Page last updated 8 January 2026 with a statement about generative AI
My name is Dr. Clare O’Farrell and I lectured at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia until my retirement in December 2024. For further details about me see my publications page. You can also contact me via email
This site (incorporating my older michel-foucault.com site) posts news in relation to new publications, conferences and other activities and provides resources in relation to the work of French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926 -1984).
If you have any news about Foucault related activity which you would like to publicise on this blog, please email me
News items in languages other than English are also very welcome. As I only speak English and French, there tends to be a bias towards items in these two languages on the blog. For news in Italian see the Variazione Foucaultiane and the Materiali Foucaultiani sites, in Portuguese the Grupo de Estudos Foucaultianos and in German the blog associated with the peer-reviewed open access journal Genealogy + Critique
News can include
- conferences, seminars, presentations, calls for papers
- publications – books, articles, conference proceedings etc. These can either be directly about Foucault or apply some aspect of his work. Please feel free to send as much information as you like – for example summaries and abstracts
- any visual art exhibitions, performances or films which deal in some way with Foucault’s work
- controversies around Foucault’s work
- any other activity or events related to Foucault
Statement about generative AI
I do not support the outsourcing of research and writing to generative AI. This is sometimes (often) very hard to detect. If you notice posts on work that falls into this category, please let me know. The use of grammar and translation software by non native speakers is not included in this category – as long as the original words were authored by a human writer/researcher.
References
Callum Cant, James Muldoon, Mark Graham, Feeding the Machine. The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I., Bloomsbury, 2024.
Kate Crawford, Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret, Nature 626, 693 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00478-x
Sharon Kabel, A bibliography of genAI-fueled research fraud from 2025. Sharon Kabel’s blog, 23 December 2025.
Dmitry Kobak et al. Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary, Science Advances, vol 7, Issue 27 (2025). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adt3813
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage, MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, no. Winter 2022 (January). https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.031d4553.
James Muldoon interviewed by Sabrina Provenzani, AI is an extraction machine. But resistance is possible, The Citizens, 17 September 2024.
Retraction Watch, Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process.
Background
As some background to the Foucault News blog, Jeremy Crampton set up the Foucault Blog in March 2007 to post news on Foucault related activity. In August 2010, he announced that he was moving on to other interests and starting another blog. At that point, I offered to take over from him in maintaining a web news presence on all things Foucault.
Foucault Resources: Overview and history
The pages of ‘Foucault resources’ on this site have been brought across from my old michel-foucault.com website and updated. If there is information missing which you would like to see on the resource pages, please email me or leave a comment in the comments boxes on the relevant pages.
I have maintained an online presence on Foucault since January 1997, and initially used my site to advertise an edited volume of papers from a conference I ran in 1994 on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Foucault: The Legacy (Brisbane: QUT, 1997). See here, courtesy of the wayback machine what my website looked like in 1998, complete with dire amateur retro design. The site was initially coded by hand in html before the advent of sophisticated web design software.
I subsequently expanded the site and here is a ‘redesigned’ version in 2000 and then its final form (done in 2007) as it appeared after its last update in July 2013.
After running the site on servers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane from 1997, I transferred and merged the material on the site with my Foucault News blog in April 2018.
Banner for the site
The banner image is a detail from the Map of Alexandria (1575) by Georg Braun. The original is from The MET Museum in New York and digitally enhanced by rawpixel. It is a creative commons image.
https://www.rawpixel.com/image/2042160/map-alexandria
A relevant passage from Foucault:
“The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”
Michel Foucault, Of other spaces, Trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, Spring 1986. (Original work published 1967), p.27.
Foucault News 