Foucauldian Concept Research Articles

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.

From ‘house of horrors’ to ‘sensitive’ governance: sex workers’ shelter detention in India

ABSTRACT Indian law prescribes ‘protective custody’ for sex workers, placing them in carceral shelters after police and NGO-initiated raids and rescues. Frequent allegations of abuse and incidents of escape are followed by media and judicial scrutiny, leaving shelter detention itself unquestioned. This article situates shelter detention in two ways. It examines its legal prescription in the Indian socio-legal context and its connections to global anti-trafficking and anti-immigration contexts. It also engages with Foucauldian concepts and feminist, socio-legal, historical, and anthropological work on India to analyze the power shelter detention instantiates. Next, the article critiques shelter detentionby drawing upon my ethnography at a Mumbai shelter and reflections on methods and ethics, and by tracking how the media and judiciary responded to an escape. Through these methods, approaches, and findings, I argue that shelter detention curtails sex workers’ mobilities and impedes their livelihoods through: 1) Its legal prescription, authorizing multiple forms of governance; 2) Its implementation, shaped by challenges of governance delaying sex workers’ release; and 3) Media exposés and judicial interventions further intensifying surveillance. The article shows, further, that sex workers’ escapes and acts of resistance illuminate not just ‘exceptional’ abuse, but the routine, ever-expanding forms of governance animating shelter detention.

Foucault and medicine: challenging normative claims

Some of Michel Foucault’s work focusses on an archeological and genealogical analysis of certain aspects of the medical episteme, such as ‘Madness and Civilization’ (1964/2001), ‘The Birth of the Clinic’ (1973) and ‘The History of Sexuality’ (1978/2020a). These and other Foucauldian works have often been invoked to characterize, but also to normatively interpret mechanisms of the currently existing medical episteme. Writers conclude that processes of patient objectification, power, medicalization, observation and discipline are widespread in various areas where the medical specialty operates and that these aspects have certain normative implications for how our society operates or should operate. The Foucauldian concepts used to describe the medical episteme and the normative statements surrounding these concepts will be critically analyzed in this paper.By using Foucault’s work and several of his interpreters, I will focus on the balance between processes of subjectification and objectification and the normative implications of these processes by relating Foucault’s work and the work of his interpreters to the current medical discipline. Additionally, by focusing on the discussion of death and biopower, the role of physicians in the negation and stigmatization of death is being discussed, mainly through the concept of biopower. Lastly, based on the discussion of panopticism in the medical discipline, this paper treats negative and positive forms power, and a focus will be laid upon forms of resistance against power. The discussed aspects will hopefully shed a different and critical light on the relationship between Foucault’s work and medicine, something that eventually can also be deduced from Foucault’s later work itself.

FOUCAULDIAN CONCEPT OF “DEATH OF MAN” IN THE WAVES

Virginia Woolf significantly impacted modernism as an experimental writer and challenged the conventional principles regarding realism. In this paper, Foucault's views on bio-power and the death of Man are used to analyze the main female characters in the novel The Waves, in order to see how their identities are shaped in a patriarchal society. It is argued that the stereotypes of femininity are internalized within the individuals by the normalizing power, and every particular anomaly is excluded. Thus, women might have predetermined fates. Sexuality as a social construct is an anchor for shaping women’s identities and destinies. Bio-power, which is a socio-political kind of power in the modern world, deploys sexuality in four great different strategic unities, namely, a hysterization of women’s bodies, a pedagogization of children’s sex, a socialization of procreative behavior, and a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure, to manage and control individual’s life and population. Due to the role of biopower and its deployment of sexuality, the repressive hypothesis regarding sexuality is rejected. Thus, we turn into docile bodies, whereby the individual’s agency is effaced, and ultimately the death of Man occurs. The death of Man indicates that we are on the brink of a new episteme, which may bring about new possibilities only if we reconsider the way we see Man in the universe

The biopolitics of Chinese tourism governance in the Arctic

ABSTRACT Scholarly attention to China's domestic experimentation and control measures applied to its population (e.g. the Family Planning Policy and Zero-Covid) has expanded. So, too, has the popularity of the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, which refers to political strategies of governing based on a population's biological features. However, China's biopolitical rationales for its growing participation in global governance (全球治理 quanqiu zhili) beyond its borders have received less attention. This research focuses on the Arctic, a region where China does not claim territorial sovereignty but has significant involvement, to examine the Chinese state's exertion of biopolitical control over its outbound tourist population. Drawing on a review of policy texts and media reports, complemented by observations at an Arctic conference held in China and three field visits to the Arctic in 2018–2019, we show how China's interventions in Arctic tourism seek to transform Chinese tourists into a productive, self-disciplining population who practice and promote state logics of social and environmental responsibility. The paper contributes to the understanding of tourism governance in frontier regions with geopolitical significance, as well as the modern state's exterritorial power over its own citizens even when they are beyond its sovereign territory.

The future of work guaranteed: Assembling NEETs in the apparatus of the welfare state

The future of work is partially written in the organisation of the welfare state – particularly in social policies and practices which imagine a vibrant labour market with ever-more employment. Here, we offer a genealogy of the peculiar formulation of the term NEETs, ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’ as emblematic of a deep cultural and organisational commitment to work. To understand this array of policies, we draw on the Foucauldian concept of the dispositif. We move between the authoritarian valency of the concept as used by Agamben, and the looser Deleuzian assemblage, to investigate the policy, discourses and material structures that guarantee the future of work. NEETS conceptually and practically narrows the broad liminal transition from adolescent to adult into a labour market transition – producing work-ready, employable subjects for any future. The future of work need not be NEETs, but to approach that future we need to attend to the overwhelming policy apparatus and assemblage that holds a post-work future at bay.

Delegated safeguarding or surveillance by proxy? Education: The prevent statutory duty in action

Research generated by Prevent is abundant. The majority of studies focus on the delivery of Prevent as a Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) initiative but rarely question the methodological pretences that underpin its practices. There is mounting pressure from the public sphere and sections of the research community that is casting doubt on Prevent's effectiveness as a policy as well as its potential to cause harm to the vulnerable communities it professes to serve through the pre-criminal space it occupies. This qualitative investigation evaluates the implementation of Prevent and its Statutory Duty at the community level, drawing on the experiences of Local Authority (LA) Prevent managers and their pastoral networks, which are predominantly populated by schools and education providers. It questions the validity of the Prevent manager's evidence base, using the Foucauldian concept of governmentality and the Bourdieusian conception of the educational field to navigate this dynamic.

Transformational Community Engagement in Urban Infrastructure Public-Private Partnerships: A Governmentality Approach to Create Social Value

Based on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, this paper overcomes the atomistic view of external stakeholder engagement research to examine the specific conditions under which community engagement in urban infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs) can be transformational and create social value with and for communities. In particular, it shows that a transformational approach to community engagement is, in practice, closer to a form of governance that emphasizes involved stakeholders’ responsibility. It traces this line of argument through the literature and practice of social enterprises and other hybrid collaborations in the private sector. Conceptually, it contributes to a political and transformational understanding of community engagement within the context of public-private partnerships. First, by proposing a “governmentality analytical framework” for understanding and uncovering the often purposefully concealed dynamic power relations in the engagement process between the state, communities, and private investors. Second, by proposing a set of guiding principles on how to: empower communities to be organized; reconfigure the institutional environment to offer incentives and reliability; and design public-private partnerships as hybrid organizations capable of including other actors, such as non-governmental organizations.

When Reality Comes Knocking at Your Discourse: Foucauldian Notions of a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”

ABSTRACT Michel Foucault has put forward a number of concepts, notably “the imaginary”, “discursive formation” and “dispositif”, that have been used by various writers to understand the “fourth industrial revolution” (4IR). This article suggests that such concepts in his early writing (1954–1975) are misleading because they entail the idea that the 4IR is a discourse that acquires “materiality” only to the extent that it is enunciated in various human and social practices. The article goes on to argue that the later Foucault (1976–1980) presents us with much better, realist concepts that help us to understand that “the 4IR” is actually a hyperbolic ideology that perpetuates the myth that we currently live in a 4IR. Various examples of the use of these Foucauldian concepts in these different ways in relation to the 4IR are offered as the argument develops.

Invasion as Trespassing Spatial Boundaries

The surge in domestic violence (DV), akin to a lurking shadow, coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This ‘shadow pandemic’ prompts me to explore the intricate interplay of spatial dynamics between DV and the COVID-19 containment measures. Mirroring the spatial patterns seen in DV, the pandemic restrictions too encompass physical and social isolation in cramped living spaces, as well as exclusion from the public sphere. In this contribution, through my engagement with the Foucauldian concept of the ‘political dream’ in a plague-stricken town, I put forth an account of ‘invasion’ as an audacious act of trespassing boundaries, particularly the transgression of citizens’ privacy during lockdowns. This concept of invasion, I argue, entwined with and starkly juxtaposed against the passive ‘non-invasion’ of DV victims in the guise of marital privacy rhetoric, leaves DV victims in a significantly more precarious position in the global epidemic. Unsettling the rigidity of the private/public; personal/political boundaries, Chinese feminists launched ‘Anti-Domestic Violence, Little Vaccine’ campaign during the Wuhan lockdown. It is in my examination of their performative intervention that I propose my second account of ‘invasion’ – invasion as trespassing a prior boundaries. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of the Habermasian public sphere theory, I delineate that the AVLV campaign is an act of invasion performed on the edges of the fixed spatial, political and legal boundaries, thereby blurring these pre-established lines.

'A real fine balancing act': A secondary qualitative analysis of power imbalance in comorbid cancer and dementia in an outpatient treatment setting.

Studies of health services reveal a focus on provision of scheduled care at the expense of patient need, placing the health service in a position of power and the patient as passive recipient. This secondary qualitative analysis of a focused ethnography draws on the Foucauldian concept of power as pervasive and relational, to examine how an imbalance of power is manifested in situations where people with both cancer and dementia are being treated for cancer. Secondary qualitative analysis of a focused ethnographic study. In the original study, qualitative data were gathered from observation and interviews with people with cancer and dementia (n=2), caregivers (n=7) and staff (n=20). The study was conducted in the outpatient departments of two teaching hospitals in England between January 2019 and July 2021. Data from all sources were analysed for this secondary analysis using constant comparison. The principal theme was balance, encapsulating the competing priorities involved in delivering cancer treatment. There was tension between maintaining safety and ensuring an individual's right to treatment, and difficulty reconciling the needs of the system with the needs of individuals. The pervasive nature of power can be harnessed to enhance the agency of people with cancer and dementia by incorporating principles of shared decision making. We recommend incorporating the principles of personalized care to achieve more equitable power relations, reduce health inequalities and ensure that cancer treatment offered to people with dementia is safe and appropriate. EQUATOR (COREQ) guidelines have been used for reporting. Patients and the public were involved in designing the original research questions and the study protocol including documentation such as interview topic guides and participant information sheets.

Memory as a means of governmentality

The article proposes to pursue Memory Studies as Studies of Governmentality. It aims to demonstrate how an analysis of memory, undertaken from the perspective of governmentality, can provide an important diagnostic of our time(s) and its political conditions, while furthermore illuminating how these are derived from narratives about the past. For this, I put into dialogue theoretical considerations of the Foucauldian concept with findings from a study of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. With a special focus on public memories that are performed and produced at the juncture of Holocaust memory and advocacy for human rights, this article puts forward an innovative approach to public memory’s entanglements with contemporary politics and subsequently argues that any public memory can in the broader context of governmental rationalities be understood as a technique of government itself.

Family inclusion in child protection: Knowledge, power and resistance

The inclusion of families throughout the child protection process can improve lifelong outcomes for children who have been removed from their parents’ care. However, child protection authorities have struggled to prioritize principles of family inclusion within systems that position families as risky. While parents’ experiences of powerlessness within child protection systems have been well documented, little is known about parents’ perspectives on family inclusion specifically. We engaged six parents who had experienced removal of children from their care in interviews and focus groups as part of a larger study that examined practitioners’, carers’, lawyers’ and parents’ views on family inclusion in Australia. In this article we report on parents’ experiences and recommendations for improving family inclusion. Through the analytical framework of Foucauldian concepts of power, knowledge and acts of resistance we highlight the complexities of parents’ lives and intersections in their experiences of systemic and social exclusion. In identifying the importance of collaboration, decision making and parental identity these findings suggest that the advocacy of parents for inclusion in the lives of their children is an underutilized asset in child protection systems.

“Protecting our female gaze rights”: Chinese Female Gamers’ and Game Producers’ Negotiations with Government Restrictions on Erotic Material

This article applies the Foucauldian concept of practiced freedom to examine how Chinese female gamers work hand in hand with game developers to negotiate government restrictions on in-game erotic material. Game developers have redesigned certain visual and textual game elements and used sexy dubbed voices to comply with state censorship while maintaining a game's appeal. Female gamers have meanwhile aligned themselves with the game developers by spending significant money on games and creating fan fiction, demonstrating their financial and sexual agency. This article explores how the practice of sexual freedom can serve as a useful lens for understanding the alliance between game developers and players, providing a glimpse into the everyday, conditioned, leisure-driven micro-resistance by engaging with existing scholarship that criticizes the commercial nature of digital games. Instead of overthrowing the conservative political framework, the goal of such gaming micro-resistance is to increase the profits of game developers and the sexual, consumptive rights of women gamers.

Displacement as Heterotopic Space: The Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan

ABSTRACT The idea of a sovereign territorial order dominates representations of space in International Relations through ubiquitous dichotomies such as international/domestic, inside/outside, and citizen/foreigner. Yet, phenomena of forced displacement question the perceptiveness of these binaries justifying an enquiry into the possibility of different accounts of the type of space that displacement constitutes. This essay revisits critically the Foucauldian concept of heterotopic space and proposes its redefinition. It then uses the revised concept for the reconstruction of the Syrian displacement crisis in Jordan. The objective is to show the validity of heterotopic space as a concept to represent the site that states, refugees, and international organisations constitute through their interactions in displacement response. The argument is that interpreting displacement as heterotopic space allows for a more credible representation of this phenomenon that supplants the assumptions of sovereign territoriality. This leads to an interpretation of displacement as an ‘other-space’ in its own capacity, thus offering an account that differs from displacement as liminality or as an exception to the territorial order.

Environmental accounting and state power in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (1537–1621)

PurposeThe study investigates the use of early forms of environmental accounting in the implementation of environmental strategies in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany between the 16th and 17th centuries.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts the Foucauldian concept of raison d’État to shed light on the ways in which environmental accounting practices were used by Tuscan Grand Dukes to form a detailed knowledge of the territory to be governed and act accordingly.FindingsFinancial and non-financial information relating to environmental issues enabled the Grand Dukes to “visualise” the territory to be managed as an enclosed disciplinary space whereby the conduct of people living therein could be decisively influenced. Accounting practices as a tool for the implementation of environmental strategies did not merely aim to protect the environment but were a means to reinforce the power of the State.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper can inform future works that investigate the ways in which environmental policies and accounting are used to pursue far-reaching governmental goals. It encourages scholars to examine further the origins of environmental accounting and its early forms.Social implicationsThe study documents how environmental strategies and the related use of accounting can have a significant influence on how individuals are allowed to conduct themselves. It also shows that environmental accounting practices can be an important tool in a State’s machinery of power.Originality/valueThe study offers a novel perspective on the use of environmental accounting information as a tool in the exercise of State power. It explores explicitly the interrelations between accounting, sustainability and power. It also adds new evidence to historical research that has engaged with early forms of environmental accounting.

Europeanization Through Education: Promoting European Studies In Eastern Partnership Countries

Our aim is to problematize Europeanization through education in EaP countries by studying the promotion of EU studies in higher education. The paper discusses the educational dimension of Europeanization in EaP countries from three interrelated perspectives - social constructivism, the Foucauldian concept of governmentality and a post-structuralist reading of centrality and marginality. We specifically focus on a series of international projects developed by the University of Tartu (Estonia) in partnership with other EU-based and non-EU universities from the EaP. We used qualitative data from reports of 4 EU-funded cooperation projects and also student’s views obtained in 2 focus groups that explored how the EU is taught and discussed. In the end, the added value of the article is that it offers a critical view on teaching about the EU in the Eastern neighborhood, focusing on local perspectives on EU-funded projects in higher education.

Intimate Others: Utopia and Heterotopia in the Reluctant Fundamentalist and the Submission

The Submission and The Reluctant Fundamentalist invest in the strategic ambivalence that characterizes heterotopias. Steering away from trauma studies I concentrated on the possibilities the concept of heterotopia offers to understanding the multilayered content and symbolism of the two post 9/11 novels. Heterotopia as a Foucauldian concept established spaces that are ‘other’ in relation to a normal space. I extend that other space to include Muslims as belonging to a heterotopic garden from which they challenge an Islamophobic and divisive discourse that is affiliated to power and uses the popular media and grievances of the 9\11 families to further cut off Muslims from contribution to mainstream society.

Good teachers and counter conduct

ABSTRACT Research on policy enactment has explored tensions created by accountability approaches associated with new forms of management under neoliberalism. These approaches generate particular discursive constructs of the ‘good teacher’ – constructs that often negate the rich, unmeasurable, and ethical practices associated with teacher professionalism. This paper draws on data generated as part of an institutional ethnography at an Australian school. Five teachers reflected on their work and the policies and procedures that govern it. They reported a range of practices for coping with the demands of policy enactment; described by one informant using the heuristic of attachment, aversion, and indifference. Significantly, the influence of external contingency – specifically in the form of climate change – represents a complex space in which teachers must navigate using ethical judgment and practical wisdom. This kind of ethical work creates demands that exceed the circumscribed notions of good teaching present in governing policies. Taking up the Foucauldian concept of counter conduct, this paper argues that these ‘unofficial’ practices are an expression of ethical professionalism. Rather than being explicitly ‘activist’, these teachers are simply engaging in ‘good work’ as it might be understood under the external contingencies associated with a changing and challenging world.