Foucault News

Daniel Weizman, Michel Foucault: A New Archivist in the Age of AI. Online Course (2027)

Clare O'Farrell

29 October 2026

Michel Foucault: A New Archivist in the Age of AI (Online Course)

8 Sessions, 20 January 2027 – 10 March 2027
Wednesdays
7:00pm – 9:00pm GMT (UK Time)
The London School of Continental Philosophy

Teacher: Dr. Daniel Weizman
Price: £240

About
Michel Foucault helped create the intellectual world we inhabit today. His concepts changed what we notice in a hospital, a school or a claim to expertise, and his vocabulary still circulates through political debate and everyday conversation. Words such as “discourse”, “normalisation” and “power” have become so familiar that we can easily assume we already know what he meant by them. Yet their widespread use often obscures the questions he developed them to ask. What makes his thought so powerful, and what can it help us understand about the changes taking place around us?

This eight-week online course returns to Foucault’s early work to explore questions that technology and AI make urgent: how knowledge is organised, how authority is established and challenged, and what place human beings occupy within the systems through which they are known. Our main text will be The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), read alongside selected passages from Madness and Civilisation, The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things.

Foucault approaches these questions through concrete historical transformations. In Madness and Civilisation, he examines the changing boundaries between madness and reason, and psychiatry’s claim to speak for the people it treats. In The Birth of the Clinic, hospitals, case records, examinations and autopsies become part of a new organisation of medical knowledge.

The Archaeology of Knowledge asks how we can investigate transformations like these. How does a pattern of behaviour become a symptom? What allows a personal history to function as medical evidence? How do people become qualified to classify others and make decisions about their lives? Foucault examines the practices through which these relationships take shape.

We will use Foucault’s approach to examine contemporary changes in knowledge. When a bank uses an AI assessment to refuse a loan, a prediction about someone’s future becomes a decision that helps shape it. The applicant may struggle to discover why they were classified as a risk, while the adviser can report the result without explaining how it was reached. What makes the assessment credible? Where does responsibility lie? And what would allow someone to challenge the judgement or the categories on which it rests?

In his book The Order of Things, Foucault provokes us by claiming that “Man” is a recent invention, and one that may disappear. He means a particular historical arrangement in which human beings are both objects of investigation and the basis for explaining how knowledge is possible. We will ask how AI might transform this arrangement, changing the concepts through which we understand thought, language and intelligence, and the place human beings occupy within knowledge.

The course offers a close, accessible reading of a challenging book, with contemporary examples and discussion of problems that concern all of us today. No previous knowledge of Foucault is required.

What will we cover?

An introduction to early Foucault through his investigations of madness, medicine and the emergence of the modern human sciences.
How archaeological analysis works, using examples to explore statements, discourses and archives.
How technology and AI may change the questions institutions ask, the evidence they accept and the expertise they recognise.
Foucault’s claim that “man” could disappear, and what changes in the organisation of knowledge might mean for our understanding of ourselves.

Requirements
This course is designed for anyone with an interest in Foucault and contemporary thought, and assumes no prior knowledge.

Elena Vasiliou, Brunilda Pali et al, A call for epistemic disobedience in the face of the European Society of Criminology’s silence on Palestine (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 October 2026

Elena Vasiliou, Brunilda Pali, Marijke Van Buggenhout, Lior Volinz, and Mattias Lucien De Backer. “A call for epistemic disobedience in the face of the European Society of Criminology’s silence on Palestine”, Justice, Power and Resistance (published online ahead of print 26 Oct 2026 )
https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2026D000000089

Abstract
This article examines the European Society of Criminology’s (ESC) refusal to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an epistemic event that exposes how knowledge, silence, and institutional power are produced within criminology. Drawing on fieldnotes, public statements, and the Motion introduced by Criminologists for Palestine at the ESC General Assembly in Athens (2025), we analyse how appeals to neutrality, academic freedom, dialogue, and institutional procedure and power were used to avoid accountability and silence demands for action. These mechanisms are forms of governance that preserve criminology’s alignment with state power and sustain its distance from colonial and genocidal violence. Reading the events that took place in Athens in dialogue with feminist, decolonial, and critical criminology, we show how these mechanisms operate as ideological and discursive mechanisms of denial and strategic ignorance, working together to shape the discipline’s boundaries. We conclude by foregrounding epistemic disobedience as a necessary practice for confronting criminology’s complicities and for imagining forms of knowledge that refuse silence in the face of injustice.

[…]
Neutrality becomes a mechanism of insulation, protecting criminology’s institutional alliances with state and legal authority. As Foucault (1980) argued, disciplines determine what can be said and who can say it. Within criminology, the language of ‘science’, ‘evidence’, and ‘reform’ establishes the limits of critique, rendering colonial violence, occupation, siege, and genocide external to its epistemic boundaries (Agozino, 2003; Morrison, 2004; Tauri, 2013; Pali, 2023; Deckert, 2025; Vasiliou, 2025).
[…]

Ravinder Sidhu & Mayumi Ishikawa. Governing the International University. The Intellectual and Ethical Challenges of Leadership (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 October 2026

Ravinder Sidhu & Mayumi Ishikawa (2022). Governing the International University. The Intellectual and Ethical Challenges of Leadership In: Fenwick W. English (ed) The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99097-8_95

Abstract
By the end of the twentieth century, many universities worldwide were describing themselves as international or global in vision, mission, and reputation. In doing so, they came to be represented in normative discourse as instruments of progressive cosmopolitanism. Under the guise of establishing “world class” status, university leaders have drawn on international benchmarks and models of good practice without sufficient regard to the persistence of colonial imaginaries of empire and nation in their revisionings. The chapter interrogates the global reach of governing rationalities such as “corporatization,” and “world class” reputation-making and the ethical and intellectual challenges they have presented for universities. Michel Foucault’s ideas of critique provides the analytical lens from which to interrogate normative understandings of the international university in Japan and Australia. Lessons learnt from two sets of crises, a natural disaster and a health pandemic, guide the discussions on using Foucault’s conceptualization of critique to consider university leadership anew.

Engin Isin, The Birth of Sensory Power. Doing Things with Words, Numbers and Neurons (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 October 2026

Engin Isin, The Birth of Sensory Power. Doing Things with Words, Numbers and Neurons, Edinburgh University Press, 2025.

How have datasciences and neurosciences converged to create a new form of power, polity and citizenship?

Proposes a theory of sensory power and re-examines theories of sovereign, disciplinary, and regulative powers
Offers a revised history of datasciences and neurosciences
Develops a revised theory of the brain-machine imitation game, offering an account of how the imitation game affects cities, states, and empires and produces the autopoietic subject

This book examines the transformation of historical forms of power and the emergence of new polities and citizen-subjects produced by a new form of power – sensory power – in the 21st century. Engin Isin highlights how sensory power, driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, transforms historical forms of power (sovereign, disciplinary and regulative), reconfigures cities, states, and empires, and engenders the autopoietic subject. Drawing from thinkers like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, and reworking their theories of power with Austin and Derrida, the book offers a critical perspective on these changes.

CFP: Byung-Chul Han and Contemporary Culture Online symposium (2026, 2027)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 October 2026

Byung-Chul Han and Contemporary Culture. Online symposium. Hosted by European University Cyprus

Deadline for abstracts: Monday 18 January 2027

Byung-Chul Han engages extensively with Foucault’s work.

Byung-Chul Han’s slim volumes of philosophy now circulate widely in English, with more than twenty books translated since 2015. These books offer a cosmopolitan account of a digital age in which technology allows power to seduce rather than repress, and in which contemplation and even idleness become essential for the survival of love and community. His accounts of burnout, transparency, psychopolitics, the “infocracy,” the disappearance of ritual and of things, the loss or expulsion of the other, the necessity of shared time, and the crisis of narration have also travelled far beyond academic philosophy.

Yet within English-language critical theory his work, which seems to have a high degree of relevance to contemporary cultural objects and movements, has received comparatively little sustained application. The immediate aim of this symposium, then, is to put Han’s concepts to work as diagnostic tools: our focus is less on his philosophy in the abstract than on what it can do when brought to bear on specific cultural objects, texts and practices. Here we follow Deleuze’s remark that a theory “is exactly like a box of tools… It must be useful. It must function,” and indeed Han’s own pronouncement in The Agony of Eros that theory is “an essential decision that causes the world to appear […] in a wholly different light.”

We welcome contributions from across the humanities and social sciences, including literary studies (print and digital), cultural studies, media and communication studies, film and television, games studies, theology, visual culture and art history, design, and more. Papers will as standard be 15 minutes, though we are prepared to be flexible in terms of length and format.

We are delighted that Professor Steven Knepper will be the keynote speaker for this symposium. Professor Knepper is, among his other achievements, co-author of Byung-Chul Han (Polity, 2024), the only full-length critical introduction to Han’s work.

Depending on the number and quality of responses, and the range of subjects covered, the aim is for this symposium to result in publication, either a focused journal special issue or a broader collection of essays with a university press. Scholars at any stage of their career are very welcome to submit.

Possible topics

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Burnout and the achievement-subject in fiction, film, art or games
Psychopolitics and the shaping of subjectivity by platforms, apps or other technologies of mediation
Storyselling in social media influencer personae, autofiction, and other forms of self-presentation
Counterexamples: digital practices that sustain ritual, contemplation and/or community
The Crisis of Narration applied to fiction, journalism or online culture
The shitstorm/swarm as mode of digital communication
Non-things: smartphones, digital artworks, e-books, Instapoems, text on screen more broadly
The aesthetics of the smooth in art and design
Generative AI and cultural production as technology of control (Infocracy, Non-Things)
Datafication’s assault on subjectivity
The defence of love/eros in the achievement society
Ritual and play as cultural practices under pressure
Boredom, contemplation and the vita contemplativa as manifested in cultural objects
Shanzhai: copying and translation in globalised culture
Han as a writer – essayistic form, brevity and/or readability as tactic

How to submit

Please send the following to j.mackay@euc.ac.cy by Monday 18 January 2027:

an abstract of 250–300 words, including the title
a brief bio-note of no more than 100 words

Papers should be given in English. There is no fee for attendance. For any questions, please contact the organiser at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy.

Foucault and Marx. Special Collection G+C (2025-2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 October 2026

Foucault and Marx, Genealogy + Critique, 2025-2026

Papers for the symposium “Foucault and Marx: Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles” (University of Vienna, 18–19 October 2024). The symposium was part of the World Congress “Foucault: 40 years after”, marking the 40th anniversary of Foucault’s death.

The special collection “Foucault and Marx,” edited by Eva-Maria Aigner, Ralf Gisinger, Christoph Hubatschke, Eva Jägle, and Jonas Oßwald, explores key aspects of the ambivalent relationship between Foucault, Marx, and Marxism. Despite the significance of Foucault’s supposed anti-Marxism for the tensions and polemics between poststructuralism, critical theory, and Marxist theory, their relationship remains surprisingly underexplored. With the recent publication of Foucault’s early lectures, particularly Penal Theories and Institutions and The Punitive Society, a much more nuanced picture of Foucault’s account of Marx began to emerge than commonly assumed. The special collection aims to investigate this constellation against the backdrop of this latest perspective, shedding new light on questions of theoretical lineage and discontinuity as well as contemporary approaches, uses, and continuations of the Foucault–Marx nexus.

Editorial

Eva-Maria Aigner, Ralf Gisinger, Christoph Hubatschke, Evi Jägle, Jonas Oßwald, “Foucault and Marx: Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles,” Genealogy+Critique 12, no. 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.31073

Articles

– Matteo Polleri, “From Adversity to Heresy: Towards a Disjunctive Conjunction of Foucault and Marx,” Genealogy+Critique 11, no. 1 (2025). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.23083

– Chiara Stefanoni and Francesco Aloe, “The Queer ‘Standpoint of Reproduction’: De Lauretis as a Reader of Althusser and Foucault,” Genealogy+Critique 11, no. 1 (2025). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.22918

– Gordan Maslov and Atila Lukić, “As the Earth Falls into the Sun: Marx, Foucault and the Problem of Destruction,” Genealogy+Critique 11, no. 1 (2025). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.22995

– Tanja Wischnewski and Johann Szews, “Modern Times: Zeitregime der Moderne bei Michel Foucault und Moishe Postone”, Genealogy+Critique 12, no. 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.23664

– Friederike Beier, “The Biopolitics of Social Re_production: Feminist Foucauldian and Marxist Perspectives,” Genealogy+Critique 12, no. 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.23004

Laurent Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time. Archaeology and Memory (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 October 2026

Laurent Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time. Archaeology and Memory, trans. Arthur Greenspan, Bloomsbury, 2024.

Description
The field of archaeology continues to face a major crisis of interpretation. The traditional view is that the basic business of archaeology is to reconstruct the history of cultures and civilizations through their material productions. Olivier challenges this view with a new approach to archaeological remains based on the works of French theorists such as Foucault, de Certeaux, and Derrida, with insight from Darwin and Freud. His thesis is that archaeology does not study the past itself but rather what materially remains of the past in our present. Olivier also develops an interpretation of material culture based on Aby Warburg’s and Walter Benjamin’s work in the anthropology of art. With wider implications for history and all social sciences, The Dark Abyss of Time is a major contribution to the theory of time, memory, heritage, and archaeology. This flawless translation makes Olivier’s elegantly written work available in English for the first time.

Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis, Série: Foucault, penseur du présent (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 October 2026

Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis, Série: Foucault, penseur du présent, Mediapart, octobre 2026

Né il y a tout juste cent ans, le 15 octobre 1926 et mort du sida en 1984, Michel Foucault est aujourd’hui le philosophe français le plus cité au monde. Jusqu’où sa pensée nous est-elle contemporaine ? Quelle part peut aujourd’hui nous paraître obsolète ? Comment celui qui n’a écrit qu’un paragraphe sur la colonisation a-t-il créé une boîte à outils utilisée par presque toutes les études postcoloniales ? Pourquoi sa pensée radicale sur les prisons n’a-t-elle guère fait école ? Une série en quatre épisodes, alors que les inédits éditoriaux de Foucault prolifèrent à l’occasion de son centenaire, en dépit de ses volontés posthumes.

Réservé aux abonné·es

Judith Butler : Entretien « L’écriture de Michel Foucault est trop ironique, trop subtile pour correspondre au stéréotype du wokisme » (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 October 2026

Judith Butler : Entretien « L’écriture de Michel Foucault est trop ironique, trop subtile pour correspondre au stéréotype du wokisme » , Le nouvel obs, Propos recueillis par Marie Lemonnier, Publié le 17 octobre 2026

Entretien L’autrice de « Trouble dans le genre » rend hommage au philosophe dont on fête cet automne le centenaire. Elle évoque les pistes fécondes qu’il a ouvertes, notamment pour le féminisme.

Comment avez-vous rencontré la pensée de Michel Foucault ?
[…]

Article réservé aux abonnés

Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery, Ravinder Sidhu (eds), The Future of Cross-Border Academic Mobilities and Immobilities. Power, Knowledge and Agency (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

22 October 2026

Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery, Ravinder Sidhu (eds), The Future of Cross-Border Academic Mobilities and Immobilities. Power, Knowledge and Agency, Bloomsbury, 2025

Open access

Description
This open access edited collection brings together reflections on the fast-changing and crisis-ridden global context and develops new ways of conceptualising academic mobilities, and immobilities, against a backdrop of a conflicted and precarious future for global higher education. The result is a set of vivid cutting-edge contributions, some of which take a global view and others which explore a country perspective, including China, France, Malaysia, Philippines, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, and more.

The book foregrounds critical approaches to academic mobility, with topics covered including blockages to mobility in the context of geopolitical tensions and the upsurge of national particularism and nativism, the intersection of academic (im)mobilities and power, political subjectivities and race, class and gender. Traditional understandings of academic mobility as physical mobility from global South to North are questioned as exclusionary and alternative models of mobility are offered. These include those appropriate to post-colonial national and regional contexts, those responsive to the changing needs of students, academics and their communities, those using online modes as well as those involving physical transfers of persons, and those about the mobility of knowledge as well as people and learning.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.