Foucault News

Terri Bourke et al, Teacher educators’ knowledge about diversity: what enables and constrains their teaching decisions? (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

13 September 2022

Terri Bourke, Mary Ryan, Leonie Rowan, Joanne Lunn Brownlee, Susan
Walker & Lyra L’Estrange (2022): Teacher educators’ knowledge about diversity: what enables and constrains their teaching decisions?, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education,
DOI: 10.1080/1359866X.2022.2119369

ABSTRACT
Internationally and in Australia, there is growing evidence that graduate teachers feel under prepared to teach diverse groups of children. This study, using a social lab and drawing on theories from Archer and Foucault examined Australian teacher educators’ views on knowledge about diversity and the enabling and constraining factors that influenced their teaching around diversity in their universities. Eleven discourses emerged, revealing knowledge associated with teaching about and to diversity, rather than teaching for diversity. The authors argue that all three facets are necessary for thorough preparation of preservice teachers for today’s diverse classrooms.

KEYWORDS
Diversity; reflexivity; discourse; knowledge; decision-making; initial teacher education

Bietti, Elettra, A Genealogy of Digital Platform Regulation (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

13 September 2022

Bietti, Elettra, A Genealogy of Digital Platform Regulation (June 3, 2021). 7 Georgetown Law and Technology Review (2022) (forthcoming),

Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3859487 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3859487

Abstract
At its inception between the 1960s and 1990s, the internet was imagined as a decentralized, horizontal and open space that would foster freedom and equality. Today, it is a collection of walled gardens, a hierarchical ecosystem ruled by a few gatekeepers who leverage access to data, attention and infrastructural capability to enclose users and competitors in relations of dependency. The transition happened over the course of one, or at best two, decades. Why did the power of digital platform companies such as Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta, Amazon, and Apple emerge and grow so quickly without a regulatory response? An important reason is that the intellectual and institutional toolbox available to Western lawyers, policymakers, and thinkers is grossly inadequate to diagnosing and addressing harm and power formation in the information capitalist era.

In this Article, I adopt a genealogical methodology to trace the evolution of digital platform regulation efforts and controversies. I connect current efforts to 1990s debates around the regulation of cyberspace: contestations on the meaning of freedom, law, power, and democracy in digital spaces. I isolate three paradigmatic views, or moments, in early Internet regulation discourse: anarcho-libertarian, liberal, and critical views. I ask how these three views or moments have shaped and led to a similar spectrum of three views on how to regulate digital platforms and promote freedom in digital spaces: libertarian aversion to regulation; liberal perspectives on self-regulation, fiduciary obligations, data protection, competition, and utility regulation; and critical accounts of platform governance.

The move from an Internet of networks to an Internet of platforms represents a significant shift: from a hybrid, decentralized environment where freedom seemed the norm, to a centralized space where the default is privatized enclosure. Still, 1990s and current understandings of digital freedom, power, and law are pervaded by similar market-liberal path-dependencies that continue to facilitate the consolidation of private power in digital environments. I suggest two steps towards a post-neoliberal approach to digital policy.

Keywords: digital platforms, power, law, freedom, regulation, Facebook, Google, Amazon, genealogy, data, cyberlaw, cyberspace, data protection, algorithms, competition, antitrust, content moderation, Facebook Oversight Board, fiduciaries, trusts, cooperatives, utilities, EU, US

Foucault quote: The book experience

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

11 September 2022

When I wrote [History of Madness], in Poland in 1958, antipsychiatry didn’t exist in Europe, and in any case it wasn’t an attack on psychiatry for the very good reason that the book stops at the very start of the nineteenth century – I don’t even fully examine the work of Etienne Esquirol. Despite all this, the book has continued to figure in the public mind as being an attack on contemporary psychiatry. Why? Because for me – and for those who read it and used it – the book constituted a transformation in the historical, theoretical, and moral or ethical relationship we have with madness, the mentally ill, the psychiatric institution, and the very truth of psychiatric discourse. So it’s a book that functions as an experience, for its writer and reader alike, much more than as the establishment of a historical truth. For one to be able to have that experience through the book, what it says does need to be true in terms of academic, historically verifiable truth. It can’t exactly be a novel. Yet the essential thing is not in the series of those true or historically verifiable findings but, rather, in the experience that the book makes possible. Now, the fact is, this experience is neither true nor false. An experience is always a fiction: it’s something that one fabricates oneself, that doesn’t eist before and will exist afterward. That is the difficult relationship with truth, the way in which the latter is bound up with an experience that is not bound to it and, in some degree, destroys it.

Michel Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault” In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Three. Power New York: New Press, p. 243

Susan Dieleman et al (ed.) The Ethics of Richard Rorty. Moral Communities, Self-Transformation, and Imagination

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 September 2022

The Ethics of Richard Rorty. Moral Communities, Self-Transformation, and Imagination
Edited By Susan Dieleman, David E. McClean, Paul Showler, Routledge, 2022

Book Description
This book contains diverse and critical reflections on Richard Rorty’s contributions to ethics, an aspect of his thought that has been relatively neglected. Together, they demonstrate that Rorty offers a compelling and coherent ethical vision. The book’s chapters, grouped thematically, explore Rorty’s emphasis on the importance of moral imagination, social relations, language, and literature as instrumental for ethical self-transformation, as well as for strengthening what Rorty called “social hope,” which entails constant work toward a more democratic, inclusive, and cosmopolitan society and world.

Several contributors address the ethical implications of Rorty’s commitment to a vision of political liberalism without philosophical foundations. Others offer critical examinations of Rorty’s claim that our private or individual projects of self-creation can or should be held apart from our public goals of ameliorating social conditions and reducing cruelty and suffering. Some contributors explore hurdles that impede the practical applications of certain of Rorty’s ideas.

The Ethics of Richard Rorty will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in American philosophy and ethics.

Table of Contents
Introduction: Stretched Thin: Rorty’s Ethical Vision Paul Showler and Susan Dieleman

Part I: Creating Moral Communities and Creating Selves

1. Reading Rorty in Tehran; Or, What Happened When I Road-Tested Rorty’s Philosophy of Life Inside an Iranian Prison Kian Tajbaksh

2. Self-Creation and Community: Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty Daniel I. Harris

3. Richard Rorty, Ethnocentrism, and Moral Community: A Westerner’s Response to FGM John Giordano

4. Rorty’s Hope of Achieving a Global Civilization Clarence Mark Phillips

Part II: Imagination, Care, and Virtue

5. Imagination as a Social Virtue Santiago Rey

6. Can Trees Care? The Overstory and Rorty’s Ideal of Inspirational Literature Ben Roth

Yokum, N. Juliette’s Endless Prosperities: Foucault avec Lacan on Sade’s Illustrious Villain (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 September 2022

Yokum, N.
Juliette’s Endless Prosperities: Foucault avec Lacan on Sade’s Illustrious Villain
(2022) Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 36 (2), pp. 172-182.

DOI: 10.5325/jspecphil.36.2.0172

Abstract
The Marquis de Sade’s Juliette-well-known as an outrageously murderous, hedonistic anti-heroine-captured the attention of some of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Most of these engagements with Sade have received some critical attention. However, Foucault’s distinctive remarks on Juliette in The Order of Things have gone overlooked. I situate Foucault’s interpretation of Juliette alongside and against Adorno’s and Lacan’s: exploring his positioning of her as a liminal figure, situated in the Classical age on the cusp of modernity, and his allusion to the way in which her “solitary-and endless” “prosperities” exceed our grasp. © 2022 Penn State University Press. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
desire; Jacques Lacan; Marquis de Sade; Michel Foucault; Theodor Adorno

Michel Foucault and the Body. Questioning the Paradoxes of Juridical and Political Inscriptions, University of Warwick, 16-17 September 2022

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 September 2022

Progressive Geographies

Michel Foucault and the Body. Questioning the Paradoxes of Juridical and Political Inscriptions

Please register your interest to attend either in person or virtually theIAS Lecture SeriesMichel Foucault and the Body. Questioning the Paradoxes of Juridical and Political Inscriptionsto be held at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK on16 – 17 September 2022.
Please visit our event’s website for more information:
Registration link:
This event brings together an international panel of researchers from the UK, France and Italy to discuss the phenomenon of judicial tattooing. The aim is to create a rich and intellectually stimulating debate on various bodily inscriptions, and especially to question the body as a site for visual punishment as well as the marks and signs of political coercion. If the French philosopher historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) suggested that the human body could be understood as a…

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An analysis of heterotopic space: Hasanpaşa Gazhane, enlightening once again (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

5 September 2022

Ural, A.G., Sariman Ozen, E.
An analysis of heterotopic space: Hasanpaşa Gazhane, enlightening once again
(2022) A/Z ITU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, 19 (2), pp. 445-457.

DOI: 10.5505/itujfa.2022.97355
Open access

Abstract
While architectural structures can be physically damaged over the years, they may also become functionally inadequate as a result of the change and de-velopment. At this point, re-functioning works transform these structures, which are valuable in terms of both social memory and cultural heritage, into structures that also respond to spatial needs. Factors that require re-functioning such as technological variables and societal changes that occur due to population growth are based on the differentiation in user needs. These changes do not always arise out of necessity, but sometimes they are necessary to create regional radical changes due to management strategies. Foucault talks about the concept of heterotopia in his work titled “Of other spaces”. The scope of these structures, in which the conflict of old and new is felt and unplanned energy is released, has been the subject of various studies and equivalence of various examples to the concept of heterotopia has been researched. This study was born from the idea that some re-functionalized buildings make users feel the old and new function at the same time, and in Foucault’s words, the user gets exposed to other space experience. As a sample, Hasanpaşa Gazhanesi, located in Kadıköy, was chosen to be examined. In the research, the findings were examined with hermeneutic method by using general resource search model and documentary resource search model, which are among the qualitative research methods. It is aimed to make ‘heterotopic’ evaluation of the chosen space and to examine the concept with concrete example. © 2022, Istanbul Teknik Universitesi, Faculty of Architecture. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Hasanpaşa Gazhane; Heterotopia; Michel Foucault; Museum Gazhane; Re-functioning

The Anglican split: why has sexuality become so important to conservative Christians? (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 September 2022

Mark Jennings, The Anglican split: why has sexuality become so important to conservative Christians?
The Conversation, August 29, 2022

The newly formed “Diocese of the Southern Cross” has broken away from the Anglican Church of Australia to form a denomination committed to a highly conservative position on sexuality and marriage equality.

Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON), the association supporting the breakaway denomination, claim Anglican bishops “were unable to uphold the Bible’s ancient teaching on marriage and sexual ethics”, making their defection necessary.

[…]
So why is sexuality so important to conservative Christians now?
This leaves us with our initial question unanswered – why is sexuality so important for this group of Christians now?

One answer is to be found in the work of the 20th century French academic Michel Foucault.
[…]
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued sexuality was the discourse of sex, or the set of conditions that create the acceptable “truth” concerning sex. He observed two such discourses, both emerging in the mid-19th century.

The first was concerned with classifying sexual practices in order to declare some healthy and normal, and others wrong or requiring “treatment”.

The second was a “reverse discourse”, opposed to the criminalisation of homosexuality and promoting sexual freedom.

Conservative Christians tend to align with the first discourse, firmly holding that same-sex sexuality is opposed to God’s “truth” of sex.
[…]

Sandra Eder, How the Clinic Made Gender. The Medical History of a Transformative Idea (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 September 2022

Sandra Eder, How the Clinic Made Gender. The Medical History of a Transformative Idea, Chicago University Press, 2022

Interview (podcast) with the author on the New Books network

An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history.

Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering.

Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: Sex before Gender: From Determining True Sex to Finding the Better Sex
Robert: Hope
Chapter 2: Happy and Well Adjusted: The Psychologization of Sex in the 1930s and 1940s
Karen: Coming of Age
Chapter 3: Culture, Gender, and Personality
Chapter 4: Making Boys and Girls: Gender at Johns Hopkins
Chapter 5: Gender in the Clinic: The Process of Normalization
Chapter 6: The Circulations of Gender, Cortisone, and Intersex Case Management
Janet: Despair
Chapter 7: The Life of Gender: Reformulations and Adaptations
Epilogue

Verovšek, P.J. The Reluctant Postmodernism of JÜrgen Habermas: Reevaluating Habermas’s Debates with Foucault and Derrida (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 September 2022

Verovšek, P.J.
The Reluctant Postmodernism of JÜrgen Habermas: Reevaluating Habermas’s Debates with Foucault and Derrida
(2022) Review of Politics, 84 (3), pp. 397-421.

DOI: 10.1017/S0034670522000316

Abstract
Politicians and scholars alike have blamed postmodernism – and the identity politics that have emerged in its wake – for the pathologies of the early twenty-first century. Despite his limited defense of the Enlightenment and his disputes with his French contemporaries, I argue that Habermas’s philosophy displays many postmodern characteristics that are often overlooked. These include its decentering of the autonomous subject, its skepticism towards metaphysics, and its rejection of stadial philosophies of history. In light of the fact that Habermas adopts weaker versions of many postmodern commitments, I reconsider his disputes with Foucault and Derrida regarding the legacy of the Enlightenment. I conclude that rather than interpreting Habermas as a conservative critic of his more radical counterparts in France, we should instead see these three thinkers as part of a shared attempt to come to terms with the problems of postwar Europe in a public, discursive manner.