Foucault News

Bourke, T., Alford, J., Mavropoulou, S., & Catalano, G. Interpretations of inclusive education in Australian policy: what’s the problem represented to be? (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

16 July 2025

Bourke, T., Alford, J., Mavropoulou, S., & Catalano, G. (2025). Interpretations of inclusive education in Australian policy: what’s the problem represented to be? International Journal of Inclusive Education, 1–20.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2025.2532634

ABSTRACT
Policies encapsulate distilled values and have good intentions. However, how problems are represented and then interpreted and translated into practice is not always clear. In this paper, we used Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) approach to analyse and critique the discourses present in three Australian states’ inclusive education documents to see how they represent General Comment No. 4’s right to inclusive education for all students including those with disabilities. Findings reveal that, for the most part, Australian states follow the sentiments of General Comment No. 4. However, there are contradictory messages related to how inclusive education, as intended by General Comment No. 4, should be enacted. In analysing the policy landscape in this way, we found that the sense of urgency underpinning General Comment No. 4 and the commitment to full inclusion for all students were variably reflected in the states’ inclusive education policies.

KEYWORDS:
Inclusive education, policy, discourse analysis

Tarusarira, J., & Wabule, A. The continuity of military identity in civilian work-places: former Ugandan soldiers in Uganda (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

16 July 2025

Tarusarira, J., & Wabule, A. (2025). The continuity of military identity in civilian work-places: former Ugandan soldiers in Uganda. Critical Military Studies, 1–15.
https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2025.2488538

ABSTRACT
In this article, we examine how Ugandan ex-soldiers deploy different military practices in civilian workplaces in Uganda and how these practices continue to define them as former military personnel. The civilian workplaces in which these former military men find themselves are quite distinct and devoid of any military tradition. Yet despite this, and even though these ex-soldiers are working with civilians, they continue to carry with them the military practices and identities in which they have been trained and enculturated. The contribution of this article is that disciplinary power can be used to understand the way that ‘hard’ military training is carried in the body long after a veteran has left the military. While this ‘carrying’ of military training is oftentimes understood as ‘negative’, our research demonstrates the ways in which former soldiers have instrumentalised this training within the civilian workplace to their advantage. We draw on the subjective experiences of Ugandan military veterans generated through life stories, which we analyse using Foucault’s concept of ‘disciplinary power’. We argue that the concept helps us understand that shifting from military barracks to civilian workplaces does not change the ways in which these former soldiers think of themselves as people who are distinct from civilians in their work ethic. The transition from military barracks to civilian workplaces is contradictory and never complete, as civilian and military work ethics enhance and/or undermine work relations in civilian workplaces. The article examines the ways in which, among other things, the practices of discipline and the understanding of time are undertaken and practised in a civilian workplace, a legacy that is carried into civilian life by former military personnel.

KEYWORDS:
Soldiers, combat, military, discipline, identity

Richard Groulx, Penser la guerre avec Michel Foucault. Tome 2: Une nouvelle représentation de la guerre : le monde comme « champ de bataille » (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 July 2025

Richard Groulx, Penser la guerre avec Michel Foucault. Tome 2: Une nouvelle représentation de la guerre : le monde comme « champ de bataille », L’Harmattan, 2025.

Au sujet de la représentation des conflits comme « guerre des races », Foucault demande s’il est possible de filtrer la « violence barbare ». De la même façon, comment filtrer la « violence de l’État » ?

À la première question, il répond que le récit historique a produit trois filtres qui permettent de rendre compte à la fois de la monarchie absolutiste et de son épuisement jusqu’à la Révolution avec l’émergence de l’État-nation. À la deuxième question relative au racisme d’État et à l’État d’exception qui apparaît au nom de la « défense de la société », il reste plus circonspect, en particulier quant aux attentes placées dans l’espérance de la société assurancielle ou à l’égard de ce qu’il appelle le « chantage des Lumières ».

Les questions essentielles restant pour lui : comment arriver à se détacher de la représentation du conflit politique ou du dissensus intellectuel en termes de guerre ou de guerre des races ? À quelles conditions pouvons-nous renouveler la culture politique contemporaine ?

Richard Groulx, Penser la guerre avec Michel Foucault. Tome 1: De la guerre des races au racisme d’État (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 July 2025

Richard Groulx, Penser la guerre avec Michel Foucault. Tome 1: De la guerre des races au racisme d’État, L’Harmattan, 2025

Au fond de la politique, qu’y a-t-il sinon la guerre ? Et cette guerre, comment la définir ? Telles sont les questions posées par Michel Foucault dans son cours au Collège de France, “Il faut défendre la société”, comme une analyse des fondements de la conception raciste et exclusiviste de la société.

À la première question, il répond que la politique a été pensée depuis toujours comme un rapport de force. À la deuxième question, la réponse toujours actuelle ne manque pas de faire grincer des dents, puisqu’au fondement des batailles menées par la politique, que trouvons-nous sinon des « guerres de races » ? Renversant l’axiome de Carl von Clausewitz qui soutenait qu’avec la modernité « la guerre n’est que la simple continuation de la politique par d’autres moyens », Foucault affirme, au contraire, qu’aujourd’hui la politique est de plus en plus continuée par la guerre. À l’interrogation « sommes-nous à la veille de faire la guerre ? », il invite à se demander s’il est possible d’arrêter cette machine infernale.

CFP: After The Death Of The Human Michel Foucault’s 100th Anniversary International Conference (2025-26)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 July 2025

Call For Papers
After The Death Of The Human
Michel Foucault’s 100th Anniversary International Conference
University of Lisbon, Portugal | June 18–19, 2026

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2025
Notification of acceptance: October 30, 2025

PDF flyer

The centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth offers a timely opportunity to reassess the profound contribution of his philosophy to our understanding of human subjectivity in the interwoven contexts of knowledge, power, ethics, and aesthetics, as these unfold throughout history, culture, and society.

Inspired by Foucault’s oeuvre and its diverse legacies, this conference invites reflection on a fundamental question: What is—and what can become of—humanity after the “death of man”? How does this notion relate to the “death of God,” the rise of biopolitics, and the ongoing erosion of core values such as truth, justice, freedom, equality, solidarity, and peace?

The implications of a post-human critique must be reexamined in light of contemporary global challenges, including the renewal of democratic institutions, the protection of universal human rights, and the pursuit of sustainable development. Engaging with, and perhaps also moving beyond, Foucault’s concepts and methodologies, we aim to better understand our historical condition—one in which the apparent farewell to “humanity” and “human nature” coexists with both the proliferation of nihilisms and the unexpected revival of plural humanisms animated by distinct philosophical stances, including the Enlightenment ideal of the public use of critical reason.

We welcome proposals for individual papers and panel sessions that address Foucault’s philosophical anthropology (or lack thereof) across the full span of his intellectual trajectory. Topics may include, for example, Foucault’s engagements with psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and existential psychology, as well as his readings of Stoicism, Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche. The conference seeks to offer an interdisciplinary forum for exploring Foucault’s diverse “views of man” from multiple perspectives—ethical, aesthetic, political, legal, educational, medical, psychiatric, or criminological—employing his key methodological tools (notably archaeology and genealogy), while remaining open to innovative reinterpretations.

As suggested by the conference title, the thematic scope is broad. Possible areas for contribution include, but are not limited to:

1. Ethics and Aesthetics of the Self
2. Power in Foucault and Emerging Forms of Power (e.g., Algorithmic
Governmentality)
3. Foucault’s Concept of Man and New Anthropologies (e.g., Donna Haraway)
4. Foucault and the Anthropocene
5. Epistemology and Interdisciplinarity in Foucault
6. Knowledge, History, and the Historical A Priori
7. Sexuality, Gender, and Pleasure in Foucault
8. Medicine, Psychiatry, Psychology, and Psychopathology
9. Education, Schooling, and Disciplinary Practices
10. Literature, Art, and Cinema in Foucault’s Thought
11. Criminology, Surveillance, and Social Anxiety
12. Critique and Parrhesia
13. Kant’s Enlightenment and Foucault’s Modernity
14. Foucault and Postmodern Critique (e.g., Decolonial and Racial Theories)
15. Foucault and the Question of Realism
16. Foucault Today: Reflections on New Publications and Unpublished Texts

Submission Guidelines
We invite submissions for individual papers and thematically cohesive panels (consisting of 3 or 4 papers). Each submission should include:
• A title, abstract (300–500 words), and 4–5 keywords
• A separate bio-bibliographical note (50–100 words)

Please submit two separate documents (in MS Word or PDF format). Papers may be written in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. Submissions should be sent to:
Fernando Silva: fernandomsilva@campus.ul.pt
Marita Rainsborough: marita.rainsborough@leuphana.de
Paulo Jesus: paulorenatus@edu.ulisboa.pt

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2025
Notification of acceptance: October 30, 2025

To ensure broad accessibility, participants presenting in languages other than English are kindly asked to provide at least a partial English version of their paper (e.g., handout or PowerPoint). Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes, followed by discussion. Each panel will include up to four papers.

Participation and attendance are free of charge. Following the conference, we plan to publish a volume featuring selected contributions.

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this news

Stuart Elden, Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert’s library at 285 rue de Vaugirard – online catalogue soon available (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 July 2025

Stuart Elden, Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert’s library at 285 rue de Vaugirard – online catalogue soon available, Progressive Geographies, July 13, 2025

La bibliothèque de Michel Foucault et de Daniel Defert du 285 rue de Vaugirard

Philippe Chevallier, Henri-Paul Fruchaud and colleagues have catalogued much of Foucault and Defert’s personal library, which will soon become available online at the Foucault fiches de lecture site. Thanks to Niki Kasumi Clements, who helped with the cataloguing, for the link. Some other parts of Foucault’s collection – books with dedications from their authors – are at Yale’s Beinecke library, which I visited in 2018.
[…]

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Constanza Ulriksen Moretti, Genealogy And Circulation of the Smart Cities Concept in Chile: An Urban Policy Failure? (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 July 2025

Constanza Ulriksen Moretti, Genealogy And Circulation of the Smart Cities Concept in Chile: An Urban Policy Failure? Finisterra, LX(128), 2025, e36321

ABSTRACT
Although studies describe the circulation of the Smart Cities (SC) concept in Chile, research on how this concept emerges in the Chilean context remains scarce. Drawing on the policy mobility approach and Foucault’s genealogical method, this article explores the multiple origins of the term. Using mixed methods (Twitter social network analysis, event ethnography, content analysis, and interviews with key informants), the results identify the national innovation and productivity agenda as the main predecessor, Spain as the primary international reference, and some reappropriations of the concept, such as the “National Plan for Intelligent Territories”. These findings complement and add new insights to analyses of the concept’s circulation, revealing not only the power relations behind the deployment and establishment of the Smart Cities concept in Chile but also that the term originates from the economic and innovation spheres rather than the urban sphere. Whereas in the Global North, the Smart Cities concept emerges as a narrative that permeates urban policies and is even referred to as ‘new urban policy’ or ‘Smart City Policy’, in Chile, it does not signify a new form of urbanism or a novel ‘model’ of urban development. Instead, it serves as an urban narrative for fostering technological industries in the city.

Keywords:
Smart cities; mobility; urban policy; urban narrative; urban imaginaries.

M G Hamner, The Order of Things: The difference of the Analysis of Wealth (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 July 2025

M G Hamner, The Order of Things: The difference of the Analysis of Wealth, affecognitive ~ religion, film, affect, academia blog, 10 July 2025

In chapter six of The Order of Things/Les mots et les choses, Michel Foucault marks, twice, a difference between the analysis of wealth and both general grammar and natural history (the three intellectual pursuits that shift in the 19th century, with the rise of the human sciences, to political economy, linguistics, and biology). The first marking of difference notes that the analysis of wealth is attached to “a practice and to institutions” (English text 168). The second differentiation seems rather to emphasize the different–that is, slower–temporality involved in the “emergence of a domain of ‘wealth’ than that involved in the emergence of natural history and general grammar, a slowness that yields “a much higher degree of historic viscosity” (English text 180).

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CFP: Foucault’s Archaeology: Sources, Questions and Legacy (2025-26)

Clare O'Farrell

5 comments

12 July 2025

Call for Papers
Discipline Filosofiche, XXXVI, 2, 2026: Foucault’s Archaeology: Sources, Questions and Legacy, ed. by Elisabetta Basso and Andrea Cavazzini

In Michel Foucault’s published and unpublished writings, between Naissance de la Clinique (1963) and L’archeologie du savoir (1969), the recurrence of the term “archaeology” marks the centrality of this notion in the period when the philosopher’s research stood out in the “structuralist” intellectual landscape for its binding together of philosophical reflection and historical research.

Following an analogy that Freud applies to psychoanalysis, archaeology emerges as a historiography of the unthought: that is, as an attempt to reconstruct how what from the past arrives to constitute the present in which we live, without ever having been present in the explicit consciousness of historical agents. Archaeology therefore starts from what is given in the present – in Foucault’s work, the objects or practices of knowledge – and traces back the layers of historicity that remain imperceptible to the immediate gaze of those whose actions are shaped through these objects and practices of knowledge.

However, the title of the chair at the Collège de France that Foucault came to hold in 1970 – Histoire des systèmes de pensée – suggests a more traditional history of philosophy or ideas. And from 1970 onwards, Foucault largely abandons “archaeology”, rendering the term somewhat enigmatic and, in any case, not fully explored in its implications.

The hypothesis animating this special issue is that archaeology, far from being reduced to a stylistic device, constitutes a philosophical concept in its own right, whose meanings and possible developments are not limited to Foucault’s direct reference to it in his works. A decisive factor in the reconfiguration of the relationship between philosophy and historiography (which is far from any philosophy of history in which becoming is crushed under the weight of retrospective awareness), archaeology also implies – as Enzo Melandri suggested as early as 1968 (La linea e il circolo) – an intention to recover what remains unexpressed or repressed from the past. While in the historical field, this entails the distinction in principle between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum (between actual events and their appearance in explicit awareness), in the philosophical field the effect of archaeology seems to consist in a therapeutic posture aimed at dissolving the painful “cramps” in the self-consciousness of an epoch or a society.

On the occasion of the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth and in light of the posthumous publication of numerous unpublished works by the philosopher, this special issue of Discipline Filosofiche aims to offer a reflection on the “archaeological” method in philosophy and the history of thought. With this in mind, contributions addressing the following topics are encouraged:

1) the relationship between archaeology and historiography;
2) Foucauldian archaeology and its sources;
3) the archaeological method and phenomenology;
4) archaeology and psychoanalysis;
5) archaeology and structuralism;
6) archaeology and language analysis;
7) archaeology and archives;
8) archaeology and genealogy;
9) the philosophical legacy of Foucault’s concept of archaeology.

Guidelines for the authors:
Submissions should not exceed 9,000 words including abstract, refer-ences and footnotes. Manuscripts may be submitted in Italian, English, French, German, or Spanish. They must be sent as an email attachment in .doc or .docx format, along with a .pdf version, to Elisabetta Basso (elisabetta.basso@unipv.it) and to Andrea Cavazzini (andreacavazzini78@gmail.com).

Submitted manuscripts will be sent to two independent reviewers, following a double-blind peer review process. The reviewers may ask authors to make changes or improvements to their contributions in view of publication. Authors are kindly requested to attach both an anonymous version of their contribution entitled “Manuscript” and a separate “Cover Page” stating their name, academic affiliation and contact details. Manuscripts must include an English abstract of less than 150 words and 5 keywords. Any property of the file that might identify the author must be removed to ensure anonymity during the review process. A notification of receipt will be issued for each submission. In drafting their text, authors can adopt any clear and coherent style, but should the text be accepted for publication, they will be required to send a final version in keeping with the style guidelines of the journal (please refer to the style guidelines at https://www.disciplinefilosofiche.it/en/norme-redazionali/).

Submission of a manuscript is understood to imply that the paper has not been published before and that it is not being considered for publication by any other journal. Should the manuscript be accepted for publication, the author will be required to transfer copyrights to the University of Bologna. Requests to republish the article may be made to the Editorial Board of the Journal.

Deadline for the submission of manuscripts: June 15, 2026
Notification of acceptance, conditional acceptance, or rejection: August 31, 2026
Deadline for the submission of the final draft: October 15, 2026