Foucault News

Miró-Bonet, M., Bover-Bover, A., Moreno-Mulet, C., Miró-Bonet, R., Zaforteza-Lallemand, C.
Genealogy as a critical toolbox: Deconstructing the professional identity of nurses
(2014) Journal of Advanced Nursing, 70 (4), pp. 768-776.

Abstract
Aim: To discuss the Foucauldian concept of genealogy as a framework for understanding and transforming nurses’ professional identity. Background: The professional identity of nurses has primarily been defined by personal and interpersonal attributes and by the intradisciplinary dimensions of nursing, leading to its conceptualization as a universal, monolithic phenomenon. The Foucauldian genealogical perspective offers a critical lens to examine what constitutes this professional identity; Spanish nursing offers a historical case study of an active effort to impose an identity that fits the monolithic ideal. Data sources: Five of the 33 professional conduct manuals for nurses’ training published from 1956-1976 during the Franco dictatorship in Spain and six interviews with nursing instructors or students at the time were analysed using a theoretical framework drawn from Foucault’s writing. Discussion: Foucault’s genealogical framework considers practices of normalization and resistance as a means of understanding knowledge continuities and discontinuities, clarifying practices that constitute nurses’ professional identity in a particular way in specific contexts and analysing the implications of this theoretical frame. Implications for nursing: The genealogy concept offers valuable tools to determine how professional identities are constituted, questions assumptions about the profession and its professionals and envisions alternative approaches. This theoretical approach helps both scholars and practitioners understand, question and transform their practices as needed. Conclusion: The genealogical approach prioritizes analysis of the phenomenon over its description and challenges many unknown, forgotten, excluded and/or unquestioned aspects of identity from a position of diversity and complexity.

Author Keywords
Discourse; Foucault; Genealogy; Identity; Nursing history; Poststructuralism; Power; Profession; Qualitative research

DOI: 10.1111/jan.12236

Marco DÍAZ MARSÁ / Jorge DÁVILA ROJAS, De la historia del pensamiento y de sus principios. Aproximación a Michel Foucault, REVISTA LOGOS. ANALES DEL SEMINARIO DE METAFÍSICA, Vol. 47 2014, pp. 81-109.

(Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España / Universidad de los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela)

On the History of Thought and its Principles. Approach to Michel Foucault

“De la historia del pensamiento y de sus principios. Aproximación a M. Foucault“.

Resumen: 

Este estudio se define y articula a partir de la pregunta por el significado, sentido y estructura de la noción de “historia del pensamiento”, tal como ésta emerge y actúa desde los últimos pronunciamientos e intervenciones de Foucault, de un modo singularmente claro y revelador a partir de la primera versión del Prefacio a la “Historia de la sexualidad” (1984), texto del que nos ocupamos con atención prioritaria a lo largo de este trabajo.

Palabras clave: Problematización, actualidad, historia, crítica, ontología, filosofía,política, principio.

Abstract

This study is defined and articulated on grounds of the question about the meaning,sense and structure of the notion of “history of thought” as it rises and functions from Foucault’s last declarations and interventions, in a particularly clear and illuminating way after the first version of the Préface à l’“Histoire de la sexualité” (1984), which we will mindfully approach along this work.

Keywords: Problématisation, actuality, history, critique, ontology, philosophy, politics, principle.

Steven Hutchinson, Intelligence, reason of state and the art of governing risk and opportunity in early modern Europe, Economy and Society, Volume 43, Issue 3, 2014

DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2014.883796

Abstract

Drawing upon primary and secondary historical material, this paper explores the role of intelligence in early modern government. It focuses upon developments in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England, a site-specific genealogical moment in the broader history of state power/knowledges. Addressing a tendency in Foucauldian work to neglect pre-eighteenth-century governance, the analysis reveals a set of interrelated processes which gave rise to an innovative technique for anticipating hazard and opportunity for the state. At the intersection of raison d’État, the evolving art of government, widespread routines of secrecy and a post-Westphalia field of European competition and exchange, intelligence was imagined as a fundamental solution to the concurrent problems of ensuring peace and stability while improving state forces. In the administrative offices of the English Secretary of State, an assemblage of complex and interrelated procedures sought to produce and manipulate information in ways which exposed both possible risks to the state and potential opportunities for expansion and gain. As this suggests, the art of intelligence played an important if largely unacknowledged role in the formation and growth of the early modern state. Ensuring strategic advantage over rivals, intelligence also limited the ability of England’s neighbours to dominate trade, control the seas and master the colonies, functioning as a constitutive feature of European balance and equilibrium. As the analysis concludes, understanding intelligence as a form of governmental technique – a way of doing something – reveals an entirely novel way of thinking about and investigating its myriad (historical and contemporary) formations.