Foucault News

Carlson, David Lee, Rodriguez, Nelson M. (Eds.) Michel Foucault and Sexualities and Genders in Education. Friendship as Ascesis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

This book examines, within the context and concerns of education, Foucault’s reflections on friendship in his 1981 interview “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In the interview, Foucault advances the notion of a homosexual ascesis based on experimental friendships, proposing that homosexuality can provide the conditions for inventing new relational forms that can engender a homosexual culture and ethics, “a way of life,” not resembling institutionalized codes for relating. The contributors to this volume draw from Foucault’s reflections on ascesis and friendship in order to consider a range of topics and issues related to critical studies of sexualities and genders in education. Collectively, the chapters open a dialogue for researchers, scholars, and educators interested in exploring the importance and relevance of Foucault’s reflections on friendship for studies of schooling and education.

David Lee Carlson is Associate Professor of Qualitative Research in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University, USA. His current research focuses on the ways in which the post-qualitative movement continues to problematize the onto-epistemology of research methodologies.

Nelson M. Rodriguez is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at The College of New Jersey, USA. His current research areas span queer studies and education, critical masculinity studies, and Foucault studies.

Smaranda Spanu, Heterotopia and Heritage Preservation. The Heterotopic Tool as a Means of Heritage Assessment. Springer, 2020
This book approaches the field of built heritage and its practices by employing the concept of heterotopia, established by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The fundamental understandings of heritage, its evolution and practices all reveal intrinsic heterotopic features (the mirror function, its utopic drive, and its enclave-like nature). The book draws on previous interpretations of heterotopia and argues for a reading of heritage as heterotopia, considering various heritage mechanisms – heritage selection, conservation and protection practices, and heritage as mnemonic device – in this regard. Reworking the six heterotopic principles, an analysis grid is designed and applied to various built heritage spaces (vernacular, religious architecture, urban 19th century ensembles). Guided through this theoretical itinerary, the reader will rediscover the heterotopic lens as a minor, yet promising, Foucauldian device that allows for a better understanding of heritage and its everyday practices.

Francisco Klauser, (2017) Surveillance and space, London: SAGE Publications Ltd

The digital age is also a surveillance age. Today, computerized systems protect and manage our everyday life; the increasing number of surveillance cameras in public places, the computerized loyalty systems of the retail sector, geo-localized smart-phone applications, or smart traffic and navigation systems. Surveillance is nothing fundamentally new, and yet more and more questions are being asked:

• Who monitors whom, and how and why?
• How do surveillance techniques affect socio-spatial practices and relationships?
• How do they shape the fabrics of our cities, our mobilities, the spaces of the everyday?
• And what are the implications in terms of border control and the exercise of political power?

Surveillance and Space responds to these modern questions by exploring the complex and varied interactions between surveillance and space.  In doing so, the book also advances a programmatic reflection on the very possibility of a ‘political geography of surveillance’.

Introduction: Governing the Everyday in the Digital Age
Part I: Conceptual foundations
Chapter 1: Surveillance and the Everyday
Chapter 2: Surveillance and Mediation
Chapter 3: Surveillance and Power
Chapter 4: Surveillance and Space

Part II: Spatial Logics of Surveillance
Chapter 5: Punctual, Linear and Planar Logics of Surveillance
Chapter 6: Surveillance relating to Fixity and Flexibility, Enclosure and Openness
Chapter 7: Spherical Attributes of Surveillance

Part III: The Functioning of Surveillance in its Relation to Space
Chapter 8: Surveillance, Authority and Expertise
Chapter 9: Policy Mobilities and Exemplification in Surveillance Matters

Part IV: The Socio-spatial Implications of Surveillance
Chapter 10: Spatial Distancing and Separation
Chapter 11: The Orchestration and Automatic Production of Space

Conclusion: Towards a Political Geography of Surveillance