Foucault

Governmentality and Youth Volunteering Policy

by Jon Dean

Presented at the Voluntary Action History Society 2010.

Young people are increasingly encouraged to volunteer, perhaps as a panacea to combat personal and social problems... more Young people are increasingly encouraged to volunteer, perhaps as a panacea to combat personal and social problems (Sheard, 1995). This paper will explore why volunteering policy has developed this instrumental tendency in recent history. It will analyse Michel Foucault’s theories of governmentality, and use these as a frame to consider the advances made in youth policy over the last half century, but with particular regard to volunteering policy in the last 15 years. Using governmentality as a tool of analysis, it will argue that volunteering policy has become a device to responsibilize younger generations; a method to improve the authority of the young over their own lives and their local areas, whilst moulding behaviour which brings about individual and collective wellbeing. It is also argued that this follows a natural progression of youth policies to tackle the ‘problem of youth’.

How to Become an Iconic Social Thinker: The Intellectual Pursuits of Malinowski and Foucault

by Dominik Bartmanski

Published in European Journal of Social Theory

The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure... more The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronislaw Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification.

The technologies of normalization and self

by Marco Gemignani

HIV Interventions: Beyond the flesh/information distinction (Review essay)

by Mizanur Rahaman

(2012) 21 Science as Culture (forthcoming)

Foucault y Deleuze: Reseña Política de su obra.

by Hjalmar Fredd Newmark Diaz

Biopolítica borbónica en Chile: el discurso antropológico sobre la ociosidad y el vagabundaje

by Patricio Lepe-Carrión

En editorial para ser publicado en el libro colectivo "Revisando el presente. Ensayos críticos desde el sur". CEAPEDI. Universidad Nacional del Comahue - Argentina.

The Ways of Skepticism: an Arabic-Islamic Detour?

by Stefano Malfitano

Call for Papers "Methods in Practice" Workshop, Manchester Workshop in Political Theory, 5-7 September 2012

by Jens Olesen

Esteban Cofre_conflicto violencia dispositivos y castigos

by Esteban Cofré

Foucault and the Political

by Jon Simons

Foucault's mother

by Jon Simons

Nunkoosing, K & Haydon-Laurelut, M (2012) Intellectual Disability Trouble. In: Goodley, D., Hughes, B., & Davis, L. Disability and social theory: new developments and directions. Palgrave Macmillan: London

by Mark Haydon - Laurelut

The total institution was not simply the place where people with intellectual disabilities used to live and work. It... more The total institution was not simply the place where people with intellectual disabilities used to live and work. It was also the place of work for several professions, such as physicians, psychologists, nurses, social workers, speech and language therapists and others engaged in regulating the lives of disabled people. The closure of institutions and there replacement with the group home as one of the places where men and women with intellectual disabilities live still involve these processionals in processes that construct disability. In the context of intellectual disabilities, these professions operate in a collective called the Community Learning Disability Team (CLDT). Staff in the group home can call on the CLDT to assist them to manage men and women with intellectual disabilities deemed to be in need of expert help. They do so by means of writing referrals in which they describe the troublesome actions, often acts of resistance, of the man or woman with learning disabilities. These referrals link the group homes with external agents of control and are also important sources of data about what is going on in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities and the people who support them in group homes. In this chapter we draw upon the insights of Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault to make sense of some aspects of the lives of men and women with intellectual disabilities who live in group homes. We have previously examined referrals to a CLDT to explore discourses of challenging behaviour in these texts. Below are two of the referrals we studied about two men, Dennis and Harry. These are taken from actual referrals made to a CLDT; we will also make reference to 3 other persons, Zoë, Lucy and John (these names are all pseudonyms) who were referred. We use these referrals to illustrate the application of Goffman’s and Foucault’s insights to group homes for men and women with intellectual disabilities. Methodologically our work with these texts is guided by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2001). CDA “is critical in the sense that it aims to show non-obvious ways in which language is involved in social relations of power and domination, and in ideology. It is a resource which can be used in combination with others for researching change in contemporary social life” (Fairclough 2001:229). CDA is a resistant and disruptive reading practice aimed at revealing how assumptions operate to serve vested interests. Our position is also informed by critical and social constructionist perspectives of intellectual disability and the lives of people who have been given this label (Goodley 1996; Rapley 2004; Roets 2009; Swain, French, Barnes, & Thomas 2004).

2011 “Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory. Vol. 29. P. 187-207.

by Jeb Sprague

It has been over a decade since the publication of Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri’s widely read Empire, a book that... more It has been over a decade since the publication of Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri’s widely read Empire, a book that claimed humanity had entered a qualitatively new era in the organization of power. How do critical sociological studies that also theorize global capitalism depart from or share affinities with Hardt and Negri’s Foucauldian-inspired notion of empire? The two most important shared insights is the notion of a new epoch in the history of world capitalism and the conceptualization of a global system that moves beyond the idea of U.S. imperialism solely as behind its fundamental structure. However, overpowering Hardt and Negri’s framework are some fundamental problems: the vague and nondialectical idea of multitude, the lack of the role of the state, their confusing and contradictory idea of constitutionalism, and a misapprehension of immaterial labor.

De Bentham à Foucault: Autour du Panoptique (2)

by Anne Brunon-Ernst

Summary of the habilitation thesis

The Dog’s Bite: Usury and Foucault’s “Resemblance” in The Merchant of Venice

by Terry Gamel

Presented at the South-Central Renaissance Conference, 2011.

According to Foucault, in the sixteenth century there was an epistemology at work that operated through the... more According to Foucault, in the sixteenth century there was an epistemology at work that operated through the resemblances between different things to show how different things could have similar properties. This principle is at work in The Merchant of Venice in the constant use of imagery related to Shylock biting Antonio. For this reason, the entire “pound of flesh” plot of The Merchant of Venice is actually an analogy for how usury can seem like biting, to show the audience the dangers of taking out loans. However, because this is a comedy, the analogy cannot be completed with Antonio’s death. The play instead becomes a warning to the lender to be careful with rhetoric.

Like a Kid in a Candy Shop: Truth and Discourse in DeLillo’s White Noise

by Beau Wuthrich

During the Enlightenment Period of the 19th Century, Immanuel Kant rejected the belief in the ability of the human... more During the Enlightenment Period of the 19th Century, Immanuel Kant rejected the belief in the ability of the human mind to understand the universe in its entirety with his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s claim was that human perception was in fact a unity of manifolds which determinately synthesized experience, binding the human subject into time, space and causality and separating him or her from the ontological, or “real” world. For Kant, there were aspects of the universe entirely indecipherable to and unintelligible by human subjects. Kant termed this transcendental spirit numen. In his breakout novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo explores Kant’s numen and the role it plays in the postmodern age. The perceptions of DeLillo’s characters reflect a certain detachment from and estrangement to the world of the objective. In this era, it is the signs and symbols man has created for himself which transcend and override the ontological cosmos and in effect replace it, attaining a higher order of valence for the individual. For DeLillo’s protagonist, Jack Gladney, the antithesis of this world of Baudrillardian simulacra is the abyss, death, the intangible and unsignafiable state of human consciousness. Death is a state of non-existence, hostile and intangible to the psyche; in other words, the perfect historical expression of Kant’s undetected numen or, as allegorized by Jack’s son Heinrich via scientific narrative, the invisible “neutrinos [that] go right through the earth” (DeLillo, 34), imperceptible “waves and radiation” (38). DeLillo’s novel gestures toward the authoritative systems and structures erected to barricade humanity against death: the abstract and discursive institutions Mark Conroy describes as the “master narratives of cultural transmission in Jack Gladney's universe: the familial, the civic, the humanist and the religious” (“From Tombstone to Tabloid.” 97), or, to use a more concrete example, the psychically-invested dams against death, the Pyramids of Giza or the Great Wall of China invested in by their dead erectors (DeLillo, 159). The rising question relates to the actual nature of truth and whether there truly is a Real-Real to go back to.

Dominant Vertebrates or The Bound Book which Binds Into Bondage: McLuhan’s Constellations and Nebulae in Resonant Acoustic Space

by Beau Wuthrich

Michel Foucault has said that power is “constructed and functions on the basis of particular powers, myriad of issues... more Michel Foucault has said that power is “constructed and functions on the basis of particular powers, myriad of issues and myriad of effects of power" (1980, 188). In other words, power is divined from multifarious institutions, practices and categories. To speak briefly, “Forms”. Macluhan states that "The Gutenberg Galaxy is intended to trace the ways in which the forms of experience and of mental outlook and expression have been modified, first by the phonetic alphabet and then by typographic printing." (1) The mosaic approach becomes the only relevant one, for in order to attain an auditory field beyond the phonetic alphabet and print, McLuhan must fragment the looking glass of print media, which values and enforces a theoretical, linear, individual approach. To do otherwise would be to sabotage his own project. The form of McLuhan’s book is, in a sense, its essence. Following this device, this essay will take a critical applicative approach rather than a reflective one, entering the auditory field and resonating with McLuhan’s text, as opposed to observing it from a unitary point of view.

3 Writing, examining, disciplining: the genesis of accounting's modern power

by Richard Macve

From resistance to polaesthics: politics after foucault

by Jon Simons

Spaces of Invention: Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault

by Kendall Phillips