Foucault News

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

Special issue: The Politics of Life, European Journal of Social Theory, Volume 22 Issue 3, August 2019 Editorial Introduction: This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by …

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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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Ítala Nepomuceno, Hugo Affonso, James Angus Fraser, Maurício Torres, Counter-conducts and the green grab: Forest peoples’ resistance to industrial resource extraction in the Saracá-Taquera National Forest, Brazilian Amazonia (2019) Global Environmental Change, 56, pp. 124-133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.04.004 Abstract This paper contributes to the theory of environmentality – the ‘conduct of conduct’ with regard to the environment …

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Gordon Hull, The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property: Regulating Innovation and Personhood in the Information Age, Cambridge University Press, 2018 As a central part of the regulation of contemporary economies, intellectual property (IP) is central to all aspects of our lives. It matters for the works we create, the brands we identify and the medicines we …

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Clare Butler, Working the ‘wise’ in speech and language therapy: Evidence-based practice, biopolitics and ‘pastoral labour’ (2019) Social Science and Medicine, 230, pp. 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.03.038 Abstract This paper examines how power and knowledge are involved in the workings of speech and language therapy and in the work of speech and language therapists (SLTs). The paper …

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Ofer Parchev, Biopower, Sadomasochism, and Pastoral Power: Acceptance via Transgression (2019) Sexuality and Culture, 23 (1), pp. 337-355. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-018-9563-x Abstract The transposition of biopower from the state to the individual has been a major preoccupation of biopower scholarship in recent decades. While some researchers have found grounds for optimism in the diminution of state control …

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Sean R. Roberts,The biopolitics of China’s “war on terror” and the exclusion of the Uyghurs (2018) Critical Asian Studies, 50 (2), pp. 232-258. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1454111 Abstract This article provides an overview of People’s Republic of China (PRC) counter-terrorism policies targeting Uyghurs since 2001 when the state first asserted that it faced a terrorist threat from this …

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Mike Gane, The New Foucault Effect, Cultural Politics Volume 14, Issue 1, March 2018, pp. 109-127 This review article considers two lecture courses by Michel Foucault (1972–73, 1979–80) and two books relating to the whole series of lectures (1970–84) by Stuart Elden. Foucault’s lecture courses can be divided into three phases, the first focused on …

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La pensée politique de Foucault sous la direction d’Orazio IRRERA et Salvo VACCARO, Paris, Editions Kimé (coll. “Philosophie en cours”), 2017, p. 248. Loin d’être considérée comme une simple notion appartenant au vocabulaire de la théorie politique, l’idée foucaldienne de la politique renvoie plutôt à une attitude généalogique fournissant un diagnostic du présent et restituant …

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Luca Mavelli, Governing the resilience of neoliberalism through biopolitics (2017) European Journal of International Relations, 23 (3), pp. 489-512. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116676321 Abstract Neoliberalism is widely regarded as the main culprit for the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. However, despite this abysmal failure, neoliberalism has not merely survived the crisis, but actually ‘thrived’. How is it possible to …

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