Foucault News

Mathematics education in the neoliberal and corporate curriculum: the case of Brazilian agricultural high schools (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

26 September 2019

de Toledo e Toledo, N., Knijnik, G., Valero, P.
Mathematics education in the neoliberal and corporate curriculum: the case of Brazilian agricultural high schools
(2018) Educational Studies in Mathematics, 99 (1), pp. 73-87.

DOI: 10.1007/s10649-018-9825-4

Abstract
The pedagogical principle learning by research guides the current curriculum in agricultural high schools in Brazil. A problematization of the principle shows how (1) it feeds into current neoliberal and corporate agendas in the education sector, and (2) it associates mathematical formalism and abstraction as necessary conditions for the production and use of biotechnology. Data consists of official national and institutional policy documents, as well as interviews conducted with nine former students, along with their school notebooks and tests. The theoretical and methodological framework draws on the work of Michel Foucault. It is argued that neoliberal market values are embedded in the mathematics education, through the articulation of abstract and formal reasoning with techno-scientific knowledge, for the purpose of competitive production. The learning by research principle shapes students’ subjectivities to desire becoming techno-scientificized individuals. The ethical question of the subordination of the value of mathematics education to a neoliberal, predominantly marketized logic is raised as a challenge to the role of mathematics in contemporary cultures. © 2018, Springer Nature B.V.

Author Keywords
High school agricultural education courses; Mathematics education; Mathematics education and subjectivation; Mathematics in agricultural education

Jan C. Zoellick, Lock them up! Lock them up? A critique of the prison mosaic (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 September 2019

Jan C. Zoellick, Lock them up! Lock them up? A critique of the prison mosaic (2018) Futures, 101, pp. 1-9.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2018.04.010

Abstract
Incarceration has become the routine response to severe criminal offence and is presented as the most humane form of punishment. Yet, multiple biases combine to form a discriminatory criminal justice system targeting poor men of colour. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Loïc Wacquant, and Angela Davis the development of prisons to the hegemonic form of managing misconduct and ultimately poverty is analysed. These include analyses of the prison-industrial complex as a close connection between incarceration and industry, as well as the role of neoliberal ideology and agenda in transforming the state based on discipline and control as responses to social ills. Following Castoriadis’ “decolonisation of the imaginary” these fundamental critiques are connected with alternatives to incarceration. Finally, exemplary alternatives to the neoliberal state complete the mosaic of social injustice and provide a broader picture on this important debate. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

Author Keywords
Alternatives to incarceration; Decolonisation of the imaginary; Degrowth; Neoliberalism; Restorative justice; Transformative justice

Index Keywords
crime, decolonization, hegemony, neoliberalism, poverty, social justice, theoretical study

Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault, the Will, and Freedom in Somatic Practice (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 September 2019

Heyes, C.J.
Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault, the Will, and Freedom in Somatic Practice
(2018) Human Studies, 41 (4), pp. 527-544.

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-018-9475-7

Abstract
This essay identifies two kinds of awareness of one’s body that occur in a variety of literatures: awareness as psychologically or spiritually enabling or therapeutic, and awareness as undesirable self-consciousness of the body. Drawing on Foucault’s account of normalizing judgment, it argues that these two forms of awareness are impossible to separate, if that separation is into authentic versus extrinsic somatic experience. Nonetheless, awareness is an important component of embodied freedom, but a freedom understood with Spinoza and Nietzsche as grounded in necessity rather than only in the will, and with Arendt and Foucault as a practice rather than an achievement of a sovereign subject. Somatic practices grounded in awareness and acceptance of the body’s necessities, along with attention to the I-can (rather than the I-will) cultivate a form of embodied freedom that bridges care of the self and the political. © 2018, Springer Nature B.V.

Author Keywords
Awareness; Body; Foucault; Freedom; Will

The Panopticon in Singapore (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 September 2019

Shech, Singapore Prison Service’s choice of name for its newsletter draws flak, The Independent, Singapore September 16, 2019

Singapore — Concerned netizens and academics alike were not happy with the Singapore Prison Service’s (SPS) choice of name for their quarterly newsletter.

The newsletter is currently called the Panopticon, an architectural infrastructure with a loaded concept.
[…]

The Panopticon newsletter was named as such in 2009 and was intended to allows inmates to be effectively and efficiently supervised.

The newsletter was made available for public access on the SPS website in July 2019.

“The features of the Panopticon are seen in many modern prisons today, and the name is consistent with SPS’ mission to ensure the secure custody of offenders, while at the same time rehabilitating them,” according to the SPS spokesperson.

The SPS stated that they will be conducting a review to rename the newsletter following the backlash.
[…]

Colleen Kelsey, Accidental Style Icon: Michel Foucault (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 September 2019

Colleen Kelsey, Accidental Style Icon: Michel Foucault, Garage magazine on the Vice site, Sep 15 2019

Editor: Update 11 February 2026. The link above is to the archived page on the Wayback Machine.

The French philosopher, who literally recommended care for the Self, is proof that so-called “public intellectuals” tend to have the best style.

[…]
I have regularly Googled, “Where did Foucault shop?” hoping for some unearthed cache of details. A bespoke suit maker? Specific sock purveyor? Anything custom? Foucault’s stylistic appeal is that of the simple, of the uniform, of the (I hate to actually say it) effortless. For myself, I crave the streamlined utility of a cinematic construction of a post-graduate, every element falling into place seamlessly—jacket, pant, boot. I will think deeply, once, about what sweater I want to wear. In my daily struggle under late capitalism, who has the time for anything else?

[…]
When Foucault was invited to debate Noam Chomsky on the idea of “innate” human nature in the Netherlands in 1971, he works the power of the matching set: a casual gray-brown bellbottomed suit. The jacket has an abbreviated collar and left side breast pocket with a whiff of a military jacket. Slices of the neck and wrists of his beige-ish turtleneck peep out. Foucault appears relaxed, yet in control. He pulls off the feat we are usually attempting, to “look like yourself.” The suit is soft, comfortable armor. Chomsky looks like the rumpled New England prof he is, with a knit tie and what my grandmother would call a “sport coat.” A comment on a YouTube video of the debate posits, “Foucault would have made a stellar Bond villain.”

Ethics, Subjectivity, and Sociomaterial Assemblages: Two Important Directions and Methodological Tensions (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 September 2019

Bazzul, J.
Ethics, Subjectivity, and Sociomaterial Assemblages: Two Important Directions and Methodological Tensions
(2018) Studies in Philosophy and Education, 37 (5), pp. 467-480.

DOI: 10.1007/s11217-018-9605-8

Abstract
Research that explores ethics can help educational communities engage twenty-first century crises and work toward ecologically and socially just forms of life. Integral to this research is an engagement with social theory, which helps educators imagine our shared worlds differently. In this paper I present two theoretical-methodological directions for educational research that centres ethics: Ethics and (human) subjectivity; and Ethics-in-assemblage. While both approaches might be seen as commensurable, they can also be seen as quite divergent. Using Michel Foucault’s later work on subjectivity and ethics, as well as recent work in Anthropology, I present a methodological direction for research into ethical subjectivity, how students come to see themselves as self-reflective ethical actors. Relevant here is the tension between ethics and politics, individual and collective modes of being, as both are crucial to both struggles for justice on a damaged planet. The second direction involves a sociomaterialist approach that employs Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘assemblage’ as well as Karen Barad’s notion ‘entangled responsibility’ to show that ethics can also be seen to co-emerge with/in phenomena that exceed human relations. In short, exploring ethics through educational research means simultaneously examining ethics as subjectivity and ethics as co-emergent larger assemblages/phenomena. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature.

Author Keywords
Assemblages; Ethics; Foucault; Justice; Materialisms; Politics; Subjectivity

Kathleen Frederickson, Queer speciation: Or, Darwin on and off the farm (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 September 2019

Kathleen Frederickson, Queer speciation: Or, Darwin on and off the farm
(2018) Victorian Studies, 60, no. 2 (2018): 228-235..
https://dx.doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.60.2.08

Abstract
In the debates over futurity that have pervaded queer theory in the early years of this millennium, the species plot has found less prevalence than it might have done. While Foucaultian biopower continues to exert a huge influence in the field, the interest in the speciation argument has ceased to seem particularly exciting. The history of speciation, though, offers a number of useful lenses through which to think about the ecology of queerness as mediated by capital—and vice versa—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the places in which to start such an investigation is Charles Darwin’s understanding of how industrial agriculture inflects the distinction between variation in nature and variation under domestication. Domestication, Darwin insists, produces more queer monstrosities. If there is a link—genealogical or otherwise— between Foucault’s “species” and Darwin’s “domesticates,” then this connection needs to be elaborated through an analysis of how a (queerly conceived) reproductive sphere participates in capitalist agricultural production.

Inge Kryger Pedersen, Striving for self-improvement: Alternative medicine considered as technologies of enhancement (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

19 September 2019

Inge Kryger Pedersen, Striving for self-improvement: Alternative medicine considered as technologies of enhancement (2018) Social Theory and Health, 16 (3), pp. 209-223.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-017-0052-3

Abstract
The notion of medical enhancement technologies has drawn attention to optimization techniques within the health area. However, this notion has evolved at the level of governmental programmes, with very little attention directed towards people’s own practices. Using a social scientific body of knowledge about enhancement technologies and a Foucauldian analytical framework, this article explores how users engage with alternative medicine. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Danish users and observations of their treatment sessions, the article demonstrates how they embark on a voyage of discovery with the body to enhance their own selves and bodily resources. The discussion centres on Rose’s approach to medical enhancement technologies and Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of the self’. A wider field of tension is outlined in which embodied alternative treatment practices play a role in various modalities of transforming and controlling bodies and selves. It is argued that such practices can be conceived of as enhancement technologies at the users’ level by showing how they not only concentrate on treatment and body maintenance, but also foster the enabling processes of changing habits, preferences, and attitudes, and creating a subjective sense of their bodies. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Author Keywords
Alternative medicine; Foucault; Medical enhancement technologies; Self-care; Sociology of the body; Technologies of the self

Index Keywords
alternative medicine, attention, drawing, habit, human, human experiment, interview, self care, sociology, tension

Muselmann: Incarceration and the mobilised body in Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona’s The Island (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 September 2019

Jayathilake, C.
Muselmann: Incarceration and the mobilised body in Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona’s The Island
(2018) African Studies, 77 (4), pp. 607-625.

DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2018.1497289

Abstract
This article interrogates the status of incarceration, and prisoners’ rights or the lack thereof, as represented in South African dramatist Athol Fugard’s Anglophone play-text, The Island (1993)–co-authored by John Kani and Winston Ntshona, and premiered in 1973–with a view to shedding light on incarceration and biopolitical violence. The play provides significant theatrical testimonies of political prisoners and incarceration by demonstrating corporeal and psychological dehumanisation processes in prisons during the apartheid era in South Africa. Despite the scholarly attention on the play, it is scarcely read through Foucault’s and Agamben’s biopolitical lenses, coupled with Nelson Mandela’s prison testimonies, and this is where this reading departs from the existing scholarship. This article argues that South African black prisoners were in a prolonged period of oppression and offensive restrictions, and in a sphere outside the normal law, thus in a status of Muselmann. How the incarcerated body is mobilised as the focal point of struggle towards apartheid laws, and how it is linked to decolonisation is also examined. Prisoners attempt to regain their freedom and agency irrespective of their living circumstances–a figurative resistance to biopolitical violence. The article offers a contribution to the critical vocabulary of the play whilst interrogating the praxis of modern biopolitics. © 2018, © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand.

Author Keywords
Agamben; apartheid; bare life; drama; Foucault; Mandela; modern biopolitics; post-colonial theatre; South Africa; state of exception

‘Doing’ gender in a rural Scottish secondary school: an ethnographic study of classroom interactions (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 September 2019

Menzies, F.G., Santoro, N.
‘Doing’ gender in a rural Scottish secondary school: an ethnographic study of classroom interactions
(2018) Ethnography and Education, 13 (4), pp. 428-441.

DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2017.1351386

Abstract
This article draws on data from an ethnographic case study that examined how pupils’ gendered identities are constructed in one rural secondary school in Scotland. We utilise the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to provide theoretical insight into how and why pupils take up particular gendered positions in school, focusing on the influence of teacher–pupil interactions. The findings suggest that some teachers reinforce traditional constructs of masculinities and femininities, and fail to disrupt boys’ views of girls as objects of desire. Teachers are also seen to reinforce gender stereotypes in their understandings of the rural landscape as an exclusive site for constructing masculine identities. We claim that this potentially limits pupils’ educational experiences. We conclude by suggesting that there is a need for teachers to develop deeper, more sophisticated understandings of gender, an area currently neglected in Scottish educational policy and teacher education programmes. © 2017, © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
education policy; Ethnographic methods; femininities; masculinities; teacher education