Foucault News

Digital Archives as Spaces for Collaborative Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences. International Workshop (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

18 September 2025

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP
26.09.2025, 9:00h-13:00h (Graz local time)
Link: https://unimeet.uni-graz.at/b/dus-xkx-sud-m3y
Digital Archives as Spaces for Collaborative Research Practices
in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Institut für Digitale Geisteswissenschaften
Department of Digital Humanities
Universität Graz
A-8010 Graz, Elisabethstraße 59/III
+43 316 380 -2292
dh@uni-graz.at
https://digital-humanities.uni-graz.at/de/

PDF Flyer

In recent years, scholars from various disciplines have been discussing digital archives, sometimes referred to as “archives 2.0”. Different questions are raised, such as what they look like or how they work. One of the basic features of these archives is based on the idea of collaboration in a digital space.[1] Collaborative research is not an easy undertaking, although it seems to be a promising way forward. It involves a joint effort by researchers with different backgrounds, disciplines and institutions to explore a particular topic or project.

Collaborative research is an opportunity to observe evolving systems, such as digital archives, and raise questions about how they shape and change knowledge and research. A focus on collaborative research is consistent with the growing trend in the humanities and social sciences to move away from scholarly critique towards projects with more impactful outcomes. Collaborative research “offers opportunities to develop participatory, adaptive, improvisational and inventive methodologies”.[2]

The main aim of this workshop is to bring together academics with different disciplinary backgrounds to discuss the possibilities that digital archives offer for collaborative research.

The presentations and discussion will draw on the design and experiences of the Foucault Fiches de Lecture project (https://eman-archives.org/Foucault-fiches/objectifs-projet) and address the following questions:

*How do digital archives shape and transform knowledge and methodologies in the humanities and social sciences?
*What opportunities and challenges do digital archives present for scholars and professionals in academia and cultural institutions?
*What are the interdisciplinary and collaborative dimensions of research involving digital archives?

[1]. Ramsey-Tobienne, A. E. (2016). Archives 2.0: Digital archives and the formation of new research methods. Peitho Journal, 15(1), 4-28.

[2] Ruckenstein, M. (2024). Foreword: The power of collaborative explorations. In M. T. Schäfer, K. van Es, & T. P. Lauriault (Eds.), Collaborative research in the datafied society: Methods and practices for investigation and intervention (p. 14). Amsterdam University Press.

The workshop will take place as a hybrid event. It will be held as an in-person event at the University of Graz with invited speakers and discussants, but will also be streamed online. If you have any question regarding the workshop, please send an email to the organizer

INVITED SPEAKERS

Vincent Ventresque
Triangle, Lyon
https://triangle.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?article7207

Carolina Verlengia
Triangle, Lyon
https://triangle.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?article7052

Marie-Laure Massot
CAPHÉS, Paris
https://caphes.ens.fr/massot-marie-laure/

Elisabetta Basso
University of Pavia
https://studiumanistici-old.unipv.it/?pagina=docenti&id=2485

PROGRAM
9:00 – Opening
9.20 – 10.20 Session 1: Presentations
10.20 – 10.30 – Coffee break
10.30 – 11.30 Session 2: Presentations
11.30 – 11.40 Coffee break
11.40 – 13.00 Session 3: Q&A

Organisation and contact:
Dušan Ristić
dusan.ristic@uni-graz.at

Leo McCann et al eds, Elgar Encyclopedia of Critical Management Studies (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 September 2025

Leo McCann et al eds, Elgar Encyclopedia of Critical Management Studies, Edward Elgar, 2025.

[Ed: Several chapters cite Foucault]

This expansive Encyclopedia provides a detailed overview of Critical Management Studies (CMS). This exciting and iconoclastic area of research and scholarship has had a major impact on the academic field of business and management studies, opening up possibilities for exploring radical and liberatory ideas in the often conservative and technicist realm of business school education. Covering many of the substantive areas of CMS, such as control and gender, and providing reflexive discussions and critiques, this Encyclopedia is a vital contribution to this important and unique field.

Vincent Pak, Queer Correctives. Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 September 2025

Vincent Pak, Queer Correctives. Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore, Bloomsbury Press, 2025

Description
Queer Correctives explores Christian discourses of sex and sexuality in Singapore to argue that metanoia, the theological concept of spiritual transformation, can be read as a form of neo-homophobia that coaxes change in the queer individual.

In Singapore, Christian discourses of sex and sexuality have materialised in the form of testimonials that detail the pain and suffering of homosexuality, and how Christianity has been a salve for the tribulations experienced by the storytellers. This book freshly engages with Michel Foucault’s posthumous and final volume of The History of Sexuality by revitalising his work on biblical metanoia to understand it as a form of neo-homophobia. Drawing on Foucauldian critical theory and approaches in discourse studies, it shows how language is at the centre of this particular iteration of neo-homophobia, one that no longer finds value in overt expressions of hate and disdain for those with non-normative sexualities, but relies extensively on seemingly neutral calls for change and transformation in personal lives.

Queer Correctives takes Singapore as a case study to examine neo-homophobic phenomena, but its themes of change and transformation embedded in discourse will be relevant for scholars interested in contemporary iterations of Foucault’s concepts of discipline and technologies of the self. Together with interview data from religious sexual minorities in Singapore, it captures a burgeoning form of homophobic discursive practices that eludes mainstream criticism to harm through change and transformation.

Arnault Skornicki, Michel Foucault, the State and the Social Sciences (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

12 September 2025

Arnault Skornicki, Michel Foucault, the State and the Social Sciences, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025

Based on the French La grande Soif de l’État. Michel Foucault avec les sciences sociales (2016).

About this book
This book proposes an original reading of Foucault’s political thought. Far from setting aside the question of the State to focus on the relationships of power “from below”, the Foucauldian approach offers a radical anti-substantialist theory of the State. Concepts such as biopolitics, discipline, pastoral power, and governmentality serve as tools for understanding the statization of power relations. Contrary to some of Foucault’s own statements, Skornicki highlights the elective affinities between genealogy and sociology, which enable an in-depth dialogue with Marxism, Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Edward P. Thompson, among others. Unexpectedly, the analytics of power appears thereby as a corrosive and productive science of the State. The author meticulously reconstructs, drawing on Foucault’s extensive body of work, how his famous ‘microphysics of power’ fits into a broader genealogy of the modern State—namely, the processes of political monopolization that have shaped the so-called Leviathan from the Middle Ages to the present. The State thus emerges not as the coldest of all cold monsters, nor simply as a vast apparatus of repression, but rather as both the product and the agent of multiple governmentalities, diverse rationalities, and various religious tendencies—ranging from the modern rule of law to totalitarianism and neoliberal bureaucracy. This is not just a new book about Foucault. It is a book about the State and the enduring possibility of theorizing it—immersed once more in the caustic waters of genealogy.

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this news

Michel Foucault. Edited by Elisabetta Basso. Binswanger and Existential Analysis (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 September 2025

Michel Foucault. Edited by Elisabetta Basso. Binswanger and Existential Analysis
General Editor: François Ewald. English Series Editor: Bernard E. Harcourt. Translated by Marie Satya McDonough. Foreword by Bernard E. Harcourt. Columbia University Press, 2025.

In the early 1950s, the young Michel Foucault took a keen interest in the method of existential analysis—Daseinsanalyse—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He gave a lecture course on this topic at the University of Lille in the spring of 1953 and wrote a detailed introduction to the 1954 French translation of Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1930), in which he promised a forthcoming book that would “situate existential analysis within the development of contemporary reflection on man.” This book presents Foucault’s unpublished manuscript on Binswanger and existential analysis for the first time in English, offering crucial insight into his intellectual development.

Foucault carries out a systematic examination of Daseinsanalyse, contrasting it with psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology and championing its ambition to understand mental illness. In his critique of existential analysis, Foucault began his turn toward emphasizing the primacy of experience, which would lead to the radically new perspective and genealogical methods of The History of Madness and The History of Sexuality. Revealing a little-known influence on Foucault’s historicist approach, Binswanger and Existential Analysis reminds us of his unparalleled ability to destabilize our conceptions of self.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984), a French philosopher, historian, and social theorist, was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century thought.

Elisabetta Basso is an associate professor at the University of Pavia and a member of the Centre d’archives en philosophie, histoire et édition des sciences at the École normale supérieure of Paris.

François Ewald is a political philosopher and historian who oversaw the publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France.

Marie Satya McDonough is a master lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University.

Bernard E. Harcourt is a chaired professor at Columbia University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and has edited a range of works by Foucault in French and English.

APPEL À CANDIDATURES | Bourse internationale IMEC/ Centre Michel FOUCAULT (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

10 September 2025

APPEL À CANDIDATURES | Bourse internationale IMEC/ Centre Michel FOUCAULT
15 décembre 2025

Version PDF
L’Imec et le Centre Michel Foucault lancent un appel à chercheur pour l’attribution de la 5ème Bourse internationale Imec/Centre Michel Foucault.

L’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (Imec), préserve et met en valeur une collection exceptionnelle d’archives dédiée à l’histoire de la pensée et de la création contemporaine. Depuis sa fondation, l’IMEC contribue au rayonnement de la recherche sur la vie littéraire, éditoriale, artistique et intellectuelle. Dans ce cadre, l’Imec souhaite renforcer sa politique de coopération professionnelle et scientifique avec le monde de la recherche, et en particulier auprès des chercheurs internationaux.

L’Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault a été fondée en 1986, à l’initiative de chercheurs internationaux qui ont accompagné le développement du travail et de la pensée de l’auteur des Mots et les choses. Initialement créé pour rassembler documents, archives et travaux composant l’œuvre de Foucault, pour faciliter et coordonner des recherches se rapportant à son œuvre ou s’inspirant de ses orientations et de ses méthodes et pour développer les échanges internationaux autour de cette œuvre, le Centre Michel Foucault a également accompagné durant les 3 dernières décennies la publication des Dits et écrits puis des cours au Collège de France, en lien avec des activités de recherche menées à partir des archives déposées à l’Imec et à la BnF.

La Bourse Michel Foucault s’inscrit par conséquent dans cette dynamique de valorisation, au cœur des objectifs du CMF.

Objet de la bourse/
Ouverte prioritairement à un·e doctorant·e, fondée sur une invitation en résidence et dotée de 2.000 euros, cette « Bourse Imec / Centre Michel Foucault » est dédiée à une recherche originale portant sur la pensée de Michel Foucault, ses influences et son rayonnement.

L’œuvre foucaldienne permet d’interroger l’ensemble du champ des sciences humaines et sociales. Dans le cadre magnifique de l’abbaye d’Ardenne, les collections de l’Imec proposent de nombreuses ressources au premier rang desquelles les archives et la bibliothèque du Centre Michel Foucault, les archives de maisons d’édition, de revues et d’auteurs en dialogue avec la pensée de l’auteur des Mots et des choses.

Confiées à l’Imec en 1997, le fonds du Centre Michel Foucault est constitué des enregistrements des cours donnés par Michel Foucault au Collège de France, auxquels viennent s’ajouter certains séminaires donnés aux États-Unis, des entretiens et des émissions radiophoniques. On y trouve également les manuscrits de quelques articles, de la correspondance et des dossiers de presse. Une très importante bibliothèque d’études est associée aux documents d’archives.

Sélection des candidatures/
La « Bourse Imec/Centre Michel Foucault » est ouverte prioritairement à un•e doctorant•e, issu•e d’une université internationale.

Parmi les critères retenus, figurent :

l’intérêt du sujet et la qualité du dossier présenté, l’originalité de la démarche critique et documentaire, son lien avec les archives conservées à l’IMEC
le parcours académique et les publications du candidat
les recommandations de professeurs et spécialistes du domaine

Statut du chercheur « Bourse Imec / Centre Michel Foucault »/
Inscrit•e dans une université ou une grande école internationale, le·la lauréat·e sera invité·e en résidence à l’abbaye d’Ardenne pour l’équivalent d’une durée de 2 mois. Le lauréat recevra une bourse d’un montant de 2.000 (deux mille) euros.

Le·la lauréat·e bénéficiera du service d’orientation et de conseil de l’Institut ainsi que des instruments de recherche réalisés pour l’ensemble des fonds et collections.
Il bénéficiera de la gratuité des titres d’accès.

Le·la lauréat·e sera invité·e à contribuer aux publications de l’IMEC, en particulier aux Carnets de l’IMEC, et sur tous supports de diffusion de l’Institut ainsi que sur le site internet du Centre Michel Foucault.
Un contrat co-signé entre la directrice générale de l’IMEC et le lauréat formalisera le statut du boursier.
La « Bourse de recherche Imec/Centre Michel Foucault » n’est attribuée qu’une seule fois dans le cadre de ce contrat.

Évaluation/
L’attribution de la bourse de recherche est soumise à une obligation de résultats.
Un compte rendu sera remis par le chercheur à l’issue de sa résidence et communiqué au Conseil scientifique de l’Institut.
Un article de 15 à 20.000 signes publiable conjointement sur le site du Centre Michel Foucault et celui de l’IMEC.
Une conférence donnée dans un cadre à définir (éventuellement en ouverture des journées doctorales).

Candidature/
L’appel pour la « Bourse Imec/ Centre Michel Foucault » s’adresse prioritairement aux doctorant·e·s, spécialisé·e·s en sciences humaines issu·e·s d’une université internationale.
Contact : appelbourseimec@imec-archives.com

La candidature doit être transmise par voie électronique à l’adresse suivante : appelbourseimec@imec-archives.com
Un accusé de réception non automatisé est adressé dans les 10 jours ouvrés suivant la date de réception.

Le dossier de candidature se compose des pièces suivantes :

Fiche de candidature à remplir (jointe)

Fiche de candidature à remplir (jointe)
Curriculum vitae et lettre de motivation du candidat
Publications du candidat
Note d’intention entre 5 000 et 8 000 signes maximum
Une lettre de soutien du directeur ou de la directrice de recherche
Une lettre de soutien d’une personnalité du monde académique

Le dossier sera exclusivement adressé au format PDF, sous forme d’un seul fichier à l’adresse appelbourseimec@imec-archives.com.
L’objet du mail devra indiquer : nom et prénom du candidat et la mention « Candidature Bourse IMEC / Centre Michel Foucault ».
Merci de bien vouloir noter que tout dossier incomplet ne sera pas étudié.
Le format maximum autorisé est de 500 Ko.
En l’absence d’accusé de réception, les candidat·e·s sont invité·e·s à renouveler leur envoi et à écrire à l’adresse appelbourseimec@imec-archives.com.

Calendrier/
Date limite de dépôt des dossiers : 15 décembre 2025
Désignation lauréat·e : 30 janvier 2026
Durée de la résidence : 2 mois

Fiche de candidature/

Nom :
Prénom :
Date de naissance :
Nationalité :
Adresse postale :
Téléphone :
Adresse électronique :

Université d’inscription :
Adresse
Code postal / Ville

Sujet de thèse :
Directeur·rice de thèse :

Résumé de l’argumentaire de recherche (10 lignes) :

Tivadar Vervoort, “Nous Sommes Tous Néokantiens”: Foucault, Lukács, and the Critique of Social Forms (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 September 2025

Tivadar Vervoort, “Nous Sommes Tous Néokantiens”: Foucault, Lukács, and the Critique of Social Forms, HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2025 15:1, 209-241

Abstract
In his introduction to Canguilhem’s Le normal et le pathologique, Michel Foucault claims that the “question of Enlightenment” has been taken up differently in the German and French philosophical traditions. Nevertheless, Foucault signals a “correspondence” between the works of Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School, on the one hand, and the French epistemologists (including himself), on the other. In this article, I deepen this correspondence by assessing Foucault’s and Lukács’s respective relations to the neo-Kantian problem of the form and content of knowledge. In theorizing the problem of reification, Lukács mobilizes Emil Lask’s understanding of the concept “form of objectivity.” He starts from Lask’s unification of the form and content of knowledge by suggesting that the commodity form emerges as the form of objectivity that constitutes both objects and subjects of knowledge in capitalist societies. I show that Foucault’s use of the notions episteme, historical a priori, and regime of truth shares the neo-Kantian concern with of the content of knowledge. By arguing that Foucault’s critique of the philosophical anthropology underlying Marxism does not apply to Lukács’s neo-Kantianism, I make room for considering both of their philosophical strategies as a “critique of social forms.”

Tuomo Tiisala, Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons Elaborating Foucault’s Pragmatism (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 September 2025

Tuomo Tiisala, Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons Elaborating Foucault’s Pragmatism, Routledge, 2024

Open access

Description
This book argues that the received view of the distinction between freedom and power must be rejected because it rests on an untenable account of the discursive cognition that endows individuals with the capacity for autonomy and self-governed rationality.

In liberal and Kantian approaches alike, the autonomous subject is a self-standing starting point whose freedom is constrained by relations of power only contingently because they are external to the subject’s constitution. Thus, the received view defines the distinction between freedom and power as a dichotomy. Michel Foucault is arguably the most important critic of that dichotomy. However, it is widely agreed that Foucault falls short of justifying the alternative view he develops, where power and freedom are essentially entangled instead. The book fills out the gap by investigating the social preconditions of discursive cognition. Drawing on pragmatist-inferentialist resources from the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), it presents a new interpretation of Foucault’s philosophy that is unified by his overlooked idea of “the archaeology of knowledge.” As a result, the book not only explains why and how power and freedom must be entangled but also what it means ethically to pursue and gain autonomy with respect to one’s own understanding.

Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, critical theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 license.

Any third party material in this book is not included in the OA Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. Please direct any permissions enquiries to the original rightsholder.

This research was funded in whole or in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [10.55776/COE3]. For open access purposes, the author has applied a CC BY-NC public copyright license to any author-accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.

Published with the support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): 10.55776/PUB1157

Winsky, N. and Onusseit, C. The Rickshaw as In-Between: Heterotopias and Social Participation (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 September 2025

Winsky, N. and Onusseit, C. (2025), The Rickshaw as In-Between: Heterotopias and Social Participation in Aging. Population, Space and Place, 31: e70068.
https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.70068

ABSTRACT
As the population aged 65 and older significantly increases, understanding the dynamics within nursing homes becomes crucial. Residents often face loneliness upon entering these facilities, experiencing a disconnection from their previous lives and parts of society. The initiative “Cycling Without Age” fosters reconnection through volunteer-led rickshaw rides. This study conceptualizes the rickshaw as an in-between space, expanding on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. By examining the interplay between nursing homes as heterotopic sites and the rickshaw as an intermediary space, this study draws on 24 qualitative interviews with volunteers, highlighting how the interactions between pilots and passengers enhance social engagement and challenge existing societal structures such as spatial exclusion. Our theoretical-conceptual contribution engages in a ludic dialogue between Foucault’s concept of heterotopias and our empirical material, speculating on the role that the rickshaw, as a mobile, micro-scale in-between space, can play between the heterotopic nursing home and the non-heterotopic rest of space.

CFP: Psychoanalysis in Transition: New Queer Approaches in 21st-Century France. Panel NeMLA (2025-2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 September 2025

Call for papers: Psychoanalysis in Transition: New Queer Approaches in 21st-Century France
Northeast Modern Language Association Convention
2026-03-05 to 2026-03-08
Gannon University
Erie, Pennsylvania. USA

Since the 1970s, LGBTQ+ Francophone authors and scholars have produced an expansive critique of psychoanalytic practices and thought. Despite their differing views, Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault, Monique Wittig, Didier Eribon, Sam Bourcier, and Paul B. Preciado have all underscored the normative tendencies of psychoanalysis (particularly in its structuralist Lacanian tradition) and its complicity in enforcing the regime of sexual difference. “We urgently need clinical practice to transition,” Preciado urged the École de la cause freudienne in 2019. “This cannot happen without a revolutionary mutation in psychoanalysis, and a critical challenge of its patriarchal-colonial presuppositions.”

Around that time, a loose coalition of French psychoanalysts advocating for queer, feminist, and postcolonial approaches emerged. Fabrice Bourlez, for example, proposes reconciling psychoanalysis and queer theory through the concept of the “minor clinic,” which he argues is better suited to plural, non-normative subjectivities. Similarly, Thamy Ayouch advocates for the “hybridization” of psychoanalysis through queer, postcolonial, and decolonial discourses to move away from the medicalization of minor subjectivities. Laurie Laufer draws on second-wave feminism, Foucauldian critique, and LGBTQ+ activism to promote an “emancipation of psychoanalysis” through the politicisation of its praxis.

Can this new paradigm effectively combat queerphobic and transphobic tendencies within the French psychoanalytic establishment? Can psychoanalysis truly “transition,” or should queer thought, as Eribon suggests, “turn its back on psychoanalysis.”

This panel welcomes papers that explore emerging queer and intersectional approaches to psychoanalysis in France, from theoretical, literary, clinical and activist perspectives.

We welcome papers related, but not limited, to the following topics:

– Queer legacies of 1970s critiques of structuralist psychoanalysis
– Psychoanalysis and debates around same-sex unions and non-normative kinship in 21st-century France
– Transphobia and psychoanalysis: (de)pathologising discourses and practices
– Queer, feminist and decolonial approaches to psychoanalysis today
– Queer transatlantic dialogues between France and the U.S.
– The future of psychoanalysis in France
– How queer/trans Francophone authors use, reject or rework psychoanalytic theories

Please submit a title, abstract (200-250 words) and a short biography through the NeMLA portal by Sept 30th 2025. Papers may be presented in English or French.

For any questions, feel free to email Benoit Loiseau : bl4115@nyu.edu