Foucault News

Teaching mathematics to lower attainers: dilemmas and discourses (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

28 June 2018

Alderton, J., Gifford, S.
Teaching mathematics to lower attainers: dilemmas and discourses
(2018) Research in Mathematics Education, pp. 1-17. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/14794802.2017.1422010

Abstract
This article draws on Foucault’s concepts of power and discourse to explore the issues of teaching mathematics to low attainers in primary schools in England. We analyse a data set of interviews, from a larger study, with the mathematics teachers of one child across three years, showing how accountability practices, discourses of ability and inclusion policies interrelate to regulate both teachers and student. We demonstrate the impact of neoliberal policy discourses on teachers’ practices and how they are caught up in conflicting ways by an accountability regime that subverts inclusive pedagogies, requiring teachers to monitor, label and assign within-child deficits. In spite of these regulatory technologies we identify contradictory fault lines between mathematics education policy discourses which we argue provide the potential for developing critical awareness of accepted practices and opportunities for change. © 2018 British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics

Author Keywords
ability; accountability; discourse; Foucault; inclusion; low attainers; Mathematics education

Schumpeter, Michel Foucault’s lessons for business (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

27 June 2018

SchumpeterMichel Foucault’s lessons for business, The Economist, Jun 21st 2018

Editor: Hidden behind Paywall

Forget McKinsey. A Gallic intellectual is the key to controlling how companies are perceived

NOT many businesspeople study post-war French philosophy, but they could certainly learn from it. Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, argued that how you structure information is a source of power. A few of America’s most celebrated bosses, including Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett, understand this implicitly, adroitly manipulating how outsiders see their firms. It is one of the most important but least understood skills in business.

Foucault was obsessed with taxonomies, or how humans split the world into arbitrary mental categories in order “to tame the wild profusion of existing things”. When we flip these around, “we apprehend in one great leap…the exotic charm of another system of thought”. Imagine, for example, a supermarket organised by products’ vintage. Lettuces, haddock, custard and the New York Times would be grouped in an aisle called “items produced yesterday”. Scotch, string, cans of dog food and the discounted Celine Dion DVDs would be in the “made in 2008” aisle.

Read more

Towards a foucauldian analysis of animal trials (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 June 2018

Koyuncu, Emre, Animals as criminals: Towards a foucauldian analysis of animal trials
Parergon, Vol. 35, No. 1, June 2018: [79]-96

Abstract:
Scholarship on the early modern practice of animal trials in Europe has grown substantially in the last few decades. After a critical literature review pointing at the shortcomings of positivist approaches and of the interpretation of the phenomenon as a purely religious practice, I present Foucauldian genealogy as a more rigorous framework for understanding the purpose this peculiar practice may have served. The benefits of adopting a Foucauldian perspective are twofold. First, it allows for a subtle functionalism that does not treat this tradition as a homogeneous block. Second, it gives an opportunity to introduce the animal body into Foucault’s genealogy of power, which rather focuses on the human body and interhuman relationships.

Atmospheric governance: Gassing as law for the protection and killing of life (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 June 2018

Nieuwenhuis, M.
Atmospheric governance: Gassing as law for the protection and killing of life
(2018) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (1), pp. 78-95.

DOI: 10.1177/0263775817729378

Abstract
Breathing is the activity which all forms of animated life share in common. The breath has been symbolised across cultures as the meaning of life itself. If breathing is imagined as life, gassing is the very opposite. Gassing is the intended (or unintended) means to prevent or obstruct breathing. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Nazi concentration camps are remembered as expressions of technological as much as metaphysical terror. The 2013 and 2017 Syrian chemical attacks show how gassing remains a ‘red line.’ This paper deals with the historical significance and complexity of air and breathing in law. Human dependency on the air has in early treaties been protected at times of war between ‘civilised’ nations but was exploited as an instrument against the breather during colonialism. Today, non-lethal-weapons, a more-than-technical term, are used extensively to discipline the biological body into political order. Engaging with the work of Foucault, Sloterdijk and others, I seek to make sense of the legal status of this contradictory political technology, which does not directly attack the body but rather conditions the atmospheric requirements for its animation. I argue for a move towards understanding law atmospherically as an extension of the body. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.

Author Keywords
Air; atmosphere; breath; gas; law; life

Index Keywords
air, colonialism, environmental legislation, environmental politics, environmental protection, governance approach, quality of life

CFP: Third Meeting of the Critical Genealogies Workshop (2018-19)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 June 2018

Call for Papers
Third Meeting of the Critical Genealogies Workshop

website
Philevents
PDF of call for papers

Venue: University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon, United States, United States

Date: May 9–11, 2019

The Critical Genealogies Workshop provides a space of collaboration and experimentation for scholars who deploy genealogy in order to investigate problematizations of the contemporary. The purpose of the event is to present in-progress genealogical work so as to thematize and reflect on larger questions of research design, strategy, and structure and practical questions about conducting genealogical research.

We seek submissions from scholars from any disciplinary or field background who deploy genealogical methods and practices in their work: previous events have included scholars from Philosophy, Political Science, History, Media Studies, and other backgrounds. Approaching genealogy largely through the lens of Foucault and Nietzsche, we also welcome other genealogical approaches of diverse inspiration. Above all, we endeavor to take seriously Foucault’s challenges to inherited practices of philosophical critique by taking up genealogy to interrogate the history of the present.

The format of the workshop involves pre-circulation of in-progress work. This will be a pre-read event; participants are expected to share their papers by March 2019 and are expected to read papers from other participants prior to arrival. Concurrent sessions will feature paper presentations consisting of two sets of brief commentaries (5 minutes each) followed by group discussion (35 minutes). The event will also feature a plenary roundtable on method and research design as well as a methods workshop session.

Please send an abstract of no more than 750 words in “.pdf” format to the event co-directors Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (University of Memphis), Colin Koopman (University of Oregon), and Bonnie Sheehey (University of Oregon) at criticalgenealogies@gmail.com by Nov. 2, 2018. Indicate “Critical Genealogies Workshop submission” in the subject line. Decisions will be conveyed by Dec. 15, 2018.

Logistical information about accommodations & transportation will be provided with program decisions. There will be no registration fees associated with this event.

For further information see our website (criticalgenealogies.weebly.com) or contact CGW co-founders Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (vrlnbsch@memphis.edu) and Colin Koopman (koopman@uoregon.edu).

Zheng Yiran, Foucault fever in contemporary China (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

22 June 2018

Opinion: Foucault fever in contemporary China – CGTN

By Zhao Hong. CGTN, 2017-02-24
Guest commentary by Zheng Yiran

On September 11, 2016, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Art Museum, a thousand people squeezed into an auditorium that can accommodate only four hundred audience. It was the Beijing Premiere of Wang Min’an’s documentary, “Michel Foucault”. Hundreds of people were standing on the aisle to watch this 83-minute film, considered to be the epitome of the “Foucault Fever” in contemporary China.
[…]
In Douban, a very popular Chinese SNS website allowing people to share comments related to books, films and other cultural products and activities, the reading group of Foucault has gathered 12,000 people. The number of Foucault fans beats that of Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, G. W. F. Hegel. Interestingly, Foucault’s group is also bigger than other groups tagged “French culture,” “French literature” and “Sophie Marceau,” who is considered as the most popular French movie star in China.

It is worth thinking about the wide acceptance and spread of Foucault in China, who inspired Chinese intellectuals and changed their ways of thinking. When China has experienced dramatic transformations in the recent decades, people can find explanations from Foucault.

Foucault and Shakespeare (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 June 2018

Editor: The organiser has asked me to post a reminder to register.

KINGSTON SHAKESPEARE SEMINAR AT GARRICK’S TEMPLE

SATURDAY JUNE 23 2018

FOUCAULT AND SHAKESPEARE

10.00: Chair: Richard Wilson (Kingston University)

Jonathan Dollimore
‘Foucault, Shakespeare and Cultural Materialism’

11.00: Coffee (Temple Pavilion)

11.30: Chair:

Kélina Gotman (King’s College University of London)
‘Foucault, Theatre, Critique’

Thomas Brockelman (Le Moyne College)
‘Foucault and Lacan Interpret Las Meninas: On the virtues and limitations of philosophical reading’

13.00: Lunch (Bell Inn, Hampton)

14.30: Chair:

Duncan Salkeld (University of Chichester)
‘King Lear and Foucault’s History of Madness’

Jennifer Rust (Saint Louis University)
‘Of Government the Properties to Unfold:Foucault’s Genealogy of Governmentality and Measure for Measure’

16.00: Tea (Temple Pavilion)

16.30: Chair:

Stuart Elden (University of Warwick)
‘Contagion in Troilus and Cressida’

17.30: Round Table Discussion

To register for this event go to:
https://foucaultandshakespeare.eventbrite.co.uk

Regimes of language and light in J. S. Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’ (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 June 2018

Dowd, G.
Regimes of language and light in J. S. Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’
(2018) Textual Practice, pp. 1-24. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1426037

Abstract
While positioning and contextualising the short story ‘Green Tea’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) in relation to existing Le Fanu scholarship, this article seeks to explore further the textual reflexivity for which it is renowned. The regimes of language and light (a formulation loosely derived from the work of Michel Foucault) are presented in Le Fanu as intertwined, yet each is also presented as paradoxically set apart. Le Fanu’s tale displays the discontinuity and mutual exteriority of the regimes in the form of an experimental exploration within the form of the tale itself. Through an attention to the interrelationship of the scopic and textual (and, to a lesser extent, the auditory) regimes of ‘Green Tea’, and to the manner in which writing is explicitly figured as both the source of disjunction and the site of interpenetration of the regimes, it is proposed that a specific understanding of allegory (in a semantic register drawing on work by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man) can provide a fresh perspective on ‘Green Tea’ as an archive of the regimes of language and light of its time. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Author Keywords
allegoresis; Allegory; de Man; Le Fanu; scopic regime

Gao Lei addresses power, violence (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 June 2018

How ruling class controls the public

Gao Lei addresses power, violence
By Kwon Mee-yoo. Korea Times, Dec 2017
Exhibition ran until January 7 2018

Editor’s note: old news

Chinese artist Gao Lei explores the power, control and violence of the ruling class in contemporary society through witty and allegorical art.

“I was inspired by French philosopher Michel Foucault’s thoughts on power and control,” Gao said during a press conference in November. “I’m based in Shanghai now and there are factories near my studio. The change of environment also influenced materials used for my works.”

Foucault, Les aveux de la chair reviewed in Spanish (plus links to other news/reviews)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

19 June 2018

Progressive Geographies

Foucault, Les aveux de la chair is reviewed in Spanish by Agustín Colombo (open access)

A roundup of news stories and other pieces – mostly in French and some in English is here. My review essay is on the Theory, Culture and Society blog (open access), and is forthcoming in the journal.

View original post