Foucault News

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

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

Lucy Powell, Doing Time: Temporality and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century British Prison Experience (2015) Life Writing, 15(1), 59–77, 2018. Published online 2015
https://doi.org/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