Foucault News

Tebkew, M., Atinkut, H.B. Impact of forest decentralization on sustainable forest management and livelihoods in East Africa (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

7 March 2023

Tebkew, M., Atinkut, H.B.
Impact of forest decentralization on sustainable forest management and livelihoods in East Africa (2022) Trees, Forests and People, 10, art. no. 100346

DOI: 10.1016/j.tfp.2022.100346

Abstract
The paper examines how forest decentralization affects forest management and sustainable livelihoods in East Africa. For this review, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania were chosen as case study nations, and study sites implementing decentralization. We used Google Scholar to find about 280 pieces of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Further, we used the Foucault’s approach and the Policy analytical approach (PAA) to distill our review. Finally, we applied assessment indicators: forest conditions, species composition, forest cover, income level, food security status, wealth equality, and equity.

Our review of the forest decentralization reforms process based on empowerment and accountability yields the following results: (1) intended to increase efficiency and ecological services are not being implemented properly, (2) forest policy reforms resulted in a net loss of forest area in East Africa, (3) forest status of some forests is stable, and the current decentralization reforms, with the exception of the Duru-Haitemba community-based forest management (Tanzania), do not address the sustainability of the forests. Understandings of the current institutional frameworks and power configurations are insufficient to devolve resources and rights to lower levels of government. This necessitates the development of new viable forest governance systems capable of deviating significantly from established modes of government. Our review suggests that decentralization forest governance and sustainable agricultural resources utilization rely on multilevel institutional architecture, actors’ collaboration at all levels and with regional integration, complement each other to form successful systems within forest landscapes. © 2022 The Authors

Author Keywords
Agro-ecology; Agro-food systems; Agroforestry; Decentralization; Resilient livelihood strategy; Sustainable forest governance

Diego Andreucci, Christos Zografos, Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 March 2023

Diego Andreucci, Christos Zografos,
Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change, Political Geography, Volume 92, 2022,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102512.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629821001724)

Abstract:
In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a “technology of government” operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly “green” mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of “vulnerability” in adaptation policies; and the governing of “climate migrants”. We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as “in need of improvement”. And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations.

Keywords:
Political ecology; Othering; Climate change; Climate migrants; Biopolitics; Racism; Just transitions; Sacrifice zones; Development; Green extractivism; Green New Deal; Postcolonial theory

Luke, T.W. Investment and Rapid Climate Change as Biopolitics: Foucault and Governance of the Self and Others through ESG. (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 March 2023

Luke, T.W. Investment and Rapid Climate Change as Biopolitics: Foucault and Governance of the Self and Others through ESG. Sustainability 2022, 14, 14974.
https://doi.org/10.3390/su142214974

Abstract:
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment strategies today are an established practice in personal and public finance. They also provide crucial benchmarks for corporate social responsibility policy in gauging the performance of due diligence and return on investment by financial managers. This study explores the growing conflict within these economic and policy networks over “value-oriented”, or total financial return, and “values-oriented”, or comprehensive non-financial impact, capital investment in recent years. How to balance these two discursive constructions of value in the pursuit of “sustainability” for both the economy and the environment at the same time is an operational challenge that managers, environmentalists and scientists have not yet fully answered. It also indicates how Michel Foucault’s approach to the power/knowledge nexus in biopolitics provides a useful perspective on these ideologically and politically charged debates over how to invest capital and steer business activity to deliver solid returns in the market as well as support more ethical and economical public policies to respond to climate change, social injustice and governance failure.

Keywords:
Foucault; discourse; dispositive; dispositional analytics; corporate social responsibility; environmental social governance; sustainability; corporate accountability; risk management

Grinberg, S. Between Responsibility and “Responsibilization”: The Everyday Making of School in Buenos Aires Slums (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

4 March 2023

Grinberg, S.
Between Responsibility and “Responsibilization”: The Everyday Making of School in Buenos Aires Slums In S. Nombuso Dlamini, Angela Stienen (Eds.), Spatialized Injustice in the Contemporary City Protesting as Public Pedagogy, Routledge, 2022

Abstract
On the basis of field work conducted in the periphery of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, this chapter discusses some of the lines that characterize current modes of political production of life in the intersection with school life. We propose that the operating system that defines the urban involves biopolitics as its scenario: the city as an expression and realization of regularization of life. Foucault deals with this problem in several of his texts and it is a question that can be traced on his first works, but clearly it is developed when he deals with the notions of biopolitics and governmentality. Through research work in schools located in urban areas called villas miseria, favelas, chavolas, and/or slums, we problematize some of the modulations and stratifications of the production and political conduction of life in current societies. By way of hypothesis, we point out that in the present managerial times, the self-make live became a key modulation of the exercise of power, that located on the self-settle the question of not governing too much but not too little. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, S. Nombuso Dlamini and Angela Stienen.

Shmidt, V. Vitalist Arguments in the Struggle for Human (Im)Perfection: The Debate Between Biologists and Theologians in the 1960s–1980s (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 March 2023

Shmidt, V. (2023). Vitalist Arguments in the Struggle for Human (Im)Perfection: The Debate Between Biologists and Theologians in the 1960s–1980s. In: Donohue, C., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12604-8_12

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-12604-8_12
Open access

Abstract
In this chapter, I explore and offer critical reflections on the widespread practice of attributing negative value to “vital forces” in debates on health and disease, as the direct result of the extensive dissemination of genetics and its implications since the late 1960s. This historical reconstruction focuses on the most heated debates in popular science periodicals and editions, having the longest-lasting public “echo,” which have shaped an intergenerational continuity in the reproduction of vitalist arguments in discursive practices regarding health, disease, and their genetic factors. Mapping attacks on vital forces as various forms of negation addresses three different debates in the historically interrelated repertoire of potentially rival approaches to health, disease, and their genetic components: (1) the attribution of negative value to primal instinct as an obstacle to the progress of human civilization; (2) the normative vitalism mainly associated with French philosophers George Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze; and (3) the movement for the deinstitutionalization of health care within the negative theology presented by Ivan Illich. The reproduction of vitalist arguments in the each of the three realms is seen as a historical continuity of the medical vitalism that appeared in the Enlightenment and that produced a less monolithic and more conceptually coherent continuum of the positions regarding health, diseases, and their causes. In line with the Lakatosian division into internalist and externalist histories of science, I focus on the multiple functions of vitalist arguments: as a main force in the contest among rival theories regarding health and disease (as a part of the internalist narrative); as a signifier of the boundary work delineating science and not-science, whether labeled as theology or as “bad” science aimed at legitimizing science (as a part of externalist history); and as an ideological platform for bridging science and its performance in policies concerning reproduction. © 2023, The Author(s).

Author Keywords
Georges Canguilhem; Internal and external histories of biology; Ivan Illich; Reproduction; Vitalism

Mooney, J. Personal narratives, public risk: using Foucault’s ‘confessional’ to examine adult retrospective disclosures of childhood abuse (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 March 2023

Mooney, J.
Personal narratives, public risk: using Foucault’s ‘confessional’ to examine adult retrospective disclosures of childhood abuse
(2023) Health, Risk and Society, .

DOI: 10.1080/13698575.2023.2166019

Abstract
Disclosure of childhood sexual abuse is a process that is often laden with boundary testing, decision-making and, at times, risk. Disclosures tend to be delayed, often into adulthood and later life, with disclosures to authorities remaining relatively low. In the Republic of Ireland adults who disclose experiences of childhood sexual abuse are directed towards child protection services due to an interplay between jurisprudence, child protection policy design, and mandatory reporting obligations, requiring social work practitioners to balance the social and the legal.

This article compares Foucault’s concept of the confessional to current social work practices of engaging with adult victims and survivors of abuse. It is argued that thinking about these interactions as a confessional-like system highlights a process of knowledge creation that is taking place when a personal narrative of abuse is shared, willingly or via mandated reporting, with a child protection agency under the auspices of a modern state. This ‘confessional-lens’ helps us identify a tipping of the balance in this area of social work practice, away from provision of care and person-centredness, across a boundary, to legalistic practice. Narratives of childhood abuse are transformed into knowledge deemed necessary to assess current risk to children. A process that places the adult on the periphery, leading to a potential for harm and re-traumatisation. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
child protection; Disclosure; Foucault; risk; sexual abuse; social work

Index Keywords
adult, adulthood, article, child, child protection, child sexual abuse, controlled study, decision making, female, human, human experiment, Ireland, jurisprudence, male, mandatory reporting, narrative, physician, risk assessment, sexual abuse, social work practice, survivor, thinking, victim

Schweyer, M. Généalogie du gouvernement de la famille: Foucault et l’histoire politique de l’autorité familiale (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 March 2023

Schweyer, M. (2022). Généalogie du gouvernement de la famille: Foucault et l’histoire politique de l’autorité familiale. Archives de Philosophie, 85, 89-107. https://doi.org/10.3917/aphi.854.0089

Résumé
À la fin de Surveiller et Punir, Foucault indique qu’il faudrait étudier les débats révolutionnaires sur le droit des parents à faire enfermer leurs enfants, pour prolonger son analyse de la discipline comme « forme de société ». Cet article se propose d’étudier ces débats, en retraçant la manière dont l’autorité familiale a été constituée comme forme de pouvoir et objet de savoir, entre la fin du xviiie siècle et le début du xixe siècle français. L’analyse des discours juridiques, pédagogiques et politiques sur l’autorité familiale permet de retracer l’émergence d’une forme inédite de gouvernementalité, dont la spécificité ne peut être appréhendée qu’à la condition de passer d’une approche généalogique à une perspective sociohistorique sur les rapports entre les groupes qui s’affrontent au sein de la société. À la lumière de ce constat, le problème du rapport entre la méthode de la « pratique historico-philosophique » et la méthode de l’enquête sociohistorique peut être réexaminé.

Abstract
At the end of Surveiller et Punir, Foucault indicated that it would be important to study the revolutionary debates on the right of parents to have their children locked up, in order to build on his analysis of discipline as a “form of society.” This article proposes to study these debates, by retracing the way in which family authority was constituted as a form of power and an object of knowledge, between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century in France. The analysis of legal, pedagogical, and political discourses on family authority allows us to retrace the emergence of a new form of governmentality, whose specificity can only be apprehended if one moves from a genealogical approach to a socio-historical perspective on the relations between the groups in conflict within society. Considering this assessment, the problem of the relationship between the method of “historical-philosophical practice” and the method of socio-historical inquiry can be reexamined.

Saffron Huang, Chat GPT and the death of the author (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 February 2023

Saffron Huang, Chat GPT and the death of the author, The New Statesman, 26 February 2023

In 1967, in an essay called “The Death of the Author”, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes argued that people should stop viewing the author’s intentions and biography as the ultimate source of meaning in a text. A text’s meaning is not fixed by the creator, Barthes claimed, but is always shifting, depending on how the reader interacts with the work. Barthes believed that we should dispense with the notion of the author, since they have no authority. Instead, readers should think of them merely as scribes who collect words and mark the blank pages. Authors may influence a text but they don’t decide how it is understood.

Who is the author behind the words that ChatGPT speaks? The popular language processing tool that the artificial intelligence company OpenAI launched in November 2022 is able to write fluently in English. It has quickly gone mainstream, composing sonnets, writing stories, and answering questions on diverse and complex topics – including world history, avant-garde films, birthday gift ideas, the complexity of the bubble-sort algorithm – for millions of users. It is also killing the idea of the author to an extent that Barthes could not have anticipated.
[…]

Michel Foucault did not believe in the straightforward death of the author. Responding to Barthes, he asserted that while the author is not a fixed, consolidated subject that straightforwardly determines meaning, our knowledge of the author still plays an essential role in producing and regulating how texts are used and interpreted, and in how society’s knowledge circulates.
[…]

Michael Maidan, Review of Elisabetta Basso, “Young Foucault: The Lille Manuscripts on Psychopathology, Phenomenology, and Anthropology, 1952-1955.” (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 February 2023

Michael Maidan, Review of Elisabetta Basso, “Young Foucault: The Lille Manuscripts on Psychopathology, Phenomenology, and Anthropology, 1952-1955.” . Foreword by Bernard E. Harcourt. Translated by Marie Satya McDonough, Philosophy in Review, Vol. 43 No. 1 (2023), 7-10 : February
Open access

As formulated appropriately by Bernard Harcourt in his foreword —even if he is not using Foucault’s strict technical sense for this term—Elisabetta Basso’s book is a ‘genealogy of Archaeology’ (x). From that point of view, the title does not give full credit to this work. Indeed, Basso’s book develops a strong interpretation of the development of Foucault’s archaeology, which considers not only Foucault’s works of the 1960s but also his earlier published and non-published work of the first half of the 1950s.

Elisabetta Basso is both a beneficiary of the mother lode (lecture drafts, book drafts, reading notes, philosophical diaries, etc.) yielded by the recent opening of Foucault archives and an active participant in the collective enterprise to classify, transcribe, edit, and publish Foucault’s early texts. Basso was the editor of Foucault’s essay on the existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger (2021). She also co-edited, together with Jean-François Bert, the volume Foucault à Münsterlingen: À l’origine de l’Histoire de la folie, Avec des photographies de Jacqueline Verdeaux (2015).

[…]

Éric Fassin, Daniel Defert : archives et actualité d’un legs (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 February 2023

Éric Fassin, Daniel Defert : archives et actualité d’un legs, AOC, 17 février 2023

Sociologue, fondateur d’Aides, la première association de lutte contre le sida, Daniel Defert est mort le 7 février 2023. Il fut aussi le compagnon de Michel Foucault, et de son deuil, il a su faire œuvre de vie en pensant politiquement non seulement la santé, mais aussi l’intimité. Dix ans après la loi de 2013 ouvrant le mariage aux couples de même sexe, à notre tour de faire travailler ses legs.

En 2013, Daniel Defert m’a accordé un entretien pour préparer une édition augmentée d’Herculine Barbin[1]. En 1978, Michel Foucault avait complété par quelques archives les « Souvenirs et impressions d’un individu dont le sexe avait été méconnu », publiés une première fois en 1874 par le médecin légiste Ambroise Tardieu après le suicide d’Abel Barbin.

Pour l’édition en anglais de 1980, Foucault avait ajouté une préface : « Le vrai sexe ». Dans ma postface de 2014, « Le vrai genre », j’ai relaté la quête qui aura permis de recouvrer à la fois le nom et le prénom de ce « pseudo-hermaphrodite », selon la médecine, dont le récit fait désormais référence pour le mouvement intersexe. Car « on ne savait pas où ça s’était déroulé, on n’en avait aucune idée : dans le manuscrit, il n’y a que des initiales », raconte alors Daniel Defert. Avec son compagnon, ils ont dû partir à la recherche d’archives.

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