Regime Of Truth Research Articles

Music and the politics of famine: everyday discourses and shame for suffering.

Understanding the politics of famine is crucial to understanding why famines still occur. A key part of this is how famine is remembered, understood, and discussed. This paper focuses on songs popular among communities that have recently experienced deadly famine. Contemporary famines almost always manifest in armed conflict contexts, where there is limited political freedom. Here, songs and music can be an important way to debate sensitive political issues. This paper focuses on the way that songs and music shape 'regimes of truth' around famine, and who is shamed and held accountable for associated suffering. It is based on long-term ethnographic research, the recordings of famine-related songs, and collaborative analysis in Jonglei and Warrap States (South Sudan) in 2021-24. The paper shows how songs can mock soldiers for their seizing of assets during times of hunger and how they can create familial shame for famine suffering, shifting responsibility away from the real causes to family members.

CRAFTING A FOUCAULDIAN GENEALOGY METHOD FOR ANALYZING CURRICULUM-AS-DISCOURSE IN SOUTH AFRICA

Introduction/Frame: (Contextualization/Justification) Viewing curriculum as discourse can enable educators to identify how historical markers of discrimination are repeated. Historical markers are archaeologically embedded in the various dimensions of a curriculum and find expression in preferred ways of thinking, speaking, doing, and being. Such historical hypernorms are often maintained by practical rationalities, or technologies of power that reify their taken-for-granted legitimacy as ‘truth regimes’. Research Question/Objectives: This phase of the study aimed to critically explore and disclose how the (socio/politico-historically constructed) rules of knowledge-formation in a contemporary occupational therapy curriculum-as-discourse, are reproduced and maintained as truths at a university that historically supported apartheid in South Africa. Methodology: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) approach was used to systematically craft a genealogy analysis method from foundational Foucauldian theory. Adjacent, a lens of the ‘dimensions of the curriculum’ was employed: i.e., the formal, the informal, the hidden, and the negated curriculum. Various data sources were categorized accordingly, e.g., overarching policy documents; social events; timetables and prescribed texts; physical teaching spaces; espoused values, and underlying assumptions modelled during assessment in teaching and learning spaces. Results: Following the four rules of knowledge-formation that ensued from an archaeology analysis, the contemporary reification of the historical markers was problematised through various technologies of power and self, as well modes of reasoning. Examples are pervasive white demographics of both students and faculty reifying cognitive monopoly and mono-cultural epistemologies; the rationalization of highly ritualized (over)assessment of students suppressing adult-to-adult transactionalism in andragogy practices; the reproduction of mono-cultural epistemologies in clinical training operating in the hidden curriculum. Final considerations: Consciously dismantling the rationalising strategies for the continuation of discriminatory patterns of inclusion and exclusion in a curriculum, can open a space for critical dialogue, disruption, and reconfiguration of a curriculum-as-discourse towards social justice, and epistemic freedom in (higher) education.

Discursos sobre descolonización y conflicto social. El caso de la VIII Marcha Indígena en Bolivia (2011)

This article examines how the narrative of the plurinational state provided the common symbolic framework for the conflict over the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (Tipnis) in Bolivia in 2011. The central dispute, one of the most important in Bolivia’s recent history, was whether or not to construct a highway through this area, a debate that has led to a major rift between peasant and indigenous social organizations that shared common reivindicative imaginaries but ultimately experienced profound divisions. This discussion serves as a key observation point to understand how decolonization imaginaries actually function, which I consider a anchoring point (point du capiton) in the narrative of the plurinational state. Through discourse analysis, review of chronicles, press statements, and accounts of the VIII Indigenous March, I aim to identify the discursive threads that framed the debates on decolonization, showing that it can be used as a rhetorical tool to mask extractivism or defend “national sovereignty,” or as an argument to uphold the self-determination of indigenous peoples. I also examine how the repertoire of the indigenous march was constructed discursively and symbolically, and the impact it left on Bolivia’s recent history. I intend for this analysis to contribute to understanding how Bolivian social perceptions are shaped in relation to the narrative of the plurinational state and its potential for social transformation as a new regime of truth.

Symbiotic neoliberalism: Foucault and the impure critique of neoliberalism

ABSTRACT This article brings together two distinct research trajectories – the growing characterization of neoliberalism as a monster and the recent debate on whether Foucault was a neoliberal – to investigate a dimension that these bodies of scholarship have not examined: our involvement in neoliberalism’s reproduction. To this end, the article introduces the concept of ‘symbiotic neoliberalism’. Drawing on the notion of parasitic neoliberalism (which underpins depictions of neoliberalism as a monster) and on the study of ecosystems (which approaches parasitism as one of the manifestations of symbiosis), and building on Foucault’s notion of the subject as a ‘vehicle of power’, I develop an account of neoliberalism as a symbiotic force that is not a monster ontologically separate from ‘us’ – the subjects that partake in its reproduction. I then use this framework to analyse Foucault’s alleged fascination with neoliberalism. Rejecting the thesis of ‘neoliberal Foucault’, I suggest that his seemingly sympathetic stances may be read both as an (un)conscious endorsement of certain features of neoliberalism and an attempt to challenge its ‘game of truth’ by ‘playing it differently’. In this symbiotic neoliberalism – embodied by Foucault’s persona and inspired by his approach – the subject as a ‘vehicle of power’ is neither solely a victim nor merely an endorser of the neoliberal system but a combination of both. This dual capacity allows for the articulation of an impure critique of neoliberalism that begins with the recognition of our symbiotic/impure entanglement in its ‘regime of truth’.

Christianity and reverential naturalism engage a world in peril: A dialogue between disciplines.

Christian theologians and ostensibly secular sociologists of religion rely on different resources to respond to personal, local, or global problems. The environmental crises we see around the world reflect a strict hierarchy between human beings and the natural world. In both the theological and social scientific arenas of the last few decades, however, we see an 'animal turn' that exposes the hubris of anthropocentrism and creates opportunities for new ways of writing and teaching about the natural environment. Using the Pacific Northwest's 'reverential naturalism' as a touchstone, the authors reflect on the extent to which their respective fields prepare secular scholars and theologians to address the crises all animals - including humans - now face. Using a dialogue format, they explore whether theological and social scientific regimes of truth and knowledge are incommensurable. What might this mean for the region and the two fields out of which they authors emerge?

Landscape discourse of the Northern villages in Contemporary Vietnamese films (in the case of ‘Bến không chồng’ of Luu Trong Ninh and ‘Cuộc đời của Yến’ of Dinh Tuan Vu)

Through analysing the cinematic language, this essay wants to find out if there is a stereotype in the representation of the Northern village landscape in the films Bến không chồng (Luu Trong Ninh) and Cuộc đời của Yến (Dinh Tuan Vu) or not. From there, this research will show that that stereotype expressed a sense of nostalgia for and created regimes of truth about the Northern village. The essay also studies the discourse overlapping in these two films about the same historical period, with the same theme about women’s misery. This writing will point out that despite filming about the same landscape, Bến không chồng presents a sad, gloomy landscape; on the contrary, Cuộc đời của Yến shows a beautiful but simple landscape like in a tourism promotional video. Then, the author will give her opinions on the reasons for that discourse overlapping.

Regimes of truth regarding ‘sexual justice’ in academic literature from 2012 to 2022: a scoping review

The notion of ‘sexual justice’ has gained traction in academic and policy arenas in recent years. This paper presents a scoping literature review of the regimes of truth, following Foucault, of ‘sexual justice’ appearing in the scientific literature from 2012 to 2022. Thirty-eight papers were coded using (1) content analysis of the studies’ central problematics, the programmes referred to, and institutional location(s); and (2) thematic analysis of how the notion was deployed. Central problematics centred on (1) critiques of, or alternatives to, dominant approaches to sexual and reproductive health; and (2) highlighting injustices. As such, ‘sexual justice’ is fighting for legitimacy in the truth stakes. There is a distinct paucity of papers tackling the translation of ‘sexual justice’ into practice. South Africa dominates as the site in which papers on ‘sexual justice’ have been produced, but there is a lack of South-South collaboration. Two themes were apparent around which conceptions of sexual justice cohere. Firstly, sexual justice is seen as a vital, yet politically ambivalent goal, with neoliberal co-optation of progressive rights agendas being warned against. Secondly, sexual justice is viewed as a means, in which sexual justice is described as having potential to repair established frameworks’ shortcomings and oppressive legacies.

DECONSTRUCTING INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 4.0 DISCOURSE IN EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY IN INDONESIA

Research with the topic of deconstructing industrial revolution 4.0 discourse is become important to provide awareness that except spiritual concepts, absolute truth cannot exist. In the discourse of Industrial Revolution 4.0, we must see the truth as separated fragments. The discourse of the industrial revolution 4.0, is born and forced to become a new regime of truth in society. Knowledge and enthusiasm regarding the discourse of the industrial revolution 4.0 which is disseminated systematically and then manifested into regulations actually curbs people's way of thinking. Therefore, this research aims to examining overlooked meanings, or even presenting a different perspective with critical analysis regarding industrial revolution discourse in education. And also revise the facts behind the belief and enthusiasm for the industrial revolution 4.0 discourse. This research uses a qualitative approach, with a literature study method, so that data is obtained through reviewing various scientific journals related to the research theme. Research findings show 1) industrial revolution 4.0 discourse was formed because the state positioned education as an opportunity for economic activity, which then had to be adapted and lead to children's investment in the future through education, 2) The delegation of quality education to the private sector and the reduced role of the state are caused by neoliberal discourse. Problems then arise when the discourse on industrial revolution 4.0 actually ignores the right to an equitable and prosperous life and further sharpens inequality in society, 3) Each social class has different habits (habitus) to respond to readiness for the industrial revolution 4.0. Starting from media ownership and access to learning, to family cultural factors and the absence of the state in important areas of learning.

Martial necropolitics: The position of the combatant in the Russo-Ukrainian war

The Russo-Ukrainian War has produced a myriad of necropolitical discourses regarding the justification of death and the subjugation of lives to potential death. Contemporary necropolitical scholarship has primarily focused on the civilian, subaltern dimension of this paradigm in a wider context, yet in this war, combatants from the opposing armed forces are the individuals most consistently embedded in these conditions of potential death. How, then, is the potential death of the combatant justified and legitimized? Through a critical engagement with the concept of the border as the front, this article will explore how the subjugation of Ukrainian and Russian combatants to the conditions of potential death is discursively justified through a framework of the necropolitical logics of survival and martyrdom. Through these logics, two competing necropolitical regimes of truth have arisen, nevertheless leading to the same conclusion – the mobilized bodies of the combatants at the front – yet promising different versions of a life beyond death itself.

Digital Therapeutic Cultures and Their New Regime of Psychological Truth

The article focuses on contemporary digital therapeutic cultures’ new regime of truth. This entails describing and critically analysing the sociomaterial apparatuses that distinguish truth from false and produce specific modes of subjectivation. The article shows that the digital regime of psychological truth is heir to the behavioural mistrust of subjectivity and the epistemological shift from the causal-comprehensive model towards the probabilistic-predictive one. However, the psychological subject has not been excluded, but her role has changed. The article introduces the distinction between valuable and spurious truths to analyse this shift. Algorithms do not need the psychological subject to produce true outcomes, but they depend on her and psy-knowledges to distinguish significative from irrelevant truths. Following Maurizio Lazzarato, the article concludes that digital therapeutic cultures share one of the main features of contemporary capitalism: to produce value at the intersection of processes of subjectivation and de-subjectivation.

Making Rivers, Producing Futures: The Rise of an Eco-Modern River Imaginary in Dutch Climate Change Adaptation

In the field of climate change adaptation, the future matters. River futures influence the way adaptation projects are implemented in rivers. In this paper, we challenge the ways in which dominant paradigms and expert claims monopolise the truth concerning policies and designs of river futures, thereby sidelining and delegitimising alternative river futures. So far, limited work has been performed on the power of river futures in the context of climate change adaptation. We conceptualised the power of river futures through river imaginaries, i.e., collectively performed and publicly envisioned reproductions of riverine socionatures mobilised through truth claims of social life and order. Using the Border Meuse project as a case study, a climate change adaptation project in a stretch of the river Meuse in the south of the Netherlands, and a proclaimed success story of climate adaptation in Dutch water management, we elucidated how three river imaginaries (a modern river imaginary, a market-driven imaginary, and an eco-centric river imaginary) merged into an eco-modern river imaginary. Importantly, not only did the river futures merge, but their aligned truth regimes also merged. Thus, we argue that George Orwell’s famous quote, “who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past” can be extended to “who controls the future, controls how we see and act in the present, and how we rediscover the past”.

From infamy to truth. Epistemic coloniality and knowledges in resistance: an approach to the cases of Inés Fernández Ortega and Valentina Rosendo Cantú

PurposeThe purpose of the article is to show the regime of truth in the institutional commissions that have the objective of restoring history by establishing a democratic, equitable, comprehensive, inclusive and fair criterion against the attempts of re-victimization and suppression of memory that Western political and cultural traditions have installed through their mechanisms of power.Design/methodology/approachBased on the analysis of the cases of Inés Fernández Ortega and Valentina Rosendo Cantú, they establish the material conditions from which prejudices and hegemonic stereotypes are intertwined to reproduce serious violations of human rights in democratic political and epistemic frameworks. The colonial function of the truth commissions in Mexico is analyzed, which are presented as mechanisms for social development, political and colonial reproduction of liberal democracy.FindingsThe qualitative results allow considering the way in which the different truth commissions in Mexico have been strongly linked to epistemic mechanisms in which truth and justice favor the reproduction of established relationships based on race, social class and gender. Especially in the so-called democratic transition, violence, truth and justice come together to highlight power relations in situations that have been disavowed by the intelligentsia.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations of the research are found in the historical configuration of the truth commissions in Mexico. The data, references and assessments are crossed by the initial function of the truth commissions and the establishment of apparatuses and mechanisms based on transitional justice. Based on this, it can be considered a methodological oversight to shift the analysis of truth commissions toward a critical assessment of the truth as a regime of government and hegemonic and colonization criteria from two very specific cases.Originality/valueThe originality of the work is found in the critical discernment of truth as a political category and the coloniality of power.

Truth clashes: caste atrocities, false cases, and the limits of hate crime law in North India

AbstractThis article brings together theories of truth in legal anthropology and the anthropology of religion to highlight how legal institutions can co‐opt hate crime laws and reproduce patterns of sociopolitical oppression. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research on the social life of India's only hate crime law – the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA), which punishes violence against Dalit (ex‐untouchable) communities – the article argues that hate crime cases involve a clash between three different truth logics: attributive truth or credibility; formal juridical truth regimes defined by evidentiary technicalities; and a distinct mode of experiential‐discriminatory truth, which is defined by its processual character. As Indian police and judiciary conflate these truth logics in practice, they publicly and legally erase realities of caste discrimination and (re)construct marginalized communities like Dalits as greedy and unreliable narrators.

Social (justice) mathematics: racializing effects of ordering pedagogies and their inherited regimes of truth

Social (justice) mathematics: racializing effects of ordering pedagogies and their inherited regimes of truth

Zoe and innovation in the care process: from the weaving of networks to rupture in the regime of truth

Zoe and innovation in the care process: from the weaving of networks to rupture in the regime of truth

Roundtable: Queer/Trans of Color Transits and the Imaginaries of Racial Capitalism

In this roundtable, scholars respond to the following guiding questions of the special issue: Racial capitalism in US scholarship is necessarily and rightfully narrated through the Transatlantic slave trade. While this is a globally relevant history for understanding the past and the present of transnational racial orders, what other histories and present modes of capitalist accumulation are relevant to telling a global history of racial capitalism? How do queer hermeneutics reckon with global and transnational histories of social differentiation that ground in other or additional intellectual traditions of what we might expansively call “race”? How would queer of color critique as an analytic be useful to question the very making of abject and abnormal bodies, the structures of knowledge and regimes of truth that produce them, and the political economies that necessitate them? To what extent does positioning queer and trans of color critique as methods objects and subjects, “beyond identity politics,” or even “the Human,” alleviate or otherwise reconfigure these issues?

Ideological Transformations of Family Discourses Produced in Popular Comedy Films in Turkey

The aim of this study is to discuss the ideological transformations of family discourses that becomes to visible in popular comedy films produced in Turkey. The discussions on family are shaped by three approaches that are categorized based on the narrative structures of the films. The first of these approaches is the corporatization of the family, which is discussed through the films Eltilerin Savaşı (Onur Bilgetay 2020) and Kocan Kadar Konuş 1-2 (Kıvanç Baruönü 2015, 2016). The second approach is the Oedipalization of the family, developed through the films Görümce (Kıvanç Baruönü 2016), Celal ile Ceren (Togan Gökbakar 2013) and Romantik Komedi 1-2 (Hakan Kırvavaç 2010 and Erol Özlevi 2013). As the last approach, the dissolution of the truth of the family and the emergence of the post-family discourse were discussed through the film Aile Arasında (Ozan Açıktan 2017).
 The findings obtained by the discourse analysis method used in the study, covering the corporatization of the family, Oedipalization, and the transformations of the family as a truth regime, show that popular comedy films are parallel to the breaks in today's popular discussion lines in Turkey.

Plague, Foucault, Camus

In January 1975, Michel Foucault contemplated the nature and formation of what in subsequent years he would come to know as governmentality. For Foucault, plague marks the rise of the invention of positive technologies of power, where these relations center around inclusion, multiplication, and security, rather than exclusion, negation, and rejection. In a point that might at first seem ancillary to his central argument, Foucault comments on stylized works about plague, such as those, according to the lecture series’ editors, exemplified by Albert Camus. In footnote fifteen of the January 15, 1975 lecture, in reference to what Foucault deemed the “literary dream of” plagues, the editors list Camus’ 1947 novel La Peste, among other works, as representative of what Foucault described as “a kind of orgiastic dream in which plague is the moment when individuals come apart and when the law is forgotten.”. This article places Camus’ novel and other works in conversation with Foucault on governmentality, subjectivation, and truth to demonstrate the ways in which individualism itself can be viewed biopolitically. In so doing, it offers an urgent intervention that speaks powerfully to and is exemplified by the current global pandemic. Plague serves both as this literary dream and as a discursive mechanism engaged simultaneously with regimes of truth and the individuals constructing them. By pairing Foucault’s historical understanding of the invention of positive technologies of power with Camus’ treatment of “the absurd” in and out of the plague context, one uncovers the interrelation of governmentality, subjectivation, and truth.

Social Justice in the 21st Century: Is the Welfare State Still a Meaningful Theoretical Construct for Modern Democracy?

The article examines the ideologem of the decline of the welfare state. The main question is whether the welfare state is still possible in contemporary society. It is argued that the thesis of the impossibility of the welfare state is an ideological statement, and the supposedly objective demise of the welfare state is what M. Foucault called ‘the regime of truth’. The article contrasts the procedural and substantive features of the concept of the welfare state. According to J. Habermas’ theory of legitimation crisis, the welfare state and the social rights it provides are not treated as paternalistic and freedom-restricting measures but rather as the foundation of legitimation.

Critical Humanism and the Study of Religion: A Statement and Defense

Abstract This essay offers a statement and defense of four core claims of my work, Why Study Religion? Those are: (1) the field of religious studies is preoccupied by procedural methods for studying religion to the neglect of values and purposes that can justify its intellectual practices; (2) this preoccupation operates under a “regime of truth” that is anti-normative; (3) this regime of truth buckles under the pressure of repressed values and smuggles in crypto-normative judgments and commitments; and (4) this preoccupation with method can be remedied by attending to purposes that can justify the study of religion, which I call Critical Humanism. Critical Humanism aims to expand the moral imagination and comprises four values: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. After describing the book’s main claims, I take up critiques expressed by Michael Stausberg, et al. in their essay, “A Normative Turn in Religious Studies?”