Foucault News

Hansen, M.P., Triantafillou, P. Methodological reflections on Foucauldian analyses: Adopting the pointers of curiosity, nominalism, conceptual grounding and exemplarity (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

6 June 2022

Hansen, M.P., Triantafillou, P.
Methodological reflections on Foucauldian analyses: Adopting the pointers of curiosity, nominalism, conceptual grounding and exemplarity
(2022) European Journal of Social Theory

DOI: 10.1177/13684310221078926

Abstract
This article seeks to provide a set of pointers for methodological reflections on Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the exercise of power. Michel Foucault deliberately eschewed methodological schemata, which may be why so little has been written on the methodological implications of his analyses. While this article shares the premise that we should refrain from a standardized methodology, it argues that providing broad pointers for analyses informed by the critical ambition and conceptual framework offered by Foucault is both desirable and possible. The article then offers some reflections and general guidelines on how to strengthen the methodological quality of Foucauldian analyses. We argue that the quality of Foucauldian-inspired analysis of modern power may gain from methodological reflections around four pointers: curiosity, nominalism, conceptual grounding and exemplarity. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
Critique; genealogy; method; Michel Foucault; relativism

Interview with Bernard Tschumi on deconstructivism (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 June 2022

The legacy of deconstructivism “makes me want to retreat to the back of the room” says Bernard Tschumi
Tom Ravenscroft | Dezeen, 23 May 2022

Bernard Tschumi designed the seminal Parc de la Villette in Paris. Photo by Peter Mauss

Deconstructivism was built on intellectual rigour and a desire for exploration that contemporary architects do not share, says French-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi in this exclusive interview as part of our series on the style.

According to Tschumi, who was one of the seven architects featured in the seminal Deconstructivist Architecture show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), deconstructivism had a serious intellectual ideology that was developed by young architects reinvestigating avant-garde architecture from the 1920s.
[…]

Bernard Tschumi:
To simplify these were neo modernism versus postmodernism. And both were fairly excessive. You may remember names of course, like [Robert] Venturi and [Aldo] Rossi and a few others on one side, and people who believed in the roots of all the modern movements.

The younger generation, very much based around the AA in London, were not interested in either neo-modernism or postmodernism – because they felt it was a tired discourse.

We explored things in an intuitive and spontaneous manner. We had something in common, an interest in early 20th-century avant-garde. Not the official modernism, but surrealism, futurism, constructivism and expressionism in cinema. We felt that there was still something that had not been fully explored.

There were at least a couple of people who read a little more than the others. People who were more interested in the history of ideas. Eisenman and myself had come across the concept of deconstruction – not only Jacques Derrida, but a lot of French philosophers – [Michel] Foucault and [Roland] Barthes.
[…]

Mills et al, Making Foucault coach: turning post-structural assumptions into coaching praxis (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 June 2022

Mills, J.P., Gearity, B., Kuklick, C., Bible, J.
Making Foucault coach: turning post-structural assumptions into coaching praxis
(2022) Sports Coaching Review

DOI: 10.1080/21640629.2022.2057696

Abstract
Foucauldian-inspired coaching practices have been a recent focus in the Foucauldian coaching studies literature. There can be no denying the emergence of a number of ethical coaching practices in synergy with Foucault’s work, yet in most coaches’ everyday practices there appears to have been little uptake. Accordingly, our central concern in this paper is considering how Foucault’s work could become a more deliberate feature of coaching. Using Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms, we argue that more significant change is yet to occur because coach education does not include the post-structural paradigmatic assumptions underpinning Foucault’s work. As a result, coaches immersed in a modern disciplinary logic may interpret Foucauldian-inspired practices through incommensurable assumptions. In this paper, we develop numerous post-structural assumptions into coaching post-structural praxis (CPSP) to demonstrate what those assumptions mean for coaches’ knowledge and practice. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Kuhn; paradigms; post structural; praxis; theory

Salinas-Arreortua, L.A., Alcantar-García, E.A., Reflexiones sobre el espacio público desde los mecanismos disciplinarios y de regulación enunciados por Foucault (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 June 2022

Salinas-Arreortua, L.A., Alcantar-García, E.A.
Reflexions on public space from disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms statement by Foucault [Reflexiones sobre el espacio público desde los mecanismos disciplinarios y de regulación enunciados por Foucault]
(2022) Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, 34 (2), pp. 817-834.

DOI: 10.5209/aris.75811

Abstract
Public space, understood as a space for socialization and construction of critical debates in the face of different problems, has been discussed from different theoretical perspectives that indicate its complexity, problems and importance, and even its extinction in the neoliberal context. However, there have been few works from Latin American literature that analyze certain behaviors and the depoliticization of public space based on the disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms exposed by Michael Foucault. Through a theoretical review of the concepts of biopolitics and public space, it is highlighted that various urban interventions have had an impact on disciplining the individual in the use and appropriation of public space and in the control of the population, through self-government, that emanates from society itself as it regulates behaviors. In this way, it is argued that the analysis of public space from biopolitics allows us to understand the why of certain behaviors, as well as the neutralization of the political character. © 2022 Universidad Complutense de Madrid. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Biopolitics; Depolitization; Foucault; Power; Public space

Willrich et al, The (mis)government in the COVID-19 pandemic and the psychosocial implications: discipline, subjection, and subjectivity (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 June 2022

Janaína Quinzen Willrich, Luciane Prado Kantorski, Ariane da Cruz Guedes, Carmen Terezinha Leal Argiles, Marta Solange Streicher, Janelli da Silva, Dariane Lima Portela,
The (mis)government in the COVID-19 pandemic and the psychosocial implications: discipline, subjection, and subjectivity
(2022) Revista da Escola de Enfermagem da USP.

DOI: 10.1590/1980-220X-REEUSP-2021-0550

Abstract
OBJECTIVE: to analyze the psychosocial implications arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, reported in online service, from the perspective of Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopower, biopolitics and governmentality.

METHOD: qualitative documental research, with analysis of medical records of users assisted in a therapeutic listening chat, between April and October 2020.

RESULTS: the data were organized into two themes: Governmentality in the COVID-19 pandemic and the production of psychosocial implications of anxiety and fear and Discipline and subjection in the COVID-19 pandemic: subjectivities marked by sadness and anguish. The first demonstrates that the “art of governing” in Brazil produced instabilities and uncertainties that influenced the production of fear of contamination/death/and non-access to treatment and anxiety. In the second theme, we can see how disciplinary control and biopolitical regulation are combined. In Brazil, an extremely unequal country, subjectivity and subjectivities marked by anguish, feelings of discouragement and sadness have been produced.

CONCLUSION: the exclusionary processes were deepened in the pandemic, with the exercise of a biopolitics that makes life precarious and produces psychological distress.

Index Keywords
anxiety, emotion, government, human, pandemic; Anxiety, COVID-19, Emotions, Government, Humans, Pandemics

Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski, The failure of May 1968 (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 June 2022

Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski, The failure of May 1968, Unherd, May 24, 2022

“What defines our public life today is boredom”. That was a Le Monde front-page headline in March 1968. Two months later, a revolution would erupt that would shake the foundations of the Fifth Republic, divide France, and alter its history forever.
[…]

In June, Michel Foucault watching France from a perch in Tunisia, wrote to one of his correspondents: “From here it looks like a great mystery.” More than half a century later, there is no consensus either on the causes or on the meaning of those events. Were the students motivated by economic anxieties? Or was this a cultural revolution? The question boils down to whether the underlying cause of the youth revolt was precarity or abundance.

Krishnan, A.R., Jha, S. Writing bodies, wording illness and countering marginalization: graphic autopathographies as a genre (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

31 May 2022

Krishnan, A.R., Jha, S.
Writing bodies, wording illness and countering marginalization: graphic autopathographies as a genre
(2022) Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2022.2030381

Abstract
The hegemonic oppression by biomedical discourses and erroneous cultural assumptions of degeneracy doubly marginalise the chronically ill and exclude them from domains of productivity. Personal narratives of lived illness experience help to contest metanarratives of dominant discourses, counter the marginalisation occasioned by social and medical othering of diseased bodies, and act as co-discourses that supplement the understanding of illnesses. In this scenario, graphic autopathographies become performative tools through which the marginalised seeks redressal using verbal, spatial and temporal representations of self, body, and illness. Drawing theoretical insights from Arthur Frank, Carolyn R. Miller, Elisabeth El Refaie, Susan Sontag, and Michel Foucault, the article investigates how the chronically ill seek to overcome biomedical reduction and social exclusion by way of this hybrid narrative genre that helps engender participation and resuscitation of the patient’s voice and agency. For this end, the article examines select graphic memoirs and extends the resulting observations to understand autopathographies in general. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
chronic illness; genre; Graphic medicine; marginalisation; medical gaze; self; stigma

Heterotopia art exhibition in Erbil Kurdistan (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

30 May 2022

Heterotopia art exhibition in Erbil focuses on migration abroad
by Wladimir van Wilgenburg, Kurdistan 24, 2022/05/24

The art exhibition “Heterotopia” focuses on migration (Photo: Wladimir van Wilgenburg/Kurdistan 24)

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The “Heterotopia” art exhibition began on May 15 in the Cihan art gallery at Cihan University in Erbil. It focuses on the culture of migration abroad and will continue until June 15.

Artist Ahmad Nabaz organized the exhibition with the help of the Cihan Cultural Centre and the Goete Institute of Iraq. It features work from nine artists. Seven of these artists are Kurdish, while the remaining two are Iranian and Palestinian.

“Each tried in their own language tried to be connected to the concept of heterotopia,” Nabaz said. “Some of them use their personal memory since they experienced migration themselves and moved to Europe.”
[…]

Heterotopia is a good title for the exhibition, Nabaz said, since it explains the lives of refugees when they live in between dystopia (in hell) and utopia (the place they aim to reach).

Heterotopia is a concept initially invented by philosopher Michel Foucault in 1967 in a discourse with a group of architects as a new type of mid-space term that means ‘another place’ that falls between utopia, where everything is an ideal, yet also dystopic, and a place of hell. Heterotopia is a non-space that lies between utopia and dystopia, often called the third space.
[…]

Workshop: Nietzsche Genealogy Foucault. History between power and life (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

29 May 2022

Li, S. A Foucauldian Power Analysis of China’s Confucius Institute in Africa: Power, Knowledge and the Institutionalisation of China’s Foreign Policy (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 May 2022

Li, S.
A Foucauldian Power Analysis of China’s Confucius Institute in Africa: Power, Knowledge and the Institutionalisation of China’s Foreign Policy
(2022) Journal of Asian and African Studies

DOI: 10.1177/00219096221086546

Abstract
The Confucius Institute (CI) was established in 2004 by China to disseminate its language, culture and other forms of positive knowledge to people of different nationalities. By critiquing existing analytical frameworks of the CI, this article draws on Foucault’s conception of power, which explains the role of language, culture, value and other non-material elements in the operation of power, to examine the case study of the CI in Africa. By investigating the CI’s power structure, its internal power operations and its power effects, this research seeks to ascertain the role of the CI in the institutionalisation of China’s foreign policy towards Africa. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
Africa; China; Confucius Institute; foreign policy; institutionalisation; power/knowledge