrams 1988). In Berlin, standardized rules represent official – or state – enunciations of authority. As such, actors share the belief in them as a legitimate reference against which work cooperation is organized. In Abidjan, the legitimacy of authority on the basis of personalized bonds reflects wider institutional normalcies in which actors see state institutions as institutions that utilize personal relations of domination as sources of authority.

Learning to identify emotion and discern it from sensation are key components of mindfulness training. Invariably, this knowledge is underdeveloped in the US and UK due to the predominance of a framework that emphasises the intellect and rationality over and above emotion. Building on the divergent ideas of temporality discussed in Chapter 8, this chapter troubles White Mindfulness’ portrayal of emotionality. Starting with Andrea Jain’s work on neoliberal spirituality that creates divisions and nationalisms, this chapter draws on Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion. Ahmed explains that the classification of knowledges through which emotion is understood in dominant Western discourses assumes either a sociological or a psychological lens. Emotions are seen to reside either in society or in the individual, generating an outside-in or an inside-out view. Instead, we come to understand that emotional objects circulate to create borders and boundaries, generating an impression of discrete bodies and formations. This thesis fosters an understanding of how dominant emotional artefacts and social norms circulate to create nationalisms, divisions, and supremacy. Through this lens the chapter considers how White Mindfulness interprets Buddhist teachings on suffering and flattens difference to render emotional effects similar. Questioning depoliticised notions of pleasant and unpleasant, the chapter also draws on Franz Fanon’s depiction of a doctor who administers care to a patient. Their relationship, viewed through the lens of the inequivalences in how emotional objects shape experience, is used as a metaphor for the White Mindfulness classroom.