Foucault News

De Sá, F. Z.; Gastal, S. A. Mobility, immobility and a-mobility: to discuss tourism in COVID-19 times (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

15 August 2021

De Sá, F. Z.; Gastal, S. A.(2021).Mobility, immobility and a-mobility: to discuss tourism in COVID-19 times. Revista Brasileira de Pesquisa em Turismo, São Paulo,15(1), 2144.
http://dx.doi.org/10.7784/rbtur.v15i1.2144
Open access

Abstract
Mobility has been revisited in recent years, associated with the themes of space, time, territory, and place, but rarely involving Tourism more directly. Analyzing Tourism under the mobility bias, broadens its theoretical scope, among others, by allowing to add to it the concepts of immobility and a-mobility. In these terms, this article aims to discuss the relations between Tourism and the triad Mobility, Immobility, and A-mobility, reviewed against the backdrop of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the issues of social isolation associated with it. The study introduces the concept of a-mobility, using the figure of the panopticon as a metaphor. The investigation procedures resume a review carried out in databases, last June, using the terms ‘Turismo’, ‘Tourism’, ‘Coronavirus’ and ‘Covid-19’, when the absence of the mobility issue was observed, in the corpus resulting from the initial review. At the present time, the question of mobility is taken up again. It is going that during the Pandemic and its immediate aftermath there was a crisis of and in mobility, dramatically affecting tourism practices. The crisis implies that displacements will gain new form and content in the near future, without abandoning mobility.

Dix, G. Incentivization: From the current proliferation to the (re)problematization of incentives (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

14 August 2021

Dix, G.
Incentivization: From the current proliferation to the (re)problematization of incentives (2020) Economy and Society, 49 (4), pp. 642-663.

DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2020.1774256

Abstract
Incentives are so widespread and seemingly so insignificant that we might simply take them at face value and fail to ask how we can account for their emergence and proliferation. Building upon Foucault’s notion of ‘problematization’ as a mode of reading history, this paper questions the taken-for-granted place that incentives have come to acquire in our current reflections and practices. To do so, it returns to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when American mechanical engineers and social scientists turned the behaviour of factory workers into a managerial problem and began to design new instruments to incentivize them. The shift from the current proliferation of incentives to their past opens up a genealogical space that invites us to explore the contingent shifts in meaning and use of incentivization as a framework to understand and govern human behaviour over the course of the twentieth century. Such a shift opens up an analytical space too. The return to early instances of incentivization allows us to compare labour incentives with labour discipline and to tease out some of the similarities and differences between these two ways of wielding power on the shop floor–and possibly beyond. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
discipline; incentive; labour history; mechanical engineers; power

Index Keywords
engineering, incentive, labor market, management practice, power relations, twentieth century

Stephen J. Ball & Emiliano Grimaldi, Neoliberal education and the neoliberal digital classroom (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 August 2021

Stephen J. Ball & Emiliano Grimaldi (2021) Neoliberal education and the neoliberal digital classroom, Learning, Media and Technology,
DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2021.1963980

ABSTRACT
This article explores some aspects of the relation between neoliberalisation and the increasing use of digital technologies in school classrooms. It does this in relation to a specific case – a specific school, classroom and a fictionalised child – Sarah, who stands as a historical singularity and an exemplary space of relations. Sarah’s classroom and her learning experience are analysed as an example ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ through the exploration of some of the chains and relays that join up ‘learning’ in her classroom to strategies of education reform, to edu-business profitmaking and to private equity investing. Together these chains and relays constitute what we term as a neoliberal dispositif of learnification. The paper offers some starting points for the analysis of this dispositif.

KEYWORDS:
Educational online platforms digital learner digital gaze neoliberalism archaeology

Discourses in Action What Language Enables Us to Do, Edited By Klaus Krippendorff, Nour Halabi (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 August 2021

9780367404208

Discourses in Action What Language Enables Us to Do, Edited By Klaus Krippendorff, Nour Halabi, Routledge, 2020

Book Description
This interdisciplinary collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of discourse, conceptualizing how discursive practices shape social, political, and even material realities today.

Discourses in Action presents a wide range of essays that explore fundamental concerns for the social consequences of text, talk, and discursively informed actions and possibilities of discursive engagement. It opens new perspectives on what language does and the differences that scholarly and practical contributions can make. Chapters cover diverse topics, ranging from political struggles, climate change, social revolutions, ethnicity, violence and other often unexpected patterns of discursive consequences. Its essays also explore the cultural contingencies that underlie discourse practices which are usually ignored when analysed from within a taken-for-granted culture.

Providing a useful examination of current discourse studies, this interdisciplinary volume is ideal for students and researchers within media, communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, cultural studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

Krippendorff, K.
Introduction: Why discourses in action?

DOI: 10.4324/9780429356032-101

Abstract
The humanities, the sociology of knowledge, cultural studies, hermeneutics, even big data statistics, all address different aspects of text and talk. Within communication research, several methods have been developed that shed light on the media in which the substance of discourses is disseminated; for example, conversation, content, rhetorical, discourse, and media analysis. In the writing of Michel Foucault, who proposed rules and practices that govern the use of language in different historical eras, discourse has become an overarching system of representation. Mathematics is a discourse that explores proofs within well-defined formalisms, independent of what other discourse communities may do with them. In scientific discourses, institutionalization begins with formal education as a path to membership. It continues in the form of handbooks, regularly appearing publications, standardized methodologies, entitlements of earned degrees, and specialized infrastructures. Members of different discourse communities may well speak the same natural language without being able to understand each other’s discourse.

Archive: Foucauldian Discourse Analysis and Early Childhood Education (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 August 2021

Gunn, A. Foucauldian Discourse Analysis and Early Childhood Education. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Published online: 23 May 2019

Summary
Formal early childhood education is a relatively modern institution to which increasing numbers of children are routinely exposed. Since the modern invention of childhood, the early childhood years have been increasingly established as a site for public and private investment in the name of individual and community development, the achievement of educational success, increased human productivity, and ultimately labor market productivity and excellence. As various forms of early childhood education have developed around the world, each has been imbued with values, perspectives, norms, and standards of its pioneers. They have also drawn upon and reinforced certain truths, knowledges, practices, and expectations about children, childhood, education, and society. As microcosms of society whose inhabitants are largely novice members of the communities of which they are part, teachers in early childhood education are routinely addressing issues of exclusion, injustice, and inequity with children and families. French historian and poststructural philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) interests in the nexus of power-knowledge-truth and its consequences for life offer avenues for comprehending how modern institutions, such as systems of early childhood education, invest in and bring about certain forms of knowledge and practice. His methods of genealogical inquiry and discourse analysis make visible the workings of power as it moves on, in, and through human bodies. The perspectives made visible by Foucauldian analyses show how techniques, developed and applied within institutions, form humans in particular ways. Thus, it is possible to see the interplay between power-truth-knowledge, how things come to be, and how they may change.

Keywords
early childhood education Foucault discourse analysis genealogy power-knowledge-truth nexus poststructuralism regime of truth disciplinary power subject position social justice

Subjects
Research and Assessment Methods Education and Society Education, Gender, and Sexualities

Garlen et al, Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse and practice (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 August 2021

Garlen, J.C., Chang-Kredl, S., Farley, L., Sonu, D.
Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse and practice
(2020) Children and Society.

DOI: 10.1111/chso.12428

Abstract
This article examines how childhood innocence is taken up in (92) memories of undergraduate students across four sites in the US and Canada. Drawing from Foucault’s theory of discourse, we examine how three themes—innocence as not knowing, innocence as being provided for, and loss of innocence as exposure to adversity—construct childhood as the absence of conflict, which perpetuates the myth of an innocence/experience binary and encourages a deficit perspective of childhood. These findings contribute to teacher education and childhood studies by highlighting the importance of interrogating adult memories in order to disrupt normative assumptions about children. © 2020 National Children’s Bureau and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Author Keywords
childhood innocence; discourse analysis; memories

Kingston, S. Parent involvement in education? A Foucauldian discourse analysis of school newsletters (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

10 August 2021

Kingston, S.
Parent involvement in education? A Foucauldian discourse analysis of school newsletters
(2021) Power and Education, 13 (2), pp. 58-72.

DOI: 10.1177/17577438211011623

Abstract
The Ontario Ministry of Education (2010) puts forth parent involvement as a solution for underachievement and as a resource for building better schools. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of school newsletters reveals that efforts to engage parents also function as a neoliberal strategy designed to govern parents. Using Foucault’s theory of governmentality, I show how the newsletters compel parents to invest in their children’s schooling and judge their value as parents in relation to their ability to produce good neoliberal citizens. I discuss how the newsletters depict ‘good’ parents as those who: (1) do not offer input into schooling; (2) make education a parenting priority and (3) raise good neoliberal citizens. The newsletters represent a strategy for cultivating neoliberal parents who do not ask more from schools and instead demand more of themselves in terms of preparing their children for school and for life. Problems with this approach are that: it asks parents to take up their children’s schooling in ways that push out other family priorities and it shuts down potential collaborations between parents and schools that could challenge neoliberal subjecthood. I call for reformulating discourses of ‘good’ involvement in ways that allow for more equal parent–school partnerships. © The Author(s) 2021.

Author Keywords
education; neoliberal governmentality; Parent involvement; partnership; school newsletters

The paradox of BKSB assessments and functional skills: the experiences of ‘disengaged’ youth on an employability course in a further education college (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 August 2021

Cornish, C.
The paradox of BKSB assessments and functional skills: the experiences of ‘disengaged’ youth on an employability course in a further education college (2021) Journal of Further and Higher Education

DOI: 10.1080/0309877X.2021.1945001

Abstract
Self-governance and responsibilisation are integral to Basic Key Skills Builder (BKSB) assessments and Functional Skills qualifications. However, very little is known of its neoliberalist effects and the governance practices of tutors teaching disengaged youth taking Functional Skills as part of the overall employability certificate. Adopting a case study approach within a large further education (FE) college, qualitative research was conducted over two academic years (2013–2015) with tutors and students enrolled on the Level 1 Achieving Skills Course, an employability course designed as a Raising of Participation Age (RPA) re-engagement provision to engage former NEET and disengaged youth in FE.

Drawing on Foucault’s theory of governmentality for analysis, key empirical findings revealed chaos, controversy and contradictions inasmuch as exposing the problematic ways in which course tutors implemented BKSB assessments and Functional Skills. Evidently, BKSB and Functional Skills operated as powerful, governance mechanisms of management ordering students according to their capabilities whilst simultaneously bringing students face-to-face with their individual shortcomings. The paper concludes that although in principle the participants were positioned in a setting which could ideally offer them a through-way from pre-vocational studies to university or apprenticeships, in actual reality this opportunity was not granted for many participants. This was exacerbated by the fact that this qualification held lowered academic status. It is on this basis that I argue for a revamp and restructure of the educational framework so that it integrates and position pre-vocational courses as the first formal rung of qualifications. © 2021 UCU.

Author Keywords
BKSB; disengaged youth; employability; Functional skills; further education; neoliberalism

Arlette Farge, Causerie sur Michel Foucault Salle des fêtes, 19 septembre 2021, Saint-Martin-la-Pallu (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 August 2021

Causerie sur Michel Foucault Salle des fêtes, 19 septembre 2021, Saint-Martin-la-Pallu.
Causerie sur Michel Foucault
Salle des fêtes, le dimanche 19 septembre à 15:30

L’historienne Arlette Farge a travaillé avec Michel Foucault sur l’ouvrage _Le désordre des familles. Lettres de cachets de la Bastille._ Elle nous fera part de son expérience singulière et de l’influence de Michel Foucault sur sa pratique professionnelle.

Gratuit. Entrée libre.
L’historienne Arlette Farge a travaillé avec Michel Foucault sur l’ouvrage « Le désordre des familles. Lettres de cachets de la Bastille. »

Salle des fêtes Place du Puits tari, Vendeuvre-du-Poitou, 86380 Saint-Martin-la-Pallu Saint-Martin-la-Pallu Vendeuvre-du-Poitou Vienne

Dassonneville, G. Foucault, Sartre et “le malheur de la psychologie”: Une histoire des images, II (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 August 2021

Dassonneville, G. Foucault, Sartre et “le malheur de la psychologie”: Une histoire des images, II
(2020) Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 82 (1), pp. 141-172.

DOI: 10.2143/TVF.82.1.3287463

Abstract
In the early 1950s, Foucault continued the project of a critique of the foundations of psychology, begun by Politzer at the turn of the 1930s and extended by Sartre in the 1940s with existential psychoanalysis. It is possible to identify a common ground between Sartrean phenomenology and Foucaultian archaeology and the French philosophical psychology inherited from Bergson. The rise of Hegelianism and Marxism in the two post-war periods and the reception of psychoanalysis determine a point of contact where the young Foucault’s reflections on the contradictions of psychology embrace the anthropological question and preserve the trace of Sartre’s readings. An attentive reading of Foucault’s writings in the 1950s, completed by the study of an unpublished document from that period entitled “Phenomenology and Psychology” (1953-1954), makes it possible to discover Foucault’s attempt to constitute a critical method presented as ‘mythology’ and to articulate it with a history of images formulated by French psycho-philosophy. © 2020 by Tijdschrift voor Filosofie. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Criticism of psychology; Existential psycho-analysis; Expression; Foucault; History of images; Mythology; Sartre
Language of Original Document: French