Foucault News

Jones, Luke, Zoe Avner, Neil Boardman, and Jim Denison. 2025. “Confessions of a Retired Footballer: A Foucauldian Reading of British Working Footballers’ Longer-Term Retirement Experiences.” Sport in Society, March, 1–21.

doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2025.2470144

Abstract
Historically, the phenomenon of retirement from high-performance sport has predominantly been researched through a psychological or psychosocial lens, highlighting the key challenges experienced by athletes in their lives after sport. Despite this substantial investment and the tailored interventions that have ensued, as well as the assertion that sport prepares individuals well for their futures, problematic issues associated with this common athlete experience prevail. Denison and Winslade (2006) have suggested that the focus of psycho-social research upon the individual athlete as the ‘problem’, and the location where ‘change needs to occur’ has limited scholarly understanding of a range of athletic issues, including retirement. Over the last few decades, the socio-cultural exploration of sports retirement has grown considerably and scholars have begun to consider sport retirement using a range of theoretical tools. However, sport retirement studies have overwhelmingly considered the initial and recent aftermath of career cessation – what sport psychologists have labelled the ‘retirement phase’ (Stambulova et al., Citation2020). In the current study, in an attempt to change this status quo, we continue our Foucauldian informed analysis of Association Football (football) retirement to analyse the experiences of 25 retired football players between the ages of 21 and 34, a minimum of 18 months since their careers had ended. To do so we use a theoretical framework derived from Michel Foucault’s (1978) underutilised conceptualisation of ‘confessional techniques’. Our data analysis has suggested that the legacy of having worked as a ‘docile football body’ continues to impact and shape our participants’ everyday experiences – in particular, through the importation of a learned ‘confessional mindset’ from their careers as a means of navigating their new roles.

Keywords:
Football, sport retirement, longer term sport retirement, Foucault, confession

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.