The Counting Machinery: Translation, Multiplication, and Liberal Politics of Homelessness in Paris

Trans-, Translation, Transnational

Using as his example post-World War I Italy and the government's interest in the size, growth rate, and "vitality" of its national population, David Horn suggests a genealogy for our present understanding of procreation as a site for technological intervention and political contestation. Social Bodies looks at how population and reproductive bodies came to be the objects of new sciences, technologies, and government policies during this period. It examines the linked scientific constructions of Italian society as a body threatened by the "disease" of infertility, and of women and men as social bodies--located neither in nature nor in the private sphere, but in that modern domain of knowledge and intervention carved out by statistics, sociology, social hygiene, and social work. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, cultural studies, and feminist studies of science, the book explores the interrelated factors that produced the practices of reason we call social science and social planning. David Horn draws on many sources to analyze the discourses and practices of "social experts," the resistance these encountered, and the often unintended effects of the new objectification of bodies and populations. He shows how science, while affirming that maternity was part of woman's "nature," also worked to remove reproduction from the domain of the natural, making it an object of technological intervention. This reconstitution of bodies through the sciences and technologies of the social, Horn argues, continues to have material consequences for women and men throughout the West.

This essay aims at relating the growth of indicators to the shifting temporalities of academic work. Drawing on research into academic work and lives but also on professional experiences, I develop the notion of chronopolitics to analyze the politics of time governing academic knowledge production, work and evaluation. Drawing on a range of examples, from the projectification of academic work and lives to the epistemic effects of strictly timed career structures, I point to the multiplication of theatres of accountability and to the shifting focus of academic work from a logic of discovery to one of delivery. In conclusion, I suggest moving beyond a debate of how to best play the indicator game, to a more fundamental critique of the entanglement of indicators and time, and to a re-timing of research as a political project.

This article discusses the relationships between social hygiene movement and psychology, seeking to present a healthcare paradigm, alternative to hygienism. Social hygiene movement was a popular social movement in Europe and the Americas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its ideas and methods influenced psychology, among many other scientific fields. This influence resulted in social control practices, aimed at the segregation of individuals who did not conform to current social norms. In contrast, at the end of the twentieth century, a paradigm emerges in mental health, called Psychosocial Attention. This paradigm establishes a way of understanding and dealing with mental health, different from that hitherto practiced by the psychology and psychiatry of the time. Thus, this article explains the principles in which Psychosocial Attention is based and the devices idealized for its materialization.

This paper explores the history of the biomedical construction of women's bodies as social bodies in the formation of colonial modernity in Korea. To do so, I engage with Michel Foucault's concepts of governmentality and biopolitics and the postcolonial history of medicine that has critically revisited these Foucauldian notions. These offer critical insights into the modern calculation of population and the biomedical gaze on female bodies on the Korean Peninsula under Japan's colonial rule (1910-1945). Foucauldian reflections on governmentality and colonial medicine can also shed light on the role of biomedical physicians in the advancement of colonial biopolitics. Biomedical physicians-state and non-state employees This paper explores the history of the biomedical construction of women's bodies as social bodies in the formation of colonial modernity in Korea. To do so, I engage with Michel Foucault's concepts of governmentality and biopolitics and the postcolonial history of medicine that has critically revisited these Foucauldian notions. These offer critical insights into the modern calculation of population and the biomedical gaze on female bodies on the Korean Peninsula under Japan's colonial rule (1910-1945). Foucauldian reflections on governmentality and colonial medicine can also shed light on the role of biomedical physicians in the advancement of colonial biopolitics. Biomedical physicians-state and non-state employees and colonizers and colonized alike - served as key agents investigating, knowing, and managing, as well as proliferating a discourse about, women's bodies and reproduction during Japan's empire-building. In particular, this paper sheds light on the processes by which Korean women's bodies became the objects of intense scrutiny as part of an attempt to quantify, as well as maximize, the total population in late colonial Korea. In the aftermath of the establishment of the Manchurian puppet state in 1932, Japanese imperial and colonial states actively sought to mobilize Koreans as crucial human resources for the further penetration of Japan's imperial holdings into the Chinese continent. State and non-state medical doctors meticulously interrogated, recorded, and circulated knowledge about the sexual and conjugal practices and reproductive life of Korean women in the agricultural sector, for the purposes of measuring and increasing the size, health, and vitality of the colonial population. At the heart of such medical endeavors stood the Investigative Committee for Social Hygiene in Rural Korea and Japan-trained Korean medical students/physicians, including Chóe Ŭg-sŏk, who carried out a social hygiene study in the mid-1930s. Their study illuminates the ways in which Korean women's bodies entered the modern domain of scientific knowledge at the intersection of Japan's imperialism, colonial governmentality, and biomedicine. A critical case study of the Investigative Committee's study and Chóe can set the stage for clarifying the vestiges as well as the reformulation of knowledge, ideas, institutions, and activities of colonial biopolitics in the divided Koreas.

The categories of mental health and mental illness have to be understood against the backdrop of the social institutions and practices which gave rise to them; and to do this, one need to set the whole in historical context. Mental health, in the rhetoric of the influential ‘mental hygiene movement’ founded in America in 1909, became equated with productiveness, social adjustment, and contentment – ‘the good life’ itself. Commentators treat mental health as an ideological concept, concealing highly problematic notions about how people should live, and regard the professions that deal with it as agencies of social control. Behind the concept of mental health lie numerous presuppositions about norms of work, education and family life; and the mental health professions are probably instrumental in maintaining these norms, by influencing not just problem cases but the way of making sense of the world.

In developing countries, dental caries is the most common disease of the early childhood. Its increased prevalence in younger age group have been predictive of oral health problems in future, affecting oral health and development leading to several morbid conditions of oral and general health. Prevalence and incidence of dental caries is highly influenced by a number of risk factors such as gender, age, socioeconomic status, dietary patterns, and oral hygiene habits. To assess social, demographic determinants and oral hygiene practices in relation to dental caries among the children attending Anganwadis of Hingna, Nagpur. A cross sectional study in 27 Anganwadis of Hingna, Nagpur was carried out over a period of two months and a total of 324 subjects attending the Anganwadis were enrolled. Social, demographic and oral hygiene practices in relation to dental caries were assessed in the study population. Out of 324 subjects, 206 had dental caries and 38 were found to be malnourished. A significant association was found among age, malnutrition, parent's educational status, oral hygiene practices, total number of siblings, and dental caries. Anganwadis should be addressed routinely on effective oral and general health promoting strategies which must include education of parents, oral and general health issues, risk factors for dental caries, and malnutrition in children below 5 years of age.

Reviewed by: The Struggle against Wage Controls: The Saint John Story, 1975–1976 Greg Marquis The Struggle against Wage Controls: The Saint John Story, 1975–1976. George Vair. St John’s: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2006, introduction by David Frank. Pp 136, $19.95 This memoir, which has a foreword by Bob White, former president of the Canadian Labour Congress (clc), is a vivid insider’s account of the labour movement’s struggle against Canada’s national wage and price control program of the 1970s. The volume was edited by David Frank, head of the New Brunswick Labour History Project. At the time, George Vair was a young labour activist who recently had become president of the local labour council. He had been president of two local union branches, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the United Auto Workers. The demonstration that took place in Saint John in October 1976 was part of the clc’s national protest against the Trudeau government’s economic policies. In 1974 Prime Minister Trudeau had mocked the suggestions of the Progressive Conservative opposition that inflation be countered by a ninety-day wage and price freeze. According to Trudeau, mandatory controls would be unworkable and would create a massive bureaucracy. A year later the Liberal government changed its mind and announced an income and price policy based on the Anti-Inflation Board (aib). The aib had the power to limit wage increases to 8 per cent annually in companies and organizations employing 500 or more workers. It also had the job of selling the program, whose appeal process was confusing, to the public. Employers and unions that did not abide by aib orders faced fines and jail time. Canadian workers had been enjoying regular wage increases since the late 1960s, and the labour movement viewed the aib as a money grab that benefited corporations at the expense of workers. The clc also denounced the controls as a threat to free collective bargaining. [End Page 269] Vair provides, in a clear and concise fashion, a unionized worker’s point of view on the aib program and the details of labour’s response to the policy in a mid-sized industrial city, Saint John. Major employers in the private sector included an oil refinery, a dry dock, two pulp mills, two breweries, a box plant, and a sugar refinery. Unions also represented public sector employees, port workers, and the building trades. At the time, Saint John was experiencing a boom, and the union movement was relatively strong, with two labour representatives on the city council. As Vair notes, the area’s building boom meant an extremely low unemployment rate, which factored in to local industrial relations. Employers, as the book details, often sympathized with specific union wage demands, usually for the pragmatic goal of labour peace, but unions usually faced the combined resistance of the federal and provincial governments, business organizations, and elements of the media. The last were particularly noticeable in New Brunswick, where the Irving industrial interests owned both Saint John newspapers. Vair provides a valuable record of how the Saint John and District Labour Council planned, organized, and staged a day of action that was part of the clc’s campaign to force the withdrawal of the aib legislation. The National Day of Protest, which involved more than 1 million Canadian workers, in essence was a general strike. The Liberal government and its allies resorted to tactics to oppose, minimize, and discredit labour resistance, including asserting that the leadership did not represent the rank and file. In Saint John, public transit, the port, most industries, and many stores and government offices closed, and the action was denounced by local business organizations. Despite Vair’s expectations at the time, the national protest turned out to be an isolated event. In his analysis, this was because the protest had the effect of weakening Trudeau’s resolve (the restraint program ended in 1978). The details of these local events, personalities, and disagreements over tactics remind researchers of the human side to historical events, and how protest movements face powerful obstacles, including the mainstream political parties, the media, and big business. Having recently attended three rallies...

In Portugal, since the first constitutional experience (1820-1823), the Liberal State was the promoter and builder of a new political project, based on representation, territorial reform and economic reorganization and standardisation. Its power apparatuses established the principles of citizenship and suffrage, integrated the peripheries and shaped a new national economic space. Stressing the tension between utopian political imagination and pragmatic processes, this article analyses each of these three main changes, which often faced strong debate, adjustments and the creation of forms of negotiation between the central administration and local political networks and agents. The imaginary that was behind liberal governance was not a tyranny of concepts; it combined doctrinal principles, political agendas and practices of power. The construction of the Portuguese Liberal State was hence based on moderation and compromise under an adaptive reformism guided by oligarchic networks. These tensions influenced the liberal institutions that were actually created and generated disenchantment, and gradually, affected the regime’s legitimacy. For Progressives, new institutions stayed short in relation to their political imagination; for Conservatives they had raised too high the «rebellion of the individual against society» and overdeveloped centralisation and the subordination of society and customs of the peoples to the State.

Author’s Response

Confucian Democracy in East Asia: A Discussion of Sungmoon Kim’s <i>Democracy After Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy</i>

How individuals comply with, and resist performance measures and metrics can be seen as a key concern in management and organization. Recent literature has advanced our understanding of compliance as a social practice which is often related to resistance. Yet, compliance is seen as something we equate with simply yielding to power without any agency. We address this theme with a study of the effects of managerialism on academic work. More specifically, we investigate the introduction of measures and controls to improve PhD completion times in a research-intensive UK university. Our findings show that despite most of our respondents voicing concerns about the reductionist nature of the target and the consequences for quality, the large majority of academics we talked to complied with the measure. We identify three compliance types that demonstrate compliance is an interpretative process. We make two principal contributions with this paper. First, we offer insights into why compliance deserves analytic attention as a social practice in its own right, as something that goes beyond mere consent. Second, we analyze the impact of managerialism on higher education through the lens of compliance. We use these insights to reflect on how compliance was linked to resistance and the effects of different compliance practices on academic work which ranged from shifting responsibilities to challenging academic integrity.

REVEREND PROFESSOR SZCZEPAN SZYDELSKI (1872-1967): A POLITICIAN AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST Rev. prof. dr hab. Szczepan Szydelski (1872-1967) was undoubtedly one of the most exceptional Roman-Catholic priests in the social and religious circles of Eastern Lesser Poland in the first half of the 20th century. His activity, still admired today, from his pastoral duties, to didactic and academic work at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, to high posts in the national and Lesser Poland Province structures of the Christian Democratic Party and other political groups, Lwów City Council, Polish Parliament, social associations and charities.

“Staged activism” is social protest using the tactics of performance, while “activist performance” is conventional stage drama deliberately performed as part of a particular political project. What are the advantages and drawbacks of each?

Race, Class, and the Neoliberal Scourge