Foucault News

Theorizing Governance as Globalized Governmentality: The Dynamics of World-Societal Order in Palestine (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

22 May 2015

Busse, J.
Theorizing Governance as Globalized Governmentality: The Dynamics of World-Societal Order in Palestine
(2015) Middle East Critique, 29 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2015.1010338

Abstract
In many cases, Middle East Studies and International Relations (IR) fail to provide an appropriate account of governance and power and the underlying dynamics of global political order. In order to overcome these shortcomings, I will highlight the conceptual compatibility between Foucauldian post-structuralist governmentality studies and world society theorization from the perspective of the Stanford School’s sociological neo-institutionalism. On this basis, I will conceptualize governmentality as a globally diffused pattern of political ordering in world society. This global diffusion of governmentality, however, cannot be equated with global homogenization, because decoupling dynamics can lead to significant differences between a global norm and how it is translated into a local context. Hence, governmentality denotes a specific, universalistic configuration of governmental rationalities and technologies but also takes into account localizations of diversity. I will identify biopower, surveillance, and technologies of the self as core dimensions of modern governmentality and analyze their contribution to the establishment of political order in Palestine. In this sense, the examples of modern statistics, good governance, and refugee camp governance not only serve as empirical illustrations for the materialization of modern governmentality in Palestine. They also underline the embeddedness of Palestine into the structural horizon of world society. As a result, political order that comes into existence in Palestine needs to be understood as world-societal order.

Author Keywords
Biopower; Foucault; global governmentality; governmentality; International Relations Theory; Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Palestine; political order; power; world society

All that is global is not world culture: accountability systems and educational apparatuses (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 May 2015

Sobe, N.W.
All that is global is not world culture: accountability systems and educational apparatuses
(2015) Globalisation, Societies and Education, 13 (1), pp. 135-148.

DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2014.967501

Abstract
This article explores why we see educational accountability systems circulating transnationally. It argues that researchers in the field of comparative and international education need to use the concepts of diffusion and translation to think about the formation, coordination and extension of networks and discursive formations through which heterogeneous, disparate objects are brought into relation. Approaching accountability in education as an ‘apparatus’ helps us engage with the research challenges presented by globalisation. This article proposes a way of seeing accountability as constitutive of the global and not as an after-effect. This approach helps us avoid the distracting and ultimately irrelevant fixation on a so-called ‘global/local nexus’ that is characteristic of much work in the field of comparative and international education. It also aims to improve on world culture theory explanations for why we are presently witnessing a global trend towards the increased ‘monitoring of monitoring’, i.e., increased self-organising reflexivity in the self-description and self-observation that school systems are called to engage in.

Author Keywords
accountability; Actor-Network Theory; Foucault; governmentality

Māori in the Kingdom of the Gaze: Subjects or critics? (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 May 2015

Mika, C., Stewart, G.
Māori in the Kingdom of the Gaze: Subjects or critics?
(2015) Educational Philosophy and Theory, 13 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2015.1013017

Abstract
For Māori, a real opportunity exists to flesh out some terms and concepts that Western thinkers have adopted and that precede disciplines but necessarily inform them. In this article, we are intent on describing one of these precursory phenomena—Foucault’s Gaze—within a framework that accords with a Māori philosophical framework. Our discussion is focused on the potential and limits of colonised thinking, which has huge implications for such disciplines as education, among others. We have placed Foucault’s Gaze alongside a Māori metaphysics and have speculated on the Gaze’s surveillant/expectant strategies with some key Māori primordial phenomena in mind, such as ‘te kore’ (nothingness) and ‘āhua’ (form). We posit the Gaze as an entity and thus aim to render it more relevant to Māori, so that it can be addressed appropriately. We also (but relatedly) preface that discussion by theorising on some of the challenges that confront us as Māori authors in even referring counter-colonially to the Gaze. Whilst we do not seek to destabilise the Gaze by positing it as a metaphysically based entity, we do hint at the possibility that critical indigenous philosophy may even for a short time bring the Gaze into focus for Māori. By introducing an awareness of an alternative (Māori) metaphysics, we may have unsettled the self-certainty of the Gaze.

Author Keywords
Foucault; Gaze; metaphysics; Māori

Maria Hynes and Scott Sharpe, Habits, style and how to wear them lightly (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 May 2015

Maria Hynes and Scott Sharpe,
Habits, style and how to wear them lightly
(2015) Cultural Geographies, 22 (1), pp. 67-83.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014560682

Abstract
Contributing to cultural geography’s emerging interest in the work of Felix Ravaisson, this article explores the relationship between the impersonal force of habit and the personalised production of subjectivity. More precisely, our concern is with the relationship between habit and the stylisation of self that can be witnessed in the production of the intellectual subject. Paying particular attention to the relationship he traces between habit, consciousness and the effort that defines subjectivity, we explore the implications of Ravaisson’s understanding of habit for the work of style, understood as an integration of habits and dispositions into a manner of being. By exploring the question of intellectual style in the work of Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche, we consider what the implications might be of performing that task of integration lightly, without the lofty weightiness that often attends intellectual life.

Author Keywords
Badiou; Foucault; habit; intellectual style; lightness; Nietzsche

Index Keywords
art, cultural geography, social theory

Knowledge production in a constructed field: reflections on comparative and international education (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 May 2015

Nordtveit, B.H.
Knowledge production in a constructed field: reflections on comparative and international education
(2015) Asia Pacific Education Review, 11 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1007/s12564-015-9354-0

Abstract
Adopting Maria Manzon’s theoretical framework, which draws on Foucault and proposes that comparative education as an academic field is socially constructed, I suggest that the field is neither stable nor well defined. To demonstrate this, I conduct a content analysis of the Comparative Education Review, using Klaus Krippendorff’s methodological framework to study comparative and international education (CIE) researchers’ understanding of the national—and of their related knowledge production in the field. Many comparativists express interests in multiple countries, and their knowledge production takes the form of individual country studies. The countries are habitually studied using a “problem approach” focusing on one specific aspect of the country under investigation and using an associated social science methodology deemed appropriate. Few comparativists are making explicit use of or reference to any methodology that is unique to comparative education. Efforts to catalog and systematize CIE research have demonstrated that the field is becoming so inclusive that it hardly is distinguishable from educational studies as a whole. Hence, I suggest that instead of speaking about unifyingfeatures of the field, it may be more relevant to speak about frequent elements, such as a focus on the national, and a knowledge production characterized by the academic practitioner who desires to improve the education systems studied. A third frequent element may be the focus on educational development, thus justifying the label of “comparative, international, and development education.” One challenge of the field is its dependence on Western social science discourses, which may be marginalizing other voices.

Author Keywords
Comparative education; Comparative Education Review; Content analysis; Development; International education; Knowledge production

CFP: Theatre, Performance, Foucault! (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 May 2015

Call for Papers
Theatre, Performance, Foucault!

TaPRA Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy working group interim event
– a one-day symposium

Date: 4th July 2015
Location: King’s College London

Further info

Michel Foucault was not only one of the most controversial and provocative thinkers of the 20th Century, he was also one of its most inventive and penetrating researchers: his work restlessly innovating new methodological openings around which other thinkers would forge entirely new disciplinary fields. Notoriously hard to pin down, his work evades easy categorisation – indeed, who was Foucault? – poststructuralist philosopher, historian of ‘systems of thought’, ‘radical journalist’ – Foucault seems to have been all of these things, and so much more. It is perhaps for this reason that his work retains its currency for us. Fundamentally, what makes Foucault’s work compelling comes down to the question that he repeatedly asked – a question that remains just as vital and urgent today: ‘what are we at the present time?’

It is with this question in mind that the Theatre, Performance and Philosophy Working Group of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) is delighted to host a one-day symposium entitled: “Theatre, Performance, Foucault!” as its interim event. If Foucault was fond of employing theatre as a metaphor in his work, in this symposium we wish to take that metaphor literally: how does Foucault’s work help us to understand contemporary and/or historical problems in theatre and performance today?

The symposium will consist of curated round-tables, twenty-minute papers and ten-minute provocations. If you would like to contribute a paper or provocation to the symposium, please submit a max. 200-word abstract and brief biography by 23rd May to Tony Fisher (tony.fisher@cssd.ac.uk), Kélina Gotman (kelina.gotman@kcl.ac.uk), and Eve Katsouraki (e.katsouraki@uel.ac.uk). We will get back to you with a response by 31st May.

Papers and provocations may address any aspects of Foucault’s thinking and/or Foucauldian approaches to theatre and performance, including the following:

– Theatre, performance and biopolitics

– Theatre, performance and state power

– Theatre, performance and ethics

– Theatre, performance and genealogy

– Performance and discipline(s)

– Theatre, Foucault & the non-human life / animal rights

– Performance, Foucault & ecology

– Theatre and the social sciences

– Theatre, performance and archaeology

– Theatre, performance and the history of ‘madness’

– Theatre, performance and the history of sexuality

– Theatre, performance and discourse

– Performance, Foucault & his heirs

Please note: You need to be an existing member of TaPRA to present or attend. If you are not, you can become a member at the cost of £10. Registrations will open by the end of May and you can register via Eventbrite (details to follow).

New neoliberalism category on Foucault News

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 May 2015

Given the ongoing popularity of this concept, I have added a new category on neoliberalism to Foucault News.

Governmentality and My School: School Principals in Societies of Control (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 May 2015

Niesche, R.
Governmentality and My School: School Principals in Societies of Control
(2015) Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47 (2), pp. 133-145.

DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2013.793925

Abstract
The introduction of new accountabilities and techniques of government for the purposes of educational reform have created new complexities and tensions for school leadership. Policies such as the publishing of league tables in the UK, high stakes testing in the US and the introduction of the My School website in Australia are particularly significant for school principals. In this article I appeal to the work of Foucault and Deleuze to provide an alternate approach to understanding how principals are constituted as subjects through a range of practices and discourses associated with the introduction of the My School website. I specifically draw upon Foucault’s notion of governmentality and Deleuze’s notion of societies of control to provoke new lines of thought into these government practices. I argue that it is through the performative in the education system that school principals are becoming perpetually assessable subjects.

Author Keywords
Deleuze; Foucault; governmentality; school principals

Política e moral em Foucault: entre a crítica e o nominalismo (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 May 2015

Monica Loyola STIVAL, Política e moral em Foucault: entre a crítica e o nominalismo, Edições Loyola, 2015

Further info

Sinopse
A polêmica recente em torno da posição de Foucault sobre o liberalismo testemunha a dificuldade em analisar a dimensão política de seu trabalho. Este livro estabelece uma leitura crítica da questão política, marcando posição nesse debate.
No entanto, ele não se ocupa apenas disso. A autora se debruça, mais amplamente, sobre os pressupostos metodológicos e epistemológicos de Foucault. Ao enfatizar determinado impasse entre método e pressuposto, o livro lança luz sobre os limites do sujeito moral moderno e da política – ou da não política – que emergem da monumental obra de Michel Foucault.

Foucault’s Last Decade – Update 22: work with the Semiotext(e) archive and manuscript submitted for review

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 May 2015

Progressive Geographies

The manuscript of Foucault’s Last Decade, as I’ve said, was almost complete. It is now with the press for review. In the last couple of weeks, while in New York, I’ve chased down a few final references; read the very valuable Régards critiques volumes on the History of Sexuality volumes (volume I and volume II and III); re-read Philippe Chevallier’s Michel Foucault et le christianisme (also see Colin Gordon on the book here); followed up lots of things; and tidied up the text.

I also had three days in the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley. I’ve already shared some detailed day-to-day reports (here, here and here) and won’t repeat things here except to note again Alain Beaulieu’s useful guide to “The Foucault Archives at Berkeley”, in Foucault Studies in 2010. I found it invaluable to doing this work and would recommend…

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