Foucault News

State of intervention: community stakeholder discourse on teen childbearing in Iowa (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

28 January 2020

Weare, A.M., Walkner, T.J., Tully, M.
State of intervention: community stakeholder discourse on teen childbearing in Iowa
(2019) Critical Public Health, 29 (2), pp. 205-214.

DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2018.1440069

Abstract
The state of teen childbearing in Iowa (USA) is positioned by community leaders as a discursive battleground for intervention. In 2015 meetings with community stakeholders, participants framed ‘culture’ (which they defined as ethnicity and religion) as a barrier in decreasing the state’s teen pregnancy rate and increasing girls’ economic self-sufficiency. The childbearing teen body was, unsurprisingly, portrayed as a public health problem in need of organizational intervention. But how participants linked ‘culture’ to neoliberal ideals was surprising and specific. Utilizing McRobbie’s concept of the ‘real self’ and Foucault’s explication of governmentality, this study draws out the role of neoliberal self-sufficiency in grooming teens to perform adolescent femininity and self-govern. In doing so, it considers community stakeholders’ meaning-making processes. Findings show the interventionist discourse does more than attempt to prevent early pregnancy: it reinforces acceptable and unacceptable pregnant bodies and compels community leaders and practitioners to govern childbearing teen bodies in precise ways. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
community; culture; girls; real me; Teen pregnancy

Index Keywords
adolescent, adult, article, female, femininity, first trimester pregnancy, girl, grooming, human, human experiment, Iowa, leadership, physician

The moral aesthetics of compulsory ultrasound viewing and the theological future of abortion (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 January 2020

Hovey, C.
The moral aesthetics of compulsory ultrasound viewing and the theological future of abortion
(2019) Studies in Christian Ethics, 32 (1), pp. 78-87.

DOI: 10.1177/0953946818761245

Abstract
By law, women seeking abortions in some US states must undergo compulsory ultrasound viewing. This article examines the moral significance of this practice, especially as understood by pro-life religious groups, in light of Foucault’s recently published lectures on ‘The Will to Know’ and the place of the aesthetic. How does the larger abortion-debate strategy of ‘showing’ and ‘seeing’ images—whether of living or dead fetuses—work as an aesthetic form of argument that intends to evoke a moral response in the absence of reason-giving? The article draws on recent, parallel debates regarding disgust before concluding with a theological response to the priority of will over knowledge and vision over action as commentary on the future of abortion debate and law, especially in the United States. © The Author(s) 2018.

Author Keywords
Abortion; Disgust; Foucault; MacIntyre; Moral aesthetics; Visual bioethics

Luz Valoyes-Chávez, On the making of a new mathematics teacher: professional development, subjectivation, and resistance to change (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 January 2020

Luz Valoyes-Chávez, On the making of a new mathematics teacher: professional development, subjectivation, and resistance to change (2019) Educational Studies in Mathematics, 100 (2), pp. 177-191.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-018-9869-5

Abstract
Reform-based discourses in mathematics education have fabricated different subjectivities for teachers such as the “traditional” and the “new” teacher. Professional development programs are proposed as effective mechanisms to fabricate the “new” teacher. However, this teacher has proved hard to produce. Thus, the “resistor” teacher has emerged into the field as a way to explain failure within school mathematics reform. In this article, I assume that resistance is a consequential response against particular forms of subjectivation imposed on mathematics teachers. Using conceptual tools from Hall and Foucault, I explore the ways wherein a high school mathematics teacher reinvents meanings of being a mathematics teacher in the context of a professional development program aimed to implement problem-solving instruction. Against the myth of the resistor teacher unwilling to change, what emerges is a process of struggle over meaning. School mathematics reform, considered as an ideological event, becomes a site in which competing meanings about being a mathematics teacher are negotiated, contested, and resisted. © 2018, Springer Nature B.V.

Author Keywords
Mathematics teacher; Meaning; Professional development programs; Resistance; Subjectivities

Preaching as master’s discourse. A Foucauldian interpretation of Lutheran pastoral power (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 January 2020

Tilli, J.
Preaching as master’s discourse. A Foucauldian interpretation of Lutheran pastoral power
(2019) Critical Research on Religion, 7 (2), pp. 113-129.

DOI: 10.1177/2050303219848059

Abstract
Michel Foucault acknowledged that the Reformation was a pastoral battle and a reorganization of pastoral power. He did not, however, analyze Protestantism much further. This article broadens the scope of critical research on Protestantism, focusing on Lutheranism. Preaching is a fruitful way to overcome overemphasis on confession. In this endeavor I apply Foucault’s concept of “master’s discourse.” I argue that while, in Lutheranism, conversion through comprehensive soul-searching is an individual matter, at the same time it relies on technologies aimed at a collective audience, such as preaching. Since preaching is divine speech, the Lutheran priest wields enormous spiritual power: the preacher is the truth-teller and the subject is required to listen to and internalize the proclaimed truth, instead of confessing their sins. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
Lutheranism; Michel Foucault; Pastoral power; preaching; Protestantism

Materialist deconstruction, anticolonial geographies, and the limits of genealogy: An interview on counter-history of the present (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 January 2020

Rockhill, G., De León, J.P.
Materialist deconstruction, anticolonial geographies, and the limits of genealogy: An interview on counter-history of the present
(2019) Philosophy Today, 63 (1), pp. 217-235.

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2019613263

Abstract
In this wide-ranging interview, Gabriel Rockhill discusses his most recent book, Counter-History of the Present, in the broader context of his research to date on aesthetics, politics and history, as well as its relationship to important interlocutors like Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir. He explains the similarities and important differences between genealogy and counter-history, and he elucidates how his work performs a materialist deconstruction that contests the idealist logocentrism operative in purely textualist modes of interpretation. The interview also develops an account of “radical geography” that calls into question culturalist spatial imaginaries, which plague certain forms of decolonial theory that diminish or efface social stratification and class conflict. The discussion thereby contributes to the development of a new model for critical social theory with an internationalist perspective, which seeks to weave these conceptual innovations into a rigorous and radical materialism.

M. Gail Hamner, Analogy: Foucault and Merleau-Ponty (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 January 2020

affecognitive

Yesterday I finished year 1969 in Dits et Écrits v. 1, the chronological collection of Foucault’s writings. The year’s set of writings almost literally ends with an analogy between the method of Foucault and that of his former teacher, Merleau-Ponty.

Recall that 1969 is the year Archaeology of Knowledge is published. It is also the year in which Foucault notes in an interview (“Michel Foucault explique son dernier livre”) that “this word archaeology embarrasses me a bit” (“Ce mot ‘archéologie’ me gêne unpeu“) because it ably suggests two things that Foucault does not intend: a search for an origin (archè) and a digging down to uncover what has been hidden away. Foucault says that, on the contrary, “I am attempting to render visible what is invisible only by being too much on the surface of things” (“je tente de renre visible ce qui n’est invisible…

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Roger Scruton (1944 – 2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 January 2020

Jane O’Grady, Sir Roger Scruton obituary, The Guardian, 15 January 2020

Philosopher, writer and political thinker with controversial views on education, hunting and architecture

Roger Scruton, who has died of lung cancer aged 75, was a philosopher and a controversial public intellectual. Active in the fields of aesthetics, art, music, political philosophy and architecture, both inside and outside the academic world, he dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.

He wrote more than 50 books, including perceptive works on Spinoza, Kant, Wittgenstein and the history of philosophy, and four novels, as well as columns on wine, hunting and current affairs, and was a talented pianist and composer.

Matthew McManus, On Mourning for One’s Enemies: Remembering Sir Roger Scruton, Merion West, 16 January 2020

Scruton could even be eminently generous to intellectual opponents he felt were worthy of respect, as in this telling paragraph discussing the work of Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty:

“Foucault’s approach reduces culture to a power-game, and scholarship to a kind of refereeing in the endless “struggle” between oppressed and oppressing groups. The shift of emphasis from the content of an utterance to the power that speaks through it leads to a new kind of scholarship, which bypasses entirely questions of truth and rationality, and can even reject those questions as themselves ideological.

The pragmatism of the late American philosopher Richard Rorty is of similar effect. It expressly set itself against the idea of objective truth, giving a variety of arguments for thinking that truth is a negotiable thing, that what matters in the end is which side you are on. If a doctrine is useful in the struggle that liberates your group, then you are entitled to dismiss the alternatives.

Whatever you think of Foucault and Rorty, there is no doubt that they were intelligent writers and genuine scholars with a distinctive vision of reality. They opened the way to fakes but were not fakes themselves.”

This is a far more nuanced take than the legions of empty takedowns on Foucaultian theory and post-modern Neo-Marxism one sees today.

Benjamin K. Sovacool, Marie-Claire Brisbois, Elite power in low-carbon transitions: A critical and interdisciplinary review (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 January 2020

Benjamin K. Sovacool, Marie-Claire Brisbois, Elite power in low-carbon transitions: A critical and interdisciplinary review (2019) Energy Research and Social Science, 57, art. no. 101242,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.101242

Abstract
Modern energy systems have tended towards centralized control by states, and national and multinational energy companies. This implicates the power of elites in realizing low-carbon transitions. In particular, low-carbon transitions can create, perpetuate, challenge, or entrench the power of elites. Using a critical lens that draws from geography, political science, innovation studies, and social justice theory (among others), this article explores the ways in which transitions can exacerbate, reconfigure or be shaped by “elite power.” It does so by offering a navigational approach that surveys a broad collection of diverse literatures on power. It begins by conceptualizing power across a range of academic disciplines, envisioning power as involving both agents (corrective influence) and structures (pervasive influence). It then elaborates different types of power and the interrelationship between different sources of power, with a specific focus on elites, including conceptualizing elite power, resisting elite power, and power frameworks. The Review then examines scholarship relevant to elite power in low-carbon transitions—including the multi-level perspective, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Anthony Giddens, Karl Marx, and other contextual approaches—before offering future research directions. The Review concludes that the power relations inherent in low-carbon transitions are asymmetrical but promisingly unstable. By better grappling with power analytically, descriptively, and even normatively, socially just and sustainable energy futures become not only more desirable but also more possible.

Author Keywords
Climate justice; Energy justice; Energy transitions; Political economy

Archive: The Discourses of Climate Change (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 January 2020

Taylor C. (2013) The Discourses of Climate Change. In: Cadman T. (eds) Climate Change and Global Policy Regimes. International Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006127_2

Abstract
Climate change has been represented in a variety of ways. These representations have enacted their own discursive formations, which people discuss and act upon at local, national and global scales. Climate change was initially discussed within scientific disciplines and represented within a technical discourse. As it became popularised, through environmental organisations and the media, governments and intergovernmental bodies began to frame climate change within specific discursive formations, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Kyoto Protocol (KP). These gave rise to forms of governance and discourse that have attained an almost hegemonic status, where climate change was framed within an overall neo-liberal governmental framework and network. As discursive formations of climate change were moved from science to government, they were transformed from a technical to a technocratic discourse. Institutional distance was created, resulting in the exclusion of other stakeholders and alternative discourses. Governance structures became elitist and exclusionary. The framing of climate change within global and national economic frameworks became the point of entry for stakeholders in climate change discussions.

Keywords
Climate Change Ecological Modernisation Amazonian Rainforest Carbon Cycle Model Institutional Distance

Archive: Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change (2010)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 January 2020

Yusoff, Kathryn. “Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change.” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 2–3 (March 2010): 73–99.
doi:10.1177/0263276410362090.

Abstract
As environments and their inhabitants undergo a multitude of abrupt changes due to climate, in the aesthetic field there has been a hardening of a few representational figures that stand in for those contested political ecologies. Biodiversity loss and habitat change can be seen to be forcing an acceleration of archival practices that mobilize various images of the ‘play of the world’, including the making of star species to represent planetary loss, and the consolidation of other species into archives implicitly organized around the category of their destruction. The first section of this article looks at Jacques Rancière’s concept of political aesthetics in order to extend an argument about the importance of aesthetics in multispecies living beyond a concentration on practices per se and into a more excessive engagement articulated by Georges Bataille. I argue that aesthetics must be considered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realm of what is possible in that politics. This is to suggest aesthetics as a form of ethics or an ‘aesthetics of existence’, as Foucault put it. The conclusion considers how a biopolitical aesthetic comes into being through such archival practices, and asks what aesthetic shifts would make the ‘play of the world’ more present in its absences.

Keywords
aesthetics, animality, Georges Bataille, climate change, ethics, Jacques Rancière