Foucauldian Concept Research Articles

Nursing in the Capitalocene: An anarchistic approach to governmentality and pastoral care.

During the COVIDicine, many nurses awoke to the ways that the Healthcare-Industrial Complex (HIC) dictates the care we are able to provide. Using the Foucauldian concepts of pastoral power and governmentality, we explore the ways that nurses participate in upholding power structures within the HIC and reproducing them in our work, contributing to a carceral culture based on hierarchy and power dynamics. We also explore the ways nurses are both agentic in this system and subject to it, reluctant to make waves and lose our place within a system that can offer nurses safety and security in, and most importantly, a paycheck. This paper articulates a prefigurative anarchist approach to nursing praxis. Through the writing of Emma Goldman, we locate a historically founded philosophical basis for practical tactics that nurses can use to actualise this praxis. Both individually and as a collective, nurses can assert their own ethic and power through direct action, micro-insurgency and solidarity to build the world we know can be. Our only limitation is our imagination.

A Modal Heterotopia: Rethinking Makam Modality and Chordal Harmony in Interwar Rebetiko

Abstract This article revisits the concepts of makam modality and chordal harmony, and argues for viewing interwar rebetiko as a musico-cultural amalgamation. I explore the transcendence of the theoretical incompatibility beyond the East–West dichotomy by employing the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia as a de-ideologised analytical tool. I conduct a case study of makam Sabâ and pertinent harmonisation on the guitar, by analysing two representative historical recordings from the 1930s and interpreting them within the contemporaneous musico-cultural context. As a result, I contend that the terms “equal-tempered makam” and “idiosyncratic harmonisation” mirror expressions of modal heterotopia within interwar rebetiko.

Foucauldian critical thinking: An antithesis to discourse of skill-oriented technicalisation

Abstract Challenging the way critical thinking is often considered a skill, this paper explores possible discursive reasons for the skill-orientation and technicization of this concept. First, using Michel Foucault’s ‘division and rejection’ theory as a discursive analytical lens, the discussion explores the neoliberal alliance of international organizations, national governmental authorities, the media, job markets, schools, and concerned parents. It explores how this alliance promotes the discourse of skill and competence, and prepares the ground for critical thinking’s technicization. Drawing further on Foucault’s decoding of human capital as the essence of neoliberalism, the paper explores the way that the technicization of critical thinking fits with a conception of the human beings as a complex mixes of production and consumption, where, as homo economicus, they become entrepreneurs of themselves. Second, in the light of Foucault’s discursive analytical conception of the will to truth, the paper traces possible historical underpinning of critical thinking’s technicization. It argues that power-knowledge, the dark side of Enlightenment technological rationality, creates an increasingly technical conception of the world that tampers with the criticality of critical thinking. If critical thinking does not render people aware of the power impinging on them, it loses its value and meaning. The paper proposes that critical thinking should rather be conceived along the lines of a Foucauldian conception of critique: the art of not being governed, which takes inspiration from Kant’s conception of enlightenment. It explores how to practise Foucauldian critical thinking, how Foucault’s technology of the self can be enacted as the protector of subjectivity against the governmentality of power.

Queer media production as soft activism: Insights from a Chinese community project

The LGBT+ movements in China are increasingly in a precarious situation. Queer media spaces are being eroded as numerous digital media platforms run by LGBT+ rights-advocacy groups and individuals have been blocked over the past few years. Given this context, a liberal model of a gay rights movement, resembling those seen in the West, is unlikely to occur in China. Consequently, softer activism approaches are often employed by Chinese LGBT+ organizations. This article leverages ethnographic insights from one of China’s leading LGBT+ community media projects to offer a critical examination of queer media production and the broader LGBT+ movements within the country. Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of ‘resistance’ and the political significance of ‘voice’, the analysis presented herein underscores the intricate relationship between queer media production and its socio-political milieu. It showcases the adaptive strategies of ‘soft’ activism adopted by Chinese LGBT+ organizations, characterized by non-confrontational tactics and a steadfast commitment to amplifying diverse queer voices.

The Performative Body in Ibsen’s A Doll House and Saput’s Sakambari: Rebelling and Reclaiming Women’s Power Dynamics

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House, directed by Bernice Garfield-Szita and Prakash Saput's Sakambari showcase a similar performative body of women, resisting the patriarchal societal system despite having existed in two distinct spatiotemporal contexts. In this light, the paper comparatively examines the performative bodies of Nora in A Doll House and Sakambari in Sakamabari to analyze how their body acts serve as a site of submission and resistance simultaneously. In doing so, the study employs qualitative methods, mainly textual analysis for visual texts, lyrics, and dialogues in a multi-modal approach, using the Butlerian concept of gender performativity, "not biology but culture," and the Foucauldian concept of body and sexuality. It examines how the performing bodies epitomize submissive and resistive agencies for autonomy and justice. Nora's and Sakambari's performative bodies in different phases – the plain, commodified, and beyond – in one way to another challenge the masculine disposition and advocate for liberation. The analysis reveals that the two characters employ contrasting approaches to resisting the existing social structure. Nora exhibits direct submission and defiance, while Sakambari explicitly submits and implicitly resists. While both of them challenge the status quo of society, the performative bodies in different layers of resistance empower them to contest patriarchal societal foundations even though their paths to liberation differ from one another.

Producing the well and skilled body: a critical discourse analysis of health and physical education curriculum policy in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT Background Aotearoa New Zealand is about to embark on a re-write of the official, national, health and physical education curriculum for all primary and secondary schools. This is a significant moment in policy history as the previous most recent curriculum updates occurred in 1999 [Ministry of Education. 1999. Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum] and 2007 [Ministry of Education. 2007. The New Zealand Curriculum]. In the latter rewrite, health and physical education was combined with all other learning areas into one policy document called The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC). In light of this imminent shift, we have undertaken a discourse analysis of the current 2007 health and physical education curriculum in order to gain insight into what driving concerns, discourses and pedagogical imperatives were privileged in that document, how we might understand those within their related social and political contexts, and what insights such an analysis might offer this moment of curriculum review. Purpose The purpose of this article is to examine how the dominant discourses of health and physical education curriculum policy in Aotearoa New Zealand construct particular ‘problems’ of the body and young people related to health, physical ability and schooling. To date, no one has undertaken such an analysis of current Aotearoa New Zealand policy in health and physical education. Methodology and analyses Based on Foucauldian concepts of discourse, knowledge/power, and problematisation, we combined Norman Fairclough’s textually oriented discourse analysis and Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ approach to analyse the health and physical education sections of The New Zealand Curriculum. Our analyses involved both a focus on lexical choice – in order to analyse the curriculum policy as text – and critical discourse analysis – to analyse the curriculum policy as discourse. While many commentators (including some of the authors of this article) have lauded the curriculum policy for its socio-cultural orientation, the results of this analysis suggest that Aotearoa New Zealand health and physical education curriculum policy is actually dominated by an orientation to enhance young people’s wellbeing, and surprisingly, this is communicated in the text as directly connected to the production of skilled body. We seek to understand this finding in the context of the positioning of the curriculum policy, as outcomes-focused curriculum policy, and neoliberal discourse. Conclusions The health and physical education sections of The New Zealand Curriculum (MOE 2007) problematises the non-skilled bodies of students and position the development of ‘skilled body’ as a key technique to enhance individual wellbeing. In this context, the emphasis on skills reinforces the notions of success and failure, worthiness and unworthiness. We argued that the writers of the next iteration of the health and physical education curriculum will need to be cognisant of how skills and bodies may be positioned through text, what students should understand, know and do, as well as the dominant ideologies and discourses that shape key concepts. Researchers and policymakers will need to critically examine the complex social, cultural and political contexts that work in this particular policyscape.

A heterotopic reading of heritage: The Village of Our Lady in Ka Ho, Macau

Postcolonial Macau is keen to celebrate its colonial legacy to preserve its cultural distinctiveness. This study explores the reordering of a Portuguese colonial site, the Village of Our Lady in Ka Ho, into an architectural heritage in the broader postcolonial context. Employing the Foucauldian concept of ‘other spaces’, specifically ‘utopia’ and ‘heterotopia’, the study argues for the heterotopic nature of heritage. It identifies the discourses and material representations of heritage, their construction and their mirroring of mainstream social ideals. Heritage as heterotopia is a conceptual entity that informs and is realised with material objects. The discourse takes heritage spaces as mediums for performances through symbolic loading on material objects to demonstrate the space's otherness. In addition, colonial nostalgia emerges as a dominant narrative in shaping urban identity. The primary proposition of this research is that heritage is made through othering, and the otherness of heritage is presented through performing. Heritage‐making transforms the site from a ‘heterotopia of deviation’ to a ‘heterotopia of performance’, which reveals the societal transition from early modernity that advocates for scientific knowledge to postmodernity that embraces neoliberalism, and then to the arriving era of post‐postmodernity based on performatism.

Devolution, counter-conduct and territoriality: The case of Tax Business Rates in the United Kingdom

Business Rates (BR) are key to the interaction between national, devolved, regional and local institutions of government in the UK. A liability to the tax can make the difference between the life and death of a business, and the design and implementation of business rates interacts with areas of policy concern as disparate as devolution, planning, charity regulation and digitalisation. We examine how BR affect political struggles between the devolved governments and the UK government using a governmentality approach focused on counter conduct, extending the scant literature on this type of taxation. Our theoretical contribution is to analyse how resistance, represented by the Foucauldian concept of counter conduct, manifests within the complex and understudied context of BR. In particular, we show that counter conduct has spatial and territorial elements which have the potential to destabilise the entire business rates programme and ought to be taken much more seriously.

Participatory micro-regeneration: governing urban redevelopment in Qinghe, Beijing

ABSTRACT This article explores how far the Foucauldian concept of “governmentality” may offer valuable insights into new trends of participatory regeneration in urban China. Drawing on participatory micro-regeneration projects in Qinghe, Beijing, this research follows a governmentality approach. It explores how the Chinese state exercises new governmental technologies of community participation and self-governance to construct governable spaces and governable subjects. During the regeneration process, we identify multiple participatory practices where citizen power is exercised in decision-making and project implementation but guided by experts within the fields structured by the state. We argue that participation has been instrumentalized by the state to achieve extra-economic objectives of social governance and people-centred development. We also observe tensions and resistance during participatory micro-regeneration, leading to the failure to develop a self-governed community.

Containment, control and surveillance: a qualitative inquiry into eating disorders and the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This paper works towards a social geography of eating disorders through the lens of the coronavirus pandemic in the UK. Through an empirical engagement with experience-centred knowledge, I couple nine in-depth interviews with autoethnographic material, drawing out the spatial (real and virtual) and temporal (habit, routine, anticipation, non-linearity) dimensions of eating disorder experience, management and recovery; highlighting principally how pandemic lockdown conditions intensified space-time, mind/body and social relations across various micro-domestic and macro-governmental scales. I engage ‘lightly’ with Foucauldian concepts of disciplinary and biopolitical power to draw out broad-brush themes around matters of containment, control and surveillance; taking feminist inspiration to think through Foucault critically as I explore a nexus of gendered pandemic power relations. In doing so, I contribute towards new feminist understandings of the disciplinary gaze, emphasizing the ongoingness of surveillance through both physical body-checking and what I term psychological ‘guising’. Through such (in)voluntary disordered bodily practices, and an engagement with the feminist mind/body dualism, I emphasize the complexity of EDs as embodied mental illnesses, further complicating feminist understandings of control. I close by discussing the ethical-methodological importance of ‘empathy’ while emphasizing the overall imperative of critical qualitative inquiry for socio-cultural geographies and beyond.

Resisting neoliberalism: testimonios of language teachers as social activists

ABSTRACT This study examines the testimonios of Mexican language teachers who experienced the violent and institutional imposition of neoliberal policies at the main university at the state of Puebla. Through the analysis of testimonios, language teachers narrated their own trajectories to resist the implementation of the neoliberal policies, such as the restriction of teaching freedom for educators, the elimination of the right to free education for students, and the current subjugation educators experience at the site of study. Based on the Foucauldian concepts of sovereign and institutional power, along with governmentality, this article analyzes the activism of language teachers, and the oppression and re-signification that neoliberal elites have carried out to silence dissident voices. While current research regarding neoliberalism and language teaching has focused on pedagogic materials and neocolonial publishing houses, the creation of learners’ subjectivities, and social-class perpetuation through language instruction, second language research has not extensively concentrated on way neoliberalism has impacted the professional development of language teachers. In this regard, the present article aims to raise awareness about the way neoliberalism has been normalized as a tool for suppression among language educators in Mexico.

The theory and praxis of mixed-use development - An integrative literature review

The study critically evaluates the theory and praxis of mixed-use development. It uses an integrative literature review design to evaluate the different conceptualisations of mixed-use development in the literature. The paper not only develops a clear categorisation of key concepts within the meta-theory, but also summarises new perspectives on the topic. Mixed-use development is theorised in terms of Jacobean and Foucauldian concepts of heterotopia and organic relations in space. The study then tracks the theoretical development of the concept in New Urbanism and Smart Growth approaches, analysing the aesthetic, social, and environmental principles of mixed-use development using idiothetic designs. The study further evaluates the nomothetic evaluation of the socioeconomic functionalities of mixed-use development in terms of social integration, housing and services distribution, travel behaviour, poverty, and crime, and local economic development using positivistic empirical analyses. Another important body of the literature is the regulative policy analyses, which critically evaluate the efficacy of top-down mixed-use policy initiatives and strategies. The study also evaluates the challenge of implementing mixed uses because of the externalities and social costs emerging from incompatible land uses and evaluates emerging research on informal mixed-use development in peri-urban settlements in the Global South.

Fã cínico: falando a verdade descaradamente

Abstract The aim of the current study is to assess how fans structure their fannish based on discussions about the insertion of political agendas in media products, which is a recurring behavior observed in the entertainment industry in recent times. Based on the analysis of Star Wars fan’s interactions about the recent introduction of characters representing political identities in the saga, the study addressed the Foucauldian concept of subjectivation through the manifestation of truths, by adopting his archaeogenealogical method. Two moral agencies resulted from this analysis, namely: the innovation evaluated by Star Wars fans concerning the insertion of new representative characters in the saga and the adequacy such changes need to meet, although remaining in compliance with the established form of the saga canon. Both agencies reflect the concern with maintaining the franchise’s status quo rather than with the political agenda. The current study has evaluated the courage to tell the truth as a cynical practice committed to perpetuate its own subjectivity by ruling other truths.

Why Do Human Beings Rise Up?

Foucault has had an enormous impact on social and legal theory. In particular, there is an overwhelming use of Foucauldian concepts in critical theories of rights. This article asks what Foucault’s work and its reception say concerning the normative legitimacy of individual rights, and what insights this discussion offers for rights theory. Though Foucauldian critique is largely historiographical and empirical rather than normative, I argue, along with scholars such as Fraser, that normative implications are rampant in Foucault, and that a normative interest can thus validly be taken. Ultimately, I argue that concepts of agency and autonomy remain present in Foucault and critical rights theory, and that this affirms both a trans-contextual basis of resistance as well as the enduring importance of rights language. I conclude that Foucauldian rights concepts and normative humanist approaches are codependent, as they both address different aspects of similar central problems. While humanism is concerned with universal reasons for resistance, Foucauldian theory offers critical tools to problematize homogenizing, exclusionary elements within universal narratives. However, the two worldviews remain codependent because they must both, in the end, affirm the legitimacy of some type of rights universalism, as legal critique otherwise robs itself of its own preconditions.

Mysticism as Counter-Conduct

This essay draws upon Dante and St. Catherine of Siena to flesh out the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Dante and Catherine occupy an important place in early modern history, challenging the designs of medieval pastoral power by embodying a new, secular mixture of the active and the contemplative life. This essay, with Foucault as a guide, suggests that they offer us another way to be modern, a path of self-cultivation surpassing modern norms for nature, the self, and the project of rational knowledge.

A FOUCAULTIAN READING OF RESISTANCE IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S NOVEL "THINGS FALL APART "

The field of cultural, human and literature has taken the entire study of the concept of resistance, as this concept is linked to the French theorist Michel Foucault. He asserts that power is what caused us to be in the place where we are now. There is no separation between resistance and power, both come through the other. Chinua Achebe is the greatest and most famous writer in African literature. He attempts to find an escape from the colonial turn that invaded African literature, The goal of Achebe's writings is to enable the African people to have pride in their history. His novel "Things Fall Apart" focused on showing the tragic situation of the people of Africa, the impact of colonialism on Africa, its history and culture, and how the colonialists tried to obliterate the African identity. The study aims to analyze the novel "Things Fall Apart" in the light of the Foucauldian concept of resistance and how the characters demonstrated the rejection of colonialism and its resistance in the novel.

The Reproduction of Nationalism and the Nationalism of Reproduction: Putin’s Biopolitics of Defending Tradition, 2012–2021

Abstract After Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in 2012, a further turn toward authoritarianism has been coupled with attacks on Western secularism, multiculturalism, and alleged moral decay. At home, the Kremlin has been increasingly preoccupied with defining and addressing problems related to citizens’ bodies, linking “traditional values” to national security. Central to this discourse are issues relating to reproductive norms. This analysis uses the Foucauldian concept of “biopower” as an epistemic point of departure in an attempt to understand the central role of reproduction in the Kremlin’s identity project. Administering the bodies of a population simultaneously produces and delimits that population according to bodily criteria. Thus, this “bodily turn” in Russian nation-building may be understood as “bionationalism,” a depoliticizing style of nationalism that relies on biopolitical techniques. The analysis explicates the mechanisms of this style of nationalism: how and why this discourse functions, legitimates problematic practices, excludes “abnormals,” expands the state into the everyday lives of citizens, and marginalizes and even securitizes alternative notions of national identity. Putin’s bionationalism may be read as an existential nationalism and thereby as producing a specific mobilizational context.

In pursuit of epistemic authority in public intellectual engagement: the case of language and gender

Abstract Public intellectual life is an area of inquiry that has not received a great deal of attention within the field of sociolinguistics. This article investigates the performative dimension of public intellectual engagement in the area of language and gender and, more specifically, how epistemic authority about gender-neutral language is constructed in public intellectual contributions in Catalonia, Spain. Adopting Arendt’s notion of truth claim and the Foucauldian concepts of regimes of truth and epistemic sovereignty, we empirically examine the mechanisms of reception and validation of the public engagements of one highly visible linguistic scholar. Our study shows the ways in which this intellectual figure strives to be recognised as having exclusive scientific authority about language. We argue that pursuing the allegedly impartial standpoint of epistemic authority about gender and language inevitably advances the interests of specific political actors and large media corporations of a conservative strand that fervently oppose gender-neutral language.

In control or at the mercy of others? Navigating power dynamics in online data collection with UK secondary school students

ABSTRACT Research involving young people is a challenging process that requires managing relationships with diverse individuals and groups, including the young participants and their various gatekeepers. While it is normally assumed that the researcher is in overall control of their research, by using a Foucauldian conception of ‘power as effects’ that operate in the form of relations and through discourse as the articulation of norms, this paper discusses how, in practice, the researcher can lose control over their research and so be forced into making substantial compromises concerning the nature and extent of the data they can collect. I do this by reflecting on my experience of conducting research involving UK secondary school students using online data collection methods during the Covid-19 pandemic. I identify several factors that generated power effects which influenced the conduct of the research, including: an ethics review that relied on a simplistic discourse concerning young participants’ (in)competence; my own self-regulation of my conduct in respect of ‘ethical’ research; my ‘positionality’ in the field; and a researcher's general dependence on participants and gatekeepers to complete their research. I conclude by reflecting on how these factors may impact upon the conditions for viable social research involving young people.

Coercive geographies: Biopower, spatial politics, and the tourist

This symposium examines the relations between biopower, destination governance and tourism. Biopower, a Foucauldian concept, refers to political strategies based on humanity’s biological features. In the simplest of terms, it is applied via biopolitical mandates that govern life of a given population. Contemporary tourism exemplifies the exertion of biopower over the mobility of travellers, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to a lesser degree, continues to do so. The role that tourism plays in enabling authorities to enact spatial transformations reinforcing state power, while also indicating potential means of resistance, is foregrounded in this symposium. The four empirical contributions extend biopolitical thought by demonstrating that biopower is instrumental in the practices and regimes of mobility, security, in/exclusion of tourism. In Europe, the Dutch government experimented with enclosed “COVID-safe” tourist spaces. In Macao, China’s border regime screened tourists based on their viral threat capacities. On Naoshima Island in Japan, museums have transformed into infrastructures of bodily control. In Taiwan, flight attendants are grappling with newly emerging forms of biopower shaping the sociality of air travel and their own practices of hospitality. These empirically informed contributions interrogate how tourism figures in attempts to govern bodies at the population level, while uncovering the modes of coercion applied to govern tourists and the spaces they inhabit.