Foucault News

Ascetic practices for reflexively navigating power, privilege and freedoms in leisure research (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

18 January 2016

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

Shaping the female student: an analysis of Swedish beauty school recruitment texts (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 January 2016

Bredlöv, E.
Shaping the female student: an analysis of Swedish beauty school recruitment texts
(2015) Studies in Continuing Education, pp. 1-16. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/0158037X.2015.1113165

Abstract
This study focuses on the recruitment of adults to the beauty industry in Sweden. It is concerned with a move in (beauty) education away from state and towards private provision in a wider context where education is becoming more heavily marketised. Drawing on a poststructural approach inspired by the work of Foucault and feminist theory, the shaping of student subjectivity in recruitment material for private beauty schools is analysed. A poststructural approach provides analytical tools that make visible the process of how power shapes subjectivities, and the use of feminist theory gives special focus to the gendered aspects of this process. The study includes a textual analysis of website homepages of beauty schools, beauty schools’ Facebook pages and web pages that provide compiled information on educational programs and courses connected to the beauty industry. The analysis shows how consumption is constituted and feminised through specific marketing strategies and thereby becomes both a starting point and a resource for the shaping of student subjectivity. Thus, a particular form of gendered entrepreneurial self is shaped in this femininised educational context, and this study therefore highlights the importance of vocational research that takes into account the shaping of student subjectivity. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
Adult education; beauty industry; poststructural feminism; recruitment; subjectivity

Doing Time: Temporality and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century British Prison Experience (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 January 2016

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

Neoliberal competition in higher education today: research, accountability and impact (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

15 January 2016

Olssen, M.
Neoliberal competition in higher education today: research, accountability and impact
(2016) British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37 (1), pp. 129-148.

DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2015.1100530

Abstract
Drawing on Foucault’s elaboration of neoliberalism as a positive form of state power, the ascendancy of neoliberalism in higher education in Britain is examined in terms of the displacement of public good models of governance, and their replacement with individualised incentives and performance targets, heralding new and more stringent conceptions of accountability and monitoring across the higher education sector. After surveying the defeat of the public good models, the article seeks to better understand the deployment of neoliberal strategies of accountability and then assess the role that these changes entail for the university sector in general. Impact assessment, I claim, represents a new, more sinister phase of neoliberal control. In the concluding section it is suggested that such accountability models are not incompatible with the idea of the public good and, as a consequence, a meaningful notion of accountability can be accepted and yet prized apart from its neoliberal rationale. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
accountability; impact assessment; neoliberalism; public good; Research Assessment Exercise; Research Excellence Framework

Pastoral power in the community pharmacy: A Foucauldian analysis of services to promote patient adherence to new medicine use (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

14 January 2016

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

Behrouz Ghamari – Foucault, Spirituality, And The Perils Of Universal History (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 January 2016

Behrouz Ghamari – Foucault, Spirituality, And The Perils Of Universal History, Paper delivered at the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, July 2015
mp3 for download

See also Soundcloud

Response by Jorge Daniel Vásquez and Megan Eardley

The beginning of Friday’s session was marked by a radical commitment to putting the analysis of religion within a framework that addresses “happiness” in its political and revolutionary dimensions. Behrooz Ghamari raised questions concerning limits and the moving boundaries between history and memory as he reflected on his experience as part of the organizational process of the Iranian Revolution. Addressing the personal interest that Michel Foucault had in Shiite Islam (its rituals and legal practices) and his theoretical writing on the revolution in Iran (1978-1979), Ghamari argued that Foucault’s readers need to understand the characteristic ambiguity of the political process alongside an analysis of revolutionary religious expression. He reveals a Foucault for whom religion is a space in which the popular imagination is formed— both in the policy of the Iranian Revolution and in the Carter administration in the United States. The ambiguity that is engendered by revolutionary religious claims may open a space through and in which teleological thinking might be transgressed.

Foucault arrived in Iran a week after the “Black Friday” massacre, when even the death of more than two hundred protestors, shot down from helicopters, could not stop people from their revolution. Foucault’s presence in Iran can serve as an anchor for understanding his thinking about the history and the subject (i.e. the history of the present – its reinvention, the ambiguity that it produces) that is configured through a political spirituality: the subject is ‘entirely’ wrapped in a History that is not determined, but becomes a particular form of self-production, keeping the subject in a constant search for that is worth defending even beyond one’s own life. Thus, the analysis of the ‘politics of spirituality’ is located far from the reduction of revolutionary religious expression to an “archaic fascism.” On the contrary, it gives way to an important analytical challenge; to consider the religious-political phenomenon in its completely modern sense (reflecting on the relationship between different spheres in which the subject is produced). This analytical move allows Ghamari to return to questions surrounding the murder of the cartoonists of the Charlie Hebdo magazine and the “Arab Spring” beyond the Manichaeism of the freedom of expression as universalized value or Enlightened anti-Islam. To take the analysis further, we might echo some of the questions raised in the debate.

In the global geopolitical context, to what extent is the analysis of the Arab Spring articulated in the same terms as Foucault’s analysis of the Iranian Revolution? What is the relationship between the specter (the ghost of the Iranian Revolution) and the ways we engage with revolution as either as a rupturing event or as an inheritance? Another entry would be to think about Foucault and the Iranian Revolution alongside the way Susan Buck-Morss thinks about the abstraction of the Haitian Revolution in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

The talk also opened possibilities of imagining a confluence of political spirituality and a political reading of the eschatological tension of St. Paul’s theology. Is a return to Saint Paul—and the tension between the now and the to-come—an attempt to take us out of the teleological prison of modern thought? What are Foucault’s links with theoretical Orientalism and how can an event like the Iranian Revolution be read not as a ‘break’ in Foucault’s thought but as a radicalization of the project which is manifested in his College de France seminars since 1977?

Jorge Daniel Vásquez Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Ecuador and Megan Eardley Princeton University School of Architecture

Governance and knowledge transformations in educational administration: Greek responses to global policies (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 January 2016

Sifakakis, P., Tsatsaroni, A., Sarakinioti, A., Kourou, M.
Governance and knowledge transformations in educational administration: Greek responses to global policies
(2016) Journal of Educational Administration and History, 48 (1), pp. 35-67.

DOI: 10.1080/00220620.2015.1040377

Abstract
This article explores the localisation of the global and European discourse of educational governance in the Greek education system through the changes that have been introduced in the field of education administration since 2009 by the then socialist government. Our research aims to contribute to the critical policy literature on the spreading marketisation and privatisation in the governing of education around the world and in Europe – through the adoption of New Public Management and Educational Leadership models. In developing our theoretical perspective, we use the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and discourse, and in order to conceptualise power and control relations in the organisation, transmission, acquisition, and evaluation of pedagogical knowledge, we draw on Bernstein’s theory of symbolic control.

Our study has examined how the field of education administration is governed through power and knowledge transformations. We trace these transformations by analysing systematically the pedagogic discourse through which the global governance discourse is relayed and becomes a ‘regime of truth’ within public policy and practice in Greece. We argue that such changes have significant implications for everyday educational practice and for the kinds of knowledge that are considered legitimate, and they may affect educational professionals’ subjectivities in fundamental ways. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
education administration; global policies; governance; pedagogic discourse; symbolic control

Call for book proposals: Theory as method in education research (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 January 2016

Call for book proposals: Theory as method in education research From the Social Theory Applied blog, 2 January 2016

Update October 2025: Link above is to the archived page on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Mark Murphy is currently in negotiations with a book publisher regarding a potential book series on the topic: Theory as method in education research. He is keen to talk to those of you who are interested in this topic and have ideas/plans for publishing in this area – that includes those of you who are nearing completion of doctoral theses as well as more established academics. The series has enormous potential for breaking new theory/method ground and he is open to suggestions from all areas of social theory, methodology and research topic. Please have a read of the short summary below and if you are interested in discussing this further, please get in touch with Mark Murphy via mark.murphy.2@glasgow.ac.uk (don’t forget the .2!)

Summary:

This series is designed to provide a set of books exploring various applications of social theory in educational research design. Each book will provide a detailed account of how theory and method influence each other in specific educational research settings, such as schools, early years, community education, further education colleges and universities. The series will represent the richness of topics explored in theory-driven education research, including leadership and governance, equity, teacher education, assessment curriculum and pedagogy and policy studies. It will also provide a timely platform for highlighting the wealth of work done in the field of social theory and education research a field that has grown considerably in recent years and has made the likes of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault familiar names in educational discourse.

It is envisaged that the series will include a variety of texts, including single/co-authored monographs, edited volumes and potentially readers/anthologies

Key features and benefits:

Explicit connections between theory and research practice
Accessible and illuminating accounts of applied social theory
Provides innovative ways of thinking about methodology in educational research design

Pedagogical features

Embedded in the design of the series is a strong pedagogical component – with a focus on the ‘how’ of applying theory in methods and an emphasis on operationalising theory in research. This pedagogical remit will be addressed explicitly in all texts – the responsibility of addressing this will fall to the authors and editors, but can take the form of case studies, learning activities, ‘focus’ sections and glossaries detailing the key theoretical concepts utilised in the research.

Foucault and Neoliberalism (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

10 January 2016

Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent (eds), Foucault and Neoliberalism, Polity Press, 2016

Description
Michel Foucault’s death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault’s conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world’s intellectual left.

However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault’s attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers ? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism?

This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

Michel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self. Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980 (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 January 2016

Michel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self. Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980, University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Translated by Graham Burchell

Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini
Introduction and critical apparatus by Laura Cremonesi, Arnold I. Davidson, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli
160 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2015

In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of many of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures.

Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form.