Foucault News

Foth, T., & Holmes, D. (2018). Governing through lifestyle—Lalonde and the biopolitical management of public health in Canada. Nursing Philosophy, 0(0), e12222.

doi:10.1111/nup.12222

“In 1974, the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau released a “green paper” known as the Lalonde Report, after the health minister at that time. The report formulated perspectives on health and the main concepts and ideas developed in it, particularly the concept of “lifestyle,” which became the foundation of public health policies in many different European countries and the United States. The concept of “lifestyle” connected personal behaviour and habits to the individual health condition; people were not dying due to a lack of access to medical care but because they lived a life prone to personal risk taking. Furthermore, what is seldom discussed is that this report not only propagated the (neo)liberal view of citizens as autonomous rational actors (homo oeconomicus), with personal responsibility for their health, but it was a first step in the transformation of Medicare and went far beyond the question of health promotion. Health was no longer something that happened to a person but was created through personal choice and, therefore, one had to assume responsibility for one’s behaviour. Using Foucault’s definition of government as the “conduct of conduct,” we will demonstrate that the Lalonde report must be understood as a specific “technology of government” and contributed to a neoliberal transformation of health care despite the fact that the Canadian system of Medicare was based on the idea of universality, meaning citizens had equal access to health care independent of their socio‐economic situation. As we will demonstrate, the Lalonde report undermined this foundation and initiated a profound reorientation, not only of the healthcare system, but even more importantly, it radically changed the way we think about our behaviour around health‐related issues. We will also discuss how the making of the report contributed to the redefinition of politics and demonstrated a lack of concern with liberal‐democratic decision‐making processes.”

Rushton, C., Edvardsson, D.
Reconciling conceptualizations of ethical conduct and person-centred care of older people with cognitive impairment in acute care settings
(2018) Nursing Philosophy, 19 (2), art. no. e12190, .

DOI: 10.1111/nup.12190

Abstract
Key commentators on person-centred care have described it as a “new ethic of care” which they link inextricably to notions of individual autonomy, action, change and improvement. Two key points are addressed in this article. The first is that few discussions about ethics and person-centred are underscored by any particular ethical theory. The second point is that despite the espoused benefits of person-centred care, delivery within the acute care setting remains largely aspirational. Choices nurses make about their practice tend to comply more often with prevailing norms than those championed by person-centred care. We draw on elements of work by moral philosopher Løgstrup and Foucault to provide insight into nurses’ ethical conduct and ask why nurses would want to act otherwise, when what they think and do is viewed as normal, or think and act otherwise if doing so is seen within the organization as transgressive? To address these more specific questions, we discuss them in relation to the following constructs: the ethical demand, sovereign expressions of life and parrhêsia. We conclude by arguing that a ethical theoretical framework enables nurses to increase their perceptibility and appreciation of the ethical demand particularly those emanating from incommensurability between organizational norms and the norms invoked by person-centred care. We argue that nurses’ responses to the ethical demand by way of parrhêsia can be an important feature of intra-organizational reflexivity and its transformation towards the delivery care that is more person-centred, particularly for older people with cognitive impairment. We conclude the article by highlighting the implications of this for nursing education and research. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Author Keywords
acute care; cognitive impairment; ethical conduct; older person; parrhêsia

Index Keywords
aged, cognitive defect, concept formation, ethics, human, intensive care nursing, medical ethics, nursing, patient care, philosophy; Aged, Cognitive Dysfunction, Concept Formation, Critical Care Nursing, Ethics, Nursing, Humans, Patient-Centered Care, Philosophy, Nursing

Machado, E.V.
Hyperidentity and orientalism: The case of the sieges of diu in Portuguese texts
(2018) South Asian Studies, 34 (1), pp. 6-16.

DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2018.1440056

Abstract
The Portuguese representations of the sieges of Diu have been produced over the span of five centuries. My main argument is that, in these texts, Diu served as a pretext to reaffirm the glories of Portugal in Asia during the sixteenth century, as well as to establish an ontological and epistemological distinction between the West and the East. Such representations stem from what Eduardo Lourenço calls ‘Portuguese hyperidentity’, a notion which helps us understand how the discourses about Diu articulate knowledge and power. The relevance of establishing a connection between Edward W. Said’s theory of Orientalism and Lourenço’s viewpoint lies in the fact that both the ‘Western conceptions of the Orient’ and the affirmation of Portuguese identity and belonging participate of what Michel Foucault called the ‘regime of truth’. © 2018 The British Association for South Asian Studies.

Author Keywords
Diu; Hyperidentity; Islam; Knowledge and power; Orientalism; Portugal