Foucault News

Mitchell Dean on Foucault’s Last Decade; Peter Beilharz on Foucault: The Birth of Power in Thesis Eleven

Clare O'Farrell

19 August 2020

Two interesting reviews of my books in Thesis Eleven. Mitchell Dean reviews Foucault’s Last Decade and Ben Golder’s Foucault and the Politics of Rights; and Peter Beilharz reviews Foucault: The Birth of Power. Both reviews require subscription, unfortunately.

FLD cover Dean is generous in his praise, but also points out some things the book does not do. A couple of passages should give an indication of both arguments:

A condition of answering these questions is that we should know what he said. Stuart Elden’s book presents itself as a detailed intellectual history of his project of a history of sexuality that occupied much, but not all, of his last decade. It is an exhaustive and dense account of everything Foucault said and wrote during this time, including material still unpublished, and is based on prodigious research. As a kind of advanced intellectual primer, it works very well, particularly for the…

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Danisha Jenkins, Dave Holmes, Candace Burton, Stuart J. Murray, ‘This Is Not a Patient, This Is Property of the State’: Nursing, ethics, and the immigrant detention apparatus (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 August 2020

Danisha Jenkins, Dave Holmes, Candace Burton, Stuart J. Murray, ‘This Is Not a Patient, This Is Property of the State’: Nursing, ethics, and the immigrant detention apparatus (2020) Nursing inquiry, p. e12358.
https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12358

Abstract
This paper opens with first-hand accounts of critical care medical interventions in which detainees, in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are brought to the emergency department for treatment. This case dramatizes the extent to which the provision of ethical and acceptable nursing care is jeopardized by federal law enforcement paradigms. Drawing on the scholarship of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this paper offers a theoretical account of the power dynamics that inform the health care of patients who find themselves caught in the custodial scaffolding of a vast immigration and detention apparatus. It offers an analysis of the display of sovereign and biopolitical power over the lives (and deaths) of detainees (Foucault), as well as the ways these individuals are reduced to “bare life” under the political pretext of an emergency or “state of exception” (Agamben). Our purpose here is both theoretical and practical: to better understand the often hidden agency or impersonal “will” exercised by the immigrant detention system, but also to equip clinicians in these and cognate facilities (e.g., prisons) with the critical tools by which they might better navigate incommensurable paradigms (i.e., care vs. custody) in order to deliver the best care while upholding their ethical duties as a care provider. This is all the more pressing because hospitals are not sanctuaries and given the incursion of federal law enforcement agents, nurses may find themselves conscripted as de facto agents of the state. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Author Keywords
critical theory; ethics; foucault; politics; professional issues

Faulty ‘tools’? Why social work scholarship needs to take a more critical approach to Michel Foucault (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

16 August 2020

Garrett, P.M.
Faulty ‘tools’? Why social work scholarship needs to take a more critical approach to Michel Foucault
(2020) Journal of Social Work, 20 (4), pp. 483-500.

DOI: 10.1177/1468017319830538

Abstract
Summary: Having outlined Foucault’s articulation of power and governmentality, the article critically explores attempts to translate the philosopher’s theorisation into social work. Findings: After briefly referring to Jacques Donzelot’s work and that of other writers, it is argued that Foucault’s conceptual ‘tools’ are problematic for those seeking to promote critical approaches within the field of social work. Those influenced by Foucault’s complex contributions may amplify a defective understanding of power which unduly emphasises ‘soft’ power and neglects the continuing significance of hierarchical and coercive power. This is reflected in Foucault’s analysis of the state and, at a micro level, his remarks on sexualised interactions involving adults and children. Efforts to ‘apply’ Foucauldian reasoning within social work may also risk promoting politically passive forms of theory and practice. Applications: Contributing to the discipline’s literature on Foucault, the article maintains the social work scholarship has much to gain by engaging with work, but this engagement might aspire to become more critical. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
critical social theory; Foucault; governmentality; power; Social work

Index Keywords
adult, article, child, human, human experiment, male, neglect, social work, sociological theory

The Archaeology of Foucault update 2: The Birth of the Clinic, a trip to Paris, working on courses on Sexuality and Les mots et les choses

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 August 2020

Progressive Geographies

While I continue to find focus a challenge as the world lurches from one crisis to another, I’ve been doing various bits of work for this book on Foucault’s work in the 1960s.

I continued work on the comparison of the first and second editions of Naissance de la clinique. I now have a completely annotated version of the text, with all the changes, large and small, marked up. The next stage was working through the English translation The Birth of the Clinic, seeing how Sheridan got from the French to the English. This is not yet a question of how he translated, but of what he translated. Given that Sheridan switches between editions, without any obvious reason, there are places where his English matches neither text published by Foucault. But in doing this initial comparison I realised that the most recent edition of the English translation…

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Elizabeth J. Done, Helen Knowler, Painful invisibilities: Roll management or ‘off-rolling’ and professional identity (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 August 2020

Elizabeth J. Done, Helen Knowler, Painful invisibilities: Roll management or ‘off-rolling’ and professional identity (2020) British Educational Research Journal, 46 (3), pp. 516-531.
https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3591

Abstract
‘Off-rolling’ is widely defined as the illegal removal of students from a school roll, unlike permanent exclusion, which involves sanctioned formal procedures. It is a practice that brings very different logics, political agendas, governmental imperatives and the associated matter of school leader professional identity into sharp relief. Deviant professional identities have already been discursively constituted, despite the current lack of research into the motivation of senior school leaders who engage in ‘off-rolling’. This article draws on Foucault to explore tensions between a political standards and an inclusion agenda, and to consider how the professional identities of senior school leaders are shaped such that ‘off-rolling’ becomes possible. It is suggested that chronic underfunding of the inclusion agenda has combined with what England’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) now describes as an over-emphasis on academic performance to create unsustainable pressures on many senior school leaders. The descriptor ‘contextual roll management’ may therefore be more appropriate. The moral outrage which accompanies public and political discourse around ‘off-rolling’ is theorised with reference to Apple, Ball and Popkewitz. Such moral indignation distracts attention from the wider socio-political and economic context within which schools are now required to deliver academic progress and inclusion. We conclude the article by outlining key empirical questions that have yet to be addressed. © 2019 British Educational Research Association

Author Keywords
educational policy; inclusion; professional identity; roll management; ‘off-rolling’

Student voice in higher education: Opening the loop (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 August 2020

Young, H., Jerome, L.
Student voice in higher education: Opening the loop
(2020) British Educational Research Journal, 46 (3), pp. 688-705.

DOI: 10.1002/berj.3603

Abstract
UK national policy and the practices of university course boards tend to reduce understandings of ‘student voice’ to a feedback loop. In this loop, students express feedback, the university takes this on board, then they tell the students how they have responded to their feedback. The feedback loop is a significant element of the neoliberal imaginary of higher education globally. This qualitative research study drew on interviews with course representatives in three universities in England, and on policy analysis, to explore the discursive construction and enactment of student voice. It uses the feedback loop as an analytical frame. Drawing on Foucault’s later work, the article aims to open up the feedback loop by exploring its manifestation in the mundane everyday practices of universities. In opening the loop, we identify the following effects of the student voice policy ensemble: students have to construct feedback as it is not just waiting to be gathered; it promotes a dividing practice, where reps are positioned differently to other students; there is a focus on problems; an ‘us and them’ is reinforced between staff and students; the loop closes down discussion; and a managerial logic obscures political processes. The article articulates its opening of the loop as a way of unmasking the modes of power which work through discourses of ‘student voice’, and hence seeks to create possibilities for resistance to being governed this way. © 2020 British Educational Research Association

Author Keywords
course representative; feedback loop; student engagement; student satisfaction

Unbounding ‘states of exception’, reconceptualizing precarity (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 August 2020

Nancy Ettlinger (2020) Unbounding ‘states of exception’, reconceptualizing precarity, Space and Polity

DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2020.1755645

Abstract
This provocation unbounds ‘state of exception’ to account for its sustainability and its role in daily life. I argue that sustaining a ‘state of exception’ requires a governmentality to govern and render the exceptional ‘normal’ over time, pointing to the mutual constitution of the two modes of governance. The omnipresent condition of possible shifts between sovereignty and governmentality relocates precarity from a statically defined objectified circumstance to the active slippage between these two fields of power. Yet whereas a ‘state of exception’ can become normalized, subjectivity cannot because the configuration of individuals’ multiple subjectivities differs relative to their lived experiences.

KEYWORDS: Governmentality, sovereign power, state of exception, precarity, subjectivity

Biopolítica: somatocracia y medicina social (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

10 August 2020

Patricio Lepe-Carrión, Biopolítica: somatocracia y medicina social, In COVID19. La comunicación en tiempos de pandemia, 2020

PDF of article

En octubre de 1974, Michel Foucault visitó la Universidad del Estado de Guanabara (que después sería la de Río de Janeiro) en Brasil, donde dictó una serie de seis conferencias en el Instituto de Medicina Social. En la segunda de ellas, titulada «Nacimiento de la medicina social» (Foucault, 2001b), es donde aparece por primera vez la noción de biopolítica. El concepto no era de su invención, lo tomó prestado del filósofo sueco Rudolf Kjellén, y tampoco fue una categoría de batalla al interior de su obra, puesto que lo abandonó muy temprano para dar paso a la idea de gubernamentalidad.

Dada la emergencia sanitaria por la que atravesamos hoy, ha sido —ciertamente— un concepto muy atractivo para la academia en general, convirtiéndose en una suerte de trending topic en la esfera de circulación de artículos y columnas de opinión. Sin embargo, pocas veces hallamos lecturas atentas respecto a los usos restringidos o contextualizados de la categoría en cuestión. Al parecer, el abuso de la consigna de Wittgenstein sobre la «caja de herramientas» ha hecho del martillo un serrucho, y de la biopolítica una noción relativa a conspiraciones perversas de un grupo de sociópatas manipulando la vida de la población (nada más lejano al pensamiento de Foucault). Daniele Lorenzini (2020) ha hecho notar brillantemente este último punto en una columna reciente

[…]

David Langwallner on Foucault’s Panopticon (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

9 August 2020

David Langwallner on Foucault’s Panopticon
Audio interview on Soundcloud

Human Rights Lawyer David Langwallner discusses the idea of the Panopticon that Michel Foucault borrowed from Jeremy Bentham to describe the all-seeing eye of the prison. Foucault argued that this has been internalised and led to a series of restraints on our natural inclinations, which have been amplified in turn by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ramón Spaaij, Annelies Knoppers, Ruth Jeanes, “We want more diversity but…”: Resisting diversity in recreational sports clubs (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 August 2020

Ramón Spaaij, Annelies Knoppers, Ruth Jeanes, “We want more diversity but…”: Resisting diversity in recreational sports clubs (2020) Sport Management Review, 23 (3), pp. 363-373.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smr.2019.05.007

Open access

Abstract
Participation in sport is highly valued by governments and policy makers. Policies and programs encourage participation of populations who are underrepresented in sport. In many countries sport participation is possible primarily under the auspices of voluntary sports clubs, many of which name demographic diversity as an organizational value. Underrepresented population groups continue to lag, however, in participating in sports clubs. Change has been slow in coming. Relatively little research focuses on resistance by those in positions of leadership to the entry or involvement of underrepresented or marginalized population groups into sports clubs. The purpose of this paper is to develop insight into why change may be so slow in coming even though demographic diversity is purportedly highly valued. Drawing on Raby’s (2005) conceptualizations of practices of resistance, on empirical research on diversity in recreational sports clubs and on work by Foucault, the authors identify six discursive practices that those in positions of leadership in sport clubs draw on to resist diversity: speech acts, moral boundary work, in-group essentialism, denial/silencing, self-victimization, and bodily inscription. The authors conclude that resistance to diversity in sport clubs has emerged from a confluence of discourses that enable noncompliance at the micro level with the use of a macro-level discourse of diversity. © 2019 The Authors

Author Keywords
Community sport; Discursive practices; Diversity; Leadership; Resistance; Sport organizations