Foucault News

Ojalammi, S., Blomley, N.
Dancing with wolves: Making legal territory in a more-than-human world
(2015) Geoforum, 62, pp. 51-60.

DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.03.022

Abstract
As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation of the wolf as entailing tense biopolitical calculations between the contradictory legal imperatives of biodiversity and biosecurity. Under the former, the wolf must be made to live; under the latter, it may need to die. These are worked out in and productive of two territorial configurations: the everyday spaces of encounter (real or imagined) between wolf and human, and the propertied territories of sheep farming. While human imperatives and anxieties are clearly central to these spatializations, we also seek to give the wolf its due, noting its important role in the making of legal territories. The coproduction of law and space, we conclude, offers important ethical lessons for humans in their relations to the wolf, as well as directing us to the need for more capacious thinking regarding territory. © 2015 The Authors.

Author Keywords
Animal geography; Finland; Legal geography; Property; Territory; Wolf/human interactions

Index Keywords
anthropogenic effect, biodiversity, nature-society relations, territory; Finland; Animalia, Canidae, Ovis aries

Nicholas Heron, What Is a Minister? Toward a Theory of the Instrumental Cause, CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, 2015, pp. 135–166

Full text on Academia.edu

First few lines
The problem of the relationship between politics and religion in modernity, Michel Foucault once suggested, is not the problem of the relationship between the emperor and the pope (the political-theological problem of Caesaropapism); it is the problem of that ambiguous figure who, significantly enough, retains the same name across both spheres: the figure of the minister (Foucault 2007, 191-2). Within the context of Foucault’s own oeuvre, this curious remark, which seems to present almost the key to his reflections on “pastoral power” (and hence, by extension, to the larger genealogy of “governmentality,” of which the former is but a part), remained entirely without continuation.

VALDEZ, I.
Nondomination or Practices of Freedom? French Muslim Women, Foucault, and The Full Veil Ban
(2016) American Political Science Review, pp. 1-13. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1017/S0003055415000647

Abstract
This article proposes a conception of freedom understood as practices. Based on Michel Foucault’s work on the ethics of the self, I develop a conception of freedom that exceeds liberation and distinguishes between genuine practices of freedom and practices of the self that are unreflective responses to systems of government. I develop and illustrate this conception through an engagement with the recent French ban on full veils in public spaces and the ethnographic literature on European Muslim revival movements. I reconstruct how Muslim women relate to alternative discourses through specific practices of the self. These practices reveal that French Muslim women actively contest discourses of secularism and liberation that construct them as inherently passive and in need of tutelage. The conception I develop sheds light on some shortcomings of Philip Pettit’s notion of freedom as nondomination. I argue that the proposed account is useful to, first, criticize the centrality of the opposition between arbitrary and nonarbitrary power in the definition of freedom. Second, I show that the predominant engagement with the external dimension of freedom in Pettit makes it difficult to capture the particular subjective practices that make up freedom and its development in the presence of power and/or attempts at domination. Copyright © American Political Science Association 2016

Despard, E.
Diagram of a love for plants gone bad
(2016) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34 (2), pp. 337-354.

DOI: 10.1177/0263775815615124

Abstract
This article uses a surprising horticultural event—an unplanned, collective ‘theft’ of plants from the Montreal Botanical Garden in 1981—as impetus to interrogate the contribution of garden plants to public life in so-called ‘green’ cities of the late twentieth century. As sites of both social nature and material culture that are perceived as socially and environmentally beneficial and frequently designed to appear more-or-less natural, gardens are normally quite difficult to see or think in politically differentiated terms. Taking a historical ‘eventalization’ of civic horticulture as a means to enable critical perception, I develop the diagram (as introduced by Foucault and interpreted by Deleuze) as an analytical tool conducive to identifying and historicizing the perceptual and socio-spatial effects produced by the use of garden plants in urban public spaces. I outline the local historical context of the theft at the Botanical Garden and analyze the functioning of a program of horticultural beautification coincident with it as a means of establishing the theft’s more general intelligibility. This illuminates, not only a change in the functioning of plants in Montreal’s urban landscape, but also a means of recognizing the historical specificity of relations between people and plants, and socio-cultural change as more-than-human. © 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.

Author Keywords
civic horticulture; Diagram; plants; public gardens; social nature; urban environmental history