Foucault News

Ragab, A.
Monsters and patients: An archaeology of medicine, islam, and modernity
(2016) History and Theory, 55 (4), pp. 112-130.

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10832

Abstract
Foucault’s analysis of the history of evolutionary thought in Les Mots et les choses introduces monsters as incomplete beings that form important steps on the evolutionary ladder toward the terminal species. Monsters represent attempts by nature to achieve the perfection of the terminal species and are, therefore, significant for naturalists in constructing the details of the natural continuum. Despite their incompleteness, monsters underwrite the natural continuum and evidence the grounding of this continuum in reality. To a great extent, the continuum of nature, proposed by Foucault, resembles a continuum of civilization through which the history of the world and the history of colonization were often seen. The non-European emerged as the monster that showcased the deeper history of the more-perfect European. In the same way that monsters were written into natural history as intermediary and incomplete beings, losing in the process their uniqueness as independent species, the colonized were written into the (new) World History as objects of colonization, modernization, and development and as the living fossils of a bygone European past. This new history was not only created for European consumption but was also an important part of European-style education in the colony shaping colonial and post colonial identities and perceptions of self and other.

This article uses Foucauldian monsters to understand the making of historical narratives about the precolonial past in nineteenth-century Egypt, where one of the earliest European-style medical schools in Africa and Asia was built in the early nineteenth century. In this school and surrounding emerging educational system, narratives about science, modernity, and religion produced new histories that came to form colonial subjects.Finally, the article asks about a post colonial/post monstrous epistemology, what it might look like and whether and how it can emerge from the postcolonial condition. © Wesleyan University 2016.

Author Keywords
Egypt; Islam; Medicine; Monsters; Postcolonial; Religion and science

Visser, L.M., Bleijenbergh, I.L., Benschop, Y.W.M., Van Riel, A.C.R., Bloem, B.R.
Do online communities change power processes in healthcare? Using case studies to examine the use of online health communities by patients with Parkinson’s disease
(2016) BMJ Open, 6 (11), art. no. e012110,

DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2016-012110

Abstract
Objective: Communication technologies, such as personal online health communities, are increasingly considered as a tool to realise patient empowerment. However, little is known about the actual use of online health communities. Here, we investigated if and how patients-use of online communities supports patient empowerment. Setting: A network of primary and secondary care providers around individual patients with Parkinson’s disease. Participants: We conducted case studies to examine our research question. We interviewed 18 patients with Parkinson’s disease and observed the use of online health communities of 14 of them for an average of 1 year. Primary outcome measures: We analysed the interviews and the online conversations between patients and healthcare providers, using Foucault’s framework for studying power processes.

Results: We observed that patient empowerment is inhibited by implicit norms that exist within these communities around the number and content of postings. First, patients refrained from asking too many questions of their healthcare providers, but felt obliged to offer them regular updates. Second, patients scrutinised the content of their postings, being afraid to come across as complainers. Third, patients were cautious in making knowledge claims about their disease.

Conclusions: Changing implicit norms within online communities and the societal context they exist in seems necessary to achieve greater patient empowerment. Possibilities for changing these norms might lie in open dialogue between patient and healthcare providers about expectations, revising the curriculum of medical education and redesigning personal online health communities to support two-way knowledge exchange.

Sabrina Smith and Matthew Atencio, “Yoga is yoga. Yoga is everywhere. You either practice or you don’t”: a qualitative examination of yoga social dynamics
(2017) Sport in Society, 20(9), 1167–1184.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2016.1269082

Abstract
Within the context of yoga’s increasing popularity, the prevailing view that yoga is ‘good for everyone’ is often perpetuated by participants. This view is derived from popular media portrayals and activities, as well as scientific research purporting yoga’s health benefits for all citizens. This paper accordingly investigates these dominant claims reproduced about yoga practise in the United States using a qualitative study involving five practitioners. We specifically invoke Michel Foucault’s concepts of discourse and governmentality to interrogate how yogic ‘truths’ are negotiated, taken up, and reproduced by several participants in the San Francisco area. Five in depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with a diverse demographic sample of yoga participants. Our findings suggest that these various individuals invested in and reproduced the ideals of social inclusion and multicultural diversity with the accompanying view that yoga operated as a community or ‘family’. The practitioners subsequently acknowledged specific barriers and instances of exclusive practises within yoga and its communities. Yet, in some cases the participants countered that these perceptions of exclusion and barriers to practise could be overcome by individual choice-making; this latter view implicates a specific mode of neo-liberal self-governance. Our analysis therefore suggests that the yoga participants invested in and reproduced ideals of individualism and meritocracy relative to normative neo-liberal yoga discourses. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Index Keywords
California, human, human tissue, individuality, perception, physician, qualitative research, semi structured interview

Springer RA, Clinton ME. Doing Foucault: inquiring into nursing knowledge with Foucauldian discourse analysis. Nursing Philosophy. 2015 Apr;16(2):87-97

DOI: 10.1111/nup.12079

Abstract
Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) is a methodology that is well suited to inquiring into nursing knowledge and its organization. It is a critical analytic approach derived from Foucault’s histories of science, madness, medicine, incarceration and sexuality, all of which serve to exteriorize or make visible the ‘positive unconscious of knowledge’ penetrating bodies and minds. Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) holds the potential to reveal who we are today as nurses and as a profession of nursing by facilitating our ability to identify and trace the effects of the discourses that determine the conditions of possibility for nursing practice that are continuously shaping and (re)shaping the knowledge of nursing and the profession of nursing as we know it. In making visible the chain of knowledge that orders the spaces nurses occupy, no less than their subjectivities, FDA is a powerful methodology for inquiring into nursing knowledge based on its provocation of deep critical reflection on the normalizing power of discourse.

KEYWORDS:
Foucault; discipline; identity; methodology; nursing knowledge; professional self