Foucault News

Maboloc, C.R.
Consumerism and the Post-9/11 Paranoia: Michel Foucault on Power, Resistance, and Critical Thought
(2015) Philosophia (United States), pp. 1-12. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1007/s11406-015-9682-7

Abstract
This paper intends to closely examine Michel Foucault’s take on power, resistance, and critical thought in the modern state, using the market-driven consumer economy and the paranoia-induced post-9/11 national security rhetoric as background. It will argue that on both domains, knowledge as similitude comes to be represented as part of the repressive configuration in the order of things. In retracing the technology of discipline where the individual unknowingly participates in his latent subjugation, the author thinks that critical thought—one that diverts power away from the center to the peripheries is the only effective way of resistance against forms of social control and domination. © 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Author Keywords
Critical thought; Knowledge and representation; Michel Foucault; Power and resistance; Similitude and social control

Miller, M.C., Grimwood, B.S.R., Arai, S.M.
Ascetic practices for reflexively navigating power, privilege and freedoms in leisure research
(2015) Leisure/ Loisir, pp. 1-20. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/14927713.2015.1116204

Abstract
Critical reflexivity enables leisure researchers to interrogate assumptions and discursive structures associated with subjectivities enacted in and through research processes. We argue that reflexive practices implemented prior to entering into fieldwork help researchers prepare for, understand and negotiate power-imbued contexts that will be encountered during research. Drawing on Foucault’s ideas on practices of freedom, this paper represents an ascetic practice whereby the first author, with support from her co-author advisers, engaged in a reflexive exercise of the self to think critically about her subjectivities in relation to freedom, justice and forthcoming leisure research. Methodologically, the paper engages a decontextualized perspective-taking exercise that opens opportunities for exploring the limits and regulations of research desires, privileges and powers, and how perspectives of injustice and oppression are inextricably linked to subjectivity. © 2015 Canadian Association for Leisure Studies / Association canadienne d’études en loisir

Author Keywords
Ascetic practice; freedom; justice; reflexivity; subjectivity

Powell, L.
Doing Time: Temporality and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century British Prison Experience
(2015) Life Writing, pp. 1-19. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2015.1118665

Abstract
This paper argues that carceral experience was a generative and organisational motif in a large number of influential early British novels, which are read as life writing. I deploy Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope in order to identify the increasing narratological centrality of the depiction of prison experience to these novels, and explain that his theory’s unique insistence on the perceptual confluence of space and time is of particular significance in the context of the prison. I ask how a chronotopic analysis repositions existing theoretical understandings of time and the prison narrative. Concretely, my discussion of the prison chronotope in these narratives challenges Michel Foucault’s understanding of the ‘prison revolution’ of 1779, John Bender’s contention that the eighteenth-century novel bears a proleptic relationship to time, and Monika Fludernik’s reading of the prison as essentially ahistorical and effectively timeless. Finally, this paper also identifies the frequent equivalence of the figure of the writer with that of the prisoner in the early novel, and argues that this meta- or supra-textual relationship in part accounts for the predominance of the motif in the fictional life writing of the period. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
Eighteenth-century novel; penal theory; prison theme; time and narrative

Waring, J., Latif, A., Boyd, M., Barber, N., Elliott, R.
Pastoral power in the community pharmacy: A Foucauldian analysis of services to promote patient adherence to new medicine use
(2016) Social Science and Medicine, 148, pp. 123-130.

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.11.049

Abstract
Community pharmacists play a growing role in the delivery of primary healthcare. This has led many to consider the changing power of the pharmacy profession in relation to other professions and patient groups. This paper contributes to these debates through developing a Foucauldian analysis of the changing dynamics of power brought about by extended roles in medicines management and patient education. Examining the New Medicine Service, the study considers how both patient and pharmacist subjectivities are transformed as pharmacists seek to survey patient’s medicine use, diagnose non-adherence to prescribed medicines, and provide education to promote behaviour change. These extended roles in medicines management and patient education expand the ‘pharmacy gaze’ to further aspects of patient health and lifestyle, and more significantly, established a form of ‘pastoral power’ as pharmacists become responsible for shaping patients’ self-regulating subjectivities. In concert, pharmacists are themselves enrolled within a new governing regime where their identities are conditioned by corporate and policy rationalities for the modernisation of primary care. © 2015 .

Author Keywords
Community pharmacy; England; Extended services; Foucault; Medicines management; Power

Index Keywords
community health worker, drug, health services, medicine; behavior change, clinical study, diagnosis, gaze, human, identity, lifestyle, medicine, patient compliance, patient education, pharmacist, pharmacy