Foucault News

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

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

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

Christopher Collstedt
The Descents of Military Violence against Civilians: A History of the Present
(2014) Scandinavian Journal of History, Published online March 2014
https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2013.875060

Abstract
Inspired by the works of Michel Foucault and Erling Sandmo, this article explores contemporary discourses of military violence against civilians from a genealogical perspective. The purpose is to shed light on the historicity of certain structures of knowledge, thoughts, politics and ethics that are fundamental for the ways in which military violence against civilians is put into words, interpreted and explained in various situations and contexts today. My main argument is that the descents of Swedish contemporary discourse on military violence against civilians can be traced back to epistemological and politico-legal conflicts in the 17th century. © 2014 © 2014 the Historical Associations of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

Author Keywords
civilians; discourse; epistemology; genealogy; military; violence