Foucault News

The Foucault Century (1926-2026), Forum at University of Campinas, Brazil (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

26 August 2026

THE FOUCAULT CENTURY (1926-2026)

Forum at the 50th Annual Meeting of the National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Social Sciences (ANPOCS)

Online and at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), Campinas, Brazil · October 2, 8, and 9, 2026

Michel Foucault’s impact on the social sciences is undeniable. From the 1960s through the early 1980s, his major works generated intense debate and were classified first as structuralist and later as postmodernist, among other reductive labels. The decades since his death in 1984 have brought a remarkable expansion and refinement of scholarship on his work and influence. The posthumous publication of his lectures at the Collège de France; of the essays, interviews, and occasional writings collected in Dits et écrits; and, more recently, of previously unpublished manuscripts and other archival materials has significantly broadened the corpus through which his intellectual and political trajectory can be understood. At the same time, researchers have put his conceptual “toolbox” to work across an extraordinary range of fields and objects: health and illness; punishment and incarceration; the emergence of the human sciences and contemporary biopolitics; and gender, sexuality, and subjectivation, among many others.

This forum aims to take stock of how Foucault’s work has been taken up in the Brazilian social sciences—anthropology, political science, and sociology—as well as in international scholarship. Comprising both online and in-person panels, it does not aspire to offer an exhaustive account of the “Foucault effect” in contemporary social science. Rather, it brings together theoretically ambitious and empirically diverse perspectives on the uses, appropriations, and misuses of the work of one of the most publicly influential French intellectuals of the late twentieth century.

PROGRAM

Session 1. Genealogy and Power, Fifty Years On: Discipline and Punish and Society Must Be Defended (Online)

Date and time: October 2, 5:30–7:00 p.m. (Brasília time)

Chair: Gustavo Higa (USP)

Speakers: Andrei Koerner (Unicamp), Marcos César Alvarez (USP), and Pedro Henrique Vasques (INEU-INCT)

Discussant: Alessandra Teixeira (UFABC)

Session 2. The “Third Foucault” and The History of Sexuality Project: Ethics, Truth, and Subjectivation (In Person)

Date, time, and venue: October 8, 5:30–7:00 p.m. · IFCH, Sala da Congregação (Congregation Room)

Chair: Diogo Corrêa (EHESS)

Speakers: Bruno Reinhardt (UFSC), Ana Paula Perrota (UFRRJ), and César Teixeira (UFF)

Discussant: Gabriel Peters (UFPE)

Session 3. Fifty Years of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (In Person)

Date, time, and venue: October 9, 5:30–7:00 p.m. · IFCH, Sala da Congregação (Congregation Room)

Chair: Lucas Pilau (USP)

Speakers: Diego Madi (USP), Jacqueline Teixeira (USP), and Gabriel Peters (UFPE)

Discussant: Diogo Corrêa (EHESS)

Giorgi Vachnadze, Technology is Politics by Other Means (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 August 2026

Giorgi Vachnadze, Technology is Politics by Other Means. Reading Gil Duran’s “The Nerd Reich”, The Biopolitics of Artificial Intelligence blog, 25 August 2026

[…]
The Foucauldian Diagram

Start with Clausewitz: war is the continuation of politics by other means. Foucault took this formulation and reversed it in his Society Must Be Defended lectures: politics is the continuation of war by other means. What he meant is that peacetime does not suspend the operations of power — it just makes them less visible. Domination continues, only now dispersed through norms, institutions, infrastructure, the ordinary policing of daily life.

I want to extend that diagram one step further: technology is politics by other means.

This is not a metaphor. It is a description of what is actually happening. When Thiel said in 2010 that technology offers “an incredible alternative to politics,” what he was articulating — with unusual candor — is that technology allows those with sufficient capital and technical capacity to reshape the conditions of collective life without submitting to democratic oversight. To act first and seek legitimacy afterward. To govern without governing, to rule without being seen to rule.

Governance disguises itself as engineering. Power presents itself as efficiency. Political problems are re-described as technical problems and handed off to systems that appear neutral precisely because they are opaque. When an ethico-political question becomes a technical question, it is effectively removed from the domain of public deliberation and handed to whoever controls the apparatus. Instrumental rationality clears the path for elitism, and elitism — when you strip away the productivity rhetoric — is just fascism with better branding.
[…]

Foucault Centenary: Colloquium and Workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 August 2026

Foucault Centenary: Colloquium and Workshop
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

31 August – 4 September 2026

PDF of full program

As part of the international commemorations of the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth, two academic events will take place in Rio de Janeiro from 31 August to 4 September 2026, bringing together researchers, doctoral students and scholars working on Foucault’s thought and its contemporary implications.

The events are organized by the IDEA Research Programme of the School of Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), the research group “Desire and Political Experience” (Universidad de Buenos Aires), MediaLab UFRJ, and the Graduate Programme in Philosophy (PPGF/IFCS-UFRJ), in collaboration with several doctoral and research programmes in Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

31 August – 2 September | International Colloquium
“What is the irony of the dispositif today? Subject, Power and Desire”
Acaso Cultural, Rua Vicente de Souza, 16, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro.

The colloquium will bring together researchers from different countries to revisit Foucault’s analyses of sexuality, power, subjectivation and desire, asking about the contemporary relevance of the diagnosis developed around The Will to Knowledge and Society Must Be Defended. The programme includes contributions from scholars working on different aspects of Foucault’s philosophy, political thought and genealogy.

3–4 September | Doctoral Course and Workshop with Orazio Irrera
“La philosophie et l’ethnographie de notre propre culture”
Acaso Cultural, Rio de Janeiro.

The course will be taught in French by Orazio Irrera (Université Paris VIII), member of the Centre Michel Foucault and coordinator of the GRAF (Groupe de Recherche sur les Archives Michel Foucault).

The workshop will explore the emergence and development of Foucault’s formulation “faire l’ethnologie de notre propre culture”, placing his work in dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Particular attention will be given to Foucault’s 1966–1967 course at the University of Tunis and to recently published archival materials that shed new light on this period of his thought. The course will examine questions of philosophy, anthropology, alterity, colonialism and the critique of universalism.

Both events are free and open to researchers, doctoral students and others interested in Foucault’s work.

For further information, programme and registration, please contact:
Senda Sferco: senda.sferco@gmail.com
Marcio Tavares d’Amaral: marciotdamaral@gmail.com

Stuart Elden, Foucault on Frans Hals, The Regents and the illustration of his History of Madness (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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25 August 2026

Foucault on Frans Hals, The Regents and the illustration of his History of Madness

Stephen Ball, Interview with Professor Stephen J. Ball about ethics of intellectual work (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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24 August 2026

Stephen Ball, Interview with Professor Stephen J. Ball about ethics of intellectual work by Jefferson Mainardes, Práxis Educativa, Ponta Grossa, v. 21, e27091, p. 1-8, 2026
https://doi.org/10.5212/PraxEduc.v.21.27091.062

Open access Interview also available in Portuguese

Stephen J. Ball is a British sociologist of education, recognised worldwide as one of the leading figures in the fields of education policy and the sociology of education. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education (IOE), University College London (UCL). Ball’s ideas and publications have a strong influence on education policy research in Brazil and Latin America1, serving as theoretical contributions to research on the process of formulating and enacting education policies, as well as on the impact of neoliberalism, commodification, and privatisation on the configuration of contemporary education systems.

The question of ethics has been a recurring theme in his most recent work, which addresses, for example, the ethics of intellectual work, the ethics of extinction and continuity, education as an ethical activity, the ethics of errancy, and the ethics of responsibility. Inspired primarily by post- structuralist theories, especially the thought of Michel Foucault, Ball does not treat ethics merely as an abstract code of conduct but as a dynamic arena of dispute, subject formation, and the exercise of power. In this interview, we present some questions about the place of ethics in his research and his views on ethics today.

Tiancheng Xia, & Yuanjing Wu, A Genealogical Critique of Medicalization: From Conrad Back to Foucault (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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23 August 2026

Tiancheng Xia, & Yuanjing Wu (2026). A Genealogical Critique of Medicalization: From Conrad Back to Foucault. Acta Bioethica, 32(2), 193–205.
https://actabioethica.uchile.cl/index.php/AB/article/view/84796

Abstract
Foucault’s genealogy is widely applied in discussions of medicalization. Critics such as Conrad have adopted Foucault’s power-knowledge analysis as a crucial tool for critiquing it. However, these critiques often tend to view medicalization excessively as a negative phenomenon and frequently propose demedicalization strategies from the perspective of social governance, which leads to the neglect of individual agency. In this regard, Foucault’s genealogy can offer alternative insights. His emphasis on the productivity of power enables a better understanding of the positive aspects of medicalization, while his discussions on governance and technologies of the self highlight the role of self-governance. This paper argues that by returning to Foucault’s genealogical analysis, we can not only develop more diverse perspectives on social medicalization but also derive insights for self-governance within current demedicalization strategies.

Keywords:
medicalization; demedicalization; genealogy; power-knowledge; governance; Foucault; Conrad

Stuart Elden, Three Foucault books in new editions from Gallimard – to coincide with his 100th birthday (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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21 August 2026

Three Foucault books in new editions from Gallimard – to coincide with his 100th birthday

Jessamine Giese, Marie White and Megan Gibson, Leading from Outside the ‘Hierarchical Box’: Enacting the Educational Leader Role in Early Childhood Teams (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 August 2026

Jessamine Giese, Marie White and Megan Gibson. 2026. “Leading from Outside the ‘Hierarchical Box’: Enacting the Educational Leader Role in Early Childhood Teams” Education Sciences 16, no. 8: 1306.
https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci16081306

Abstract
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is significantly shaped by policy and an enduring focus on quality. While policy governs service provision, it is teams of educators who transform policy into practice, defining and enacting understandings of policy and quality through shared decision-making. In Australia, central to the ECEC quality agenda is the educational leader, a role positioned to guide teams of educators in decision-making. This paper examines how the educational leader role is interpreted in centre documents by services and then enacted in practice by individuals, drawing on Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis of a textual archive comprising policy documents, centre documentation, and focus group data from four Queensland long day care centres. Findings indicate a disconnect between policy intentions of the educational leader and centre-level enactment, where the role is both enabled and constrained in various ways. The educational leader is identified as enacted through five discursive practices: the educational leader as an ‘add-on’ role, no degree required, outside the ‘hierarchical box’, compliance officer, and guide and mentor. By making visible the ways centres interpret and individuals enact the role, this study presents pathways forward to revisit policy and reconsider the positioning of the educational leader in centre staffing structures.

Keywords:
early childhood education and care; educational leader; discourse analysis; discursive practices; decision-making; quality; leadership and teamwork; roles and responsibilities

Julie Assouly & Esther Heboyan (eds.) “Elsewhere” in American Cinema. How Hollywood Represents the World (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 August 2026

Julie Assouly & Esther Heboyan (eds.) “Elsewhere” in American Cinema. How Hollywood Represents the World, Bloomsbury, 2026

Description
The foreign ‘elsewhere’ has long been depicted in American cinema as a site of fascination and fantasy, shaping how Western audiences view the world. ‘Elsewhere’ in American Cinema explores how these portrayals have also created enduring stereotypes and reinforced troubling power dynamics, models and counter-models.

Bringing together a diverse group of international contributors, the volume explores depictions of the ‘elsewhere’ across various genres including musicals, westerns, war films, and romantic comedies. Drawing on theoretical frameworks such as Michel Foucault’s heterotopias, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and Homi Bhabha’s concept of in-betweenness, the eleven chapters offer fresh perspectives on films spanning from the silent era to contemporary Hollywood. Through close readings of films such as The Fugitive (1947), America America (1963), and Kingdom of Heaven (2005), they analyse Hollywood’s emphasis on patriotism and its problematic portrayal of conflict zones, the role of music in exoticising foreign lands, and the evolution of stereotypes into counter-models.

As a result, the cinematic ‘elsewhere’ emerges as a complex space that is simultaneously real and constructed, familiar and alien, onto which American filmmakers project cultural anxieties, fantasies, and ideologies, revealing the changing relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.

Ian Hunter, Spiritual Exercises in Kantian Philosophy: An Interview with Ian Hunter (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 August 2026

Ian Hunter, Spiritual Exercises in Kantian Philosophy: An Interview with Ian Hunter by Rex Butler, Journal of the History of Ideas blog, 17 August 2026

Ian Hunter is an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is an intellectual historian who has published various studies in the history of philosophical, political, legal, and theological thought. These studies treat thought as a concrete activity that is carried out within historical time through “arts and methods” and anchored in various “intellectual personae.” His first major work of this kind was Rival Enlightenments, published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. His most recent work and the topic of the present discussion is The Kantian Religion, an historical account of Kantianism as a philosophical religion published by Princeton University Press in 2026. For the JHI Blog, he discussed his latest work with Rex Butler, a Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University who writes on critical theory and Australian art.

[…]
Ian Hunter: I had already drawn on Foucault’s discussion of spirituality and its relation to philosophy in earlier works. Foucault treats spirituality as the carrying out of certain “acts of the self on the self” that are designed to shape a subject capable of higher forms of insight, including philosophical insight. This was an approach that he shared with his one-time Berkeley colleague, the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown, from whose studies of philosophical asceticism I have also learned so much. Fraenkel’s and Hadot’s work has been less important for my investigations, since the former thinks that Neoplatonic philosophy functions as a true religion, while the latter argues that ancient philosophy’s role as a way of life was transferred to Christianity, leaving modern philosophy to emerge as an abstract method. In characterizing Kantianism as a philosophical religion, my aim is more straightforwardly historical: to delineate a series of features that permit the empirical question of its religious disposition to be posed.

[…]