Foucault News

Zhang, A.
Chinese Practice of Foucault’s ‘Disciplinary Power’ and its Effects on the Rehabilitation of Female Prisoners in China
(2020) British Journal of Criminology, 60 (3), pp. 662-680.

DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azz068

Abstract
The prison system of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been viewed by some scholars as effective in achieving the primary target of Chinese imprisonment: rehabilitation. This article aims to redress this argument. Drawing on interviews undertaken with 30 female parolees/ex-prisoners and 10 prison officers, this article argues that the Jifen Kaohe System in prison, which is strongly imprinted with Foucault’s theory of ‘disciplinary power’, is ineffective and is unable to make accurate judgements on the achievement of prisoners’ rehabilitation at selected women’s prisons. This article suggests that Foucault’s disciplinary power is theoretically problematic in producing a ‘new person’, not the least of its unawareness of contextualized culture, values and situations, and women’s agency in prison. © 2019 The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
Chinese female prisoner; disciplinary power; Jifen Kaohe System; rehabilitation

Maev Conneely, Paul Higgs & Joanna Moncrieff, Medicalising the moral: the case of depression as revealed in internet blogs. Social Theory & Health (2020).
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-020-00141-1

Abstract
Depression is regularly declared to be equivalent to a bodily illness, yet critics have long contested this ‘medical’ view of mental disorders. Following the ideas of Szasz and Foucault, we describe an alternative ‘moral’ view of depression, which emphasises the agency of the individual and presents depression as a potentially problematic but meaningful response that can be regarded as an aspect of character.

We use popular internet blogs by people with depression to explore these contrasting conceptions, which can also be found in other research and information on depression. In blogs, the medical view is used to challenge what bloggers perceive as a persistently influential moral view, by deflecting criticism and responsibility and disowning unwanted aspects of the self. At the same time, bloggers make positive use of the moral concept of depression when discussing recovery. The moral view enables people to take active steps to address their difficulties and to integrate the experience of depression into their understanding of themselves in a challenging yet rewarding process of personal development. We suggest that the moral view of depression represents an enduring aspect of our understanding of ourselves, which the medical view has been superimposed onto, but has not managed to suppress.

Rakesh Sengupta, “Towards a Decolonial Media Archaeology: The Absent Archive of Screenwriting History and the Obsolete Munshi.” Theory, Culture & Society, (July 2020).
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420930276

Abstract
Much has been written about how Foucault’s archaeology of the modern episteme, emerging from early 19th-century Europe, was curiously divorced from its context of colonialism. Media archaeology, as Foucault’s legacy, has also remained rather geopolitically insular and race agnostic in its epistemological reverse engineering of media modernity. Using screenwriting history as a case study, this article demonstrates how bringing decolonial thinking and media archaeology together can challenge linear narratives of modernity/coloniality in media history. The article connects two seemingly disparate histories of archival absence and human obsolescence to reveal the construction of an elusive screenwriting modernity that has historically obscured parallel scripting practices and pre-existing scribal traditions.

Keywords
archive, Bollywood, decolonial thinking, media archaeology, screenwriting

Alexander Kauffman. Manet, museum, modernism: Michel Foucault and modernist art history. Journal of Art Historiography Number 22 June 2020.

Open access

Extract
Michel Foucault’s writing transformed the field of museum studies. 1 As Kevin Hetherington reflected in a recent state-of-the-field volume, ‘Foucault can be seen as one of the two leading theoretical inspirations for critical museum studies since the 1980s [along with Pierre Bourdieu].’ 2 Foucault himself wrote little about the subject, but devoted substantial attention to the concurrent institutional formations of the prison, the clinic, and the asylum. Adaptations of those writings by Tony Bennett, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, and other museum studies scholars triggered a reconfiguration of the field, sometimes known as ‘the new museology’ or ‘critical museum studies.’3 Instead of fading over time, Foucault’s presence has only grown as scholarship and public discourse around museums has increasingly focused on issues of power, authority, and subjectivity.