Foucault News

Raili Marling and Marko Pajević (eds), Care, Control and COVID-19. Health and Biopolitics in Philosophy and Literature (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

8 July 2023

Raili Marling and Marko Pajević (eds), Care, Control and COVID-19. Health and Biopolitics in Philosophy and Literature, de Gruyter, 2023

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110799361

About this book
This volume sheds light on the social and cultural transformations that accompanied the Covid-19 crisis by looking at health and biopolitics from a philosophical and literary perspective.

The biopolitical measures taken globally in response to the crisis have led to previously unheard-of restrictions in liberal societies, resulting in deep and potentially lasting transformations both in social structures and interpersonal relationships. Many researchers have addressed the Covid-19 crisis as a political or epidemiological challenge, but few have paid sufficient attention to the culturally specific reactions and cultural representations of the human beings at the centre of events. Literary analyses capture this human component and give insights into different reactions to, and protests against, the health-political measures addressing the crisis.

This book puts the notion of biopolitics, first extensively theorised in the 1970s, to work in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and uses literary case studies as starting points for discussions of contemporary politics, media, and legal and surveillance regimes. It brings together eleven scholars from six countries with the shared aim of combining literary and philosophical expertise to create a better understanding of the changes in society and political attitudes induced by the ongoing pandemic.

Editor information
Raili Marling, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia; Marko Pajević, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.

Højme, Philip, “Biopolitics and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Foucauldian Interpretation of the Danish Government’s Response to the Pandemic” (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 July 2023

Højme, Philip. 2022. “Biopolitics and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Foucauldian Interpretation of the Danish Government’s Response to the Pandemic” Philosophies 7, no. 2: 34. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7020034

Abstract
With the coronavirus pandemic and the Omicron variant once again forcing countries into lockdown (as of late 2021), this essay seeks to outline a Foucauldian critique of various legal measures taken by the Danish government to cope with COVID-19 during the first year and a half of the pandemic. The essay takes a critical look at the extra-legal measures employed by the Danish government, as the Danish politicians attempted to halt the spread of the, now almost forgotten, Cluster 5 COVID-19 variant. This situation will serve as a critical point from where to start using Foucault’s writings on life and biopolitics in order to expose various legally problematic governmental decisions that became visible during the handling of COVID-19 in general and the Cluster 5 mutation in particular. Reframing the pandemic within Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, this essay concludes that the state of exception has led to an increase in biopolitical logic, where some lives have come to matter more than others. As a critical counterpoint to this logic, the conclusion suggests that the notion of biocommunism could provide a suitable reconfiguration of communism. A reconfiguration that could mitigate some of the issues related to biopolitics is uncovered earlier in the essay.

Keywords: G. Agamben; J. Butler; biopolitics; biocommunism; COVAX; COVID-19; Denmark; M. Foucault; pandemic; vaccine nationalism

Gabriel Rockhill, The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia: Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

6 July 2023

Gabriel Rockhill, The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia: Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback, Monthly Review, 1 June 2023

Like any major social and political movement, the events referred to as those of May 1968 have multiple different aspects and internal contradictions. They cannot be easily summed up in terms of a single significance, and they were themselves the site of class struggles, with various groups vying for power, pushing and pulling in different directions. This is as true of the past as it is of the present, in the sense that the battle over historical meaning continues long after the event itself has passed.
[…]

In the dominant historical ideology, there is such a close affiliation between what is known as French theory and the uprisings of 1968 that there is often no need to demonstrate the existence of any concrete material connections between them. Given the rising prominence, through the course of the mid- to late 1960s, of the intellectuals affiliated with the problematic but predominant labels of structuralism and poststructuralism—including the major market successes of books like Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) and Lacan’s Écrits (1966)—it is frequently presumed, moreover, that there is a causal relationship between these theoretical developments and the practical contestation of the status quo.
[…]

Pennacchia, J. Exclusionary tactics in English secondary education: an analysis of fair access protocols (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 July 2023

Pennacchia, J.
Exclusionary tactics in English secondary education: an analysis of fair access protocols
(2023) Journal of Education Policy
DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2023.2222409

Abstract
Although all young people in England are entitled to a full-time, state-funded education suitable to their needs, every year some are without a school place and must be found one through local fair access protocols. This paper uses the enactment of fair access protocols in one local authority to examine the impacts of policy shifts to increase the power of self-governing schools and reduce the role of local authorities in ensuring local educational inclusion. Drawing on observations of two fair access panel meetings and a school’s preparations for these meetings, alongside Foucault’s theorisation of relationships between local practices and wider policy conditions, I argue that particular tactics are produced through fair access practices, which prioritise procedural fairness to schools and serve to categorise perceived risky young people. This interpretation of fairness arises out of a policy landscape of tensions, which requires schools to balance individual performance priorities alongside collective duties for inclusive and equitable education, and turns what should be an inclusive policy into another facet of the increasingly nuanced exclusionary architecture of English education. The findings are internationally relevant given global support for self-governing schools which is creating new issues for the educational inclusion of marginalised populations. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Fair access protocols; Foucault; inclusion, exclusion; self-governing schools

Devi Akella, Looking beyond the gaze. A reflective faculty learning experience (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

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4 July 2023

Devi Akella, Looking beyond the gaze. A reflective faculty learning experience
In Anteliz, E. A., Mulligan, D. L., & Danaher, P. A. Eds. The Routledge international handbook of autoethnography in educational research, Routledge, 2023

Extract from introduction
Numerous articles emphasising the need for international cultural immersion and community engagement experiences which encourage students to be active participants in the learning process leading to advanced critical thinking and global competency skills have been published in the last few years (Lessor, Reeves & Andrade, 1997; Vande Berg, Connor-Linton & Paige, 2009). However, less attention has been focused on the faculty members who take the lead by internationalising their curriculum and exposing their students to global exploration through travel expeditions, where they too might face similar learning situations as their own students (Akella, 2016; Coryell, 2016; Fischer, 2008; Hall, 2007; Mohamed, 2016; Todd, 2016).

However, faculty just like their student counterparts, acquire intercultural expertise through “teaching and research opportunities abroad and by building relationships with peers in other countries” (ACE, 2012, p. 4). An understanding of international settings and respect for cultural differences would place faculty members in an advantage in classrooms and when interacting with their students. It would allow faculty members to teach students cultural sensitivity and equip them with multicultural competencies. For faculty members these travel experiences can be “transformative” (Fischer, 2008, p. 2), resulting in “intellectual dynamism” (Hall, 2007, p. 54) and “academic refueling” (Festervand & Tillery, 2001, p. 110) forcing them to “rethink [about their] professional self-definitions and boundaries” (Hall, 2007, p. 54). In fact, traveling abroad for faculty members could involve painful moments, of moving beyond their comfort zone, challenging their mental schemas, acknowledging past misconceptions and prejudices, trying to deconstruct happenings, and rebuilding one’s external picture of the world. A process of going beyond one’s professional gaze, of evolving into a new person outside the disciplinary gaze of one’s own political system and country. A process of self-transformation gradually resulting in the creation of a more knowledgeable teacher, broad-minded academic, intellectually stimulated researcher, and a more open-minded person (Eddy, 2014; Festervand & Tillery, 2001; Fischer, 2008; Hall, 2007; Keese & O’Brien, 2011).

Integrating Foucault’s (1997) philosophies of disciplinary gaze and the model of situated learning, along with the research method of autoethnography, this chapter endeavors to capture my transformation process.

Morag Carol Paton, Carving Space for Staff Agency in a Faculty of Medicine: A Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis of administrative staff and faculty relations (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 July 2023

Morag Carol Paton, Carving Space for Staff Agency in a Faculty of Medicine: A Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis of administrative staff and faculty relations, PhD. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, 2023

Abstract
Administrative staff in higher education have been described as invisible (Eveline, 2004; Szekeres, 2004) and often characterized as being “non-academic, nonfaculty, non-teaching, [and] non-professional” (Losinger, 2015, p. 157). These characterizations manifest within health professions education (HPE) contributing to the undervaluing of staff and staff contributions.

While administrative staff are present on campuses or within the virtual workspace, staff often remain absent when it comes to HPE documents, literature, and reports. With few exceptions, if staff appear in the HPE literature it is as a passive object, often as a resource, a possession, or a liability. If staff appear in institutional reports, it is often within an acknowledgement section rather than a list of authors. These absences are also felt in the everyday staff experience: staff are sometimes overlooked in meetings, may not feel comfortable contributing knowledge, and may feel devalued or invisible in their roles.

At the same time, the neoliberal university system has led to the increasing professionalization of staff roles, occurring as health professionals experience their own shifts in power and prestige. These changes affect staff and faculty relationships in the health professions education space – at times, leading to tensions if not toxicity.

Throughout this thesis I build and examine an archive of published literature, archival documents, interview data, and my reflections and lived experience as a staff member to conduct a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis. Specifically, I conduct a “history of the present” (Foucault, 1977; Garland, 2014) to identify discourses that regulate the work of and power relations between administrative staff and faculty in a faculty of medicine. I discuss what these discourses make possible for staff to do, be, or say and what these discourses now make impossible. I explore the material effects of discourse, very purposefully centering staff voices within this text. Using feminist and decolonial critical theories throughout my analysis, I engage with the historic and hierarchical structure of academic medicine that constructs the largely feminized administrative staff cohort as having limited agency in HPE. To navigate the tensions produced by discourses and structure, I work to rebuild agency through staff voices, resistance, and recommendations for practice.

Kaufman, S.R., Morgan, L.M. The Anthropology of the Beginnings and Ends of Life (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 July 2023

Kaufman, S.R., Morgan, L.M.
The Anthropology of the Beginnings and Ends of Life (2023) Medical Anthropology, pp. 465-490.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315249360-40

Abstract
This essay reviews recent anthropological attention to the “beginnings” and “endings” of life. A large literature since the 1990s highlights the analytic trends and innovations that characterize anthropological attention to the cultural production of persons, the naturalization of life, and the emergence of new life forms. Part I of this essay outlines the coming-into-being, completion and attenuation of personhood and how life and death are attributed, contested, and enacted. Dominant themes include how connections are forged or severed between the living and the dead and the socio-politics of dead, dying, and decaying bodies. The culture of medicine is examined for its role in organizing and naming life and death.

Part II is organized by the turn to biopolitical analyses stimulated by the work of Foucault. It encompasses the ways in which the biosciences and biotechnologies, along with state practices, govern forms of living and dying and new forms of life such as the stem cell, embryo, comatose, and brain dead, and it emphasizes the production of value. Much of this scholarship is informed by concepts of liminality (a period and state of being between social statuses) and subjedification (in which notions of self, citizenship, life and its management are linked to the production of knowledge and political forms of regulation). © Cecil G. Helman 2008.

Author Keywords
biopolitics; birth; death; Medical anthropology; personhood; social studies of science

Iguchi et al, Female Genital Cutting and the “Medical Gaze” in Southeast Asia (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 June 2023

Iguchi, Y., Rashid, A., Afiqah, S.N.
Female Genital Cutting and the “Medical Gaze” in Southeast Asia, In Kyoko Nakamura, Kaori Miyachi, Yukio Miyawaki, Makiko Toda (eds)
Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: Global Zero Tolerance Policy and Diverse Responses from African and Asian Local Communities, Springer (2023), pp. 127-140.

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-19-6723-8_9

Open access

Abstract
This article discusses female genital cutting (FGC) in Southeast Asia in the context of the increasing medical control over the female body. It questions and evaluates medicine’s role in controlling women’s bodies through informing and underpinning the public health policies enforced them. Using a cultural studies methodology of text analysis, we have focused on the specific discourses on FGC in Southeast Asia. There were three findings in the study. Firstly, although overt state medical control over FGC does not appear to exist in Southeast Asia, the medical gaze has been adopted and perpetuated by the religious community in their resolutions. Secondly, we contend that whether they are promoting FGC or attempting to stop it, medical practitioners are equally/similarly involved in objectifying the female genitalia, and sharing what the well-known French theorist, Michel Foucault termed “the medical gaze.” Either way, they are implicitly contributing to medical control over the female body. Our third focus regards how local people view FGC. We found that local people had initially thought that FGC functioned as a mark of religious identity, but to a large extent they eventually came to adopt the same medical gaze as that of the European ideology of their colonizers. In this respect Southeast Asia presents an interesting example of a site of negotiation and contestation between the local traditional views of FGC based on custom or religion, and global discourses on FGC. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023.

Eugene B. Young, Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power. Deleuze via Blanchot (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

29 June 2023

Eugene B. Young, Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power. Deleuze via Blanchot, Bloomsbury, 2022

Description
Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze’s thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art.

Examining Blanchot’s suggestion that art and dream are “outside” of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault’s theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze’s philosophy of time and his work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka’s Castle, Villeneuve’s Arrival, and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds.

Table of Contents
Introduction: How the True World Finally Became a Bad Film

PART ONE: Power and the Outside
I. Power and the (In)Visible: Foucault and Deleuze
II: From Menace to Passion in Blanchot & Deleuze: ‘The Sovereignty of the Void’ & Experience of the Imaginary
III. Dreams: The Eclipse of the Day & its Incessant Return

PART TWO: Art, Literature, & Ideas
IV. The Conceptual Composition of the Work of Art: Chaos & the Outside
V. Literature’s Radical Reversal: from Absence of Origin to Deterritorialized Future
VI. Kafka’s Castle: A Case Study-Conceptual Inexistence & Obscure Value

PART THREE: Cinema
VII. Cinematic Worlds of Truth and Reality: Deleuze’s Movement Image via Foucault
VIII. Radical Reversals of Cinematic Art: The Dissociative Force of Blanchot’s Outside in Deleuze’s Time-Image
IX. “Is Anyone Seeing This?”

Conclusion: Artistic Fiction and the Thought of Eternal Return

Eugene B. Young is Professor of Practice in Philosophy and English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, USA. He is the primary author and editor of The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Fan Yang, Habermas, Foucault and the Political-Legal Discussions in China A Discourse on Law and Democracy (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 June 2023

Fan Yang, Habermas, Foucault and the Political-Legal Discussions in China. A Discourse on Law and Democracy, Springer 2022

About this book
This book revisits the discourse theories of Habermas and Foucault in a Chinese context. After arguing that Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy is too normative and idealistic, it presents Foucault’s Discourse Theory of Power Relations to illustrate the tensions between different Western discourse theories. The book then draws on the normative concept of Confucian Rationality from traditional Chinese cultural sources in order to investigate how adaptable these two discourse theories are to the Chinese society, and to balance the tension between them. Presenting these three dimensions of discourse theory, as well as the relations between them, it also uses empirical descriptions of certain facts of political-legal discussion both in traditional China and in the country’s new media age to explain, supplement and question this theoretic framework.

The book asserts that, because of the diverse modes of thinking in specific cultures, there might be different normative paradigms of discorse and different political-legal discussion modes across corresponding cultural contexts. Normative discourse theories provide guidance for the practices of deliberative democracy and legal discussions, which can in turn verify, supplement, improve and challenge the normative discourse theories. In addition to demonstrating the multiple dimensions of discourse theories, this research also promotes an approach to the Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy that combines elements of both Chinese and modern society.

Fan Yang is an associate professor of law and a fellow of the Center for Jurisprudence Research and the Research Center for Judicial Data Application at Jilin University, China. He holds a PhD degree of social science from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay in France, and another PhD degree of philosophy from East China Normal University. His teaching experiences and studies focus on sociology of law, legal philosophy and comparative law.