Foucault News

McMahon, J., Barker-Ruchti, N.
The media’s role in transmitting a cultural ideology and the effect on the general public
(2016) Qualitiative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 8 (2), pp. 131-146.

DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2015.1121912

Abstract
Previous research investigating Australian swimming culture revealed a deeply entrenched ‘slim to win’ ideology, a notion that is centred on the swimmer body needing to be lean in order to achieve competitive performance. While previous research revealed that ‘slim to win’ was occurring in situ, this study examines how media representations might come to be possible contributors to this ideology being proliferated to outsiders of the culture. Specifically, three professional sports photographs are examined for materiality criteria. Further, an affect perspective is employed through Foucault’s idea of ‘dispositive’ to consider how the messages provided by the images, their captions and the titles of the news items they were included in, were consumed. We argue that the media representations included in this investigation are highly problematic because they reinforce the ‘slim to win’ ideology. Further, we argue that many people who contributed to the online forums relating to these media representations reproduced and to a certain extent negotiated ‘slim to win’ through their comments. This latter point occurred via the representations which provided a platform for critical interpretation. © 2016 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
affect; body; dispositive; Foucault; Materiality; media; online forum comments; photographs; slim to win; swimming

Elise Hunkin, Deploying Foucauldian genealogy: Critiquing ‘quality’ reform in early childhood policy in Australia, Power and Education March 1, 2016 8: 35-53

doi: 10.1177/1757743815624114

Abstract
The last two decades have seen the emergence of a global education paradigm that has reimagined education through the lens of neo-liberal ideology. Education policy agendas and discourses in current times are globally governed through transnational networks, which have increased the opaqueness of education policymaking. For critical policy researchers, the challenge is to respond with new methodologies that can capture and critique the increasingly diffuse, fractured nature of contemporary policy processes. This article presents one such methodology, where Foucauldian genealogy is used to construct a history of the discourse of ‘quality’ in early childhood reform policy in Australia. The genealogical approach is combined with ‘network ethnography’, which uses interviews with policy actors and the construction of policy network and mobility maps to undertake a governmentality analysis of discourse production. The preliminary findings emphasize the global spread of a positivist discourse of quality, and discuss its neo-liberal ideological ties and policy uses in Australian early childhood policy. The tactical use of human capital theory in the Australian Early Years Learning Framework is uncovered, wherein government discourse control resulted in the creation of learning outcomes for children, intended for use as a performativity structure.

Keywords
Early childhood education quality critical policy analysis genealogy discourse Australia

Ole B. Jensen, New ‘Foucauldian Boomerangs’: Drones and Urban Surveillance, Surveillance and Society, Vol 14, No 1 (2016)

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Abstract
This paper uses the metaphor of ‘boomerangs’ articulated by Michel Foucault to discuss the potential for drones to become the ‘next layer’ of urban surveillance in our cities. Like earlier Western technologies and techniques of government that were ‘tested out’ in foreign warzones and then ‘brought back’ to urban centres (the helicopter and its utilization in Vietnam and its return to urban police forces is a clear illustration hereof), contemporary unmanned aerial vehicles hold the potential to act as proverbial ‘Foucauldian boomerangs’ and return from warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to Western cities. The paper explores how a nexus of Surveillance Studies and mobilities research may be a fruitful way into comprehending this new phenomenon. En route the practical applications of drones as well as the historical importance of aerial power are connected to a situational understanding of mobilities. The paper points at a number of challenges for the future and should be understood as a first tentative attempt to set this on the research agenda.

Keywords
Mobilties; Situational Mobilities; Urban Studies

Katherine Bischoping, Selom Chapman-Nyaho, Rebecca Raby, Linking Visuality to Justice through International Cover Designs for Discipline and Punish, Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, Visualizing Justice (IJR) Volume 5: Winter 2016, pp. 180-214

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Abstract:
Discipline and Punish revolves around the demise of a brief impulse to develop a juridical subject. We employ cover designs of this book from around the world as lenses through which to focus on how Foucault links visuality to justice. From examining covers showing the envisioning of “model men” that justify the inspection of others, we move to covers drawing attention to the measured rationalities and restless irrationalities of such inspection, and to the ubiquity of the resulting “carceral complex” across interconnected institutions. We turn next to cover images that spur our attention to the contemporary significance of torture, either when consumed in spectacular forms of “dark tourism” or when perpetrated secretly under state sponsorship – a possibility that Discipline and Punish appears not to anticipate. In response, we develop an understanding of how torture may nonetheless cohere with Foucault’s conception of discipline. Finally, we discuss how cover designs remind us that we, like Foucault, are caught up in disciplinary gazes, and ask where the possibilities of resistance and hope might lie.