Foucault News

Governing the (un)healthy child-consumer in the age of the childhood obesity crisis (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

30 September 2018

Powell, D.
Governing the (un)healthy child-consumer in the age of the childhood obesity crisis
(2018) Sport, Education and Society, 23 (4), pp. 297-310.

DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2016.1192530

Abstract
In recent years, multinational food and drink corporations and their marketing practices have been blamed for the global childhood obesity ‘crisis’. Unsurprisingly, these corporations have been quick to refute these claims and now position themselves as ‘part of the solution’ to childhood obesity. In this paper, I examine how and why corporations fund, devise and/or implement ‘healthy lifestyles education’ programmes in schools. By using a critical ethnographic research approach alongside Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I interrogate what those with the ‘will to govern’ (such as corporations) wanted to happen (e.g. fight obesity, change marketing practices and increase consumption), but also what actually happened when these corporatised education programmes met their intended targets in three New Zealand primary schools. I critically examine these programmes by focusing on the ways in which three technologies of consumption–product placement, transforming children into marketers and sponsorship–attempt to govern children to be lifelong consumers of the corporate brand image and their allegedly ‘healthy’ corporate products. Although students were not necessarily naïve and easily coerced into becoming mindless consumers of corporate products, students and their teachers readily accepted that sponsorship, product placement and marketing in schools were normal, natural, necessary and mostly harmless. Healthy lifestyles education programmes represent a new ‘brand’ of health, health education and corporation. The child-citizen is governed to become the child-consumer. Corporations’ anxieties about being blamed for childhood obesity are fused with technologies of ‘healthy consumption’: the consumption of corporate products, corporate philanthropy, the corporate brand and corporate ‘education’. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
childhood obesity; consumers; critical ethnography; food and drink industry; Foucault; governmentality; Health and physical education; marketing; sponsorship; technologies of consumption

Stuart Elden, An anonymously published text by Foucault on Arcadie – ‘Le départe du prophète’, 1982 (with an interview between Didier Eribon and André Baudry)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 September 2018

Progressive Geographies

This text was first published in Libération, July 12, 1982, p. 14 (pdf). There it is signed ‘DE’, and follows an interview with Didier Eribon with André Baudry. Readers would assume that ‘DE’ meant Didier Eribon, but in his book Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Paris: Fayard, 1994, pp. 274-77, Eribon says that it was actually written by Foucault.

Eribon reproduces Foucault’s text on pp. 280-81 of his book, and the interview with Baudry which it accompanied, on pp. 278-79. But I was curious to see the text in its original form, and thought others might be too. As Eribon notes, there is a difference between the original and published text. It’s a minor contribution to an understanding of Foucault’s political views in the 1980s – Arcadie was a journal and organisation campaigning for gay rights.

There are several other uncollected notes, lectures and interviews by Foucault here…

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On translating Foucault at the movies (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

28 September 2018

Clare O’Farrell on Translating Foucault at the Movies, Columbia University Press blog, September 27, 2018

Today for National Translation Month we are presenting our film fans with a guest post from Clare O’Farrell who translated Foucault at the Movies by Michel Foucault, Patrice Maniglier, and Dork Zabunyan. In this post, O’Farrell gives a personal account of the challenges and opportunities that arose from this project. Foucault at the Movies brings together all of Foucault’s commentary on film, some of it available for the first time in English, along with important contemporary analysis and further extensions of this work. It offers detailed, up-to-date commentary, inviting us to go to the movies with Foucault.

Enter our drawing for a chance to win a copy of this book!

read more…

Special issue on Foucault in Iran, Iran Namag (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

27 September 2018

Special issue on Foucault in Iran
Iran Namag Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2018

English Verso

Foucault and Iran Reconsidered: Revolt, Religion, and Neoliberalism
Michiel Leezenberg

French Secular Thought: Foucault and Political Spirituality
Brian Turner

Risking Prophecy in the Modern State: Foucault, Iran, and the Conduct of the
Corey McCall

Foucault and Epicureanism of the Iranian Revolution
Yadullah Shahibzadeh

What is at the heart of the dispute? Reflections on the Foucault Controversy Forty Years Later
Kevin Gray and Rida Faisal

Iranian Conditions: Metaphors of Illness in Iranian Fiction and Film
Babak Elahi

In Memoriam: Heshmat Moayyad, 1927-2018
Franklin Lewis

Persian Reverso

A Thunderbolt Out of the Blue: The Iranian Revolution in Foucault’s Thought
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Possibilities and Limitations in Writing the History of the Present: Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Ata Mohamed Tabriz

Foucault’ Accounts of the Iranian Revolution in Light of Islamic Historiography
Mahdi Shafieyan

Foucault and Iran
Daniel Defert

Michael Foucault’s 1979 Interview
Farès Sassine

Foucault, La sexualité/Le Discours de la sexualité (1964 and 1969 courses) – EHESS/Gallimard/Seuil 2018

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 September 2018

Progressive Geographies

140113_couverture_Hres_0 Michel Foucault, La Sexualité. Cours donné à l’université de Clermont-Ferrand (1964) suivi de Le Discours de la sexualité. Cours donné à l’université de Vincennes (1969) – EHESS/Gallimard/Seuil 2018

The first volume of Foucault’s pre-Collège de France courses is due for publication in October 2018. I’ve mentioned this before, but the official description is now up at the Seuil site.

Michel Foucault avait engagé le projet d’une histoire de la sexualité dès les années 1960, et lui avait notamment consacré deux cours, jusqu’ici inédits.
Le premier, donné à Clermont-Ferrand en 1964, s’interroge sur les conditions d’apparition, en Occident, d’une conscience problématique et d’une expérience tragique de la sexualité, ainsi que de savoirs qui la prennent pour objet. Partant d’une réflexion sur l’évolution du statut des femmes et du droit du mariage, ce cours aborde l’ensemble des savoirs sur la sexualité, de la biologie ou l’éthologie à la psychanalyse.
Le second…

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Academic fashion startup Diiple – (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 September 2018

Diiple

Our story began when Kai, an adjunct professor of sociology, became enthusiastic about the new idea of academic streetwear. Once he met Eva, an award-winning fashion designer with similarly oriented thoughts, the idea began to take off. Diiple was founded in Helsinki, Finland, in the summer of 2016.

Dispositif teeshirt

We like to think that Diiple – a name that breathes Nordic spirit with its double i’s (think about the word skiing!) – is not only a lifestyle brand but also an academic community. At least this is what we are striving for! Although our slogan says that we are passionate about academic streetwear, we also see ourselves as part of a larger celebration of nonconformist, radical, and original thought.

We especially celebrate some of the rare individuals who created their own values and concepts to get a better understanding of our contemporary condition. It is our intention to create a growing set of examples so we can examine some of the most iconoclastic achievements in the different fields of theory and culture. Please visit our Studies section to read about our reasoning and analyses for choosing these particular individuals.

Governmentality teeshirt

We see ourselves as unique, and we do not expect to please everyone. However, when it comes to our products, we refuse to compromise on quality. We hope to become the natural first choice in academic streetwear – a name we invented. To become a true community, however, we need your help. Together we can create a superb site largely based on your suggestions for new products as well as new studies.

Kind regards, Kai and Eva
Contact us

See also this post on Diiple’s blog: Trials and errors in Academic Streetwear

CFP: DNC3ALED: Power and Knowledge in a Polycentric World

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 September 2018

Click on the following links for the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Russian versions of the DNC3-ALED Congress. Please sign up here now to receive the latest information!

Congress theme

The legitimacy of “Europe” and “the West” as identifiable territorial and imagined entities is in crisis. The awareness has grown of a world becoming more polycentric. At the same time, the field of Discourse Studies is growing at a dazzling rate across the globe. Discourse Studies is known for theoretical orientations and methodological tools that account for meaning production as a social practice mobilizing languages, media and technologies. It is thus uniquely placed to observe and analyse the shifting conceptions of a post-colonial, post-Eurocentric, post-west-and-the-rest world. The different understandings of the intersection of language and society, in the range of specific schools, theories and approaches within Discourse Studies promise to inspire conflicting analyses of the world today.

The focus of Discourse Studies also varies according to the specific national or regional contexts in which issues of power and language, subjectivity and inequality, language and context are being problematized. For instance, Anglophone, French-, German-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Russian-speaking communities of discourse analysts and theorists are marked by dynamic debates, terminologies and approaches that are not always well known outside each language community. The third DiscourseNet Congress, which is co-organized with ALED, aims to be a site of dialogue and reflection across and about different linguistic and national traditions in Discourse Studies.

DiscourseNet is an interdisciplinarynetwork of discourse researchers who have organized more than 25 conferences in Europe over the past ten years. The Asociación LatinoAmericana de Estudios del Discurso was formed in 1995 to promote the development of Discourse Studies inLatin America. ALED has organised 12 International Congresses and about 11 national events for each country member. A joint initiative of DiscourseNet and ALED, DNC3 – ALED invites specific approaches to shifting conceptions of, for instance, “Europe”, “the global South”, “the West”… Within the overarching frame of our contemporary entangled world, we invite discourse analysts from around the world to take stock of contemporary developments in Discourse Studies.

DNC3-ALED

is open to discourse researchers from all disciplines,
welcomes presentations in the many languages in which discourse research is being done today,
aims to create and develop non-hierarchical and open spaces for dialogue and exchange.

We welcome papers which re-examine existing discourse theoretical frameworks, articulate new approaches from different fields and schools,study social phenomena empirically and reflect on the critical potential of Discourse Studies. We also invite contributions that deal with theoretical and/or methodological challenges in Discourse Studies, preferably with a focus on the nexus of knowledge and power.

Researchers may focus on a wide variety of topics. We encourage contributions that seek to develop novel approaches to, for instance: subjectivity in contemporary society, discursive epistemology, indexicality, ideology, knowledge and hegemony, governmentality in the knowledge economy, protest and activism, materiality of/and discourse, critique and reflexivity, bi-, multi- and translingual communication, language policy, discourse and gender, class, migration, racism, populism, (neo-)fascism, discrimination, argumentation and rhetorics, social cognition, institutional discourse, workplace communication, practices and identities in the workplace, multimodal interaction and discourse analysis, online media formats and digital culture, materialism and discourse, digital humanities, cross-cultural interaction, multimodality, corpus and computer-aided analysis, conversation and interaction…

Keynote speakers

DNC3-ALED will be opened by Johannes Angermuller and Dominique Maingueneau. The speakers will reflect a range of backgrounds and include

Caterina Carta, Canada (in English)
Patrick Charaudeau, France (in French)
Laura Pardo, Argentina (in Spanish)
Viviane Resende de Melo, Brazil (in Portuguese)

The conference webpage is http://dnc3aled.discourseanalysis.net, where you will find more information on the programme, the registration, the venue, the publications and the organization team in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. For more information, please contact dnc3aled@gmail.com.

Soggettività e Veridizione nell’ultimo Foucault (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

24 September 2018

Giorgio La Rocca, Soggettività e Veridizione nell’ultimo Foucault, Sapienza Università Editrice, 2018

L’opera analizza il tema della soggettività e della veridizione negli ultimi quattro corsi tenuti da Michel Foucault al Collège de France, con particolare riferimento agli ultimi due dedicati al governo di sé e degli altri.

L’idea è di leggere tutti questi argomenti attraverso il filtro del carattere, di per sé, tema non foucaultiano. Eppure, proprio nell’ultimo Foucault, sembra che si possa rintracciare un’attenzione a tale questione.

Si giunge così a presentare l’estetica dell’esistenza come un’epifania del carattere, mettendone in rilievo le affinità e le consonanze con la teoria e l’etica delle virtù, secondo una valenza autonoma e senza inclinare necessariamente a una teoria del bene esterna alla sua stessa dimensione.

Benché l’opera si concentri sugli aspetti etici del soggetto, del dir-il-vero e della parrhesia, l’ambito politico – centrale nell’opera di Foucault – non è affatto mortificato se si accetta, aristotelicamente, che l’ethos è una dimensione della politica e non dell’etica, e che è il carattere, dunque, a risolvere il problema del soggetto nell’ambito del politico.

English
The work examines the theme of Subjectivity and veridiction in the last four lectures by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France, in particular those dedicated to “The Government of Self and others” (1982-1983), and to “The Courage of truth” (1984).

The proposition is to read these topics through the notion of character, normally not a foucaldian theme. You thus reach the present of the “aesthetics of existence” as a epiphany and realisation of character, to remark the affinity and consonances with the theory and ethics of virtue.

Although the work focuses on ethical perspectives of Subject, of veridiction and parrhesia, the political setting, central in the Foucault’s work, is not neglected at all, because according to Aristotle, the ethos is first of all a political and not an ethical dimension. So, it’s the character that resolves the problem of Subject in the political range.

Fabrication of a desired truth: the oblivion of a Naxalite woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 September 2018

Pourya Asl, M.
Fabrication of a desired truth: the oblivion of a Naxalite woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland
(2018) Asian Ethnicity, 19 (3), pp. 383-401.

DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1429892

Abstract
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) explores effects of the 1967 Communist Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal India. Irrespective of the glowing reviews the author earned for her truthful representations, the novel presents the pro-Communist uprising in a particular discursive regime that establishes a particular way of remembering and forgetting. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘subjugated knowledges,’ this essay seeks to examine the epistemic hegemonies and mainstream perspectives of the novel that have confined particular experiences and memories of the movement to the margins and rendered them unworthy of epistemic respect in the battle among power/knowledge frameworks. The novel reconstitutes a gendered history of the movement in which women’s story of engagement is spatiotemporally erased and reformulated. I argue that the genealogy of this particular oversight is rooted in the heteronormative capitalist ideology of the States that exercises discursive power over individuals to fabricate a desired truth. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
capitalism; Communism; female subjectivity; Naxalbari; subjugated knowledges

Rhetoric Lecture – The Emergence of Desire: Notes toward a Political History of the Will in Foucault’s “Aveux de la Chair” (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 September 2018

Daniele Lorenzini, Rhetoric Lecture – The Emergence of Desire: Notes toward a Political History of the Will in Foucault’s “Aveux de la Chair”

2 October 2018
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm

The Department of Rhetoric
3335 Dwinelle Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2670

In this paper on Foucault’s fourth volume to The History of Sexuality, Les aveux de la chair (Gallimard, 2018), I argue that desire, conceived as a central and permanent dimension of the human subject, is the condition of possibility of the emergence of both the modern experience of sexuality and the mechanisms of power that produced, organized, and exploited it. This condition of possibility, as Foucault points out, was historically constituted. Thus, the objective of this paper is both to critically reconstruct the way in which Foucault accounts for the progressive emergence of desire as a principle of subjectivation/objectivation of sexual acts in the Greco-Roman and Christian worlds, and to emphasize the socio-political relevance of these early chapters of his history of sexuality—an often downplayed relevance that is connected to what I call a political history of the will.

Daniele Lorenzini is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie ‘Move-in Louvain’ Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre Prospéro (Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (Columbia University). Starting in Fall 2019, he will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Jacques Maritain e i diritti umani [Jacques Maritain and Human Rights] (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2012), Éthique et politique de soi [Ethics and Politics of the Self] (Paris: Vrin, 2015), and La force du vrai [The Force of Truth] (Lormont: Le Bord de l’Eau, 2017). He is the editor, with Henri-Paul Fruchaud, of Michel Foucault’s lectures About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), Qu’est-ce que la critique? suivi de La culture de soi (Paris: Vrin, 2015; English edition forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press); Dire-vrai sur soi-même (Paris: Vrin, 2017; English edition forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press), Discourse and Truth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019).