Foucault News

Oztig, L. I., & Karluk, A. C. (2025). Beyond Foucault and Post-Panoptic Theories: New Perspectives on China’s Surveillance Mechanisms in East Turkestan. Geopolitics, 1–25.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2025.2465681

ABSTRACT
Surveillance is as old as human history. In pre-modern times, it mostly took place through spies, informants, and guards. In modern times, it became a systematised practice conducted through bureaucratic structures. Foucault’s panopticism explains how surveillance shapes modern societies by turning individuals into self-disciplined subjects. Today, an array of technologies – including algorithms, sensors, satellites, biometric devices, and DNA analysis – is increasingly used for surveillance purposes. The rapid evolution and expansion of these practices, driven by advanced technology, have given rise to new concepts such as ‘control society’, ‘surveillance-oriented societies’, ‘modulatory control’, ‘liquid surveillance’, ‘dataveillance’, and many others. We argue that the idiosyncratic surveillance practices employed by China bring a paradigm shift in surveillance studies, as they cannot be fully explained by panoptic and post-panoptic theories of surveillance. Our research is grounded in the firsthand experiences of Uyghurs subjected to China’s high-tech surveillance in East Turkestan, collected through approximately 500 surveys, 21 in-depth interviews, and two focus group discussions. Our respondents reveal that China’s use of advanced technology infiltrates every facet of social and private life in East Turkestan, compelling the residents to engage in self-discipline not only in the public sphere, but also in their private sphere, extending into their houses and vehicles, family and neighbourly relations, and the ways they interact with technology. China’s practices, which we call ‘techno-panoptic governance’, have moved to extremes in surveilling, disciplining, and manipulating individuals on a granular level. This type of governance is designed to achieve a complete erasure of privacy and individual agency by strategically leveraging technology. Its objective is to manipulate and disrupt individuals’ everyday reality, driving them into a state of constant anxiety and paranoia. Under this system, individuals are compelled to perceive and treat their everyday lives as mere data that could alert state authorities at any moment and live in a state-imposed reality.

Ahrens, T., & Ferry, L. (2025). Governmentality, counter-conduct, and modes of governing: Accounting and the pursuit of municipal sustainable waste management. Contemporary Accounting Research, 1–28.

https://doi.org/10.1111/1911-3846.13026

Abstract
Recent research into the uses of accounting as a technology of government has used Foucault’s notion of “counter-conduct” to shed light on various ways in which the governed can seek to alter the regimes to which they are subjected. This paper unpacks the notion of counter-conduct further in order to develop a clearer conceptualization of how regimes of government can change over time, with or without clearly identifiable attempts by the governed to influence such changes. We develop our argument based on a longitudinal field study of sustainable waste management practices in a municipality in the English East Midlands. We track the municipality’s attempts to become more sustainable in the context of an evolving central government performance management regime that went through a series of legislative and administrative iterations—namely, Best Value, Comprehensive Performance Assessment, and Comprehensive Area Assessment. We conceptualize these iterations of central performance management and the related changes in local government practices and technologies of governing as a series of overlapping “modes of governing” (Bulkeley et al., 2007, Environment and Planning A, 39(11), 2733–2753). We suggest that accounting research can benefit from the notion of modes of governing because it sheds light on the theoretically expected, but empirically underresearched, copresence of multiple rationales, programs, and technologies of governing, all operating at the same time.

Dhona, H. R. (2024). Islamic communication as an invention of modern-western knowledge: critical analysis toward Islamic communication in Indonesia. Asian Journal of Communication, 34(3), 381–398.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2024.2320902

ABSTRACT
This article questions the idea that Islamic communication is rooted purely in the religion itself. By studying the field of Islamic communication studies in Indonesia, it analyzes discourses which produce knowledge of Islamic communication. Foucauldian archaeological method is employed to examine literatures, textbooks, and other sources which form regulated statements about Islamic communication tradition in Indonesia, developed by both public university scholars and Islamic scholars in the nation. The author argues that Islamic communication traditions in Indonesia are the product of modern developmentalism discourse which dominated in the New Order era (1966–1998). As a consequence, Islamic communication tradition in Indonesia is currently unable to provide an alternative perspective in much broader communication studies. This article proposes revisiting the history of Islamic communication within certain local contexts and use of the Islamic discourse as a criticism toward every kind of domination, including the domination of knowledge termed Islamic.

KEYWORDS:
Archaeology, communication history, dawah, developmentalism, Islamic communication, Indonesia, prophetic communication

Reddy Naveen K. Redefining disease in the age of blood-based biomarkers, Frontiers in Sociology, vol 10 2025

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1533429

Abstract
This article explores the sociological and ethical implications of redefining disease in the era of advanced diagnostic technologies, with a focus on blood-based biomarkers. Drawing from Foucault’s concept of medicalization and Illich’s critique of disease mongering, it highlights how diagnostic expansions, driven by corporate and institutional influences, are reshaping the boundaries of health and disease. Advances such as blood assays for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, liquid biopsies in oncology, and biomarkers for depression and diabetes, while promising, raise concerns about premature diagnoses and overtreatment. The influence of pharmaceutical and insurance industries on diagnostic criteria, as seen in the ICD updates, underscores the need to address conflicts of interest and regulatory gaps. Case studies on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s reveal how these changes could benefit stakeholders at the expense of patient welfare. The article calls for ethical oversight, stricter regulation, and research into the population-level efficacy of diagnostic and treatment protocols.