Foucault News

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy,

Kingston University London, Penrhyn Road campus, KT1 2EE

Thursday 21^st – Friday 22^nd May 2015

Confirmed keynote speaker: Alenka Zupančič (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts/EGS)

Deadline for abstracts: 28^th February 2015

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In a contemporary discourse suffused with the theme of ‘crisis’ – political, economic, educational, social, ecological, technical – what are the resources of philosophy at this moment for thinking power relations and potentialities?

‘Power’ has long been a central concept for philosophy and critical thought. The theme gained particular influence in the wake of Michel Foucault’s studies of the 1970s and ’80s, spurring productive dialogue with different accounts of power and domination provided by the feminist, post-colonial and Marxist traditions, and in race/ethnicity, gender and queer studies. More recent European thought – drawing on influences as broad as Spinoza, Marx, Aristotle, Heidegger, Benjamin, mathematics and religious texts – has provided challenging new resources for thinking power, potency, potentiality, subjectivities and politics.

For all this, to what extent can philosophy in 2014 help comprehend contemporary social and political forces? Can it think the powers and potentialities at work within our modern context? Have the concepts of power, potency and potentiality been adequately theorised? How might these concepts help us to think the relation of theory and practice? How do powers and other force relations manifest themselves in the very location of philosophical and critical thought itself?

We invite papers from a broad spectrum of disciplines engaging with modern European philosophy, on topics that could include (but are not limited to):

• contemporary conceptualisations of power (Marxist, post-Marxist, post-colonial, feminist and other)
• historical potentialities
• theorising the reversibility of social power relations in gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity studies
• actualisations of philosophy, contemporary impacts
• theories of resistance
• the potential of philosophical history: dynamis, energeia, potestas, potentia
• regimes, discourses, institutions of power
• power and limits of critique
• contemporary political power, crisis, and philosophical/critical responses

Please send 300-word abstracts to: crmepagc@gmail.com by 28^th February 2015.

CFP: Time Served: Discipline and Punish 40 Years On

Nottingham Trent University is now accepting submissions for their 2015 conference on Michel Foucault‘s “Discipline and Punish.” The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2015.

11-12 September 2015, The Galleries of Justice, Nottingham, UK

40 years after it was first published in French, the impact of Michel Foucault’s seminal text Discipline and Punish on theories of incarceration, discipline and power remains largely unchallenged. The aim of this conference is to revisit the text in light of the past four decades of penal developments, public debate and social consciousness on incarceration as it continues to constitute society’s mode of punishment par excellence.

In addition to thinking through the legacy of Discipline and Punish and its continued relevance today, specific focus will be given to the text itself, its position within Foucault’s wider critical project and its important relationship with his activism most notably the work of the GIP [Groupe d’Information sur les prisons] during the early 1970s. For example, the publication in 2013 of his 1973 lectures at the Collège de France on La Société Punitive, calls for a return to this period and a new engagement with Foucault’s work on prisons, not least in its pursuit of a more openly Marxist critique of the relationship between incarceration and bourgeois capital accumulation.

Here, attention should also be paid to Foucault’s methodology in researching and writing the text. Discipline and Punish marks his movement from an archeological to a genealogical approach towards what he terms the ‘history of the present.’ What is at stake in this shift and how effective is his genealogical method for thinking through the material and discursive structures of incarceration operating within our own society and moment? How does the juxtaposition set up between the torture and killing of Damiens and the prison timetable of the book’s opening raise important questions not simply about punishment but the role of representation – images and narratives of incarceration – in framing public consciousness about the space of the prison?

It is hoped that the conference will bring together a range of participants: scholars working in the fields of philosophy, sociology, criminology, urban geography, architecture, history, literature, media studies as well as artists, writers and activists involved in projects based in and about prisons and their conditions.

If you would like to offer a paper or other form of intervention, please send us a 250 word abstract along with your name, e-mail and (if relevant) institutional affiliation. If you would like to organize a panel of 3 or 4 presenters, please also send a panel title along with the abstracts and contact details.

Deadline for abstracts: 1 March 2015.

E-mail: sophie.fuggle@ntu.ac.uk

The conference is organized by Nottingham Trent University and will be held at the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham.