Foucault News

Flora Pitrolo, Marko Zubak (eds), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s. Disco Heterotopias, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

This book explores some of disco’s other lives which thrived between the 1970s and the 1980s, from oil-boom Nigeria to socialist Czechoslovakia, from post-colonial India to war-torn Lebanon. It charts the translation of disco as a cultural form into musical, geo-political, ideological and sociological landscapes that fall outside of its original conditions of production and reception, capturing the variety of scenes, contexts and reasons for which disco took on diverse dimensions in its global journey. With its deep repercussions in visual culture, gender politics, and successive forms of popular music, art, fashion and style, disco as a musical genre and dance culture is exemplary of how a subversive, marginal scene – that of queer and Black New York undergrounds in the early 1970s – turned into a mainstream cultural industry. As it exploded, atomised and travelled, disco served a number of different agendas; its aesthetic rootedness in ideas of pleasure, transgression and escapism and its formal malleability, constructed around a four-on-the-floor beat, allowed it to permeate a variety of local scenes for whom the meaning of disco shifted, sometimes in unexpected and radical ways.

Flora Pitrolo is a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and Syracuse University London. Her work investigates alternative European performance and music cultures of the 1980s, with a special focus on Italy. She publishes both as a scholar and as a journalist, and is active as a DJ and producer in various archival and experimental music scenes.

Marko Zubak is a Researcher at the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb, specialising in popular culture in socialist Eastern Europe. His publications include The Yugoslav Youth Press (1968-1980), and he has curated the exhibitions ‘Yugoslav Youth Press as Underground Press’ and ‘‘Stayin’ Alive: Socialist Disco Culture’.

Steven A. Hirschler, Hostile Homes. Violence, Harm and the Marketisation of UK Asylum Housing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021

About this book
This book explores the ways in which the state and private security firms contribute to the direct and structural harm of asylum seekers through policies and practices that result in states of perpetual destitution, exclusion, and neglect. By synthesising historic and contemporary public policy, criminological and sociological perspectives, political philosophy, and the direct experiential accounts of asylum seekers living within dispersed accommodation, this text exposes the complex and co-dependent relationship between the state’s social control aims and neoliberal imperatives of market expansion into the immigration control regime. The title borrows from former Home Secretary Theresa May’s pronouncement that the UK government aimed to foster a ‘hostile environment’ in its response to illegal immigration. While the Home Office later attempted to rebrand its hostile environment policy as a ‘compliant environment’, this book illustrates how aggressive approaches toward the management of asylum-seeking populations has effectively extended the hostile environment to those legally present within the UK. Through an examination of the expanded privatisation of dispersed asylum housing and the UK government’s reliance on contracts with private security firms like G4S and Serco, this book explores the lived realities of hostile environments as asylum seekers’ accounts reveal the human costs of marketised asylum accommodation programmes.

Steven A. Hirschler is Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at York St John University, UK. His research interests include the privatisation of UK asylum housing and the relationship between law, social inequality and social control practices. Steven has previously published on topics ranging from the 2011 UK riots to structural violence in video games. His teaching covers themes including criminological theory, victimology, asylum and immigration, and state violence.

Chapter: From ‘Crimmigration’ to Governmentality: Theoretical Perspectives on the Management and Marketisation of Immigration Control

Abstract
This chapter examines key theoretical positions employed in the examination of asylum seekers’ exceptional treatment by the state. It begins with the ‘crimmigration’ narrative advanced by Stumpf and expanded and adapted by others as a way of highlighting the convergence of crime control tactics, institutions and attitudes within immigration control practices. The second half of this chapter questions the appropriateness of adopting Giorgio Agamben’s interpretations of concepts like ‘bare life’ and ‘homo sacer’ in the study of the state’s role in victimising asylum seekers and other migrants through sovereign mechanisms of control and in using the law as a way of circumventing humanitarian responsibilities. Returning to Michel Foucault’s concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’, this chapter ends with an argument that Foucault’s articulation of power as diffuse and the state’s aim to ‘protect’ society—often at the expense of others allowed to wither and die—offers a much more promising theoretical approach, as it allows for the possibility of agency and resistance within highly controlled environments