Foucault News

Stuart Elden, A 1970 French interdisciplinary seminar on structuralism (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

26 March 2026

A 1970 French interdisciplinary seminar on structuralism, organised by Gilbert Gadoffre, André Lichnerowicz and François Perroux, and attended by Suzanne Bachelard, Pierre Bourdieu, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, André Martinet, Jacques Monod, Clémence Ramnoux, Michel Serres, Gilbert Simondon and René Thom

İhsan Gürsoy, Can education liberate us? Reframing an old question (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

24 March 2026

İhsan Gürsoy, Can education liberate us? Reframing an old question, Journal of Philosophy of Education, February 2026
https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhag002

Abstract
This article reframes the question ‘Can education liberate us?’ by shifting attention from education’s capacity to produce emancipated individuals to its capacity to enable—or foreclose—liberation within the experience of subjectivation. Instead of proposing new educational theory or conducting empirical research, it examines how normative frameworks in educational discourse limit possibilities for thinking about freedom and self-relation. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s and Michel Foucault’s respective critiques, the article argues that liberation must target not just the individual, but the very experience by which one comes to recognize oneself as an educational subject. Through critical analysis of Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy traditions, and Gert J. J. Biesta’s vision of democratic education, it shows that the most explicitly critical approaches operate within normative frameworks that presuppose specific forms of subjectivity, and predetermine what liberation means. As a counterpoint, the article returns to Plato’s paideia, reinterpreting it through Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’, and Heidegger’s analysis of the Cave Allegory. This reinterpretation considers whether education might function not as formation, but as a practice of freedom—one that frees the relation to self from normative constraints.

Joanne Hunt, Understanding disability/impairment, inclusively: the case of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 March 2026

Joanne Hunt, (2026). Understanding disability/impairment, inclusively: the case of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, Disability & Society, 41(1), 281–287.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2025.2492653

Abstract
Whilst myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has recently attracted high-profile media coverage, dominant accounts do not tell the whole story of how this group of disabled people came to occupy – albeit unequally – society’s fringes. This article, platforming some of the sidelined work of disabled activist-scholars, offers an understanding of oppressions confronting people with ME/CFS that is more inclusive of the politics impacting wider marginalised communities, offering possibilities for coalition-building with other social movements. Moreover, overlooked literature reveals intersecting power systems that differentially shape how ME/CFS is experienced, promoting an understanding of disability/impairment more inclusive of diversity. Inspired by the exhortation of Mike Oliver to record our own histories – lest they be written for us – this contribution seeks to challenge hierarchies and exclusions confronting the author as an academically-sidelined person with ME/CFS.

Keywords:
Disability, intersectionality, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, neoliberal-capitalism, politics of knowledge production, social movements

Joanne Hunt, Mapping the government of disability in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: A critical feminist account (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 March 2026

Joanne Hunt. Mapping the government of disability in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: A critical feminist account. International Journal of Disability and Social Justice. 2025. Vol. 5(3):332-356.
https://www.doi.org/10.13169/intljofdissocjus.5.3.0004

Abstract
People with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome have historically been conceptualised in health and social policy as “undeserving” of societal support, largely via a variant of biopsychosocial model charged with promoting multifaceted harms.

Whilst scientific literature has been preoccupied by paradigm conflicts pertaining to (bio)psychosocial and biomedical models of disability, the socio-cultural and biopolitical context driving (bio)psychosocial hegemony has received little mainstream scholarly attention.

Nevertheless, this context is addressed within subjugated knowledges, notably through the epistemic labours of disabled activists and marginally situated scholars.

This article espouses a feminist standpoint, feminist disability studies, and Foucauldian thought in re-examining and synthesising some of this work, locating psychosocial truth claims within an intersectionally oppressive and ever-expanding government of disability.

I argue that greater respect for subjugated knowledges could lead not only to a more strongly objective and nuanced understanding of (bio)psychosocial hegemony but also to greater possibilities in terms of resistance.

Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 March 2026

Stuart Jeffries, Jürgen Habermas obituary, The Guardian, 16 March 2026

Philosopher and social theorist who advocated a new direction for German thought after the horrors of Nazi rule

The philosopher, social theorist and defender of humane Enlightenment values Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, spent the last months of the second world war helping to protect the Third Reich. He was 15 and a member of the Hitler Youth. Too young to fight and too old to be exempted from war service, he was sent to the western front to man anti-aircraft defences.

He later described his father, the director of the local seminary, as a “passive sympathiser” with the Nazis and young Habermas shared that mindset. But he was soon shaken out of his and his family’s complacency by the Nuremberg trials and documentaries of Nazi concentration camps.

[…]

His great leftist, Jewish teachers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer philosophised in that rupture. Their student would follow suit. Adorno and Horkheimer had returned from American exile after the war to re-establish the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, and were developing an interdisciplinary way of thinking called critical theory. Adorno, in particular, whose assistant Habermas became in 1956, mused on whether “one who escaped [Auschwitz] by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living”.
[…]

Reason, Habermas maintained, was crucial to clear communication and such communication was a bulwark against fascism. Violence could have no role in that. The Enlightenment, Habermas concluded, continued to have “a sound core”. But in accepting the Enlightenment legacy Habermas was a man out of time – opposed not just by student radicals but by postmodernist thinkers.

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, said: “After the massacres we have experienced, no one can believe in progress, in consensus, in transcendent values. Habermas presupposes such a belief.” Habermas’s book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) defended those values against postmodernists – among them Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

[…]

For background reading on the “debate that never was” between Foucault and Habermas, see
James Schmidt, Foucault, Habermas, and the Debate That Never Was, Persistent Englightenment, 17 July 2013

Ronni Laursen, Miriam Madsen (eds). Education and the Politics of Time. Temporal Governance in Teaching and Learning (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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17 March 2026

Ronni Laursen, Miriam Madsen (eds). Education and the Politics of Time. Temporal Governance in Teaching and Learning, Springer, 2026

About this book
Education and the politics of time: temporal governance in teaching and learning explores how time—its organization, regulation, and lived experience—structures education across diverse contexts.

Organized into four thematic sections, the book’s 17 chapters offer critical analyses and vivid empirical accounts that expose the politics of time in education. The first section, the national and transnational politics of time, shows how reforms and policy agendas impose particular temporal logics on education systems. The second, the politics of institutional time, investigates how preschools, schools, and universities govern everyday life through calendars, timetables, and institutional rhythms. The third, the politics of teachers’ time, examines how temporal pressures shape professional work, identity, and wellbeing. The fourth, the politics of students’ time, traces how temporal expectations regulate students’ learning trajectories, aspirations, and everyday experiences.

Taken together, these chapters reveal how the politics of time shape educational practices in contested ways and toward different ends. With contributions from scholars based in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Australia, Kenya, Chile, and the USA, the volume situates local cases within wider global dynamics.

Rather than treating time as neutral, the book insists on its political character, showing how temporal norms structure identities, possibilities, and inequalities—and how they might be reimagined.

Emma Noble, Medical gaslighting: conceptual and theoretical foundations (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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13 March 2026

Emma Noble, Medical gaslighting: conceptual and theoretical foundations. Social Theory & Health 24, 1 (2026).
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-025-00247-4

Abstract
Medical gaslighting is a term that is frequently found in gray literature but rarely found in formal literature. However, Gaslighting is a term that has been examined in scientific literature, typically in relation to intimate partner relationships. I compare the concepts gaslighting and medical gaslighting in literature to identify critical distinctions and develop the following conceptual definition for medical gaslighting: Medical gaslighting is an interpersonal phenomenon involving a healthcare professional and a patient within which the healthcare professional trivializes, psychologizes, or dismisses the patient’s subjective bodily symptoms and health concerns. This leads to delays in care, medical mistrust, doubt in the reality of one’s bodily experiences, and medical trauma. Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action and Foucault’s conceptualizations of power are proposed as theoretical underpinnings to the phenomenon of medical gaslighting in order to contextualize the antecedents which make the phenomenon possible and lay the groundwork for future studies that I hope will aim to quantify and mitigate its effects on the health of marginalized populations.

Lorenzo Petrachi, Michel Foucault’s «La croisade des enfants». Schérer, Rochefort and the Political Philosophy of Childhood (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 March 2026

Lorenzo Petrachi, Michel Foucault’s «La croisade des enfants». Schérer, Rochefort and the Political Philosophy of Childhood, Filosofia politica 1/2026, pp. 121-140.
https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1416/119910

Article in Italian

Abstract
The essay offers an analysis of Michel Foucault’s previously unpublished manuscript, “La croisade des enfants”. After establishing its date and providing a description of the manuscript, the essay situates it within contemporary debates on childhood sexuality and power relations between adults and minors, paying particular attention to the work of René Schérer and Christiane Rochefort, whose writings intersect with Foucault’s project in several ways. In doing so, the article brings into focus the political and philosophical stakes of “La croisade des enfants”, illuminating aspects of Foucault’s thought that have thus far remained understudied.

Keywords
Foucault, Childhood, Schérer, Rochefort

Jessamine Giese, Megan Gibson, and Marie White, Navigating Policy Disconnect in Early Childhood: Teams Interpreting the NQF, EYLF, and Modern Awards (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 March 2026

Jessamine Giese, Megan Gibson, and Marie White, Navigating Policy Disconnect in Early Childhood: Teams Interpreting the NQF, EYLF, and Modern Awards. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, First published online February 12, 2026
https://doi.org/10.1177/18369391261425987

Abstract
In Australia, early childhood education and care (ECEC) has experienced substantial policy reform in the past 15 years with major shifts in qualification requirements, a national prescribed curriculum, and increasing focus on quality. Teams of early childhood educators are expected to collaboratively navigate these reforms while making decisions that lead to quality. This paper draws on a PhD study that examined how teams of educators in ECEC make curricular and pedagogical decisions within a complex policy landscape. Three key national policy documents that govern educators’ work—Guide to the National Quality Framework (NQF), Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), and modern awards—were closely analysed to make visible the complexities of how team decision-making is conceptualised in policy. Findings contribute to the global political attention on ECEC and offers ways forward for educators, organisations, and governments to re-align the reform strategy and strengthen policy implementation, leading to quality outcomes for children.

Jessamine Giese, Early Childhood Educators Producing Curriculum and Pedagogy: Discursive Possibilities of Team Decision-Making (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 March 2026

Jessamine Giese, (2025) Early Childhood Educators Producing Curriculum and Pedagogy: Discursive Possibilities of Team Decision-Making. PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology.

Open access

Description
There is increasing political interest in Australia on early childhood education and care reforms requiring educators to collectively navigate, and translate, policies into practice. This thesis explores how teams of educators interpret policy for curriculum and pedagogy. Provocations and opportunities are presented to strengthen the implementation of reform, offering new insights into ways teams of educators work within the scope of contemporary policy intent. A theoretical lens inspired by Michel Foucault enabled a scrutiny of key policies alongside an analysis of how teams of educators interpret and enact these policies, offering productive ways of thinking and speaking about team decision-making.

Abstract
This study is an inquiry into how teams of educators produce curriculum and pedagogy in long day care. In Australia, early childhood policy reform has presented major shifts in qualification requirements, a national prescribed curriculum, and rising importance on the quality of curriculum and pedagogy as provided by teams of educators (ACECQA, 2024). As educators are expected to navigate these reforms collaboratively, teams in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector grapple with the changing regulatory landscape (Armstrong, 2023; Harrison et al., 2023; Phillips & Boyd, 2023) and challenges associated with attracting, retaining, and upskilling educators saturate the workforce (Commonwealth of Australia, 2024; Education Services Australia, 2021; Queensland Government, 2023). This study brings a new layer of insight to the Australian ECEC landscape, following the scrutiny of key policies alongside an analysis of documents and focus groups on how teams of educators interpret and enact these policies.

Michel Foucault’s (1972) set of ideas outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge inspired both the theory and method elements of the research design for this qualitative study. A textual archive was created, consisting of data generated from policies and data collected from four long day care centres in Queensland, including centre documents and transcribed focus groups. The analytical tools applied in this study were informed by Foucault’s concepts of discourse (1972) and relations of power (1990; 1991), operationalised to look closely at the research question: How do teams of early childhood educators make curricular and pedagogical decisions in long day care?

A Foucault-informed theoretical lens enabled scepticism and critique (Gillies, 2013). Questioning the ‘rules’ which make possible the existence of policies and teams of educators enabled the taken for granted ways of doing curricular and pedagogical decision-making to be disrupted. As gaps and contradictions were located, “discovering new layers” (Foucault, 1981, p. 68) led to the identification of potential new paths for teams in ECEC. Drawing on Foucault’s work (1972), this study does not pose a singular and fixed response to the research question. Rather, use of Foucault’s concepts (1972; 1990; 1991) interrogated normalised discursive practices, and presented productive ways of thinking and speaking about team curricular and pedagogical decision-making.

Therefore, this study offers “possible paths of attack” (Foucault, 1996, p. 262) to encourage government policymakers and ECEC providers alongside their teams to “think otherwise” (Ball, 1998, p. 81) about the assumed ways teams of educators work to understand, and implement, policy. Overall, three key provocations are presented. First, this study makes visible disconnections between policies and the ways teams of educators enacted curricular and pedagogical decision-making, probing a revisit to the cluster of policies that govern educators’ work. Second, this study prompts policymakers to explore pathways to better harness the value of the degree-qualified teachers’ specialised curricular and pedagogical knowledge in teams. And third, this study presents opportunities to think differently about the position of the educational leader, a crucial role in leading quality curricular and pedagogical decision-making in Australia. Given the ongoing complexities of the ECEC workforce and the substantial political interest in the early years (both nationally and worldwide), this study opens up possibilities to strengthen the implementation of reform, through offering new insights into the ways teams of educators work within the scope of contemporary policy intent.