Foucault News

Carey, J.L.W.
Taking Responsibility for Cloning: Discourses of Care and Knowledge in Biotechnological Approaches to Nonhuman Life
(2015) Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 11 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1007/s10806-015-9544-0

Abstract
This article examines the practice of animal cloning in relation to discourses of care and responsibility, in particular a common cultural interpretation of care theorized by Michel Foucault. This interpretation figures care as a “pastoral” relation premised in essential differences between carers and objects of care, and its interspecies implications are increasingly drawing the attention of theorists in animal studies. This article argues that, perhaps despite appearances, animal welfare in the form of pastoral care and abstract conceptualizations of animals that are dominant in discourses of animal biotechnology are not mutually exclusive, but rather in practice may be operating in conjunction with each other, discursively working together to naturalize ethics of biotechnology and animal welfare that reinforce rather than question human dominance and superiority. Specifically, mapping the normative framework of pastoral care onto the existing scientific orientation to acquiring knowledge of animal bodies produces a definition of care that is presumed to be both finite and perfectible. Ultimately, critical analysis of biotechnological manifestations of care and responsibility enables both a theorization of the industry’s performance of responsibility independently of its care-related claims about its own practices, and the elucidation of an alternative framework for assessing interspecies ethics that maintains a critical distance from the supposed “naturalness” or “unnaturalness” of interspecies relationships such as cloning. © 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Author Keywords
Animal ethics; Biopolitics; Biotechnology; Cloning; Ethics of care; Foucault

Bullen, J.
Governing Homelessness: The Discursive and Institutional Construction of Homelessness in Australia
(2015) Housing, Theory and Society, 22 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2015.1024886

Abstract
This paper analyses changes in the conceptualization of “homelessness” in Australian policies, programmes and services from the 1970s to 2006. Research and commentary confirm a shift away from an understanding of homelessness in terms of “structural”, social and economic factors to an understanding in terms of “individual” issues. Research reflects this dichotomy, but attempts to reconcile the two explanations have failed in practice. Using Foucault’s work on governmentality, historical official statements and in-depth interviews, I show how changing policies and programmes, involving an extension and reconfiguration of political power beyond the state, had a constructive role in shaping “homelessness”. This “welfare reform” characterized homelessness as dependency, and programmes increasingly focussed on producing a managed form of self-reliance, shifting the conceptualization of homelessness towards individual explanations.

Ailon, G.
From superstars to devils: The ethical discourse on managerial figures involved in a corporate scandal
(2015) Organization, 22 (1), pp. 78-99.

DOI: 10.1177/1350508413501937

Abstract
This article draws upon a growing body of Foucauldian-inspired literature on business ethics. Looking at the media as a prime site of dynamic discursive production in contemporary times, it offers an analysis of the underlying moral sensitivities and ethical frameworks characteristic of reports about the two top managerial figures involved in the Enron scandal: Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay. Analysing Forbes and BusinessWeek articles, the article examines the sudden appearance of these managers as a heightened moral threat, asking what constellations of knowledge and meaning were expressed through the demonization of these once idealized managerial superstars. It shows that while speaking in the name of ethics, the examined discourse also undermines ethics in that it promulgates a largely paradoxical and ethically incapacitating concept of self and logic of action.

Author Keywords
business ethics; discourse; Enron; Foucault; Lay; self; Skilling