Disciplinary Technologies Research Articles

From water source protection to future village: environmental prefigurative politics and technologies of the self in China’s Qingshan village

ABSTRACT A growing body of research focuses on individual environmental consciousness as an alternative and complement to regulatory and economic policy strategies for sustainable development. However, existing studies failed to explain the complex associations between individual environmental consciousness and conservation practices. This study constructs a framework of environmental prefigurative politics - technologies of the self (EPP-TS) to investigate how the mobilization of technologies of the self can lead to the subjectivization of individual environmental consciousness, thus enabling environmental prefigurative politics to shape specific conservation practices. First, this study argues that a range of technologies of the self, including discursive, incentive, and disciplinary technologies, are mobilized to subjectivize individual environmental consciousness. Second, the subjectivization of individual environmental consciousness prompts and institutionalizes the improvisation of environmental prefigurations, embodying the political imaginaries and power structures that environmental prefigurative politics aspire to realize in society. Third, environmental prefigurative politics also influence the development pathways and situated agency of nature conservation, thereby shaping specific conservation practices. Finally, this study also critiques the environmental prefigurative politics under authoritarian environmentalism, as it also reinforces authoritarian power in subjectivizing individual environmental consciousness.

‘But we didn’t put it to a vote!’. A case study of direct-democratic decision-making in formal education

The current study examined the unofficial implementation of direct-democratic decision-making assemblies in three typical public (state) schools of consecutive educational levels (kindergarten, primary and middle school) in a village in Greece. The study drew on Michel Foucault’s analysis of power technologies and power relations in disciplinary dispositives like Education. The main aim of the study was to investigate the ways in which both pupils and teachers engaged with the disciplinary technology inherent in the educational dispositive and to document their conceptualization and attitudes towards these direct-democratic assemblies. The research methodology utilized participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Findings indicated that the disciplinary technology continued to function as per the dominant dispositive, despite the implementation of direct-democratic decision-making assemblies, while pupils generally exhibited a sense of empowerment, displaying support and being influenced in their daily lives by the assemblies’ governmentality. Minor challenges concerning the implementation of such assemblies are addressed and further possibilities of such implementations are discussed.

Progress in Rotorcraft Design: 1974–2024

Fundamental advancements in aircraft design over the past 50 years have enabled a range of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) air vehicle configurations and have significantly enhanced aircraft performance, safety, and reliability. This summary paper chronicles the evolution of rotorcraft design from 1974 to 2024. It is segregated into three key pillars of aircraft design preceded by an aircraft design overview. The three pillars are processes and tools, technology, and air vehicle configuration. The first pillar, on design processes and tools, describes advancements in technology, methodologies, and computational capabilities such as the transition from design solely by wind tunnel testing, physical models, and hand calculations to computer-aided design/synthesis and simulation in a model-based engineering digital-twin environment. The second pillar, on technology, focuses on advances in disciplinary technologies and how they have been incorporated into aircraft design. Technologies discussed include composite materials; rotor systems; propulsion systems, ranging from advancements in turbine engines to all- and more-electric propulsion technologies utilizing various energy storage systems to convertible engines; fly-by-wire systems; avionics and cockpit architectures, including digital displays, navigation aids, and communication equipment; and autonomous and semiautonomous systems. The third pillar, on air vehicle configuration, focuses on platform architectures. Major architectures discussed are high-speed VTOLs such as the thrust-vectored aircraft, tiltrotors, lift/thrust compounded helicopters, and all- and more-electric aircraft.

Decolonizing a museum: Exhibiting Mexican American mythologies of place in Los Angeles’s historic Plaza District

This article examines how the disciplinary technologies of land use, zoning laws, immigration policy and urban renewal were utilized in the creation of LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes (LAPCA), Los Angeles’s first museum dedicated to Mexican American arts. I analyse the methods used by LAPCA’s founders, curators and city planners who have deployed the museum’s location adjoining the city’s historic Plaza to situate this institution within the symbolic and spatial jurisdiction of a historic place. In this case study, I begin with an exploration of the earliest foundations of ethnic tourism in Los Angeles’s historic Plaza district to situate LAPCA within a long history of governmental interventions used to create and reframe Los Angeles’s ethnic cultural spaces. I draw upon two theoretical strands – Foucauldian governmentality and Henri Lefebvre’s dialectic of urban implosion/explosion – as my primary tools of genealogical critique. In this article I provide new practical applications for using governmentality as a lens through which we can examine how the ensemble of administrative techniques and procedures used in the governance of populations shape the spaces they inhabit.

Violent Exposures, Exposing Violence: Gender, Anti-Blackness and the Strip-Searching of Black Women and Girls in Canada

In recent years, more media attention has been given to the routinisation of police strip-searches in Canada. As with many violent policing practices, the routine use of strip-searching disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous, and racialised women. This article investigates the legal archives of two cases of the strip-searching of Black women and girls in Canada – the case of S.B. who was violently strip-searched by four Ottawa police officers in 2008 and the case of three 12-year-old girls who were strip-searched in a Halifax public school in 1995. This article demonstrates that the exposure of Black women’s and girls’ bodies that occurs in the strip-search encounter is part of the matrix of gendered anti-Blackness. In tracing the moves that the state makes to erase the sexualised violence of the strip-search, this paper suggests that the strip search be understood as a form of gendered anti-Black terror – a technology of violence that functions to evict Black women and girls from personhood. The disciplinary technology of the strip-search is one way in which the state exercises its sovereign power and marks Black women’s and girls’ bodies as violable bodies. I argue that the weaponisation of bodily exposure has a long legacy, and as a highly visual and spectacular encounter, the strip-search cases point to a particular kind of persistent corporeal violence.

Modernity, Hegemony, and Public Transport as Public Space: A Reading of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz

This article explores through a reading of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz how public transport as a public space serves as a technology of discipline. First, the article argues that modern subjectivity is articulated at least in part through public transport as a public space. Second, the article outlines how the conception of modernity formed in public transport as a public space requires defining the lumpenproletariat as a constitutive other of modernity insofar as they cannot substantially participate in the public culture of modern public transport. Third, in order to maintain its hegemony, modern culture disciplines the lumpenproletariat into becoming modern subjects by using the public space of modern public transport as a disciplinary technology.

European Youth Dialogue as a Governmental Technology: Construction of the Youth Voice

In recent years, the EU Youth Dialogue (EUYD) gained significant popularization as an important political mechanism through which young people in dialogue with policymakers from the local to the EU level jointly formulate youth policies. In an ethnographic study of the sixth cycle of the EUYD, I applied the Foucauldian analytics of government to analyze how the voice was constructed. In contrast to the representations that EUYD annuls hierarchies and offers a space for equal discussion between young people and policymakers, thus producing a genuine voice, I argue that the construction of the voice is always under the influence of various power relations that form specific voices. I illuminate how, through concrete techniques and micro-practices, EUYD worked as a disciplinary technology that sought a docile voice of the youth and at the same time offered a space for shaping the subjectivity of young delegates as active and responsible EU citizens.

The Strength to Diet: If it Fits Your Macros Dieting as Masculine Body Work

Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of 76 “day of eating” vlogs, this article explores how cis men adhering to the “If It Fits Your Macros” diet dynamically negotiate the meanings of their eating habits and their bodies to bolster their claims to hegemonic masculinity. Employing Foucault’s theory of disciplinary technologies and critical masculinities scholarship, the analysis serves as a case study of how the body work of dieting men reinforces normative discourses of masculinity. While dieting has previously been framed as a “technology of femininity,” this article argues that dieting similarly operates as an embodied practice through which men perform masculinities. Extending the literature on the subjective experiences of dieting men, I suggest that men navigate the ostensibly “feminine” terrain of dieting by via repertoires of self-discipline and embattlement against fat. Using these discursive tools, men portray dieting as a moral-aesthetic project that bolsters and secures their own hegemonic constructions of masculine status.

Social Quarantining in the Construction and Maintenance of White Australia

While medical quarantining has (again) received widespread attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, comparatively little consideration has been given to how medical quarantining is entangled with socio-political life. Further, there are no known studies that consider how quarantine might also be employed as a socio-political practice. This article explores the concept of social quarantine by tracing the creation of white Australia via the social construction, excise and discipline of Indigenous peoples as a potentially contagious Other. It shows how social quarantine integrates largely disparate sociological concepts/literatures (e.g. bordering, (im)mobility, confinement, enclave society, discipline, eugenics, assimilation), demonstrating how they unite under settler colonialism as a powerful assemblage of disciplinary technologies. Social quarantine also makes visible how the threat of contamination has been central to constructing and protecting Australia’s (white) imagined nationhood from the perceived disease of Otherness.

Fiscal cuts in education and their effects: Politicising learned helplessness as a disciplinary technology in education leaders in Catalonia. An exploratory research study

The paper aims to explore how head teachers and other education service leaders and their teams have been experiencing shifts in their identities during the last decade of education cuts in Catalonia (Spain), and the possible effects during the current COVID-19 crisis on educational leaders. Our exploratory hypothesis covers the crisis years (2008–2015) and on into the non-recovery years (2015–2020) until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. During these years, through what Ball (2008) describes as a “ratchet effect,” education cuts and their everyday effects in schools produced learned helplessness (LH) in head teachers and leaders. Theoretically, we propose to examine this malaise from a political angle, seeing it as a disciplinary technology to transform education leaders’ identity and practices. To corroborate this, we conducted four interviews with head teachers of different public primary, secondary, and special education schools, and a psychopedagogical service leader in the same semi-rural area in Catalonia. The exploratory results show that the incremental and selective cuts soon became a new normal and created feelings of (political) learned helplessness that may be seen not as negative side effects but as a disciplinary technology that reshaped leaders’ subjectivity. At the same time, education leaders carried out some (ir)responsible practices of resistance that can be understood as care of the self and others. More research needs to be done with different agents to capture the complexity and ambiguity of cuts and LH as a political phenomenon.

From Bureaucratic Discipline to Self-Actualization: Using Marx and Foucault to Critique the Demand for Better Work Rather Than Less Work

This essay brings together Karl Marx’s alienation critique with Michel Foucault’s theoretical work on technologies of power to examine the demand for self-actualizing work. I argue that many of the themes in Marx’s writings appear frequently in the human relations management literature and are later incorporated by New Public Management. However, Foucault’s work is shown to complement and extend Marx’s initial alienation analysis, and then to highlight the reliance of human relations management on disciplinary technologies. Lost in the demand for better work is a more radical vision of harnessing machinery to bring about a post-work society.

Moving with Fitbit: Body Narratives, Fit Subjectivities, and Racialized Discipline

ABSTRACT In this article I use an auto-ethnographic account of personal Fitbit use to develop the interrelated concepts of body narratives and fit subjectivities. Body narratives are data-informed personal rationalizations we make about the state of our bodies. For example, we can use personal Fitbit data to form a post hoc rationalization to explain aches and pains from being sedentary the day before. The same goes for increased energy from a longer-than-average workout or a negative mood following a low sleep score. Body narratives are further enhanced through gamification, which provides feedback loops for narrative construction, and encouraged through technological nudges built into the device and application. Fit subjectivities emerge as identities that conform to the disciplinary technologies and culture of late capitalism and the neoliberal focus on individualized care for one’s body. Fit subjectivities encourage people to view their body as a portfolio of data points, a digital other, to optimize in the marketplace. Fit subjectivities are also communicated through the new media ecology of late capitalism, such as with the hashtag #fitspo on Instagram, wellness YouTube channels, and corporate wellness programs. Both disciplinary concepts must also be racially contextualized, since ideal bodies often conform to white standards. Ultimately, the ability to qualitatively use the quantitative data of Fitbit and its app is explained as an extension of the project of knowing and disciplining oneself and the digital other. Negotiating this process will characterize the further integration of technology into our bodies under the current regime of late techno-capitalism.

Headship preparation in Taiwan: moral obligation or disciplinary power?

ABSTRACT With the increasing global interest in preparing school headteachers over the past two decades, educational systems have developed numerous means by which aspiring headteachers are prepared for the role. Reflecting this global trend, local governments in Taiwan have launched a new type of headship preparation approach, namely, the aspiring headteachers’ Administrative Placement (AP) in local education authorities, ostensibly aiming to enhance participants’ policy and administrative capabilities. Drawing on the analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault, this study problematizes the operation of the AP scheme and examines how it functions as a regime of discipline and self-discipline. Data collected from three AP schemes in different localities were used to examine the insidious effects of power relations, and findings revealed that the aspiring headteachers were, in effect, being situated into a wide range of disciplinary and dividing practices, through which they became more visible, knowable, and amenable. The study argues that the AP scheme is best understood as a disciplinary technology that shapes aspiring headteachers as self-regulating subjects and renders them as delivery subjects that contribute to securing the local delivery capacity, rather than authentically preparing educative leaders.

Viral Times

Viral Times

In and/or/plus Out: Queering the Closet

By enacting a reflexive return to our initial encounters with the ambiguous and multivalenced potential offered by queerness, I locate and piece together the traces of an always already lost/forcibly disappeared network that is constantly unfolding nonetheless. Taken together, these individual/ized encounters form structures of queer knowing, moving, and feeling that counter this individualization, which I argue is an integral part of the repertoire of techniques designed to foreclose the potential of a queer collective. It is with this in mind that I posit what I call authoritarian heterosexuality as a particular and particularly potent political regime, one that is entangled in colonial legacies and local sedimentations that inform the contemporary Egyptian state’s attitudes towards queers specifically, and towards its citizenry more broadly. And by using this affective material as my entry point into an analysis of what queer might really mean here, I am able to reveal the traces of this violating constitution. Put differently, by engaging in a structural analysis of diverse articulations and experiences of queerness, I am simultaneously engaging in an analysis of the ways in which authoritarian regimes, in their efforts to eradicate queerness, end up producing it along lines that are perhaps illegible when read with the optic of traditional queer theory. To this end, I will be foregrounding my analysis in “the closet” as both a material artifact and disciplinary technology of this heterosexist regime that works to impress a damaging sense of individualism in subjects, as well as a site of potential for queers to collectivize, once the inconsistencies and similarities between such designations as “in” and “out,” “private” and “public,” and “individual” and “collective” are parsed out.

Who is Watching? What Do They Want? A Foucauldian Analysis of Teacher Candidates’ Experiences with the edTPA

Background/Context This article is a policy discussion of the edTPA preservice portfolio assessment; it uses Foucault's work and our data to suggest a more critical and activist approach to the assessment. Currently 764 teacher education programs in 40 states have included the edTPA as part of their requirements. In Illinois, it is a newly required high-stakes portfolio assessment required for teacher licensure. Purpose/Objective We studied our teacher candidates’ experiences with edTPA portfolio. We wanted to know how they experienced this new assessment and how that might inform our program. As instructors, we had heard many complaints from our candidates, and we wanted to examine their experiences from their perspectives. Participants In this study, we collected narrative accounts from two different cohorts of teacher candidates in Year 1 (2015–16) and Year 3 (2017–18) to better understand their perspectives (total N = 37). The participants were interviewed at the end of their student teaching semester after they had completed their portfolio. Research Design We collected narrative accounts from two different cohorts of teacher candidates in Year 1 (2015–16) and Year 3 (2017–18) to better understand their experiences with the edTPA (total N = 37). We gave participants a choice of whether to do individual or focus group narratives. Participants were interviewed at the end of their student teaching semester after they had completed their portfolio. Findings As teacher educators, we aimed to support our candidates’ development into critically engaged educators. However, we found that the regulatory powers in the policies and procedures of the edTPA had a negative effect on our candidates’ experiences with it. We also did not give them the tools they needed to sufficiently analyze this particular assessment, despite having discussed testing policies in the schools and their negative implications for teachers and students. Further, we found a normalization of the edTPA between Year 1 and Year 3 of implementing this assessment that suggested a trend toward normalization over time—from energetic critique in Year 1 to acceptance and a just-get-it-done attitude in Year 3. Conclusions We conclude with implications for teacher educators, including a call for more critical engagement with this and other disciplinary technologies that our candidates may be subject to. As teacher educators, we advocate for a more explicit critical analysis with candidates to help them more deeply understand the history, context, and implications of corporatized, standardized assessments in teacher education, in particular the edTPA, and testing in the schools.

Membaca Tubuh-Tubuh Patuh: Representasi Penciptaan Identitas Pribumi Melalui Tubuh-Tubuh Patuh di Hindia Belanda dalam Film Moeder Dao De Schildlapegelijkende

In the early twentith century, the Dutch colonial government launched a development program designated towards the modern Western world in the Dutch East Indies. This is due to the penetration of capital from Europe. In this process, they embraced the natives as part of the new world. The colonial authority used certain knowledge discourse systems that worked in various modern colonial institutions, such as offices, schools, religious institutions, mining, transportation, factories. In other words, the natives who originally had different knowledge from the colonists were subtly made to follow the logic of the colonial authorities. This paper will show various representations in the film Moeder Dao de Schildpadgelijkende, about how the practice of Western colonialism discourse in the Dutch East Indies during trying to internalization their knowledge system into the Indigenous knowledge system.Discourse is a disciplinary technology through the practice of certain knowledge to create docile bodies through a certain normalization process. In this process, a person acts treated in such a way is to enter into the system of knowledge pressed by the authorities. The indigenous body becomes the working locus of colonialism’s power and knowledge. A docile body exists a form of certain norms and rules in society. In this knowledge building, the logic of the colonial language as a tool for the formation of indigenous identities. The tangibility of inferiority created in the naratives arose from the perspective of the colonial rulers towards natives living in Western standards. Although the native people could meet Western standards, under the discourse of colonialism, it was still a subject that had to follow the colonial power itself.

The Rationalization of the Surveillance: From the ‘Society of Normalization’ to the Digital Society and Beyond

The authors show that the liberal biopolitics gave a birth to the development of the rationalized surveillance based on power-knowledge as a complex of force relations. Due to formal pragma-tism, rational knowledge and the disciplinary technology the ‘society of normalization’ arose. Its influence spread not only to concrete individuals, but to all the people and was only limited by the nation-state sovereignty and historic time (up to the end of the 20th centu-ry). But nowadays there appear such factors as globalization, the rise of the network society, the digitalization that mark the evidence of complexity, non-linear development and the emergence of multi-ple risks, vulnerabilities, and uncertainties

11Science and Medicine

AbstractThe titles reviewed in this chapter concern science and medicine studies. They represent work drawn from a variety of contexts and disciplinary perspectives, including science and technology, the history of science, literary studies, critical race theory, public health, the philosophy of science, law, ethnography, anthropology, architecture, and geology. The chapter has five sections: 1. Histories and Historicity; 2. Epistemology and Dissemination; 3. Institutions and Praxis; 4. Bodies and Subjectivities; and 5. Conversations (Journals).

La episiotomía como práctica cultural de género: otro caso de mutilación genital femenina.

En la primera mitad del siglo XX la episiotomía se asentó como un procedimiento rutinario dentro del paradigma tecnocrático de atención al parto. Los estudios sobre su efectividad se iniciaron medio siglo después, sin encontrar beneficios en su práctica. En la actualidad la evidencia científica sigue sin apoyar su efectividad, sin embargo la episiotomía se practica de forma rutinaria en gran cantidad de países, especialmente en primíparas. Este artículo tiene por objetivo profundizar en la comprensión de la episiotomía como una Mutilación Genital Femenina moderna (MGF) analizando su práctica en relación a la construcción social del género y la maternidad como institución y vivencia. El análisis, desarrollado en base a una investigación bibliográfica, revela la episiotomía como una práctica de género constitutiva del patriarcado moderno, cuya génesis en el siglo XVIII se enmarca en la producción del dispositivo de sexualidad teorizado por Foucault. Finalmente, el análisis del doble discurso mantenido en relación a las MGF sitúa la práctica de la episiotomía como una tecnología disciplinaria de dominación colonial y de género.