Foucault News

Young people’s voices: disciplining young people’s participation in decision-making in special educational needs (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

22 June 2014

McKay, J.
Young people’s voices: disciplining young people’s participation in decision-making in special educational needs
(2014) Journal of Education Policy, Published online Feb 2014

Abstract
In recent years, education and family policy in the UK has sought to incorporate the views of children and young people through an active participation agenda, in the fulfilment of children’s rights under the obligations of the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child. Drawing on empirical evidence, this paper suggests that this aspiration is flawed. The inclusion of young people’s voices in decision-making is context dependent, and influenced by individual relationships, both positive and negative. It is framed by policies that subjugate children within disciplinary technologies that determine a regime of ‘truth’ about effective and appropriate participation. Drawing on data gathered as part of a wider study on the relationships between services users and services providers in special educational needs, this paper demonstrates that active inclusion of the voice of the child can be illustrated to be at least variable, and at worst prejudiced. It is suggested that the notion of participation produces tacit forms of ‘government’ that further classify and divide young people, magnifying their marginalization. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
advocacy; Foucault; governmentality; participation; young people’s voice

DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2014.883649

The ethics of stats: Some contemporary questions about telling the truth (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 June 2014

Muers, R.
The ethics of stats: Some contemporary questions about telling the truth
(2014) Journal of Religious Ethics, 42 (1), pp. 1-21.

Abstract
This essay argues for the importance and interest, within and beyond theological ethics, of the ethical questions faced by professionals who are called on to be producers of statistics (herein “stats”) for management purposes. Truth-telling, in the context of demands for stats, cannot be evaluated at the level of the individual statement or utterance, nor through an ethical framework primarily focused on the correspondence between thought and speech. Reflection on stats production forces us to treat truth-telling as contextual and political, and to engage with the idea that the capacity to tell the truth is learned or acquired in communities, societies and institutions. I develop this engagement through a rereading of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on “telling the truth” and Michel Foucault on parrhēsia, identifying and exploring the relationship between the responsible use of stats and the “cynical” protest against them.

Author Keywords
audit culture; Dietrich Bonhoeffer; lies; Michel Foucault; truth; truth-telling

DOI: 10.1111/jore.12042

Male prisoners’ constructions of help-seeking (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 June 2014

Cobb, S., Farrants, J.
Male prisoners’ constructions of help-seeking
(2014) Journal of Forensic Practice, 16 (1), pp. 46-57.

Abstract
Purpose: Help-seeking behaviours are fundamental to mental health and well-being. This study is concerned with how male prisoners talk about help-seeking in order that treatment programmes can be developed that better address their needs. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach: Informed by Foucauldian and Social Constructionist philosophies, this discourse analysis draws on the interview transcripts of nine male prisoners, looking at the discursive constructions mobilised in relation to help-seeking and the implications these have for agency.

Findings: Three overarching discourses are identified: “man-up and deal with it”, “solidarity” and “authoritarian”. Prisoners resist formal help because of a perceived injustice in the system, disrespect for staff and feeling helpless when they are “bombarded with medication to keep quiet”. When they do engage with formal help-seeking behaviours it is frequently “to work the system”. Generally, they are more motivated to engage with informal help-seeking behaviours with each other, learning the knowledge like “a taxi driver” and sharing it with fellow prisoners although, for some, expressing emotion is like “an episode of Eastenders […] like a girlie programme”. Research limitations/implications: The qualitative nature of the analysis requires certain discourses to be privileged over others, acknowledging that there is no one truth. Further research is needed to explore informal sources of help-seeking within the prison population.

Practical implications: There is a need to develop treatment programmes that promote informal help-seeking strategies and work with prisoners in a facilitative rather than coercive manner. Originality/value: To privilege the voices of prisoners.

Author Keywords
Discourse analysis; Foucault; Help-seeking; Male prisoners; Social constructionist

DOI: 10.1108/JFP-01-2013-0005

Moving elite athletes forward: examining the status of secondary school elite athlete programmes and available post-school options (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 June 2014

Brown, S.
Moving elite athletes forward: examining the status of secondary school elite athlete programmes and available post-school options
(2014) Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, Published online Feb 2014

Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this study focused specifically on examining the status of and the promotion of two elite athlete programmes (EAPs), the students/elite athlete selection process and available post-school options. The research was guided by Michel Foucault’s work in understanding the relationship between power and knowledge.

Participants, setting and research design: Two EAPs, a state school with a sport academy option (School A) and a private correspondence school designed specifically for elite athletes (School B), were purposefully selected for the study. Twenty key informant elite athletes and five teachers/coaches became central to the ongoing qualitative data collection for this study.Data collection: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants and teachers/coaches. During the class visits, field notes were recorded using a digital recorder focusing upon key informants’ reactions to the course content, their learning experiences and the social interactions between key informants and teachers/coaches. Documents were also collected to contextualise the two EAPs.Data analysis: First, I analysed the data following the method of constant comparison using NVivo, a software package that assists researchers in the analysis of qualitative data. This involved coding the data to identify key themes. After the data were clustered into key themes, I examined the discourses within the themes that positioned both teachers/coaches and elite athletes in particular power relationships using Foucauldian theory.Findings: The findings revealed that elitism within the ranks of the EAP created tension and jealousy amongst the elite athletes as some were more highly prized than others. Furthermore, the elite athletes and sponsors promoted the EAPs and in turn the EAPs and sponsors promoted the achievements and successes of the elite athletes as their skills and knowledge were highly valued in comparison to other students within the school. The EAPs also offered limited post-school options of obtaining an athletic scholarship to study at a university and/or to become a professional athlete.Conclusions: Foucault’s theoretical framework of govermentality helped map how the EAPs were talked about within discourses of power, and assisted in understanding how acceptance and resistance by participants normalised practices of social exclusion. The data highlighted the need for EAPs to provide more information about possible post-school options and to develop a critical orientation to the labour market, recognising the relationships between elite sports, knowledge, skills, credentials and post-school options. © 2014 © 2014 Association for Physical Education.

Author Keywords
elite athletes; Foucauldian theory; performativity; post-school options; secondary schools

DOI: 10.1080/17408989.2014.882890

Reading Foucault with Gibson-Graham: The Political Economy of “Other Spaces” in Berlin (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 June 2014

Erdem, E.
Reading Foucault with Gibson-Graham: The Political Economy of “Other Spaces” in Berlin
(2014) Rethinking Marxism, 26 (1), pp. 61-75.

Abstract
In recent years, Berlin has been widely acclaimed for the creative enactment of alternative urban imaginaries. This article explores how such spaces of urban alterity can be theorized from a political economy perspective. The beginning section explores the extent to which the “be berlin” campaign succeeds in representing the economic diversity embodied by these alternative sites. The middle section draws on the work of Gibson-Graham and Foucault to develop a heterotopic reading of economic diversity, focusing on three distinct aspects: the ubiquity and multiplicity of “other spaces,” the (il)legibility of the spatial order, and the politics of difference articulated through heterotopias. The final section applies this heterotopic perspective by deploying the urban garden project Prinzessinnengarten as an example.

Author Keywords
Community Economy; Economic Diversity; Heterotopia; Right to the City; Urban Economics

DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2014.857845

Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 June 2014

Gabrys, J.
Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city
(2014) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (1), pp. 30-48.

Abstract
A new wave of smart-city projects is underway that proposes to deploy sensor-based ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these smart and sustainable cities give rise to distinct material-political arrangements and practices that potentially delimit urban ‘citizenship’ to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? And what are the implications of computationally organized distributions of environmental governance that are programmed for distinct functionalities and are managed by corporate and state actors that engage with cities as datasets to be manipulated? In this paper I discuss the ways in which smart-city proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. I do this by working through an early and formative smart-city design proposal, the Connected Sustainable Cities (CSC) project, developed by MIT and Cisco within the Connected Urban Development initiative between 2007 and 2008. Revisiting and reworking Foucault’s notion of environmentality in the context of the CSC smart-city design proposal, I advance an approach to environmentality that deals not with the production of environmental subjects, but rather with the specific spatial- material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies, and ways of life. By updating and advancing environmentality through a discussion of computational urbanisms, I consider how practices and operations of citizenship emerge that are a critical part of the imaginings of smart and sustainable cities. This reversioning of environmentality through the smart city recasts who or what counts as a ‘citizen’ and attends to the ways in which citizenship is articulated environmentally through the distribution and feedback of monitoring and urban data practices, rather than through governable subjects or populations.

Author Keywords
Biopolitics 2.0; Citizen sensing; Environmentality; Programmed city; Smart city; Sustainable city

DOI: 10.1068/d16812

Post-traumatic memory projects: autobiographical fiction and counter-monuments (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 June 2014

Jensen, M.
Post-traumatic memory projects: autobiographical fiction and counter-monuments
(2013) Textual Practice, Published online Dec 2013

Abstract
In our age the categories of memory, monumentality, and truth telling are all far from stable. In the highly charged world of what Foucault termed ‘parrhesia’ – a mode of free speech ‘linked to courage in the face of danger’ – testimony can challenge a state’s version of events and autobiographical fictions offer contexts through which trauma might be understood. In this essay, I argue that this danger and instability has come to supersaturate concrete and textual representations of traumatic experience, and also to link the discourses with which these different renderings are debated. Such works function analogously as what Pierre Nora termed ‘lieux dé memoire’ that generate forms knowledge about the relations between truth, memory and memorial. As Leigh Gilmore puts it, they have the ‘potential to reorganize what justice and knowledge look like in the context of trauma’. The seemingly distinct memory projects manifested in, for example, war memorials, autobiographical literature, and legal testimony have, I suggest, developed against and alongside a common set of problematic conceptual, linguistic and socio/political principles. Each of these projects similarly map out and produce idiosyncratic representations of the nature of these boundaries, the genre-blurring and interdisciplinary character of which my own argument echoes. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
autobiographical fiction; culture and mourning; Life writing; psychology of writing; trauma fiction

DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2013.858068

Elizabeth Povinelli, The Four Figures of the Anthropocene (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 June 2014

Elizabeth Povinelli – The Four Figures of the Anthropocene

Center for 21st Century Studies

Published on Apr 23, 2014

As is known, although his histories of sexuality would consume much of his final life, Michel Foucault was not interested in sexuality in and of itself but only in relation to how it entangled itself in modern forms of power—what he called the “technology of life.” Ditto with the four figures and strategies of sexuality: the hysterical woman (a hysterization of women’s bodies); the masturbating child (a pedagogization of children’s sex); the perverse adult (a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure); and the Malthusian couple (a socialization of procreative behavior). The reason Foucault cared about sexuality and its dominant discursive figurations and strategies, was because he cared about the formations of modern power within which he lived. This talk asks, what would the figures of power be if Foucault were writing today in the shadow of climate change, the emergence of the security state, and the shaking of neoliberalism.

Abécédaire Foucault (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 June 2014

Alain Brossat, Abécédaire Foucault, Préface de Stéphane Nadaud, Editions Demopolis

Site

Cet Abécédaire Foucault n’est pas un essai sur la pensée de Foucault mais bien plutôt un cheminement avec Foucault. En adoptant le principe de l’abécédaire, il ne s’agit pas de passer en revue les principales notions à l’œuvre dans le travail de Foucault mais plutôt de tenter de rendre le lecteur sensible à la puissance d’une pensée constamment animée par le souci de l’actuel (le présent tel qu’il est, pour nous, en question). En croisant et combinant des textes animés par le souci d’entrer dans la discussion foucaldienne contemporaine, toujours plus animée, et d’autres qui sont portés par l’inspiration foucaldienne sans se rattacher à une quelconque orthodoxie, cet ouvrage s’efforce de mettre en évidence la façon dont une pensée forte comme celle de Foucault peut agir sur ses lecteurs en les incitant à se tenir à la hauteur des enjeux aussi bien philosophiques que politiques de leur époque. Aux antipodes du commentaire de texte(s) érudit, cet abc… destiné à être lu dans tous les sens vise, entre autres, à convaincre le lecteur que la philosophie vive est tout sauf un soporifique – un stimulant destiné à intensifier la pensée, en vente libre, sans effet indésirable….

With thanks to Alexandre Klein for this news

Using Weber and Foucault to understand the evolution of motivations in a Tibetan Buddhist organisation in Scotland (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 June 2014

McKenzie, J.S.
Using Weber and Foucault to understand the evolution of motivations in a Tibetan Buddhist organisation in Scotland
(2014) Culture and Religion, Published online March 2014

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of the evolution of motivations amongst participants engaged with the Tibetan Buddhist organisation, Rokpa, in Scotland. In doing so, this paper points to the utility of the Max Weber’s concept of authority and Michel Foucault’s concept of the discourse for understanding this evolution and sheds further light on the subjectivisation thesis in relation to understanding the dual processes of secularisation and sacralisation in contemporary, global society. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
authority; discourse; motivations; Scotland; subjectivisation thesis; Tibetan Buddhism

DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2014.884008