In numerous countries, pessimism about enduring social and educational inequalities has produced a discernible therapeutic turn in education policy and practice, and a parallel rise in therapeutic understandings of social justice. Focusing on developments in England and Finland, this paper explores the ways in which radical/critical conceptualisations of social justice privilege attention to psycho-emotional vulnerabilities. Extending older forms of psychologisation, therapeutic understandings of social justice in many contemporary radical/critical accounts resonate powerfully with the wider therapisation of popular culture and everyday life. Using theories of discursive power, we explore the new forms of governance, subjectivity and agency in mainstream therapeutic programmes, and evaluate their implications for pedagogies rooted in radical/critical notions of social justice.

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Publicly funded projects with economic aims and discourses have permeated the public sector, including education. In practice this has meant a shift whereby publicly funded education has evolved into a series of business-oriented projects with individually targeted activities. The rapidly increasing amount of project-based work in education is a result of a shift whereby Finland has become a project society. In this article I will disclose the alliance between projectisation, marketisation and therapisation of education in Finland by analysing project-based equality training in education and project-based training and guidance for young adults. Both activities operate in quite different contexts in the field of adult education but are still targeted by similar forms of power that I aim to analyse in this article.

This article explores a new kind of political ethos in education: the alliance of projectisation and precarisation and their individual-based implementation. It is a critique of project based activities working with ‘at risk’ groups in Finland, specifically in the preparation of immigrants and those with criminal backgrounds, for a life of precarity. The projects discussed refer to publicly funded, short-term educational programmes that operate outside or on the edge of the formal education system. The authors' argument is that while projects have become an ideological method of introducing a market orientation to welfare politics, this political ethos places people considered to be ‘at risk’ in positions where insecurity is inevitable, and flexibility may be either a help or a hindrance.

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