Foucault News

Affect and counter-conduct: cultivating action for social change in human rights education (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

9 November 2017

Zembylas, M.
Affect and counter-conduct: cultivating action for social change in human rights education
(2017) Discourse, pp. 1-13. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2017.1300573

Abstract
This paper explores the entanglement between two partially connected concerns that offer the potential to animate current discussions on human rights teaching and learning: ‘affect’ and ‘counter-conduct’. Both terms are at the heart of human rights education (HRE) approaches that aim at cultivating resistance in children and youth so that they respond in critically affective and action-oriented ways to human rights violations and social injustices in ‘the everyday’. These concepts are used to explore: first, how to encourage children and youth to enact forms of counter-conduct that are critical in human rights struggles, rather than responses which are sedimented through the governing technologies of declarational approaches of HRE; and second, how these counter-conduct practices may constitute ethical and political practices that critique liberal and sentimental forms of affect about human rights violations. It is argued that theoretical insights that pay attention to counter-conduct and affect offer possibilities for reconsidering normalized ideas in HRE. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Author Keywords
Affect; counter-conduct; Foucault; human rights; human rights education; sentimentality

Kevin S. Jobe, Foucault and the Telos of Power (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 November 2017

Kevin S. Jobe, Foucault and the Telos of Power (2017) Critical Horizons, 18 (3), pp. 191-213.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2017.1293888

Abstract
In this paper, I argue that the unique contributions of Foucault’s late work to critical social theory can be identified in the ways in which power relations are refined as the material condition of “politics” as distinguished from that of law, where “politics”: (a) includes both competitive and goal-oriented strategic actions and interactions, (b) excludes the coercive technologies of law embodied in State institutions, (c) presupposes “incomplete” reciprocity between actors engaged in directing others, (d) always entails modes of revealing truth and acting upon the self. By contextualising the break between pastoral power and direction in the 1979–1980 lectures, I show how for the late Foucault, power relations constitute the material condition of “politics” precisely because, unlike relations of control or coercion, their aims and objectives remain open to the possibility of building new relationships and potentially more “political” forms of social action. I conclude by situating this major distinction within Foucault’s unfulfilled project to study the “military dimension” of society, and the relevance and urgency of this project for contemporary struggles against new forms of militarism and austerity.

Author Keywords
action; Foucault; Habermas; law; parresia; politics; power

Catherine Manathunga, Mark Selkrig, Kirsten Sadler, and (Ron) Kim Keamy, Rendering the paradoxes and pleasures of academic life: using images, poetry and drama to speak back to the measured university (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

7 November 2017

Catherine Manathunga, Mark Selkrig, Kirsten Sadler, and (Ron) Kim Keamy, Rendering the paradoxes and pleasures of academic life: using images, poetry and drama to speak back to the measured university (2017) Higher Education Research and Development, 36 (3), pp. 526-540.
https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1289157

Abstract
Measurement of academic work has become more significant than the intellectual, pedagogical, cultural, political and social practices in which academics and students engage. This shifting emphasis creates paradoxes for academics. They experience a growing sense of disconnection between their desires to develop students into engaged, disciplined and critical citizens and the activities that appear to count in the enterprise university. As measurement discourses preclude the possibilities of human emotion and hinder intellectual labour, we embarked on an arts-informed research project that established new creative spaces for our colleagues to illustrate the pleasures and paradoxes of their academic work. In the research project, we developed critical pedagogies through art and poetry that enabled academics to speak back to university management–and each other–about how they experience their work. In this paper, we draw upon poststructural ‘micro-physics’ of power, the poststructuralist ‘politics of reinscription’, and art, poetry and drama as critical pedagogies to interrogate the potential of arts-informed research to speak back to the measured university. The key contribution of this article is to recommend arts-informed methodologies as a forum for dissent and resistance at a time when the spaces of collegiality, pleasure and democracy in the measured university are under attack. © 2017 HERDSA.

Author Keywords
academic work; arts-informed research; critical pedagogies; Foucault; neoliberal university

Panopticisms: From fantasy to metaphor to reality (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 November 2017

Fludernik, M.
Panopticisms: From fantasy to metaphor to reality
(2017) Textual Practice, 31 (1), pp. 1-26.

DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1256675

Abstract
Since Foucault’s popularisation of Bentham’s panopticon in Discipline and Punish, panopticism has become a master trope in literary criticism and inspired novelists to adopt panoptic scenarios in their work. This article follows the trajectory of the panopticon metaphor in criticism and fiction and demonstrates how the merely metaphoric model has become a reality in current penal contexts. In particular, it will be shown how literary criticism and fiction reinterpret the original Benthamite and Foucauldian constellations of the panoptic for their own purposes and that present-day penal and nonpenal surveillance contradicts the rationale under which the panopticon operated for Jeremy Bentham. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Angela carter; D.A. miller; Jeremy bentham; Michel foucault; Panopticon; Sarah waters; Supermax prisons

Rebecca Smith, The emergence of the quantified child (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 November 2017

Rebecca Smith, The emergence of the quantified child (2017) Discourse, 38 (5), pp. 701-712.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1136269

Abstract
Using document analysis, this paper examines the historical emergence of the quantified child, revealing how the collection and use of data has become normalized through legitimizing discourses. First, following in the traditions of Foucault’s genealogy and studies examining the sociology of numbers, this paper traces the evolution of data collection in a range of significant education policy documents. Second, a word count analysis was used to further substantiate the claim that data collection and use has been increasingly normalized through legitimizing discourses and routine actions in educational settings. These analyses provide evidence that the need to quantify educational practices has been justified over long periods of time through a variety of documents and that the extent to which data governs educators’ thoughts, discourses, and actions has dramatically increased during the past century.

Author Keywords
Data; educational discourse; educational policy; genealogy; history of education; sociology of numbers; testing

Teresa Lloro-Bidart, Neoliberal and disciplinary environmentality and ‘sustainable seafood’ consumption: storying environmentally responsible action (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 November 2017

Teresa Lloro-Bidart, Neoliberal and disciplinary environmentality and ‘sustainable seafood’ consumption: storying environmentally responsible action (2017) Environmental Education Research, 23 (8), pp. 1182-1199.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2015.1105198

Abstract
This article invokes a neoliberal and disciplinary governmentality lens in a political ecology of education framework to analyze educational programming at Long Beach, California’s Aquarium of the Pacific. I begin by briefly describing governmentality as Foucault and neo-Foucauldian scholars have theorized the concept, followed by a discussion of the emergence of green governmentality and environmentality in political ecology. Next, I invoke a political ecology of education framework informed by neoliberal and disciplinary environmentality to analyze institutional and teaching practice at the Aquarium. In this analysis, I demonstrate how the institution’s funding structure, placement within the entertainment markets of the southern California area, and commitment to ocean conservation education all influence how the Aquarium conceptualizes itself and its work. I focus on the case of the Blue Cavern Show and the Seafood for the Future program, which work in tandem to define a problem (declining fish stocks; possible seafood shortages) and then structure a neoliberal solution through the market (sustainable seafood consumption). I conclude by discussing the implications of this research for environmental education, which include unpacking how neoliberalism impacts teaching practice, especially as it relates to notions of framing environmentally responsible action. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
informal education; neoliberalism; political ecology; zoos

Craig E. Stephenson, The possessions at Loudun: tracking the discourse of dissociation (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 November 2017

Craig E. Stephenson, The possessions at Loudun: tracking the discourse of dissociation
(2017) Journal of Analytical Psychology, 62 (4), pp. 544-566.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12336

Abstract
Embedded in the history of dissociation is the best known case of possession in European history, the 17th century possessions at Loudun, France (1632-1638). The exorcisms and the trial drew crowds from all over Europe, the outcome prefiguring the direction in which the Western science of mind would be carried. The published debate about the possessed and obsessed Ursuline nuns of Loudun spans four centuries. One can track how theorizing about dissociation changed over time, with psychological contributions by Jean Martin Charcot, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Pierre Janet, Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Freud’s psychoanalytic notion of demonological neurosis emphasized defensive strategies and a diabolic parody of adulthood. Jung’s concepts of demonism and possession highlighted dissociated complexes that assimilate the ego and unseat the self, rendering a life ‘provisional’. Dissociation as possession provides a through-line in Jung’s Collected Works, from his 1902 dissertation to one of the last essays he wrote, in 1961. Within the context of psychotherapy, therapists and patients work towards psychological containment, consciously reorienting themselves to the presence of unconscious factors, personifying, embodying and thereby incorporating images of dissociated Otherness into the experience of selfhood. © 2017, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Author Keywords
Charcot; de Certeau; demonism; dissociation; Janet; obsession; possession; self

Amber Hughes & Ron Laura, The contribution of Aboriginal epistemologies to mathematics education in Australia: Exploring the silences (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 November 2017

Amber Hughes & Ron Laura, The contribution of Aboriginal epistemologies to mathematics education in Australia: Exploring the silences
(2017) Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(4), 338–348.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1359782

Abstract
Epistemology is a conceptual template for how we think about the world, and the study of how we come to know the world around us. The world does not dictate unequivocally how to interpret it. This article will explore this position on the fluidity of epistemic constructs through two prominent philosophical perspectives, those being derived from the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Foucault, respectively. These insights will be used to more deeply unfold the current situation for Aboriginal students within dominant approaches to mathematics curriculum in Australia, and the subsequent approaches to the inclusion of Aboriginal knowledge and epistemologies. It is suggested that the epistemic constructs most valued and thus credited as conveyors of ‘truth’, and therefore positioned as powerful forms of knowledge within dominant curriculum and education policy, are those derived from Western, Eurocentric origins. This privileging of particular epistemological constructs over others is reinforced unconsciously through the articulation of educational goals deemed most appropriate, or ‘socially just’, for the Aboriginal student population. The place of Aboriginal knowledge within such constructs is therefore reflective of broader ideation around the role of education within society and its failure to challenge existing structures of power and injustice. © 2017 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

Author Keywords
Aboriginal knowledge; educational goals; Epistemology; Foucault; mathematics curriculum; social justice; truth; Wittgenstein

Luca Mavelli, Governing the resilience of neoliberalism through biopolitics (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 November 2017

Luca Mavelli, Governing the resilience of neoliberalism through biopolitics
(2017) European Journal of International Relations, 23 (3), pp. 489-512.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116676321

Abstract
Neoliberalism is widely regarded as the main culprit for the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. However, despite this abysmal failure, neoliberalism has not merely survived the crisis, but actually ‘thrived’. How is it possible to account for the resilience of neoliberalism? Existing scholarship has answered this question either by focusing on the distinctive qualities of neoliberalism (such as adaptability, internal coherence and capacity to incorporate dissent) or on the biopolitical capacity of neoliberalism to produce resilient subjects. This article adopts a different perspective. Drawing on and partially challenging the perspective of Michel Foucault, I argue that neoliberalism and biopolitics should be considered two complementary governmental rationalities, and that biopolitical rationalities contribute to governing the uncertainties and risks stemming from the neoliberalization of life. Biopolitics, in other words, plays a key role in governing the resilience of neoliberalism. Through this conceptual lens, the article explores how biopolitical rationalities of care have been deployed to govern the neoliberal crisis of the Greek sovereign debt, which threatened the stability of the European banking system and, I shall argue, the neoliberal life, wealth and well-being of the European population. The article discusses how biopolitical racism is an essential component of the biopolitical governance of neoliberalism. Biopolitical racism displaces the sources of risk, dispossession and inequality from the neoliberal regime to ‘inferior’ populations, whose lack of compliance with neoliberal dictates is converted into a threat to our neoliberal survival. This threat deserves punishment and authorizes further dynamics of neoliberal dispossession. © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.

Author Keywords
Biopolitics; Foucault; governmentality; Greek sovereign debt crisis; neoliberalism; resilience

Michel Foucault défenseur de l’ethnologie: « La magie – le fait social total » (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 November 2017

Bert, J. (2017). Michel Foucault défenseur de l’ethnologie: « La magie – le fait social total », une leçon inédite des années 1950. Zilsel, 2,(2), 281-303. https://www.cairn.info/revue-zilsel-2017-2-page-281.htm.

Premières lignes
Les milliers de pages de notes manuscrites de Michel Foucault, conservées à la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), donnent à voir un auteur bien différent de la caricature que certains spécialistes de l’histoire des sciences humaines et de la philosophie ont dessinée après sa mort. Ces simplifications alternent entre la référence appuyée à sa critique des sciences humaines, dans le sillage de Les…

Plan de l’article
De l’ethnologie et des « formations culturelles »
Le formalisme de Claude Lévi-Strauss
De la magie et de l’irrationnel