Foucault News

Eva Joyce, Rewilding tourism in the news: Power/knowledge and the Irish and UK news media discourses, Annals of Tourism Research (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

27 February 2024

Eva Joyce, Rewilding tourism in the news: Power/knowledge and the Irish and UK news media discourses, Annals of Tourism Research, Volume 104, 2024.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2023.103718.

Abstract:
This study investigates how complex power relations shape the knowledge about rewilding tourism produced by the news media in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. A multi-level Foucauldian discourse analysis with a socialist ecofeminist lens is adopted to evaluate online news articles about rewilding tourism across a 5-year period (2017–2022). By tracing the network of power relations across society, this micro-meso-macro-level discourse analysis reveals the discursive strategies, taken-for-granted norms, taboos, silences and subjugations shaping rewilding tourism knowledge. The results show how tourism is tapping into the growing public engagement with rewilding, while we fail to critically evaluate the long-term implications for future generations of the ‘green grabbing’ of land, primarily for the carbon credits market and incidental rewilding (eco)tourism.

Keywords: Power; Rewilding tourism; Biodiversity; Ecofeminism; Foucault; Carbon credits

Call for abstracts: “Like a Face Drawn in Sand at the Edge of the Sea.” Vicissitudes of the Posthuman Forty Years After Foucault’s Death (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 February 2024

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Workshop
“Like a Face Drawn in Sand at the Edge of the Sea.” Vicissitudes of the Posthuman Forty Years After Foucault’s Death.

PDF of Workshop flyer

WORKSHOP

“Like a Face Drawn in Sand at the Edge of the Sea.” Vicissitudes of the Posthuman Forty Years After Foucault’s Death.

“Does man really exist? To imagine, for an instant, what the world and thought and truth might be if man did not exist, is considered to be merely indulging in paradox. This is because we are so blinded by the recent manifestation of man that we can no longer remember a time – and it is not so long ago – when the world, its order, and human beings existed, but man did not.”
M. Foucault, The Order of Things

Forty years after Foucault’s death and sixty after the publication of An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, we would like to invite you to interrogate the posthuman as an open problem and process on the historical and epistemic level. In particular, we would like to discuss whether and how historiographical and methodological issues pertaining to the archeological project have been transformed, scaled down, transposed or partially resolved today.

The Order of Things wished to show the emergence and disappearance of the configurations of knowledge in their empirical arising. Among them, we see man taking his ambivalent place as both mysterious object and sovereign subject of western knowledge, only to soon disappear along the lines of the image we captured in the title. But, however deferred, historiographical and epistemological problems return incessantly, questioning the status of discontinuities in the archaeological project: what backdrop would be able to account for both the emerging and the fading away of orders of identities and differences? To what logic do their mutations respond? What explanation is offered?

According to the archaeological instance, posthuman is then manifestly not a condition of existence but an open process: the uncertain outcome of the mutations of these conditions of possibility, of their precipitation.

What does it mean to question this diagnostic today? What mutations have taken place or struggle to do so? What are the stakes? Would it be legitimate to say that today we speak from the space of knowledge left vacant by the disappearance of the figure of western knowledge that gave rise to the humanities?

The workshop’s aim would be to draw a map, though bound to be partial, fragmentary and mobile, of a range of practices both in research and in applied fields related to the tools forged in the debate pertaining to posthumanism. This could be done, on the one hand, by exploring the current functioning of the toolbox elaborated by the thinker in the 1960s and early 1970s, and on the other hand, by interrogating the way in which these tools have been brought into contact and fruitful interaction with different theoretical inputs and epistemic and political instances (feminist, anti-racist, queer, post-colonial, ecological, a.o.).

KEYWORDS:
Foucault, archeology, posthumanism, human-machine interaction, more-than-human.

We look forward to your contribution!
Please submit the title and abstract (no more than 500 words) of your contribution by March 24th, 2024, to https://emorob.fss.muni.cz/conferences/2024-foucault40 or by email to: Foucault40Brno@muni.cz
DEADLINE: March 24th
VENUE: May 30-31, 2024, Masaryk University, Room M117 – Joštova 10, Brno, Czech Republic.

The workshop is supported by the project EMOROB (2023-2027) Robots, Computing the Human and Autism/ Cultural Imaginations of Autism Diagnosis and Emotion AI (EXPRO GAČR_ 2023/23/GX23-05692X), FSS MU

Jordi Collet-Sabé & Stephen J. Ball, Without School: Education as Common(ing) Activities in Local Social Infrastructures – An Escape from Extinction Ethics (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 February 2024

Jordi Collet-Sabé & Stephen J. Ball (04 Jan 2024): Without School: Education as Common(ing) Activities in Local Social Infrastructures – An Escape from Extinction Ethics, British Journal of Educational Studies
DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2023.2298776

ABSTRACT
In this third paper in a series of four, we explore some ways of doing education differently. An education that moves beyond the persistent failures and irredeemable injustices of modern mass schooling episteme. The episteme for education we adumbrate – an episteme of life continuance – begins with a recognition of interdependency and the value of diversity, diverse knowledges and relations of tolerance. We propose an escape from the extinction ethics which modern schools perpetuate and a new grammar of living in which education and politics are processes of re-learning, co-learning, decision taking, limit testing, and conflict resolution in relation to an uncertain future. To achieve this, we outline a set of open and ‘unplanned’ commoning activities that would take place within local social infrastructures focused on re-politising learning itself and practicing the care of oneself, others, community and the environment. The proposal for a different education as common(ing) activities undertaken within social infrastructures, is about reimagining political and environmental relations, and co-creating a sense of collective ownership of and responsibility for the environment. A form of community that it is practical, rather than utopian, and that would be both the means and ends for such an education.

Keywords:
education, commoning, social infrastructures, environment, Foucault

Lisa Borrelli and William Walters, Blood, sweat and tears: On the corporeality of deportation (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 February 2024

Lisa Borrelli and William Walters, Blood, sweat and tears: On the corporeality of deportation. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, (2024)
https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241232325

Abstract
It is hard to imagine how deportation regimes could function without the threat or the exercise of force. Yet surprisingly a focus on forces and bodies, and more generally the question of corporeality, has rarely been foregrounded by migration scholars looking at deportation. Academic study of clandestine border crossing as well as detention abounds with descriptions and theorization at the level of the body. Why not deportation? Building on fieldwork with cantonal police units in Switzerland between 2015 and 2017, this paper calls for scholars of deportation to take corporeality seriously. We follow some of the corporeal practices implemented by state actors and related experts and authorities to understand how bodies feature in removal practices in terms of senses, feelings, affects, nerves, pulses, breathing. Violence overarches this scene, but it is by no means the whole story in the state’s struggle for sovereignty and racialised removal, since we should equally register the other moves that are integral to deportation operations such as calming, monitoring, medicating, consoling, dressing, undressing, and inspecting. To overlook the corporeal is to risk producing an overly sanitized, cleansed, tidy depiction of deportation.

Keywords
Deportation, corporeality, state power, migration control, violence

Agustín Colombo, «El quiasmo no ontológico de la carne. El enfoque de la subjetividad en las investigaciones tardías de Michel Foucault y su relación con Merleau-Ponty» (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 February 2024

Colombo, Agustín. 2023. «El quiasmo no ontológico de la carne. El enfoque de la subjetividad en las investigaciones tardías de Michel Foucault y su relación con Merleau-Ponty». Logos. Anales del Seminario de Metafísica 56, nº 2: 269-85.
https://doi.org/10.5209/asem.88549

Resumen
¿De qué manera el problema de la carne permite analizar el vínculo que tiene el pensamiento de Foucault con el de Merleau-Ponty? Al igual que Merleau-Ponty, Foucault piensa la carne en un modo susceptible de ser comprendido en términos de “quiasmo”. Sin embargo, a diferencia de Merleau-Ponty, la carne en las investigaciones de Foucault designa más bien un quiasmo no ontológico de la subjetividad que ilustra las dinámicas por las cuales esta es constituida y, al mismo tiempo, se constituye a sí misma en la historia. De este modo, la carne aparece como un motivo o un tema clave que permite repensar la evolución de la crítica de la subjetividad que Foucault le hace a Merleau-Ponty y a la fenomenología desde muy temprano, al menos desde Phénoménologie et psychologie.

Palabras clave: Michel Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, carne, subjetividad, Phénoménologie et psychologie, Fenomenología, antropología, experiencia

Peter W Shay, Precluding Critical Pedagogy: Ethical Democracy and the Tyranny of Functional Metrics, Visible Learning, and Data Surveillance (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 February 2024

Peter W Shay, Precluding Critical Pedagogy: Ethical Democracy and the Tyranny of Functional Metrics, Visible Learning, and Data Surveillance, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Volume 21, Number 3, pp. 26-58

http://www.jceps.com/archives/16139

Open access

Abstract
Through a Foucauldian theoretical framework, this article contests the efficacy of the modern assessable and visible learning curriculum, and analyses how the current education episteme disempowers the ethical subjectification of the individual, dislocating the development of aesthetic agency. It articulates a tension between education for the development and enrichment of specific skills and economic growth, which is data-driven, and a more humane, values-driven education. As the vociferous application of, and focus on, standardised tests dominates pedagogical practice and only certain types of empirical knowledge become the accepted norm, then aesthetic agency is subverted. Such data-gazing practices, it is argued, neglect the Foucauldian psychagogical ‘care of the self’ of students through the cultivation of a life practice; instead, as data surveillance pervasively dominates recent pedagogical rationales, students are further alienated from ethical practices of self that lead to an ethically democratic society. Focusing on the Foucauldian concepts of discipline, biopolitics, and biopower, and the way these concepts shape educational practice, some of the studied blindness and lacunae dissimulated in the excitement of measuring the “effectiveness” of education is analysed.

Keywords:
Data-gaze, aesthetic agency, critical education, visible learning ethical democracy

Burrows, L., Holden, D., Tynan, E. Untangling Maralinga: Spatial and Temporal Complexities of Australia’s Atomic Anthropocene (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 February 2024

Burrows, L., Holden, D., Tynan, E.
Untangling Maralinga: Spatial and Temporal Complexities of Australia’s Atomic Anthropocene (2023) Journal of Australian Studies, 47 (3), pp. 515-530.

DOI: 10.1080/14443058.2023.2199757

Abstract
Reflecting on the atomic test sites in the South Australian desert, this article analyses the bisociation of cultural and historical spaces with geographical and geological formations. We expand Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias to include complex intersections with natural environments. Given the close association of human intervention and landform, these atomic test sites are also important indicators of the Anthropocene, marking transitional geo-spaces influenced by both human and pre-human geological action. Crossing dimensions of colonial contest, tourism, atomic science and geology, we demonstrate that temporal and physical intersections of multiple human cultures at atomic test sites both influence and are influenced by deep-time geological history. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Anthropocene; atomic history; Australia; geology; Maralinga

Etienne Balibar – Structure et politique: les différences anthropologiques (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 February 2024

Titre complet: SPHEPS 2023-2024 – Cycle des invitations – Etienne BALIBAR, “Structure et politique: les différences anthropologiques” (7 février 2024)

Cette vidéo est l’enregistrement de la séance du 7 février 2024 du SPHePS (Séminaire Permanent d’Histoire et de Philosophie du Structuralisme), organisé par Jeanne Etelain et Patrice Maniglier. Le séminaire alterne entre un cycle de conférences que donnent Patrice Maniglier et Jeanne Etelain (et qui porte cette année sur “féminisme et structuralisme”) et un cycle d’invitations de personnalités qui permet d’explorer l’insistance du structuralisme dans la pensée contemporaine. Lors de cette séance du 7 février, Etienne BALIBAR revient sur la question des rapports entre structure et politique dans son propre travail. À travers un récit rétrospectif très complet sur sa propre trajectoire théorique, il explique comment s’est progressivement imposée à lui la thématique de ce qu’il appelle les “différences anthropologiques” (manuel/intellectuel, masculin/féminin, normal/pathologique, commun/étranger… et la liste n’est pas cloturable a priori), et en quoi ces différences exigent une logique qui à la fois s’ancre et renouvelle de l’intérieur l’héritage de la pensée structuraliste, dans un sens qui la reproche des pensées intersectionnelles. A la suite de la conférence, qui dure environ 2 heures, la discussion s’engage sur différents aspects à la fois de la relation de sa recherche avec le structuralisme, et de cette proposition en elle-même. On trouvera dans cette conférence une introduction à la fois complète et profonde de la pensée d’Etienne Balibar et de sa place dans l’histoire de la pensée depuis les années 1960. Une séance à tous égards mémorable.

Foucault quote: Kairos – choosing the right moment

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 February 2024

[…] this problem of being “on time” and not being on time as you know was one of the main problems in Greek ethics— the notion of kairos. Kairos is the right moment. In the first Greek texts, the problem for ethics was choosing the right moment to do something.
[…]
In general, I think the Greeks’ problem was how to deal with necessity and fortune—Ananke and Tykhe. The Greeks had what you might call a very fatalistic attitude toward Ananke and Tykhe, as you know. Anyway, the problem faced by ethics, behavior, conduct, and politics was definitely not in trying to change things in relation to Ananke and Tykhe, but in dealing with them as they were and catching the right moment when you could actually do something. Kairos was the play, the element through which human freedom could deal with and manage Ananke, the world’s necessity. That, I think, is the reason why kairos, the problem of the right moment, was one of the central problems in Greek ethics.

Michel Foucault, Discussion with the Department of Philosophy in What Is Critique? & The Culture of the Self. Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Arnold I. Davidson. Translated by Clare O’Farrell, Chicago University Press, 2024, pp.84-5.

Michel Foucault | History of Sexuality | Philosophers Explained | Stephen Hicks

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 February 2024

Michel Foucault | History of Sexuality | Philosophers Explained | Stephen Hicks, Feb 10, 2024

“The History of Sexuality” is Michel Foucault’s examination of the history of discourse about and practice of sexuality over the past three centuries. While sexuality was open in the seventeenth century and relatively closed through the Victorian era, it might appear that sexuality in the modern era has been open. In fact, with the increase in the discourse about sexuality in modern times, Foucault argues we live in a new age of repression.