Foucauldian Method Research Articles

Crafting a Foucauldian Archaeology Method: A Critical Analysis of Occupational Therapy Curriculum-as-Discourse, South Africa

South Africa has a colonial and apartheid past of social injustice, epistemological oppression, and exclusion. These mechanisms are historically inscribed in the designs, practices, and content of higher education—including in occupational therapy curriculum. If these historical markers are not consciously interrogated, patterns of reproduction are reified along the fault lines that already exist in society. The focus of this article is to demonstrate how an archaeological Foucauldian method was crafted from foundational Foucauldian archaeology analytics and existing approaches of Foucauldian discourse analysis to unearth the rules of the formation of the occupational therapy profession. These rules pertain to the formation of (a) the ‘ideal occupational therapist’; (b) who had a say about the profession; (c) the ways of preferred reasoning; and (d) underlying theoretical themes and perspectives about the future. Data sources for this archaeology analytics included commemorative documents of universities on the origin of their programmes; historical regulatory documents; and the South African Journal of Occupational Therapy archive from the period 1953–1994. The analysis rendered two subthemes for each of the rules of formation including ‘white exceptionalism’, white male national, and international, regulatory bodies, the profession’s know-how practical knowledge, and its need for recognition within a bio-medical paradigm. Unearthing the historical markers of a curriculum and viewing it as discourse may enable a conscious reconfiguration thereof.

The molecularisation of security: medical countermeasures, stockpiling and the governance of biological threats

What do states need to do to protect themselves from security threats? When it comes to global health threats, the answer seems to be to stockpile medical countermeasures. In The molecularisation of security, Christopher Long takes us through the ways in which molecular science has shaped contemporary security practices, with developments such as the mRNA vaccines during the COVID–19 pandemic, and why this should matter for future security and international relations. In the past, security threats were countered with weapons, armies, defence strategies and intelligence. This vital new book explains how security can be delivered when science can pinpoint and neutralize the threat of a particular molecule or microbe, and indeed viruses such as HIV, Ebola or COVID–19. Long's conception of the molecularization of security follows an established line of scholarship that has explored the relationship between global health and security (see, for example, Simon Rushton and Jeremy Youde's edited volume, Routledge handbook of global health security, London: Routledge, 2014). Drawing on a Foucauldian method of exploring ‘the biopolitical matrix of body and population’, Long discusses the importance of molecular life for contingency and preparedness, and for developing countermeasures for some of the biggest security threats in the world. The author helpfully focuses on how molecular science and medicine shape security, rather than how security shapes health and science. Here, Long paints a complex picture that draws on a range of threats, from rabies to Ebola to smallpox, and a host of new molecular security actors. Long's argument builds on the works of Ulrich Beck, Michel Foucault, Georg Hegel and Martin Heidegger. To put it simply, states’ responses to these threats involve stockpiling medical countermeasures and incentivizing pharmaceutical companies to create new countermeasures, giving these actors a pivotal role in global security.

The rule of the weird: power relations in the films of Yorgos Lanthimos

ABSTRACT This study examines the power relations found in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ films. Since 2005, Lanthimos has been making films that left his mark on art cinema. Despite the inevitable rise of the director – especially since Dogtooth (2009) – there are few studies on Lanthimos. Existing studies either focus on only one film or deal with him within the Greek New (Weird) Wave movement. However, even if the director came out of this movement, his films have a unique artistic style. The director presents us with various representations of power by using interpersonal relationships in his films. He accomplishes this by using elements from his one-of-a-kind cinematographic, thematic and narrative perspective. These films, in which bodies under authority are shown to us utilizing an absurdist narrative, distinguish Lanthimos from other filmmakers. There are no academic studies on the concept of power that is frequently used in Lanthimos’ films. In this study, this deficiency is solved and the relations of power found in the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos are analyzed using the Foucauldian method of analysis and in light of the thinker’s concepts such as docile bodies, discipline, control, bio-power and sovereign power.

The Discipline of Happiness: The Foucauldian Use of the “Positive Energy” Discourse in China’s Ideological Works

One important question about ideological works in China concerns the tension between mobilisation (encouraging public expression) and control (limiting public expression). Recently Xi Jinping’s administration has doubled down on both strategies. To study the rationale of this seemingly self-contradictory move, the authors examine the recently prominent ideological discourse of “positive energy.” Through a combination of online ethnography and discourse analysis using Foucauldian methods, we find that the discourse borrows and evolves from previous ideological works, but most importantly and distinguishably features a more dispersive, rather than centralised power structure. It penetrates popular culture and private lives, and by doing so disciplines people’s subjectivities, rather than only aiming at top-down persuasion or control. The logic of “positive energy” produces self-disciplined docile subjects, and quietly resolves the tension between mobilisation and control by having subjects internalise the interests of the state as their own good.

ANALISIS WACANA FOUCAULT DALAM STUDI KOMUNIKASI

Michel Foucault is a popular thinker across disciplines in academia. In Indonesian communication studies, his concepts are used in several ways as an instrument analysis on many communication act/ event. The problem is only little, or even no one, wrote how to do the Foucauldian method of analysis in the context of communication studies. This article proposes how to do Foucauldian analysis in communication studies by focusing on analyzing statements, historical analysis and analysis of power. This article explains that Foucauldian discourse analysis is not textual-linguistic analysis, then it could be done in all of the research areas within communication studies, including communication researches with managerial perspectives such as public relations, business communication, advertising, and others. To cite this article (7 th APA style): Dhona, H. R. (2020). Analisis Wacana Foucault dalam Studi Komunikasi [Using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis in Communication Studies]. Journal Communication Spectrum, 9 (2), 189-208. http://dx.doi.org/10.36782/jcs.v9i1.2026

The Third Modulation: Foucault, Security and Population

Evolving as Foucault’s third modulation of power, security power marks a radical departure from previous eras of sovereign and disciplinary power. Dramatically decentering the individual, altering the means by which government acts and shifting from a static to a dynamic conception of temporal activity, an understanding of Foucauldian security power provides a number of critical insights into modern governance. This paper seeks to explain and analyze Foucault’s conceptualization of security power as the new language of governance and apply it in relation to the pervasive phenomena of government attempts to control fertility. Using the cases of inter-war France and post-colonial India, the theorization of security power will be grounded in the realities of natalist policy demonstrating the universality of the exercise of security power and its applicability to numerous contexts and settings. The concretization of theory in case study not only illuminates the workings of a new model of power but highlights the difficulty of resisting this novel type of government control. Understanding power to understand modes of resistance is central to the Foucauldian method, and drawing from Foucault’s newly translated lectures, this paper will bring to light a fascinating mode of analysis which helps illuminate the evolving nature of power and control in the modern era.

The Third Modulation: Foucault, Security and Population

Evolving as Foucault’s third modulation of power, security power marks a radical departure from previous eras of sovereign and disciplinary power. Dramatically decentering the individual, altering the means by which government acts and shifting from a static to a dynamic conception of temporal activity, an understanding of Foucauldian security power provides a number of critical insights into modern governance. This paper seeks to explain and analyze Foucault’s conceptualization of security power as the new language of governance and apply it in relation to the pervasive phenomena of government attempts to control fertility. Using the cases of inter-war France and post-colonial India, the theorization of security power will be grounded in the realities of natalist policy demonstrating the universality of the exercise of security power and its applicability to numerous contexts and settings. The concretization of theory in case study not only illuminates the workings of a new model of power but highlights the difficulty of resisting this novel type of government control. Understanding power to understand modes of resistance is central to the Foucauldian method, and drawing from Foucault’s newly translated lectures, this paper will bring to light a fascinating mode of analysis which helps illuminate the evolving nature of power and control in the modern era.

Foucault, Simon Springer, and Postneoliberalism

Scholarship in Foucauldian governmentality has reemerged as a critical area of contemporary political discourse and has had a pronounced effect on neoliberal and postneoliberal research in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Perhaps the most versatile postneoliberal critic is Simon Springer, who has offered dynamic accounts of neoliberalism and its decline via a Foucauldian method. While Springer’s research is novel, I believe it is not a rigorous Foucauldian account of neoliberalism and its future. JEL Classification: B00, F01, N00

On the genealogy of strategies: resilience in the revolution

AbstractThis article examines what it means to write a genealogy of the strategy of ‘resilience’. The paper notes that scholars writing critically about resilience tend to operate under the influence of Foucauldian method. It begins by asking to what degree genealogy forms the coherent method or set of methods in three Foucauldian analyses of resilience thinking. Identifying some questions for the literature in this context, the paper examines the place of strategies in Foucault’s work, and how this relates to the genealogical method. Having suggested that genealogy must not ignore the history of strategies of confrontation, I illustrate my argument by looking at the role of resilience thinking in revolutionary strategy. This paper argues that lack of clarity about genealogy’s key methodological principles has meant that reification is a recurrent problem in Foucauldian scholarship in this specific context, and has constrained study of the radical political potentialities of resilience.

‘How can you be strong all the time?’ Discourses of stoicism in the first counselling session of young male clients

AbstractBackgroundBeing ‘strong and silent’ has long been a definitive masculine stereotype. However, research shows that stoicism and the strict control of feelings can contribute to grave consequences for young men who suffer with depression.AimThis study aims to explore stoicism in the talk of young male clients in their first counselling session.MethodRecordings of the first counselling sessions of six male university students attending a university counselling and psychotherapy research clinic, were listened to, transcribed and analysed using a Foucauldian method of discourse analysis.Results/FindingsDiscourses of stoicism presented a number of different, often opposing, constructions. The male clients were aware of a ‘strong and silent’ masculinity and talked about a number of conflicts when coming to counselling. They were seen to negotiate with the counsellor the struggle to share and express feelings while maintaining a masculine identity. Stoicism was constructed as a useful emotional resilience but also as a dysfunctional barrier to showing caring feelings.ConclusionsThis research enhances understanding of conflicts of stoicism in counselling for practitioners working with young male clients. The findings can contribute to professional practice by helping practitioners recognise the tension for male clients opening up and expressing their feelings to a counsellor, as well as encouraging practitioners to respond in a way that opens up a dialogue about constricting masculine stereotypes.

Educating European citizenship: Elucidating assumptions about teaching civic competence

In recent years, the idea of the contribution of education to citizenship has been reinitiated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate constructions of citizenship as they are articulated in European policy documents on teacher education. It is indicated that the normative form of active citizenship is put into play through the individual and her or his actions, which is centred on learning. Drawing on Foucault’s analytic approach to problematization and Foucauldian methods of analysing policy problematizations of a certain problem, this study draws attention to the discourse of active citizenship and technologies of accountability that are utilized to shape teaching civic learning. It is suggested that citizenship is constructed as a learning problem, which motivates young people in school to reflect on their skills and competences. It is also from these capacities that their attitudes towards cultural diversity are assumed to be developed. Thus, in the formation of citizenship, emphasis is laid on the individual’s capacity for learning, which is also mobilized in narratives of the construction of Europe.

Foucault across the disciplines: introductory notes on contingency in critical inquiry

Foucault is one of the most widely cited thinkers across social sciences and humanities disciplines today. Foucault’s appeal, and ongoing value, across the disciplines has much to do with the power of his thought and his method to help us see the contingency of practices we take to be inevitable. It is argued in this introductory article that Foucault’s emphasis on contingency is as misunderstood as it is influential. I distinguish two senses of contingency in Foucault. A first sense, widely acknowledged, concerns Foucault’s facility at showing that a taken-for-natural practice is in fact contingently produced. A second sense, widely neglected, concerns the facility of Foucauldian methods for grasping how a given practice was contingently produced. The second sense of contingency opens up possibilities for practical transformation that the former sense of contingency largely leaves to the side.

Prophetic Pragmatism and the Practices of Freedom: On Cornel West's Foucauldian Methodology

This essay explores the Foucauldian influence on Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism. Although West argues that Foucauldian methods are insufficient to deliver a philosophy of liberation, I argue that there is nothing in Foucault that would prohibit West from such a goal, even though a philosophy of liberation was not one of Foucault’s goals. Fortunately, one can understand West’s own project of liberation in terms of “practices of freedom,” allowing one to describe West’s philosophical project in strict Foucauldian terms.

A experiência da pesquisa e da orientação: uma análise genealógica

O artigo discute vicissitudes do trabalho de pesquisa e de orientação em pós-graduação numa interlocução com um enfoque genealógico foucaultiano. Realiza uma análise conceitual sobre método em Foucault contraposto à perspectiva cartesiana. Apresenta elementos para um diagnóstico do presente da pesquisa nas áreas de ciências humanas no Brasil, a partir de estudos de outros pesquisadores e de levantamento feito com mestrandos em Psicologia. Realça a importância da discussão metodológica na pesquisa; analisa aspectos táticos e problematizantes dos projetos de pesquisa enviados para agências de fomento; discute parâmetros de avaliação da função e da relevância da pesquisa nessas áreas.

Immigrant Exclusion from Welfare: An Analysis of the 1996 Welfare Reform Legislative Process

Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in August 1996. This major welfare reform bill explicitly barred legal immigrant eligibility for most federal means‐tested public benefits. This article applies a Foucauldian method of analysis to congressional discourse surrounding legal immigrant exclusion from welfare. Such an approach examines how political issues are constructed to reveal the use of power and discursive rules in the production of socially and politically acceptable truths. I argue that legislators used specific discursive constructions to frame immigrant exclusion provisions. These discursive approaches, often at odds with empirical data, reinforced existing ideology and governed the employable concepts that held power in the debate. The analysis also demonstrates that political discourse implicitly revolved around the “immigrant bargain.” Elements of this bargain included the ideal type of immigrant desired by the United States and the proper relationship of the nation to such immigrants.

Historicizing Indian Psychiatry

Sir, Amit Ranjan Basu's article ‘Historicizing Indian Psychiatry’1 and the commentaries on it by Paul Hoff2 and Sridhar Sharma3 invoke some critical comments. Dr Sharma completely misses the point of ‘historicism’ (as noted by A.R. Basu himself) and provides an ‘account/appraisal’ of Indian history that has little relevance to the issue. Or may be, in an ironical sense, this brings forth the importance of Foucault's methodology in understanding/managing our past. Even as a simple historical story telling, the article contains some gross inaccuracies and sweeping generalizations that need critical reflection. The battle of Buxar in 1764 was not ‘between the East India Company under the leadership of Lord Clive and Nawab Sirajjudaula’. Sirajjudaula was defeated in 1757 battle, apprehended within a few days by the company sepoys and was murdered by Mohammedi Beig at the instigation of the company. The 1764 battle was between the company on one hand and Mir Kasim, Shah Alam II and nawab of Audh on the other. Neither was Clive the leader of the company forces at that time. He was in England though he came back soon afterwards at the helm of the company. Neither Charaka nor Hippocrates were individuals in history but represent schools of thought and systems of medicine. Hippocratic times were 600 to 300 BC. The Hippocratic oath that we know of today was formulated sometime in 3rd century BC. Ayurvedic times are taken as 8th century BC to 8th century AD. The Charaka Samhita (a compilation of the then thoughts and practices) is a product of 1st century AD. It is definitely post-Alexander. Thus the claim that Indian humor theory predates Greek one is completely untenable. The glaring fact that is being ignored is that at that time there was a fair bit of business and cultural exchange between west and east and all ideas, be it about medicine or astronomy or mathematics evolved in an environment of exchange. ‘Philosophy in India is essentially spiritual’—this often quoted sentiment is itself a post-colonial construction that arose from the need to create an east-west dichotomy. As a strategy of recovery of pre-colonial self it is flawed and is historically completely incorrect. Dr Sharma mentions, in a general way, a multitude of psychotherapeutic theories and practices mentioned in ancient Indian text, many in as yet untranslated Sanskrit texts. It will be nice to have definitive examples. To represent a glorified and sanskritized one-dimensional version of past in this subcontinent is a crypto-political move that has been going on for too long. Invoking and interpreting Gita and some such other texts in exclusivity to construct our psychiatric past by other authors reflect the same phenomenon. Psychiatry is a product of post-industrial paradigm and there can be an (ancient) history of psychiatry but there cannot be an ancient psychiatry. Both Paul Hoff and Sharma tend to equate Foucault with antipsychiatry. This reflects a rather poor reading of Foucault and antipsychiatry both. Given that Laing latched on to Foucault's work, Szasz was rather non-committal. Both of them attacked the then psychiatry from an Existential point but Szasz's was a Judeo-Christian moralistic over interpretation of Sartre while Laing was notorious for continuously shifting his theoretical positions and practices. On the other hand Cooper was a member of South African Communist Party and his criticisms were made from that angle. Foucault himself had little to say about antipsychiatry (or psychiatry for that matter) and his study of madness and unreason was an example to demonstrate a larger project of unraveling historical development of ‘ideas and practices’. In Basu's writing ‘Indian Psychiatry’ and ‘psychiatry in India’ are used interchangeably and without any specificity. Does he consider the two to be equivalent? I think that will be rather naïve and anti-Foucauldian in itself. Basu is also, rightly, concerned about the construction of lack resulting from the power play that goes behind the development of episteme in a Foucauldian sense but does not distinguish it from the power play that generates in colonial exchange that precludes dialogue and fosters silence. He is also rather vague in pointing out how to address this lack and listen to it in a turn around of Foucauldian method. That is a bit disappointing. In trying to be too Foucauldian, Basu also ignores Derrida's criticisms of Foucault's reading of Cartesian reason–unreason.

From Ancient to Victorian Cultural Studies: Assessing Foucault

In 1999 the journal Literature and Culture devoted special issue to the subject of Studies and Cultural Studies. What is notable about the essays included in this volume is the collective level of skepticism they express about the way cultural studies concepts and practices have recently been applied. (1) Isobel Armstrong, for example, faults Foucaultian history for its over-reliance upon limiting notions of regulation and surveillance.... [so that] [e]very text becomes evidence of form of regulation, demonstrating panoptical motivation. Foucauldian readings, Armstrong claims, depend as result on a homogenized account of the nineteenth century and of Victorianism in particular. (2) Armstrong is concerned about the way tendentious concepts such as disciplinary power are assumed by Foucault's followers prior to any analysis, which crowds out the opportunity for more open, less predetermined form of historical-critical practice. Armstrong's claims may be said to be symptomatic, for we have reached point in studies in which even critics otherwise friendly to cultural studies nevertheless tend to frame their approaches by describing how they differ from Foucauldian methods, not merely how they intersect with them. (3) Armstrong's critique, like those of other recent scholars, (4) announces concern with the limitations and in particular the excesses of the discourse-based analyses of sexuality, derived primarily from the first volume of Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1978), that prevailed in the late 1980s and 1990s. I want to propose, though, that both the self-conscious applications of Foucault in studies since the late 1980s and the recent critiques of Foucault and Foucauldian methods from cultural-studies-friendly scholars have been limited by an over-reliance on single text, that first volume of The History of Sexuality. My aim here is not to dismiss the valuable work on poetry derived from an engagement with volume one by such scholars as Richard Dellamora, Jeff Nunokawa, and Christopher Craft, nor do I dispute the obvious value of Foucault's liberating critique of the repression hypothesis of sexuality. (5) These scholars have located in Foucault set of conceptual tools for addressing poetic language--specifically, language that produces, reflects, and debates gender and especially male sexual norms. Instead, for the remainder of this essay, I want to do thought experiment, one which involves placing the still-potent debate about the legacy of Foucault for studies in general and poetry studies in particular in different context, that of separate field--classical cultural studies--and separate set of texts, the second (1985) and third (1986) volumes of The History of Sexuality. (6) I am suggesting that the classicists' responses to Foucault will enrich our own, Victorianist engagements with his legacy: they are instructive for their more energetic, bolder critiques of Foucauldian ideas, and as in the case of David Halperin, even stronger defenses of Foucault's usefulness for conceptualizing history. (7) In closing section, I will discuss how volumes two and three of the History of Sexuality, and the classicists' recent engagements with it, provide rich opportunity for reframing our understanding of male lyric subjectivities in poetry. What follows below, then, is not just set of suggestions for further reading in distant, exotic field but survey of vivid debates that have implications for our own critical practice and have been source of personal inspiration to me. In the mid-to-late 1970s, the study of sex and gender began to emerge in classical studies after long period of what has been described as self-imposed, Victorian repressive silence, the kind that Foucault seeks to refute in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. …

Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality, History

Discourse analysis has come to represent something of a `growth industry' in both research and critical psychology. Despite the apparent indebtedness of many such methods of discourse analysis to Foucault, there exists no strictly Foucauldian method of analysing discourse. Through a close reading of Foucault's `The Order of Discourse' (1981a), this paper re-characterizes the concept of discourse from a firmly Foucauldian perspective. Whilst not arguing against discourse analysis per se, the author indirectly takes issue with erroneous applications of Foucault's conceptualization by clarifying his perspective on what discourse is, and on what `discursive analysis' should entail. This critical presentation of the Foucauldian notion of the discursive will be contrasted with two prominent approaches to discourse analysis in psychology, namely those of Parker (1992) and Potter and Wetherell (1987). Key issues in this regard revolve around the themes of knowledge, materiality and history. By outlining the core components of what Foucault (1981a) terms `the order of discourse', and through the exposition of a four-step `method' of discursive critique, the author propounds an image of what a Foucauldian discursive analytic method may have looked like, should it have ever existed, before specifying exactly why one never did.