Foucault News

Conor Heaney, What is the University today? (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 February 2016

Conor Heaney, ‘What is the University today?’, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 13 (2), 2015, 287-314

Full PDF here and here

Abstract
What is the University today? In this paper, a Foucault and Deleuzo-Guattarian inspired approach is taken. I argue that the University is, today, a site of ‘neoliberal governmentality’, which governs students and academics as sites of human capital. That is, students and academics are governed to self-govern themselves as sites of human capital. This transformation in how students and academics are governed will be identified as a recent trend through the examination of relevant UK-government reports on higher education. Furthermore, it will be identified as a trend that ‘decodes’ knowledge – in the specific sense developed by Deleuze and Guattari – which renders academic knowledge (the knowledge the student ‘consumes’ and the knowledge the academic ‘produces’) meaningless.

Keywords:
Foucault, University, Deleuze and Guattari, neoliberal governmentality, knowledge

Lars Thorup Larsen, The problematization of fertility treatment: biopolitics and IVF policy in Denmark (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

31 January 2016

Lars Thorup Larsen (2015): “The problematization of fertility treatment: biopolitics and IVF policy in Denmark”, Distinktion 16(3): 318-36.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2015.1089520

Abstract:
With the demographic challenges facing many European states, one would perhaps expect the state to invoke a biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre’, as Foucault termed it, and attempt to regulate birth rates. This expectation is too simple, however, as this article shows both theoretically and empirically. In order better to understand the possible counterweights to biopolitical concerns about the birth rate, the conceptual distinction between biopolitics and governmentality is useful. Scholarly debates about biopolitics and governmentality have been surprisingly silent on what constitutes the internal relationship between the two or how they may come into conflict. The article elaborates this conceptual distinction and demonstrates its relevance in a genealogy of how fertility treatment has been problematized in Danish assisted reproduction policy. Since access to IVF treatment does not appear to follow a biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre’, it is interesting to explore and compare how IVF treatment – and its doctors, patients, and children – has been problematized instead. In a variety of different ways, the biopolitical concern about the low birth rate has been overshadowed by concerns about how to govern. Either the new treatment has been problematized as an unnecessary cover for private or special interests, for instance doctors’ illegitimate attempts to self-govern, or problematization has centered on prospective parents characterized as demanding or selfish. The interface between biopolitics and fertility treatment is thus only understandable with a view to problems of governing and the resulting tension between governmentality and the biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre’.

Critical agency in education: a Foucauldian perspective (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 January 2016

Dirk Postma, Critical agency in education: a Foucauldian perspective, Journal of Education, No. 61, 2015, 31-52

Full text

Abstract
While the neoliberal order is associated with the economy, government and globalisation, as a form of governmentality it effects a particular subjectivity. The subject is the terrain where the contest of control plays out. The subject is drawn into the seductive power of performativity which dictates its agency, desires and satisfactions and from which escape is difficult to imagine. Neoliberalism is particularly interested in an education which provides it with the much needed powers of production and consumption. This dependency of the neoliberal order on a particular kind of agential subjectivity is also its weakness because of the indeterminacy of the self. Within this openness of the human subject lies the possibility to be different and to escape any form of subjectification.

Foucault’s account of the critical agent portrays a form of difference that opposes and transcends neoliberal ordering. Foucault finds the principle of practices of freedom in the Greco-Roman ethics of the care for the self. It is an ethics where the subject gains control of itself through the ascetic and reflective attention in relation to available ethical codes and with the guidance of a ‘master’. Such as strong sense of the self is the basis for personal and social transformation against neoliberal colonisation. The development of critical agency in education is subsequently investigated in the light of Foucault’s notions of agency and freedom. The contest of the subject is of particular importance to education interested in the development of critical agency. The critical agent is not only one who could identify and analyse regimes of power, but also one who could imagine different modes of being, and who could practice freedom in the enactment of an alternative mode of being. The educational implications are explored in relation to the role of the teacher and pedagogical processes.

Archive: “To read, write, and cast accounts”: Foucault, Governmentality and Education in Upper Canada/Canada West (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 January 2016

McGarry, Michael (2013) “To read, write, and cast accounts”: Foucault, Governmentality and Education in Upper Canada/Canada West, Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto

Full text

ABSTRACT

Contributing to the work of philosophers of education who have been examining issues of economy and emancipation, this dissertation employs a set of critical lenses drawn from Foucault’s investigation of governmentality to trace correspondences between economic liberalism and public schooling in Upper Canada/Canada West, the historical antecedent of present day Ontario. The analysis adheres to Foucault’s advice that philosophical critique involves a question asked of the present but answered in history. Thus through a Foucauldian genealogy it is argued that a series of transformations in the deployment of governmental power occurred in Upper Canada/Canada West that entailed the entry of an economic rationality into deliberations over the creation of a school system.

To support this argument evidence is presented that demonstrates how race, biopolitics, and the burgeoning science of political economy combined in the first half of the nineteenth century to form the conditions of possibility for governmental control of schooling. In particular, it is illustrated how these conditions favoured a pedagogy based in Locke’s epistemology, and were legitimized by the providential status accorded political economy. This pedagogy, which was promoted as mild and so conducive to student engagement, and the authority of political economy are revealed as integral to the methods of instruction and curriculum of the province’s common schools, and indicative of the legacy of economic liberalism that persists, albeit transformed, in Ontario education to this day.

The result of this critical analysis is a redescription or, in Foucault’s terminology, a “countermemory” of Ontario educational history that challenges the presumed naturalism of the ideals characteristic of economic liberalism, such as autonomy, accountability, entrepreneurialism, and consumer choice. The dissertation contends that these ideals are active in local educational regimes long legitimized by economy, and dangerously aimed at fostering political consent by manipulating subjects into locations of restricted agency.

Providing insight into the historical role played by liberal governmentality and economy in the local context contributes to the study of Foucault and the philosophy of education, and also suggests a change in approach to questions regarding the corporatization or marketization of education. Instead of viewing economy as either a necessary component of schooling or a contemporary affront to educational ideals, it is proposed that it be re-evaluated according to its persistent, but contingent, historical correspondence with liberal government and its institutions.

Foucault 8/13 | François Ewald on Foucault & Neoliberalism (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 January 2016

Foucault 8/13 | François Ewald on Foucault & Neoliberalism

Transcribed and edited by Raphaëlle Jean Burns
Reviewed and approved by François Ewald

[Editors’ Note (Raphaëlle Jean Burns): This is an edited transcription of François Ewald’s talk at Hunter College CUNY on Tuesday, September 29, 2015, 2:30-4:00 pm Room 204 Roosevelt House, Hunter College. The talk was titled “Foucault’s Neoliberalism: European and American Perspectives.” The talk was sponsored and moderated by Professor Sanford Schram of Hunter College, CUNY. The audio version can he listened to here]

François Ewald
I will try to respond to your questions regarding Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism from my own point of view and by way of a series of remarks.

My first remark concerns my astonishment at this identification between Foucault and liberalism. For me this question makes absolutely no sense. I remember these lectures [Birth of Biopolitics], as I was naturally in the room at the Collège de France when Foucault delivered them, and there were absolutely no indications that he shared any of the ideas of Gary Becker or anyone else from that school of thought.

CFP: Historical Epistemology: a history of the present (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 January 2016

APPEL À CONTRIBUTIONS / CALL FOR PAPERS
Deuxièmes Journées d’études / 2nd Workshop
Epistémologie Historique: une histoire du présent
Historical Epistemology: a history of the present
19-20-21 mai 2016

Ecole doctorale de Philosophie ED 280, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Institut des sciences Juridique & Philosophique de la Sorbonne – UMR 8130
Centre de Philosophie Contemporaine de la Sorbonne, Equipe EXeCO

PDF of call for papers

The working domain of this workshop corresponds to the domain of historical epistemology (HEP), broadly understood both as a “tradition” and as a method in philosophy and history of science. On this occasion we would like to investigate one of the most distinctive traits of HEP, that is, the permanent tension between past and present it instantiates. As testified by many of its practitioners, HEP is an inquiry which is present-oriented, or, alternatively, it is written using the present as a standpoint. In this sense, normative (or recurrent) history of science, as conceptualized by Gaston Bachelard or Georges Canguilhem, relies on a current scientific norm, whereas Michel Foucault’s approach, beside introducing a difference between present and actuality, seems to question or limit the validity of current scientific norms. From the normative history of science to the project of an “history of the present” and of an “historical ontology of ourselves”, Foucauldian expressions reprised also by Ian Hacking, a space is opened for a methodological and philosophical reflection which is unavoidable for every further development of HEP. Probability (Hacking 1975, 1990), sexuality (Davidson 2001), objectivity (Daston-Galison 2007) and the experimental systems of molecular biology (Rheinberger 1997) are some examples of the categories and material constraints out of which our experience of the world and of ourselves are being structured today.

The histories that the aforementioned authors reconstruct of these categories and constraints illustrate the twofold critical import of an epistemological analysis: on the one hand, they articulate the intertwinement of ethical and epistemic norms while, on the other, they open up the space for new modalities of thought and action. The discussion of the role of the present and of actuality within HEP will thus give us the possibility to articulate the political and ethical stakes implied by this kind of inquiry.

With reference to this general framework, the proposals should constitute original articulations of either one of the following axes of problems:

I. The role of scientific norms and values in historiography: We would like to further analyze the role played by the present of science in HEP: how do the references to actuality vary according to the different scientific domains? To what extent does the continuous or discontinuous trajectory of an epistemic object determine (or is determined by) the kind of normativity at stake in a certain discipline? To what extent do the conditions of applicability of the principle of recurrence draw on the nature of the norms of a certain science? Is a recurrent history of human science possible? What gives a recurrent history its critical import? These questions bear on the different ways of relating the past to the present and of understanding the progress and transformations of the sciences.

II. The power of the concept: Works inspired by the approach of HEP have highlighted several ethical-political issues, while at the same time refusing to see the scientific norm as a simple effect of power. Such an assimilation of a scientific norm to an effect of power would abolish the normative privilege which a current science has on its past, thus neglecting the relation between truth and reality. What remains to be shown, however, is that scientific progress cannot be understood apart from concrete social and technical problems, that is, of man’s ability to comprehend and transform reality. We welcome contributions bearing on: the relation of a concept to its techniques; the analysis of techniques of observation, of measuring and of medical normalization; the relation between the classification of the living and the different manners of making up people; or the different epistemological, archaeological, and genealogical forms that an analysis of the relation power-knowledge can take.

Proposals (500 words plus a short presentation of the candidate) must be sent by 2016 February 1st (notification of acceptance or refusal by February 22nd), in word or pdf formats, to epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com. Proposals by graduate students and young researchers will be privileged. The languages of the workshop will be French and English.
***
Dates importantes / Important dates
Limite de proposition d’interventions / Application deadline : February 1st 2016
Réponse / Notification of acceptance: February 22th 2016
Remise de textes / Texts submission : May 6th 2016
Journées d’études / Workshop days : May 19-20-21st 2016

Comité scientifique / Scientific committee
Christian BONNET, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Jean-François BRAUNSTEIN, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Arnold I. DAVIDSON, Université de Chicago.
Pierre WAGNER, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Le comité d’organisation / The Organizing committee
Ivan MOYA DIEZ, Matteo VAGELLI (coordinateurs)
Tiago ALMEIDA, Audrey BENOIT, Nicola BERTOLDI,
Marcos CAMOLEZI, Wenbo LIANG

Foucault 8/13: LIVESTREAM (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 January 2016

Foucault 8/13: LIVESTREAM

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Nancy Fraser, Kendall Thomas, and Richard Brooks discuss Foucault’s eighth lecture series at the Collège de France, Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979). Please watch the livestream of the seminar here or below. We will also have a livestream overflow and discussion room at Columbia Law School, in Jerome Greene Hall room 101, beginning at 6:15 pm. Please also read the introductory posts presenting the seminar discussion by Nancy Fraser, Kendall Thomas, and Richard Brooks, and the framing essays by François Ewald and Bernard Harcourt. Bibliographical references for the seminar are here. Welcome to Foucault 8/13!

Responsibilizing individuals, regulating health: debating public spots, risk, and neoliberal governmentality in contemporary Turkey (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 January 2016

Bahar Aykan and Sanem Güvenç-Salgırlı (2015). Responsibilizing individuals, regulating health: debating public spots, risk, and neoliberal governmentality in contemporary Turkey. New Perspectives on Turkey, 53, pp 71-92.

DOI:10.1017/npt.2015.19

Abstract:
Currently, a mass media campaign is underway in Turkey using a new
communication means called the “ public spot” (kamu spotu ). This article
concentrates on the public spots produced by Turkey’ s Ministry of Health, and
more specifically on those that advocate quitting smoking and preventing
obesity. Drawing on interviews with Ministry of Health personnel and
analyzing the content of these spots, we suggest that they operate as risk
caveats. They caution individuals against smoking and obesity’s potential harms
and guide her/him towards self-health governance by encouraging the
maintenance of a particular lifestyle that embraces a balanced diet, regular
activity, and no smoking. As such, we read these spots as a technique of
neoliberal governmentality. This technique works primarily by responsibilizing
individuals as health entrepreneurs investing in risk free lifestyles; that is, by
conceptualizing health as a matter of self-conduct where personal responsibilities
are emphasized.

Algorithms, Governance, and Governmentality: On Governing Academic Writing (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 January 2016

Introna, L.D.
Algorithms, Governance, and Governmentality: On Governing Academic Writing
(2016) Science Technology and Human Values, 41 (1), pp. 17-49.

DOI: 10.1177/0162243915587360

Abstract
Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic or value-centered design of such actors.

In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin. © 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.

Author Keywords
academic disciplines and traditions; governance; other; politics; power

The dynamics of tourism discourses and policy in Brazil (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 January 2016

Fazito, M., Scott, M., Russell, P.
The dynamics of tourism discourses and policy in Brazil
(2016) Annals of Tourism Research, 57, pp. 1-17.

DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2015.11.013

Abstract
This article employs a Foucauldian inspired discourse analysis in order to unveil hidden aspects of the tourism development policy-making process in the UNESCO Espinhaço Range Biosphere Reserve, Brazil. It identifies the emergence of different representations of tourism development and demonstrates the process of social construction of sustainable tourism as an overarching discourse, which incorporates different-sometimes opposing-representations of tourism development to gather the support of people with different backgrounds and interests. However, this research demonstrates that this flexibility caused the sustainable tourism narrative to become a vague and imprecise discourse in the context of the case study, which has been used by the regional elites to conserve the status quo, but disguised as a critical alternative perspective. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd.

Author Keywords
Development studies; Espinhaço Range Biosphere Reserve; Foucauldian discourse analysis; Policy making

Index Keywords
ecotourism, policy making, recreational policy, tourism development; Brazil, Serra do Espinhaco