Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Jemma Tosh, Psychology and Gender Dysphoria. Feminist and Transgender Perspectives, Routledge, 2105 Description Psychiatry and psychology have a long and highly debated history in relation to gender. In particular, they have attracted criticism for policing the boundaries of ‘normal’ gender expression through gender identity diagnoses, such as transvestism, transsexualism, gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria. …

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Heather Brunskell-Evans, Mini-Symposium on Sex and Gender: Foucault and the Construction of Transgender Children, The Electric Agora A modern symposium for the digital age blog, July 2019 Thirty years ago, ‘the transgender child’ would not have made sense to the general public, nor would it have made sense to young people. Today, children and adolescents …

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Niko Besnier, Susan Brownell, Thomas F. Carter, The Anthropology of Sport. Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics, University of California Press, 2017 Few activities bring together physicality, emotions, politics, money, and morality as dramatically as sport. In Brazil’s stadiums or China’s parks, on Cuba’s baseball diamonds or Fiji’s rugby fields, human beings test their physical limits, invest emotional …

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Siew Fung Lee (2019) Governing ‘disadvantage’ through readiness: A Foucauldian policy genealogy of funded nursery places for two-year-olds. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949119864200 ABSTRACT This article critically examines how the policy of funded nursery places for ‘disadvantaged’ two-year-olds in England opens up economic and political spaces in readiness for increased governance. The government introduced …

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Benjamin Meiches, The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) Interview with author conducted by Jeff Bachman Description For a term coined just seventy-five years ago, genocide has become a remarkably potent idea. But has it transformed from a truly novel vision for international justice into a conservative, even inaccessible …

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Paul Rekret, Derrida and Foucault. Philosophy, Politics, and Polemics, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017 Derrida and Foucault offers a major contribution to the interpretation of these two highly influential thinkers. By tracing the moments where Derrida and Foucault’s arguments converge but also where they deviate, this book fundamentally recasts our understanding not only of these …

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Originally posted on Progressive Geographies:
‘Foucault in the Valley of Death‘ – Andrew Marzoni on Simeon Wade’s Foucault in California in The Baffler (online and in issue #46). I spoke to Marzoni by phone during his research for this piece, and am briefly quoted in it. Although it uses the Wade memoir, it goes quite a…

Yongchun Cai, Borges and Ge Fei: Transfiguring the poetics of atemporal labyrinth (2019) Neohelicon, 46 (1), pp. 303-329. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-019-00480-7 Abstract This article examines, from a comparative perspective, how Jorge Louis Borges configures his archetypal textual labyrinth in “The Garden of Forking Paths” and to what extent the Chinese avant-gardist Ge Fei is inspired to absorb, …

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Thiel, J. The UK National Student Survey: An amalgam of discipline and neo-liberal governmentality (2019) British Educational Research Journal, 45 (3), pp. 538-553. DOI: 10.1002/berj.3512 Abstract The UK National Student Survey (NSS) has high status on the agenda of UK universities. Its rise in status is linked to its influence on national rankings and associated …

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Gobby, B., Niesche, R. Community empowerment? School autonomy, school boards and depoliticising governance (2019) Australian Educational Researcher, 46 (3), pp. 565-582. DOI: 10.1007/s13384-019-00303-9 Abstract The public education systems of many countries have undergone governance reforms involving administrative decentralisation, corporatisation and community ‘empowerment’. In this paper, we examine the significance of local participation and partnerships in …

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