Regime Of Truth Research Articles

Pós-verdade, neoliberalismo e cinismo institucional

Este texto trata da conjuntura política brasileira e do processo que redundou no golpe de Estado que destituiu a presidente eleita Dilma Rousseff. Articulando as noções de regime de verdade, práticas discursivas e política de escândalo, o texto avança na descrição da formação de uma articulação das classes dominantes, corporações da mídia, Ministério Público e Poder Judiciário para destruir as possibilidades eleitorais das forças de esquerda no Brasil, abrindo caminho para a implementação do receituário neoliberal. Apropriando-se principalmente da ideia do combate à corrupção, os velhos esquemas do poder econômico organizam a construção de discursos e ações de Estado que compõem o cinismo institucional como política de Estado.

Beyond the sham of the emancipatory Enlightenment: Rethinking the relationship of Indigenous epistemologies, knowledges, and geography through decolonizing paths

This article contributes to the current debate on decolonizing geography. It explores rethinking the relationship of Indigenous epistemologies, knowledges, and geography from Indigenous perspectives. After deconstructing the Enlightenment as an illusory way towards emancipation and critically exploring the heritage of geography regarding Indigenous peoples, this paper examines the Indigenous epistemologies that are considered counter-discourses that challenge western ‘regimes of truth’. It approaches Indigenous knowledges through decolonizing paths to capture the originality and strength of Indigenous epistemologies more fully, and re-centre Indigenous conceptual frameworks as offering new possibilities to write the ‘difference differently’ in human geography.

Persona & Parrhesia: Research notes on the dialectics of the real

<p>If reality is socially established through practices that, directly or indirectly, depend on communication and therefore on some notion of truth, the idea of a post-truth communicative regime or “age” may seem not only bizarre but also worrying. The dissolution of the real announced by the prophets of postmodernism in the form of either a “perfect crime” or a “liquid reality”, has been interpreted as the effect of the crisis of truth and legitimation that Jean-Françoise Lyotard referred to with his notions of ”performativity” and ”legitimation by force”. In this perspective, reality depends on truth and the possibility of truth depends in turn, by configurations of power that seem too elusive and ephemeral to be effectively engaged with in either theory or practice. In this paper, I mobilize the notions of parrhesia and persona in an effort to establish an alternative standpoint to discuss the epistemological and ontological implications of the postmodern condition and the crisis of truth associated to it. The main point can perhaps be summarized in the idea that, if the new regime of truth (or post-truth) relies on persona expressing the roles/characters compatible with it, the notion of parrhesia may gain a critical relevance for the normative evaluation of these personas and the social implications of their truth. Famously re-introduced by Michel Foucault in his analysis of truth and its discursive conditions, the notion of parrhesia has a heuristic potential that is not fully exploited. While challenging in fundamental ways the social construction of reality on practical grounds, the digitalization of social life presents also theoretical challenges some of which can be addressed by the reconceptualization of parrhesia in relation to the social role of the persona rather than the individual. In my paper, I present some preliminary research notes in this direction.</p>

Sociopolitical testing discourses in elementary teachers’ talk about reading assessment

Purpose The purpose of this work is to describe the current sociopolitical context and complex consequences surrounding elementary literacy education in one Midwestern US state and consider how power works through language. Design/methodology/approach Using qualitative methods and critical discourse analysis as a theory and method, surveys and interview data from teachers, administrators and parents, policy documents and other artifacts were analyzed and described to explain the sociopolitical climate. Findings Using Fairclough (2015) and Gee’s (2015) tools, the authors identified the discourses of deficiency, efficiency and gatekeeping in the data. Foucault’s ideas about governmentality and regimes of truth are used to explain the ways teachers took up the policies and resisted them. Research limitations/implications The authors argue that a new testing regime is on the move, and more unity and critique by elementary and secondary teachers and administrators will be important for restoring and sustaining quality literacy instruction and decision-making in all classrooms. Practical implications Continued research is needed to understand how particular reading assessments exacerbate and perpetuate the ranking and sorting in schools and the loss and struggle children face when they are denied literacy experiences that validate their lives outside of school and give meaning and purpose to reading in school. Originality value As the reality for secondary education language arts teachers begins to shift to a more restrictive curriculum, a loss of academic freedom and frequent testing, the authors see an opportunity for new professional alliances to form in support of a complex theory of literacy.

A Muslim Azef, or One More Orientalist: Playing the Other in Imperio-Orientalist Mirrors

The paper discusses constructing various versions of Muslim identity by politically opposite actors, the government and Muslim activists, involved in ‘placing’ Muslims in modernizing late-imperial Russia. The problem is approached through the extreme case of M.B. Hadjetlache (ca. 1870-1929), a baptized Jew reinventing himself as Circassian and Muslim and as such working as a State agent against Muslim opposition and vice versa. His strategies of deceit and reasons to trust him in different cultural and political milieus reveal reciprocal and often shared Orientalisms of the ‘regimes of truth’ defining the processes under study.

从“知识-权力”的哲学视角看西方主流经济学理论——基于西方经济思想史的研究

Drawing on Foucault's knowledge-power philosophy view,this paper not only makes a systematic review of the analysis of the interaction of power and economics theories in the history of western economic thought,but also provides a new framework and perspective for exploring,understanding and critically learning from western mainstream economics theories. Through a literature review of the history of western economic thought,it arrives at the conclusions as follows:firstly,it is difficult for economics theories to get rid of the profound influence of the power;secondly,those mainstream economics theories favored by power can construct a regime of truth that is conducive to the development of their own schools through the resources they have;thirdly,once the mainstream economics theories have formed the regime of truth,it is easy to restrict economists' creativity and imagination and is harmful to the innovation and development of economics theories. It argues that,under the background of the construction of philosophy and social sciences with Chinese characteristics,the knowledgepower philosophy framework can also be helpful to promote further development of the research of China's economics theories,and China's economists must undertake the mission of critical reflection.

Ethics, power, internationalisation and the postcolonial: a Foucauldian discourse analysis of policy documents in two Scottish universities

ABSTRACTThis paper provides a critical discussion of internationalisation in Higher Education (HE), and exemplifies a process of uncovering the investments in power and ideology through the partial analysis of four strategic internationalisation documents at two Scottish Higher Education institutions, as part of an ongoing international study into the ethics of internationalisation (EIHE).1 A Foucauldian discursive analytical approach is employed in analysing the policy documents. It reveals the relationships between power and knowledge in the constitution of regimes of truth within internationalisation, while serving to interrogate the dynamics of the affective and ethical in the comprising of such relationships and imaginaries. A critical postcolonial theorisation works in tandem with a Foucauldian approach in uncovering the relations of power discursively at work and the discursive effects of power in institutional terms. Four key themes are identified within the documents and critically discussed. The discussions serve to demonstrate that a lack of critical engagement with internationalisation discourses in Higher Education has the effect of reifying a dominant view and suppressing the emergence of alternative discourses. A critical postcolonial lens facilitates interpretability of power dynamics through and beyond internationalisation in Higher Education to consider the ethical effects of such power in its investments in global inequality, injustice and oppression within the global modernist imaginary.

(O)bekväm (o)vetskap Om bekvämlighetszoner under de guidade visningarna av en moské

(Un)comfortable (un)knowing. On comfort zones in the guided tours of a mosque is article, proceeding from the study I did for my thesis on the guided tours of the great mosque in Stockholm, discusses the situations that were characterized by a struggle for having the right knowledge and interpretative prerogative. e concept of comfort zone (Ahmed 2008), and how that is related to ideas of societal happiness, is central. It is a concept that opens up for analysis of how the exercise of power depends on the position of the speaker. During the tours there has been a rhetorical struggle to establish a comfort zone. e article explores the interlinking of know- ledge and social positioning, and how positions decide the credibility of what is said. Acknowledging that there are regimes of truth surrounding Muslims in Sweden, the main focus lies on the production of knowledge regarding Muslims in the context of the guided tours of a mosque in Stockholm. Special attention is given to how regimes of truth regarding Muslims inform the conversations during the visits, how they are debated in this particular arena and how that is dependent on positionality. It is a situation in which a Muslim, in the position of the guide, has an opportunity to present alternative storylines, or stories, about who Muslims are and what they do. During the visits there was a tendency for the guests to feel comfortable. In spite of being guests they managed the discomfort by recreating a comfort zone brought about by the alternative sto- rylines. Seemingly objective and established knowledge on Muslims has had such an impact that it made the Muslim guides less trustworthy, even when they talk about personal experiences and their private lives, giving the guides a position of discomfort.

Historical and Cultural Prerequisites for the Decline of the Significance of Truth: Cujus Regio, Ejus Religio?

Background: This article deals with the historical and cultural prerequisites for the decline of significance of truth in Western societies. In response to the formulated problem question, the ideas taught in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences are briefly discussed, the existing conditions of the power to form the directive regime of truth in the context are outlined.Objectives: The aim of the paper is to analyze historical and cultural prerequisites for the decline of the meaning of the truth in the public discourse.Method: This article is prepared using the methods of analysis and synthesis of academic literature. The analysis of academic sources and the citation follows the chronology according to the publishing year of the source. The methods of comparison and analogy are also used, the authors’ insights and generalizations are provided.Conclusion: The main conclusion is formulated that culture, as shown by the history, has some self-regulatory mechanisms that occur in different forms as a significant condition, which prevents the establishment of a unidirectional regime of the truth.

A critique of medicalisation: three instances

ABSTRACTBy briefly exploring three different examples where the existence of mental illness and developmental delay has been presumed, this paper sheds light on the way what Foucault calls the emergence of a regime of truth, i.e. where something that does not exist is made to exist through the construction of a system of truth around it. The first example concerns the direct marketing of pharmaceutical products to consumers in the US, the second the use of psychology in semi-post-Cold War Korea, and the third the persisting authority of psychology in the treatment of the developmentally delayed. While these instances are not innately connected, looking at these as part of the process by which the authoritative knowledge is established will help us understand, albeit partially, the mechanism by which mental illness penetrates our lives as truth, and how this regime of truth is supported by the authority of psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, what Foucault calls the ‘psy-function,’ reinforcing the medicalisation of our lives.

Spaces for Gender Equity in Australian Early Childhood Education in/Between Discourses of Human Capital and Feminism

IN THIS ARTICLE WE use feminist post-structuralist concepts of discourse and relations of power to question how a neoliberal regime of truth in Australian early childhood education impacts educators currently working for gender equity with children, prior to their entry to schooling. We show how this regime of truth is endorsed and transferred in and by key documents of the Australian National Quality Framework (NQF) including the National Quality Standard (NQS) and the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) in which discourses of universal rights, individual freedom and choice, and human capital dominate approaches to inclusion and diversity that govern gender equity work (ACECQA, 2011, 2017a, 2017b; DEEWR, 2009; NSW Education, 2016). Our article addresses how some educators use their understandings of feminism to negotiate spaces for gender equity work within the theoretical, political and ethical tensions arising in/between discourses that constitute this neoliberal regime of truth.

Beyond Celebration: A Critical Sociological Inquiry of Interracial Union Research in Canada

Research in Canada has latched onto the explanation that the growth in interracial unions is both cause and consequence of progressive social change. The authors cast a skeptical eye on this regime of truth produced by positivistic statistical procedure and the speculative theory of social change as it connects to the state brand of tolerance. They offer a meta-theoretical critique that challenges the taken-for-granted assumption that the growth in interracial unions can be explained by multiculturalism, the presumed antiracist implications of these unions, and the supposed amorphousness that mixed-race children presumably embody. The authors seek to disrupt the mystification and commodification of interracial unions and the children of these unions as proxies for social change. Instead, they call for critically and historically informed qualitative and quantitative research that avoids deputizing interracial unions en masse as societal change agents. They call for other and more robust metrics for measuring the reduction of racism. Attendant to radically altering how interracial unions are imagined, it is necessary for theory and research practices to deeply engage with class, gender, race, sexuality, and asymmetries of power when examining the complex, contradictory, and joyous inner and outer life-worlds of interracial couples and families.

Gatekeeping and trailblazing: The role of biomarkers in novel guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease

In innovation policy discourse, clinical practice guidelines are often viewed as gatekeepers: they select which novel technologies may enter clinical practice. Earlier research has pointed out, however, that in biomedical innovation a ‘regime of hope’ and a ‘regime of truth’ interact. High expectations of future developments can feed into clinical guidelines by changing assessment criteria, thus co-shaping the ‘gate’ innovations have to pass. This paper shows how diagnostic guidelines can embody hope in yet another way, by introducing a novel disease vocabulary that paves the way for emerging diagnostic technologies. I discuss two sets of guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease: the guidelines issued by the American National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association (2011), and the parts of the DSM-5 related to diagnosing AD (2013). Both function as gatekeepers in that they explicitly discourage the use of biomarker testing in clinical practice. However, they also act as ‘trailblazers’, transforming the conceptualization of Alzheimer’s disease in such a way that biomarker tests can be easily fitted in later on. The paper ends with some reflections on the potential presence of such ‘trailblazing’ in other diagnostic guidelines, and its acceptability from an ethical and societal point of view.

George Herbert’s The Temple: A Religious Rhyme or Political Poetry?

George Herbert’s retreat from a political path and a turn towards a religious route has created a perception that the poet and priest had separated himself from politics. His magnum opus, The Temple, corroborates such a point of view with it verses coated with poetic praises and surrounded by biblical allusions, morals and confessions. Within Foucauldian perspective, this study peruses a different path of repainting the picture of the pious priest into a political poet, highlighting how his religious intentions were not separated from political influence. This paper highlights the inseparable bond between politics and religion in the Jacobean Era by analysing how the regimes of truth play its part in shaping the poet’s discourse.

“Caballito blanco, ¡vuelve pa’ tu pueblo!”: Troubling and reclaiming the historical foundations of Chilean early childhood education

In accordance with the white patriarchal foundations of the early childhood education field of the global north, Chile’s early childhood education has a colonial and androcentric origin which has been left unquestioned. Reviews of Chilean early childhood education omit/ignore other socio-political agendas, such as class, gender, and ethnicity that still shape the current landscape. This article reconstructs the foundations of Chilean early childhood education through a reconceptualized mestiza history of the present. This approach challenges the neutrality of Chilean early childhood education and seeks to reclaim it by examining the underpinning regimes of truth that re-colonize children and women moving within and inhabiting the field. Analyses show how two main strands shape(d) early childhood education and care: social (and currently, multiagency) policies, and curriculum and pedagogy. The relationship between these strands has been recursive and contradictory and overlapping over time. However, their mixture creates an illusion of literal transposition as a syncretic effect, which under close examination exposes its fault lines.

Daughters of the revolution: legal narrativity in S v Zuma

While the social and political significance of President Jacob Zuma’s trial for rape in 2006 has been well-explored, its legal relevance has largely been passed over. Yet, the trial is important both for how it lays bare the mundane, naturalised operations of the law applicable to rape – and simultaneously illustrates how this regime of truth was called into question. A number of authors have already pointed to the rape myths, or discursive practices, relied upon to reach the final decision in S v Zuma. Yet, the mere fact of these myths’ existence is insufficient to ensure their success. Taking the trial as its example, and drawing on theories of legal narrativity, this article investigates how the structure and sequencing of witness testimony, coupled with the development of the complainant’s character in very particular ways, shaped judicial evaluations of plausibility. Close attention to how ‘the rape victim’ is actively constituted in and through the law points to the disciplinary and normalising effects of rape trials. Attention to legal story-telling as a discursive practice, especially in contexts where events seem ambiguous and open to interpretation, is as important as law reform to improving the experiences of rape complainants in court and allowing for the transformation of dominant discourses about rape.

Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Can We Understand? Can We Resist and Survive? Can We Become Without Neoliberalism?

Concern regarding capitalism, profiteering, and the corporatization of higher education is not new. A market focus that creates students as consumers and faculty as service providers has dominated global practices in colleges and universities for some time. Most recently, however, this more liberal market-driven focus has actually morphed away from a jurisdictional emphasis (with a potential focus on fairness) to forms of veridiction (neoliberal truth regimes) that legitimate intervention into all aspects of society, the environment, interpretations of the world around us, even into the physical individual bodies of human beings as well as the more-than-human. In higher education, this neoliberal saturation has led to changes that are of seismic proportion. The authors in this special issue describe their own research into, interpretations of, and life experiences as they attempt to survive within this neoliberal condition, and as they also generate counter conducts and ways of thinking without neoliberalism.

‘The East’ strikes back. Ultras Dynamo, hyper-stylization, and regimes of truth

This case study deals with Ultras Dynamo, the leading group in the active fan scene of Eastern German (the term Eastern Germany is used within this paper to refer to the territory on which the GDR existed from 1949 to 1990; it entails the federal states Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thuringia and the eastern part of Berlin) side SG Dynamo Dresden (throughout the paper, the club’s full name ‘Sportgemeinschaft Dynamo Dresden’ will be shortened using either Dynamo Dresden or simply Dynamo. Among the fans, the club is mostly called SGD (abbreviation of Sport[G]emeinschaft Dynamo) which is also used on flags, banners and in fan chants). The paper analyses styles of self-representation of the active fan scene at Dynamo and critically analyses the claim made by the group to being apolitical. The process of collective identity construction is linked to media images of the group and a ‘regime of truth’ is identified: a self-sustaining and interdependent cycle which overarches the process of image- and identity-construction at Dynamo Dresden and which can be traced back to processes of labelling, stigmatization and secondary deviance.

Lisandro E. Claudio. Taming People's Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their Contradictions. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013, 240p.

Taming People's Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their ContradictionsLISANDRO E. CLAUDIOQuezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013, 240p.People is the foundationalist myth of the ruling Aquino which began with the presidency of Corazon (Cory) C. Aquino who replaced the fallen dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1986 and which continues under the presidency of her son, Benigno (Noynoy) S. Aquino, III, which will end in mid-2016. The Aquinos and their yellow crowd elite supporters claim legitimacy based on a divinely sanctioned popular uprising against an evil dictator re-establishing a righteous democracy. People power also gained international prominence as one of the first televised revolutions, with the plucky Cory Aquino defeating the wily dictator Marcos, leading to a heroic transition to democracy. That this piece of political folklore has lost appeal for most Filipinos who remain poor and are now often disillusioned with this once new political order is evidenced by the dwindling crowds at the annual celebration of power. The themselves seem to have abandoned the idea of people power.No recent book captures the ambiguous legacy of better than the work of the young Ateneo historian Lisandro E. Claudio. What Claudio has done in this book is quite extraordinary. He systematically distinguishes two formations, the official, yellow narrative and the anti-people National Democratic discourse of the communist left (later in the study it becomes evident that he analyzes a third discursive alternative as well: the subaltern perspective of laborers on the Aquino-Cojuangco owned Hacienda Luisita). Claudio then examines how these discourses are literally monumentalized and the message this political architecture is trying to convey. These material commemorations of the anti-Marcos struggle culminating in the mass uprising against Marcos that he examines are, on the one hand, the quasi-official of the Shrine of Mary Queen of Peace, popularly known as the Our Lady EDSA shrine and the Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Monument of Heroes) of the left.Beyond this Claudio then undertakes an ambitious and revealing case study of how people power is viewed in Hacienda Luisita, the great plantation of the landlord-politician Aquino- Cojuangco dynasty. But he also shows how the role of the communist left is viewed ambivalently by the sugar plantation workers, many of whom were caught up in violence initiated by the strike breaking landlords but also instrumentalized by the left.The book is well written in a sophisticated, but intelligible post-modern style, with key theoretical insights effectively used to clarify Claudio's discursive approach to recent Philippine history. The result is a study full of more insights about recent Philippine politics than any other I have read in past decade. Claudio constructs a theoretical framework for the book drawn from memory studies to reconstruct the people narrative. He invokes Foucault's regime of truth, a provisional . . . product of the capillary movement of knowledge-power-but may nevertheless coalesce into identifiable discursive formations (pp. 5-6). Not a mere top-down ideology like the authoritarian developmentalist one of the Marcos era, the mainstream discourse was created by the Church hierarchy, middle class activists, big business, and traditional politicians. But Claudio is not content with just analyzing the official story which deemphasizes the role played by ordinary Filipinos who overthrew Marcos in favor of the Godgiven- miracle explanation of EDSA (the major Manila street after which people power is often known in the Philippines). …

BDSM under security: Radical resistance via contingent subjectivities

In recent decades, BDSM communities have engaged in a political struggle for rights by separating their practices from the oppressive gaze of legal and medical praxis, seeking to legitimize BDSM discourse and actions under the slogan of ‘safe, sane and consensual’. The espousal of principles governed primarily by health and safety nonetheless carries a normalizing overtone, apparently trapping the community within the epistemic codes against which they struggle. This article suggests that the security mechanism Foucault identifies as forming part of biopower can serve as a critical analytic capable of arbitrating between BDSM as a form of political resistance to hegemonic sexual norms and the restraints imposed by the ‘safe, sane and consensual’ code itself. We argue that communities using health and safety codes shift the political struggle from direct resistance to sovereign power to the transgression of hegemonic regimes of truth through contingent sexual identification and practice.