Ten Weeks on Foucault Course: Powerful Ideas and Practical Applications
Course by Kerry Sanders
6 Aug 2013 – 8 Oct 2013
University of Sydney, Centre for Continuing Education.
Training and development courses open to anyone
Introduction
It will be argued that Foucault gives an analysis of political power and its institutions, which are crucial to understanding the world we now live in. Foucault shows that control over knowledge, that is what we know or believe, makes us what we are. One of the most important mechanisms of making modern individuals is the process of ‘normalisation’ in which divisions are established between groups such as ‘sane and insane’; criminal and law abiding; diseased and healthy. We will then apply ideas such as: ‘bio-power’; ‘technologies of the self’; ‘surveillance’ to some contemporary situations and see if Foucault’s ideas illuminate our social understanding.
Course Content
- Introduction to Foucault: The construction of the subject through power and knowledge
- Bio-Power: How do political and cultural institutions use the human body, with its capacities and limitations, to its own ends?
- Discipline and Punish
- Those who have the power to say what constitutes the truth, have the power to construct subjecthood.
- The History of Sexuality, Vol. l
- Technologies of Self Construction: These are the self-chosen practices of the subject, in which self-discipline and self-analysis seem to be freely chosen.
- “The Subject and Power”
- Technologies of the Self. What is Foucault’s (limited) ‘solution’ to the problems of oppressive power?
- Technologies of Space. The body is actively produced with its constraints and capacities through the spaces in which it operates. E.g. The shifts in workplace architecture in the different stages of industrialism, produces different kinds of workers: agricultural workers developed different body capacities than someone confined to the space of an assembly line, where the body is maximised to do repetitive tasked for long periods.
- Apply ideas such as: ‘bio-power’; ‘technologies of the self’; ‘surveillance’ to some contemporary situations and see if Foucault’s ideas illuminate our social understanding.
Foucault News 