Foucauldian Concept Research Articles

Dreaming of other spaces: What do we think about when we draw?

Parents, carers and educators of young children show a deep interest in the drawings that children produce. In the past, this interest was often directed toward emergent representational schema that young children were seen to utilise to process ideas and understandings of their world. The attention paid to these specific drawings was particularly prompted by the influence and broad application of stage development theories (Kellog, 1967; Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1964; Piaget, 1975) on early childhood teaching and learning.More recently, connections between young children and learning have been enhanced, to implement more socially inclusive teaching and learning strategies (MacNaughton, 2005; Dahlberg & Moss, 2005) and recognise diversity and plurality in early childhood contexts. With this in mind, there is a subsequent need to reconsider the ways adults engage with children as they draw, to rethink how such drawings are ‘viewed’ and ‘read’.This article examines how the drawings produced by young children might be informed. It explores, through Deleuzian and Guattarian (1972/1983) concepts of dreaming and becoming, a transforming, bodiless engagement, and the Foucauldian (1986) concept of heterotopic space, how a child might search for and access referents during the drawing process. Applying such concepts facilitate expansion on the analysis of drawing that has been, historically, firmly situated within stage development theories. Deleuzian and Guattarian, and Foucauldian readings also assist in beginning to theorise on developing more socially inclusive experiences in early childhood contexts.The theories presented in this article inform an inter-generational collaborative approach to drawing (Knight, 2008) that opens up lines of communication between adult and child that challenge dominant beliefs and discourses of early childhood teaching and learning. Two specific accounts form fieldwork undertaken in a pre-school and a long day-care centre during 2008 serve to provide samples and discussion points.

Pinturas de Casta: Mexican Caste Paintings, a Foucauldian Reading

This article looks at the genre of casta painting developed in colonial Mexico during the eighteenth century. The genre consists of a series of paintings representing the different racial mixes that characterised New Spain throughout the colonial period and that continue to play an important role in contemporary Mexican society. By referring to several Foucauldian concepts such as disciplinary power, biopower, normalisation, deviance and heterotopia, this essay aims to locate the links between this genre and prevailing discourses on race, with a particular focus on the ensuing institutional and political practices implemented in the colony during this period. Centrally, by focusing on this genre as a representational technology of colonial surveillance, the paper argues that discourses on race in New Spain oscillated between an ideal representation of colonial society, ordered and stabilised through rigid classificatory systems, and a real miscegenated population that demanded a more fluid understanding of the colonial subject’s societal value beyond the limitations of racial determinism

The political impact of science: is tobacco control science- or policy-driven?

Tobacco control is often viewed as a clear example of how scientific knowledge can fundamentally change social norms. This article discusses the relationship between scientific knowledge and public policy on the basis of tobacco control and how its development is interpreted quite differently across disciplines. One literature tends to view the impact of science on politics as being almost automatic even in situations where this has clearly not happened. Another literature focuses on the internal obstacles of the political system to let science impact upon public policy. Unfortunately, this division lets each perspective reduce science and public policy to each other all too easily, which this article aims redeem through the use of a Foucauldian concept of the ‘will to knowledge’ as well as a discussion of how the case relates to the broader literature on science and public policy. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Effecting science, affecting medicine: Homosexuality, the Kinsey reports, and the contested boundaries of psychopathology in the United States, 1948–1965

Despite the well-documented intensive battle between Alfred Kinsey and American psychiatrists around the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that Kinsey's work, in fact, played a significant role in transforming mental health experts' view of homosexuality starting as far back as the late 1940s and extending all the way through the mid-1960s. After analyzing the way in which Kinsey's work pushed American psychiatrists to re-evaluate their understanding of homosexuality indirectly through the effort of clinical psychologists, I then focus to a greater extent on examples that illustrate how the Kinsey reports directly influenced members of the psychiatric community. In the conclusion, using a Foucauldian conception of "discourse," I propose that in order to approach the struggle around the pathological status of homosexuality in the 1950s and the 1960s, thinking in terms of a "politics of knowledge" is more promising than simply in terms of a "politics of diagnosis." Central to the struggle was not merely the matter of medical diagnosis, but larger issues regarding the production of knowledge at an intersection of science and medicine where the parameters of psychopathology were disputed in the context of mid-twentieth-century United States.

Recognition of Prior Learning as a Practice for Differential Inclusion and Exclusion of Immigrants in Sweden

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze how recognition of prior learning acts as a dividing practice and a technique for inclusion/exclusion of immigrants in their vocations in Swedish working life. It is a qualitative study of three pilot programs in Swedish urban centers, and the data consist of interviews and documents pertaining to these programs. The theoretical starting point of the analysis is three Foucauldian concepts: order of discourse, dividing practice, and technology of power. The results show how recognition of prior learning acts as a dividing practice; in the process of recognition, the targeting of certain vocations for assessment, the degrading of competence in the process, and the differing opportunities vis-à-vis further training and the labor market are part of the process of inclusion/exclusion in/from the orders of the labor market. Technologies of power—surveillance, observation, and examination— are part of this process.

From Schools to Learning Environments:The Dark Side of Being Exceptional

Schools and classrooms, as well as the work place and the Internet, are considered today as learning environments. People are regarded as learners and the main target of school education has become 'learning' pupils and students how to learn. The roles of teachers and lecturers are redefined as instructors, designers of (powerful) learning environments and facilitators or coaches of learning processes. The aim of this paper is to argue that the current self-understanding in terms of learning environments is not merely about a renewal of our vocabulary, but an indication of a far more general transformation of the world of education. It is argued that the current self-understanding in terms of 'learning environments' and 'learners' indicates a shift in our experience of time and place; a shift from (modern) historical self-understanding towards (post-modern) environmental self-understanding. The essay draws upon Foucauldian concepts in order to map the modern organisation of time and space in 'schools'. This past organisation is confronted with the current organisation of time and space in 'learning environments'. By contrasting both maps the paper focuses on the main characteristics of the current experience of time and space, that is, 'environmental self-understanding', and explores in the final section the dark side of this self-understanding.

Clifford Malcolm: glimpses of his South African legacy of hope

This article reviews the contributions of Cliff Malcolm while in South Africa during the period 1997–2005. It focuses on his contribution to the fields of science education, teacher education, learner-centered education, transformational outcomes-based education and HIV/AIDS education. In this paper we provide snapshots of his work as an academic, researcher, writer and humanist as he attempted to redefine scientific literacy to acknowledge the primacy of context and culture as mediating influences on meaningful learning, especially in rural communities. We make brief reference to his use of the Foucauldian conception of power to articulate the complementarity of power and energy as an expression of agency and action, the ultimate goal of a relevant science education. An important aspect of his empirical work with research units, universities and schools, was promoting an awareness of the foundational value of learner centred education which acknowledged the child as a ‘collective self’ rather than an ‘autonomous self’ as derived from the Western canon. Critical of imposing Western conceptions of science on Africa, he appropriates the indigenous concept of ‘ubuntu,’ to demonstrate the danger of dichotomising and essentialising scientific truth while simultaneously marginalising indigenous knowledges.

The outside and inside in norwegian and english prisons

.This article is based on our first experiences visiting prisons, and being surprised by the ways in which the inside and outside often seemed indistinct. One of our narratives comes from England, the other from Norway. Our analysis emerges from a recognition that, despite visiting prisons for different research projects in different countries, our experiences in prison spaces shared striking similarities. We had each expected prisons to have clear and demarcated boundaries between inside and outside, consistent with Goffman's binary distinctions in the total institution model. However, this model was not a good fit with our view of prisons, since it did not capture the importance of indistinction. The inside and outside were often entangled and fused with one another, having both distinctions and indistinctions simultaneously. The seemingly incompatible juxtapositions between inside and outside were consistent with the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, as a better fit with our ideas. Our observations improve our understanding of confinement as a dynamic and often contradictory state of be‐tweenness. After exploring our personal narratives from visiting prisons, some theoretical implications of the concept of heter‐otopia within institutional research are discussed and contrasted to that of total institution.

The good, the bad and the pacifier

In this article, interviews with eight managers and questionnaires from 75 practitioners are analysed to explore their perceptions of the role of pacifiers (or dummies) within the nursery. Managers and practitioners source their knowledge from the media, family/friends, and short professional speech and language courses; however, their perceptions of pacifiers derive from mainly contested research that has filtered into the public domain. This creates tensions between perceived parental rights to offer a child a pacifier, current UK guidelines and participants' own, often ambivalent, views. The article engages with Foucauldian concepts to explore how authoritative knowledge filters into everyday practice and to deconstruct relations of power within the early years setting.

Auditing Nature, Enacting Culture: Rationalisation as Disciplinary Purification in Early Twentieth‐Century British Dairy Farming

Abstract This paper undertakes a critical examination of the rationalisation of British dairy farming in the early twentieth century, with a particular focus upon the emergence of milk yield recording as a vehicle of rationalisation. The historical analysis is used to rework and rethink the concept of rationalisation itself, by conceiving it as a disciplinary technology of ontological purification, which reconfigures the relations between humans and nonhumans, and between humans and animals in particular. In this way I seek to integrate contrasting approaches to modernity, showing how the core sociological narrative of rationalisation can be re‐worked in terms of a Foucauldian conception of disciplinary power and a symmetrical or ‘actor‐network’ approach to ontological politics.

Governing the contagious body: genital herpes, contagion and technologies of the self

Genital herpes is a prevalent sexually transmitted viral infection. While genital herpes is not life-threatening, it can cause physical discomfort and psychosocial difficulties, and may increase the risk of contracting HIV. Given that genital herpes cannot be cured, both the condition itself, and the possibility of passing it on to others, becomes a part of the everyday reality of those individuals diagnosed with genital herpes. In this article we explore the ways in which people with genital herpes attending the Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) clinic govern their 'contagious bodies'. The discussion draws on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, and uses Foucault's idea of ethics as a framework to identify the technologies of the self by which individuals with genital herpes govern their own thoughts and behaviours in relation to the contagiousness of the condition. Implications for practice and other ways of thinking about what happens in the STI clinic context are suggested.

From Embedded to Machinic Intellectuals: Communication Studies and General Intellect

This essay examines how the increasing dependence of the academy, specifically communication studies, on corporate and federal funding is creating a sector of embedded intellectuals. Using the theoretical lens of what is loosely called “autonomism,” I argue that the concept of General Intellect forces us to reconsider traditional notions of intellectual work. The significance of communication, as both a growing academic field and infrastructure for this General Intellect, puts the discipline in the spotlight. After summarizing Gramscian and Foucauldian conceptions of the engaged intellectual, I sketch out a figure of the intellectual adequate to these conditions, what I call the machinic intellectual.

National policy and the implementation of recognition of prior learning in a Swedish municipality

The recognition of prior learning (RPL) has been a part of adult education policy and practice for a long time, but in different ways and in different times and places. In Sweden, RPL has been an explicit part of the policy since 1996. This policy analysis starts with the current Swedish policy concerning RPL. The figures of thought expressed in official policy texts are traced in, and compared to what is expressed in, the (discursive) practice of a case of local policy and development initiatives. The objective of the analysis is to see how the policy in official texts is reproduced and transformed at the local level. The theoretical starting point is the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’, and RPL is seen as a technique for governing adult education, the adult learner and also adult learning. The analysis focuses particularly on the governing of adult education, expressed in the ‘salvation narrative’ of RPL, and in ideas of what RPL is and how it should be organised. Indirect as well as direct techniques of governing are identified in the governing of and through RPL.

Ziyou (Freedom), Occupational Choice, and Labor: Bangbang in Chongqing, People's Republic of China

AbstractThis paper aims to examine the complicated processes and dynamics of rural migrant workers' occupation choice in post-Mao China among a specific migrant population, the bangbang (porters or carriers) in the city of Chongqing in southwest China. By employing ethnographic data from my year-long anthropological field research among bangbang and following the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, this paper explores the question of whether neoliberalism alone deliberately and vehemently transforms these laborers into self-reliant subjects. It argues that for rural migrants, the discourse on ziyou (freedom), as promoted by the state, plays a significant role in facilitating the migrants' subject formation, transforming them into self-reliant and enterprising laborers even as it makes them vulnerable to fierce exploitation. At the same time, bangbang turn this neoliberal rationality around and use it in their struggle for the security and aid refused to them by the state because it externalizes the “technologies of the self.” Bangbang internalize neoliberal techniques of governance that are framed as ziyou (freedom), not from social responsibility or patriotism but from disappointment with and distrust of the state.

A funny thing happened on the way to the journal: a commentary on Foucault's ethics and Stuart Murray's "Care of the self"

Stuart Murray's 'Care and the self: biotechnology, reproduction, and the good life' utilizes Foucault's "care of the self" to examine health domains in its title. The present author discusses three important articulations of concern with the Foucauldian concepts of care of the self that are absent in the work of Murray and others: first, the voluntarism and individualism inherent in ideas about care of the self; second, the absence of the interactional and relational; and, third, the perpetuation of the interpretation of Foucault's concept of governmentality, 'the conduct of conduct', as primarily coercive.

“Student Voice” and Governmentality: The production of enterprising subjects?

“Student voice” is now taking a more central role in educational policy, guidance and thinking. As it does so, however, it becomes less clear how to interpret it: it can perhaps no longer be seen as a radical gesture that will necessarily challenge educational hierarchies. Drawing on qualitative research into one student participation project, “Students as Researchers”, the article explores how far Foucauldian concepts of governmentality may offer a more sophisticated understanding of the power relations embedded in student voice initiatives. From this perspective, for instance, such projects may be read as attempts to instill norms of individualism, self-reliance and self-management, which resonate with new configurations of power and authority under neo-liberalism, respond to specific debates about school standards, effectiveness and competition, and help construct young people as reflexive “knowledge workers”. Whilst a governmentality perspective does not preclude acknowledging the positive effects of participation projects, it does draw attention to their complexities, such as the new value hierarchies and exclusions they may create, problematising particular groups of young people and limiting possibilities for resistance.

Constructing Meaningful Lives: Biographical Methods in Research on Migrant Women

The article argues that biographical methods are particularly suited to shift the methodological and theoretical premises of migration research to foreground the agency and subjectivity of migrant women. It is argued that structural and cultural readings can usefully be applied to the self-representations of migrant women. The context of migrant women's self-representations is explored through looking at the story-telling communities they develop and through the expert knowledges of institutions regulating migration. The dichotomisation of unique versus collective modes of life-stories is questioned. Applying the Foucauldian concept of subjugated knowledges, it is argued that migrant women's life-stories hold transformative potential for producing knowledges critical of gendered and ethnocised power relations that research should pay attention to.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF RISK AND POWER: A Review Article of Magnus Hornqvist, The Organised Nature of Power: On Productive and Repressive Interventions Based on Consideration of Risk, Stockholm University, 2007, ISSN 1404 1820, ISBN 978 91 7155 442 0

In The Organised Nature of Power, Magnus Hornqvist initially synthesizes Foucauldian and Marxian conceptions of power in order to highlight the connection between everyday exercises of power and power relations embedded in social structure and the state. He then proceeds to demonstrate how risk has become the coordinating mechanism in the organization of power. Risk is a common language and technology across institutions, linking exercises and structures of state power in ways that have both productive and repressive consequences. The architecture of risk and power is empirically investigated in the context of public employment, prison and customs bureaucracies in Sweden. The investigation is based on readings of policy documents, official forms, risk assessment technologies, surveillance infrastructures and case reports used in these bureaucracies. Hornqvist demonstrates how power is embedded in norms of risk management beyond the law; the multifaceted and variable uses of risk in processes of empowerment and subjection across different state bureaucracies; and the fact that we are still in disciplinary societies more than societies of control. Hornqvist's work is interrogated to indicate some limitations and directions for future research.

Precarity Unbound

Departing from tendencies to bound precarity in particular time periods and world regions, this article develops an expansive view of precarity over time and across space. Beyond effects of specific global events and macroscale structures, precarity inhabits the microspaces of everyday life. However, people attempt to disengage the stress of precarious life by constructing the illusion of certainty. Reflexive denial of precarious life entails essentialist strategies that implicitly or explicitly classify and homogenize people and phenomena, legitimize the constructed boundaries, and in the process aim at eliminating difference and possibilities for negotiation; the tension between these goals and material realities helps explain misrepresentations that can be catastrophic at multiple scales, re-creating precarity. Reactions to 9/11 by the Bush administration represent a case in point of reflexive denial of precarity through strategies that created illusions of certainty with deleterious results. Normatively, the paradox of precarious life and reflexive denials prompts questions as to how urges for certainty in the context of precarity might be constructively channeled. the author approaches this challenge in the final section by drawing from a nexus of concerns about post-Habermasian radical democracy, individual thought and feeling, and network dynamics. Whereas Hardt and Negri reverse the direction of the Foucauldian concept of biopower from top-down to bottom-up, the author draws from Foucault's concept of governmentality in relation to resistance to imagine a cooperative politics operating within as well as across scales.

Nothing More To Do: Euthanasia, General Practice, and End-of-Life Discourse in the Netherlands

Euthanasia in the Netherlands, which has been legal since 1984, is often talked about; yet, only rarely does it culminate in a euthanasia death. In 2001, for example, only 1 in 10 of those who initiated a request for euthanasia with their physician died a euthanasia death. Using data gathered during a 15-month ethnographic study with general practitioners, families, and patients, this article explores the practice of euthanasia, a practice based mainly in talk. Applying a Foucauldian concept of discourse, I will examine euthanasia as a script for how people think, feel, and act at the end of Dutch life, attempting to answer the question: What are Dutch people talking about when they talk about euthanasia? This article is intended to provide ethnographic data not currently available on the modern-day practice of euthanasia and to add to a growing body of literature on death, dying, and the role of the state.