Foucault: 25 years on
Re-posting from Foucault-L mailing list:
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De: David McInerney
Para: Mailing-list
Enviado: miércoles, 15 de abril, 2009 1:10:00
Asunto: [Foucault-L] 'Foucault: 25 Years On' provisional conference program
FYI, information on the forthcoming Foucault conference at the
University of South Australia on June 25, including abstracts and bios.
Foucault: 25 years on
The Centre for Post-Colonial Studies and Globalisation is marking the
25th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault with a conference to
reflect on the influence of his work.
Provocation:
Twenty five years after his death, reflecting on Foucault is an
enormous task. His influence permeates disparate and innumerable
fields and informs so much of our thinking, along with that of many
great theorists who have followed him. Foucault’s influence is one
of ramifying and far reaching interdisciplinary complexity, but he
draws us together too, providing a common theoretical baseline to
diverse disciplinary endeavours. He shows us the connections between
things. Just as his life and his work connects up theoretical
pursuits as diverse as queer theory and postcolonial studies, so his
influence draws together and draws bridges between theorists. In so
doing, Foucault’s legacy muddies the theoretical waters, forcing
strange synergies and theoretical configurations such as the
antifoundational humanist. Growing from the murky ferment of French
colonial history, the father of poststructuralism’s story is as
complex as that encounter, and his legacy is as mutating, unsettling
and transformative. A reflection on Foucault needs to accommodate a
consideration of the enormity of the shadow which such a legacy casts
over continuing intellectual production.
ABSTRACTS & BIOS
BARRY HINDESS
KEYNOTE: Liberalism and History
Barry Hindess is Professor of Political Science in the Research
School of Social Sciences at ANU. He has published widely in the
areas of social and political theory. His most recent works are
Discourses of power: from Hobbes to Foucault, Governing Australia:
studies in contemporary rationalities of government (with Mitchell
Dean), Corruption and democracy in Australia and Us and them: anti-
elitism in Australia (with Marian Sawer). He has published numerous
papers on democracy, liberalism and empire, and neo-liberalism.
IAN GOODWIN-SMITH
Foucault: 25 Years on
Twenty five years after his death, reflecting on Foucault is an
enormous task. His influence permeates disparate and innumerable
fields and informs so much of our thinking, along with that of many
great theorists who have followed him. Foucault’s influence is one
of ramifying and far reaching interdisciplinary complexity, but he
draws us together too, providing a common theoretical baseline to
diverse disciplinary endeavours. He shows us the connections between
things. Just as his life and his work connects up theoretical
pursuits as diverse as queer theory and postcolonial studies, so his
influence draws together and draws bridges between theorists. In so
doing, Foucault’s legacy muddies the theoretical waters, forcing
strange synergies and theoretical configurations such as the
antifoundational humanist. Growing from the murky ferment of French
colonial history, the father of poststructuralism’s story is as
complex as that encounter, and his legacy is as mutating, unsettling
and transformative. A reflection on Foucault needs to accommodate a
consideration of the enormity of the shadow which such a legacy casts
over continuing intellectual production.
Ian Goodwin-Smith is a lecturer in social theory and social policy at
the University of South Australia. His research interests orbit
around an intersection of postcolonial theory and social policy. He
has a particular interest in new theoretical directions for
progressive politics with a focus on culture, social identity,
subjectivity and social democratic citizenship, as well as an
interest in critiques of expertise and professionalism.
BEN GOLDER
Foucault, Anti-Humanism and Human Rights
Responding to recent engagements with Foucault, and in part to the
provocation of this conference, this paper argues that in his late
work Foucault does not submit to the ‘moral superiority’ of
humanism and introduce a liberal humanist subject. Rather,
Foucault’s late investigations of subjectivity constitute a
continuation and not a radical departure from his earlier positions
on the subject. Such a reading helps us to assess Foucault’s late
supposed ‘embrace’ of, or return to, human rights, which is here
re-interpreted as a critical anti-humanist engagement with human
rights, conducted in the name of an unfinished humanity. In this way,
the paper engages not only with the way in which mainstream accounts
of human rights tend to assimilate anti-foundational and post-
structural challenges, but also with the quality of Foucault’s own
political legacy and future in the age of human rights, 25 years on.
Ben Golder is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, UNSW, with an
interest in legal theory and post-structuralist philosophy. He has
written several articles on Foucault and is, with Professor Peter
Fitzpatrick, the author and editor, respectively, of Foucault’s Law
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2009) and Foucault and Law (under contract with
Ashgate, to come out in 2010).
JIM JOSE
De-radicalising Foucault: Governance Discourse and the Taming of
Foucault?
The paper explores the alleged links between contemporary
understandings and uses of ‘governance’ and Foucault’s ideas.
Scholars working in quite diverse disciplines have asserted, with
increasing frequency, their debt to Foucault for the idea of
‘governance’. However, it is doubtful that Foucault ever used the
word ‘governance’, or that he would have accepted having his ideas
grouped under that term. This paper argues that positing Foucault as
an intellectual progenitor of the concept of ‘governance’
conflates two quite different and incompatible discourses. The
political effect is to undermine the emancipatory impulse embedded
within Foucault’s political philosophy. In effect, this serves to
reposition him within a framework that de-radicalises his
intellectual legacy and renders him safe for mainstream scholarship.
Jim Jose is Associate Professor in Politics at the University of
Newcastle. He is the author of Biopolitics of the Subject: an
Introduction to the Ideas of Michel Foucault (1998) and articles on
political theory, feminist theory, and Australian politics. His
research interests include political theory, governance and post-
colonialism.
BRURIA BERGMAN & THOMAS NORDGREN
Disambiguating the Prague Trial
Through his media studies, Michel Foucault has liberated retrenched
viewpoints by showing how the assumptions underlying specific
systemic structures open those structures to manipulation for
purposes of influence, subjugation, punishment and elimination (cf.
death). This paper applies Foucault's methods to the examination of
an exhaustively exhumed Czechoslovakian ‘show trial’ of the 1950s,
informally termed the ‘Slansky Trial’. Dr. Bergman, one of the co-
authors, recently published another paper entitled ‘The Prague
Trial – a Pre1967 Verifactory Case in the Study of Contemporary Anti-
Semitism Camouflaged as Anti-Zionism, and Pointers towards Undoing
the Camouflage’. Through demonstrating the anti-democratic/anti-
Semitic nature of the Slansky Trial, the authors hope to enable long-
closed democratic mechanisms to reassert their primacy in
contemporary Czech culture and promote the idea that such analyses
might be carried to other nodes of injustice as well.
Bruria Bergman received her PhD from the Middle Eastern Department of
the University of Melbourne where she redefined Metaphor in terms of
Semiotics and Mathematics with examples from Hebrew Literature. Her
thesis was examined by Thomas Seobok, Editor of Semiotica. She
earlier obtained a major in Modern European history from La Trobe
University.
Thomas Nordgren received his Ph.D. from the English Department of the
University of Houston, where he specialized in postmodernism and
rhetorical analysis. He retired in 2006 as Senior Lecturer in
Rhetoric and Contemporary Literature from the Humanities Department
at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.
DAVID MCINERNEY
Oriental Despotism and the Political Monsters of Michel Foucault's
‘Les Anormaux’
On 29 January 1975 Foucault spoke of two figures of the Despot in
revolutionary France, one of them incestuous (the king), the other
cannibalistic (the crowd). The figure of the Despot constitutes a
norm of political conduct, if we understand the ‘normal’ as
constituted in its relation to its spectral, abnormal ‘Others’. In
1959 Foucault’s tutor Louis Althusser had suggested that the
‘Oriental despot’ was a spectre or 'scarecrow' (épouvantail)
constitutive of Western political thought. Foucault's lecture, on the
other hand, suggests something of a specific mode through which these
figures suddenly assumed a material form. This paper extends these
theses through an analysis of how James Mill articulated his
political theory in The History of British India (1818) around the
thesis that 'the fear of insurrection' constitutes the necessary
impetus for the movement from 'semi-barbarous' to 'civilized' society.
David McInerney is a Lecturer at the University of South Australia’s
School of Communication, International Studies and Languages. He is
completing a book on James Mill for publication in 2009, and has been
involved in the borderlands project since 1996, including editing a
2005 special issue of borderlands e-journal (Althusser & Us).
KATRINA JAWORSKI
Deliberate Taking: The Author, Agency and Suicide
In the essay ‘What is an Author?’, Michel Foucault contends that
‘the author does not precede the works’. If this is the case, then
what happens when the notion of the author as never outside discourse
is grafted to suicide? What happens when suicide – most commonly
defined as a deliberate taking of one’s life – is read through the
idea that the one who is doing the taking does not precede it? Does
this not obliterate agency in suicide: the key ingredient necessary
to marking the individual as the sole author of their death? I
respond to the questions by first considering what Foucault’s
contention might offer to understanding the constitution of agency in
the act of suicide. I then draw on elements of Judith Butler’s work
to consider a way of thinking of suicide, which furthers Foucault’s
contribution. I suggest that positioning suicide as already part of
discourse does not undermine the individual as the author of death,
or makes the act of taking one’s life any less deliberate. I
conclude with a comment on Foucault’s position on death being
power’s limit, and what this might mean for understanding suicide.
Katrina Jaworski works as a researcher in the Divisions of Health
Sciences and Education, Arts and Humanities, University of South
Australia. Her research interests include: gender, bodies, death,
dying and suicide in particular.
MARTIN HARDIE
From Barthes to Foucault and beyond – Cycling in the Age of Empire
Cycling is a game in flux. It is not the myth or an epic as Roland
Barthes wrote. Mont Ventoux is a moonscape, bare, barren and rising
out of the lavender plains of Provence. They are no longer heroes of
epic proportions but bare life, homo sacer competing for all to see
in the desert of the real. The precarity of this existence better
depicts the state of the peloton today: free as the birds to soar to
the greatest heights Simpson, Pantani, Armstrong et al … the list is
endless; but free to be shot down at a whim. Cycling has always been
an assemblage and a line of flight – from the factory, the farm,
from the peloton itself. Cycling finds itself in the eye of the storm
as the processes of globalisation seek to reform it in their own
image. On the frontline is the very body of the cyclist – this is
the object of control. We need to contextualise the globalisation of
professional cycling in the age of Armstrong and the successive
doping crisis as events which signify the coming of Empire and the
permanent state of exception.
Martin Hardie has managed bands and worked in Aboriginal Art and
Craft centres. He has been a solicitor and a barrister. He has also
been an advisor to various members of the former East Timorese
resistance and government, a university lecturer, a cyclist, cycling
journalist and team manager. He now teaches law at the School of Law
at Deakin University.
MICHAEL DUTTON
KEYNOTE: 911 and the Afterlives of Colonial Governmentality
Beginning in Hong Kong with the treatment of the SARS virus and
moving quickly onto 911 in New York, the paper argues that two quite
distinct renditions of power are captured in these two events. One
refers back to concerns of population while the other is locked into
what Foucault refers to as the ‘Nietzschian-repressive’
hypothesis. Together these two forms re-emerge, somewhat
paradoxically in a formation known as ‘colonial
governmentality’ (Scott, Prakash, etc). This notion is inspired by
the Saidian binary (Europe and its other), but simultaneously
recognises the power of Foucault’s focus on the correct distribution
of people and things. Joined as a form of governmentality, the
lessons of the colonial offer new insights not just into the colonial
past but more importantly into our modern world. This form of power
further complicates the already detailed work undertaken by many on
questions of power, sovereignty and politics.
Professor Michael Dutton is the Research Professor of Political
Cultures at the Griffith Asia Institute and Professor of Politics at
Goldsmiths, University of London. He was the founding co-editor of
the journal Postcolonial Studies and has written extensively in
journals such as Public Culture, Social Text and Positions. His books
include Policing and Punishment in China (CUP 1992), Streetlife China
(CUP 1999), and Policing Chinese Politics: A History (Duke 2005). The
last of these books won the American Asian Studies Association
Levenson Prize for the best book on contemporary China in 2007. His
most recent book is co-authored. Called Beijing Time, it was
published by Harvard UP in 2008.
ALEXANDER LAMBEVSKI
Discipline, Resistance and Emotions: Subjectivity and Freedom in the
Works of Gay, Lesbian and Queer Followers of Foucault
David Halperin’s brave book What Do Gay Men Want? (2007) is a
paradigmatic example of the struggle that so many ‘Foucauldian’
lesbian, gay and queer scholars have had with the various ways in
which Foucault’s work tends to efface (emotional) experience, agency/
subjectivity, meaning, and (the possibility of) relative freedom from
the arbitrary rule of various discourses. The passionate queer
scholars’ embrace of Foucault’s refusal to provide a model of
subjectivity (for fear of contaminating their analyses with the
insidious disciplining and normalising effects of psychology) has
resulted in a virtual embargo on any meaningful investigation of
queer subjectivities. Using as points of departure Halperin’s book
and Foucault’s references in The Use of Pleasure to the importance
of emotions to the subject’s surrender to or resistance to
disciplinary power, this paper will outline the usefulness of
microsociology and interactional ritual theories for building a non-
normative, sociological model of queer subjectivity.
Alexander Lambevski is a founding editor and publisher of Sextures,
an online international refereed academic journal for sexualities,
cultures and politics, and an independent scholar from Sydney. He has
published numerous refereed journal articles and book chapters, and
currently is working on a book on queer emotions and sexual citizenship.
STEPHEN KERRY
Are You a Boy or a Girl? Foucault and the Intersex Movement
The world’s first intersex organisation, the Turner’s Syndrome
Association of Australia, formed in 1983. It is at that time, a year
prior to Foucault’s death, we witness the first stirrings which echo
Foucault’s articulations. The Intersex Movement coalesced around an
articulation of the voice that challenges modern medicine’s power to
name and diagnose counter normative bodies. This author is not the
first to argue that the Intersex Movement’s call to arms is the
literal embodiment of poststructuralism, queer theory and Foucault.
The interplay between lived experiences, bio-power and theory has
been articulated within the narratives, actions and theorisation of
intersex individuals and their peers. In the author’s recent study
of Intersex Australians one individual locates Foucault in their life
and their re-conceptualisation of sex and gender: Foucault ‘taught
me that binary classifications are only one means to order the
world’. This paper will explore how the Intersex Movement has
reclaimed the subjugated knowledges of their bodies.
Stephen Kerry employs feminist, gender and queer theories to
understand and give a voice to those people who live on the margins
of sex, gender and sexuality. As a queer identifying Buddhist
Trekkie, Stephen has brought theory into practice through 20 years of
participation in student and queer activism and volunteering for not-
for-profit peer support organisations. Stephen is a lecturer in the
Sociology Department at Flinders University.
KATE SEYMOUR
Problematisations: Violence Intervention and the Construction of
Expertise
Foucault’s (2007: 141) ‘history of problematizations’ draws
attention to the ways in which ‘things’ become ‘problems’.
This paper focuses on the dichotomisation and categorisation of
violence as, either, ‘serious’/‘abnormal’ (non-gendered)
violence or gendered (‘domestic’ violence), reflecting the
transformation of some forms of violence into problem violence.
Evident here, based on the findings of an exploratory study of the
ways in which practitioners who work with male perpetrators of
violence construct and understand violence, is the creation of
particular realms of intervention, divided along disciplinary lines,
each associated with distinct domains of knowledge, authority and
expertise. In the process certain behaviours are ‘claimed’ as
the ‘territory’ of a professional group. As emphasised by Foucault
(2007: 71), ‘for knowledge to function as knowledge it must exercise
power’. Expertise thus performs a powerful, exclusionary function,
controlling who can speak authoritatively about an issue. It is
argued that this partitioning of certain behaviours, as representing
particular ‘types’ of problem and particular ‘types’ of
people, and the ‘territory’ of some professional groups and not
others, reflects the broader context of (gendered) power and
disciplinary knowledge and has significant implications for the ways
in which male violence is conceptualised, named and addressed.
As a qualified social worker, Kate Seymour has worked extensively in
the areas of child protection, public housing, vocational
rehabilitation and correctional services (with adult offenders). She
commenced her current role, as a lecturer in criminology and justice
studies with Charles Sturt University in NSW, in 2004. Kate’s
research interest and activity is focused on gender and violence,
specifically the relationships between masculinities, power,
sexuality and violence.
DEIRDRE TEDMANSON & DINESH WADIWEL
The Governmentality of New Race / Pleasure Wars? Foucault,
‘Neoptolemus’ and the NT Emergency
In the ‘Society Must be Defended’ lectures, Foucault notes that
‘the problem of war’ is linked to the state’s bio-political
power to destroy not only political adversaries, but also ‘the enemy
race’ (1976: 257). This paper conceptualises the Northern Territory
Emergency Response (NTER) as a novel form of racialised combat: a
form of neoptolemus or ‘new war’. The paper argues that new
configurations of race/pleasure wars reinforce elements of biopower
and population management foundationally connected to sovereignty
within the Western tradition (Foucault, 1976; Agamben, 1998). The
paper suggests that there is a correlation between new
governmentalised bureaucratic regimes of race war and the prurient,
sexualized and intensely moralizing national public discourse about
the NTER. The regimes of legitimation, violence and racialisation
that accompany Western sovereignty, also inculcate economies of
pleasure connected to sex, sexuality and reproduction that are
defined and decided upon through a law of continuing racial domination.
Deirdre Tedmanson is a lecturer at the School of Psychology, Social
Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. Deirdre
is a core researcher for the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable
Societies and actively involved with its Social Policy Research Group.
Dinesh Wadiwel is an adjunct researcher at the Hawke Research
Institute for Sustainable Societies Social Policy Research Group.
Dinesh currently heads a national non government peak disability
organization.
HELEN MCLAREN
The Challenge with Foucauldian-Informed Feminist Poststructuralist
Discourse Analysis
This paper discusses the challenges that the author faced when using
poststructuralist feminist interpretations of Foucauldian discourse
analysis as a research methodology, which emphasised the enmeshment
of the researcher’s subjective self in the research. Analysis of the
'self' involved the author being stripped of her ‘creative role and
analysed as a complex variable function of discourse’ (Foucault
1977, p. 138). In a struggle to deconstruct personal 'truths', the
author repeatedly questioned her multiple subjective positions and
life narratives and continually checked these against feminist
concepts within literature, with colleagues and research
participants. Sensitivity towards personal 'truth', and the author’s
power over the interpretation of data, became an object of discourse
analysis in its own right. This paper argues that reflexive
engagement strengthened the discourse analysis through broadening the
author’s own discursively defined views and by exposing how
constructions and subjective experiences interacted with research.
Helen McLaren is a lecturer at the School of Psychology, Social Work
and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. Her key
research interests have centred on oppression, exclusion,
disadvantage, inequity, shame, blame and silencing. Helen has used
victims of sexual abuse, domestic violence and bad heteronormative
relationships as vehicles in which to view these phenomena.
TERRY EYSSENS
Exception? What Exception? Foucault’s State of Convention
The notion of the ‘state of exception’ (i.e. the sovereign
decision to suspend some or all of the suite of rights, freedoms and
obligations associated with the social contract) understands that
such rights and obligations normally exist and function as
protections. Giorgio Agamben’s work figures the contract suite’s
institutionalised presence in terms of this conceptualisation, and
then contemplates a permanent state of exception. However, in
Foucault’s work on ‘governmentality’, the contract suite
functions as a conceptual veneer in the service of the state’s self-
preservation, rather than as protection for citizens. This
perspective has implications for the usefulness of the notion of the
exception as a way of understanding modern political obligation and
authority. It is in this context that anti-foundationalist synergies
between Foucault, Hume and others will be considered, particularly
with regard to the role of convention in a governmentalist
understanding of the relation between citizens and the state.
Terry Eyssens is a Doctoral Researcher and teacher in Philosophy at
the University of Ballarat. His research is focussed on the state’s
monopoly on politics and political positions in contemporary society,
and on questions around the possibility of politics without the state.
JACK ROBERTS
A Genealogy of Public Relations in the Context of War
Foucault’s genealogical critiques of liberalism in the 1970s
inspired a whole school of thought which is now known as post-
Foucauldian governmentality theory. Recent debates on the ethics of
public relations (PR) have centred on problems of ‘truth’ and
the ‘public interest’ especially with regard to the Iraq War
(2003-). How can this theory be adapted to the important study of the
contemporary role of PR in war? Nikolas Rose and Mitchell Dean have
proposed that liberal ‘technologies’ of government such as PR can
be understood by mapping out historical transformations in
liberalism. The history of PR that discussed in this paper may not
neatly fit into their schema. Nevertheless, the author argues that by
using it to analyse the genealogy of PR and how it has constituted
‘the truth’ and ‘the public’, we can gain a very satisfying
understanding of the contemporary role that PR plays in war.
Jack Roberts is currently undertaking PhD research aimed at
developing a Foucauldian framework for understanding the role of
public relations in war and using a case study of Australia and the
War on Terror in 2002-2003.
MATTHEW CHRULEW
Foucault’s Genealogy of Christianity in the Return of Religion
For all Foucault’s influence in the humanities and social sciences,
including theology and biblical studies, a number of factors
(including decisions on publication and norms of interpretation) have
meant that his genealogy of Christianity as confessional and pastoral
apparatus has rarely been taken into proper account. For all its
flaws and incompleteness, Foucault provides a valuable analysis of
Christianity’s unique and shifting regime of subjectification and
its persistence and modification in secular modes of governance.
Today, religion has once again become a central topic of theoretical
debates. Amid widespread discussion of the theologico-political and
the legacy of Paul, Christianity is presented as self-deconstructing
religion or essential touchstone of radical politics. This paper will
provide a number of reasons why Foucault’s fragmented and recursive
genealogy of Christianity is still an important resource for this
debate.
Matthew Chrulew is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Studies in
Religion and Theology at Monash University. From July he will be a
postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Inclusion at
Macquarie University. He has published essays on animal studies,
Foucault, and biblical studies, as well as a number of short stories.
RATNAM ALAGIAH & JANEK RATNATUNGA
Theories About Theories: Accounting Theories After Foucault
Foucault’s works demonstrate how power creates knowledge, how
knowledge creates power, and how ‘the human’ is both the object of
knowledge and is also subject to knowledge. Applying Foucault’s
genealogy, we analyse a series of discourses present within
accounting about income. Income is regulated by the institution of
social welfare in Australia, leading to the creation of the ‘poor’
who are then categorised, marginalised, excluded and ultimately,
controlled. Only as we understand this historical process, of how we
have come to be as a society, are we able to liberate human
intelligence from its shackles.
Ratnam is a lecturer in accounting at the University of South
Australia. He specialises in financial accounting, company
accounting, accounting theory and international accounting, and has
research interests in the impact of a single global currency on
accounting, international accounting and in critical perspectives on
accounting.
Professor Ratnatunga joined the School of Commerce at the University
of South Australia as Head in February 2009. Previously he was the
Chair in Business Accounting at Monash University, a position he held
for eighteen years. His research interests are very wide and he has
worked in the profession as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG, and has
been a consultant to the World Bank on a number of international
projects
MATTHEW BALL
Policing the Use of ‘Foucault’: Three Case Studies from Legal
Education Scholarship
This paper will outline the first three major research projects that
adopt Foucault’s work to understand Australian legal education, and
will consider each of these as case studies through which the
‘use’ of Foucault can be investigated. While remaining sensitive
to the many potential readings and uses of Foucault’s ‘tool-
box’, as well as his problematisation of the author as an organising
tool of discourse, this paper will demonstrate that the way
researchers unify and understand Foucault as an author, and what they
seek to do with their own research, has an important effect on how
they use his work. In addition, these particular case studies offer
an opportunity to consider the introduction of Foucault’s concepts
to a discipline that is notoriously insular and hesitant in its
engagement with interdisciplinary thinking, and examine this
intersection of theoretical perspectives in numerous ways.
Matthew Ball is an associate lecturer in the School of Justice at
Queensland University of Technology. His doctoral research used
Foucault’s work to understand the production of the legal identity
at three Australian law schools. Matthew’s other major research
interest is examining violence within male same-sex intimate
partnerships.
LEONIE MCKEON
Learning to Speak Mandarin and Understanding Chinese culture is
Different not Difficult
Learning Mandarin is considered to be difficult, and acquiring a deep
understanding of Chinese culture is thought to be near to impossible.
The author has redesigned the conventional way Mandarin is taught so
that learners are able to speak Mandarin with confidence very
quickly. This method of learning Mandarin helps participants to
understand Chinese cultural rules and therefore to be able to behave
appropriately in a business context with Chinese people. The author
has identified and applied some key points of Michel Foucault’s
works that have influenced the theoretical underpinning of her
business, Chinese Language and Cultural Advice (CLCA). Foucault’s
works on discourse and power and knowledge have enabled the author to
develop a teaching methodology which makes Mandarin and Chinese
culture easily learnable and therefore accessible.
Leonie McKeon lived in Taiwan where she studied Mandarin, taught
English as a second language and edited a series of children’s ESL
books. She returned to Australia and studied Anthropology, which
included studies of Michel Foucault’s works. In 1998 she won an
entrepreneurial scholarship to commence her business Chinese Language
and Cultural Advice (CLCA)
STEVEN HODGE
A Foucauldian Strategy for Vocational Education and Training Research
Vocational education and training (VET) is an area of research
dominated by positivist approaches. Such approaches complement the
behaviourist educational philosophy known as ‘competency-based
training’ (CBT) that underpins Australia’s VET system. This paper
reflects on a quandary encountered by researchers examining the
history of competency-based education at a TAFE institution in South
Australia. The issue was how to account for a series of mutations in
the way CBT was understood and practiced that subverted the largely
unquestioned expectation of progress. The researchers found that
Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ approach allowed for the construction
of a mode of intelligibility which lends the history a disturbing
coherence. At the centre of this construction is an understanding of
CBT as a highly permeable system whose configurability supports the
reticulation of multiple forms of power. In this discussion some
other attempts to introduce Foucault’s ideas into VET research are
considered in relation to the main case.
Steven Hodge is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Research in
Education, Equity and Work at the University of South Australia,
where he is researching learning in vocational education. He was a
secondary art teacher and also studied philosophy. Steven has worked
in the vocational education sector over the last decade, becoming
interested in epistemological problems in Australia’s vocational
education system along the way.
TONY FLETCHER
The War Against Aboriginal Australia: Foucault, Racism and Social
Work Education
In a series of lectures at the College de France 1975-1976 entitled
‘Society Must Be Defended’ Michel Foucault delivers the (dis)
position; ‘… sovereignty’s old right—to take life or let
live… came to be complemented by … the power to ‘make’ live
and ‘let’ die…’(2004:241). Foucault connects this (dis)
position with socio-political events to produce his concept that
modern societies - though describing their machinations as in a state
of peace - are internally at war with those subjects/bodies produced
as members of an ‘inferior species’ (Foucault, 2004). This paper
discusses the application of a Foucauldian (dis)position regarding
this concept of ‘racism’ when connected to the concepts of
‘fields of visibility’, ‘spatial distribution’ and
‘biopower’ with social work students, to explore respectful
practice when working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Tony Fletcher is a PhD candidate in the School of Psychology, Social
Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. His
research interests include gendered violence, masculinities,
whiteness and finding ways to make connections with poststructural
scholarship that support the foregrounding of potential and the
loosening of grids of possibility in social work practice.
CHRIS HORSELL
Foucault, Social Policy and Homelessness
Foucault’s work provides fertile ground for an analysis of areas of
significant concern to students of social policy through his
development of the ideas of discourse, power/knowledge, surveillance
and the metaphor of the panopticon and the way populations are
constructed as included and excluded. His development of these
concepts allows an insight into the development and function of
policy not always apparent in traditional social policy analysis. In
this paper, the author explores why these concepts are pertinent to
understanding how homeless populations are constructed as objects of
social policy, particularly with respect to contemporary discourses
of inclusion and exclusion. The author argues that the use of these
ideas challenges some of the less obvious assumptions permeating
current developments in policy and service provision to homeless
people, while also enabling an ability to respond more contextually
to shifting frameworks of power.
Chris Horsell is currently a PhD candidate at Flinders University’s
School of Social Work. His area of study is homelessness and social
exclusion in Australia, with a particular emphasis on a critical
analysis of the South Australian Social Inclusion Initiative. Chris
is currently employed as a Senior Project Officer with the Department
of Families and Communities (SA).
PAL AHLUWALIA
KEYNOTE: The Poststructural and the Post-colonial
Post-colonial theory is many different things to many different
people. It serves many different purposes. It is drawn from the
unique conditions which its adherents inhabit and from the unique
experiences upon which they draw. For many of us, and for post-
colonial theory at its broadest, a reading of Edward Said is a
central experience, and it is that reading which puts Foucault at the
heart of post-colonial thinking, or which contributes to the
embedding of the poststructural in the post-colonial. But there is an
alternative reading, and closer analysis demonstrates how the
relationship between the poststructural and the post-colonial can be
read as the inverse of one which embeds poststructuralism at the
beginning. Looking at the suite of experiences which were formative
in the development of Foucault and other central poststructuralists,
it can be argued that the post-colonial is embedded at the root of
poststructural thinking.
Prior to commencing as Pro Vice Chancellor, Professor Ahluwalia was
Research SA Chair and Professor of Post-colonial Studies in the Hawke
Research Institute and Director of the Centre for Post-colonial
Studies. At the same time he was a Professor in the Department of
Ethnic Studies at the University of California. His main research
interests lie in the areas of African studies, social and cultural
theory, in particular, postcolonial theory and the processes of
diaspora, exile, and migration. On 14 October 2008, Professor
Ahluwalia was appointed a UNESCO Chair in Transnational Diasporas and
Reconciliation Studies.
_______________________________________________
Foucault-L mailing list
_______________________________________________
De: David McInerney
Para: Mailing-list
Enviado: miércoles, 15 de abril, 2009 1:10:00
Asunto: [Foucault-L] 'Foucault: 25 Years On' provisional conference program
FYI, information on the forthcoming Foucault conference at the
University of South Australia on June 25, including abstracts and bios.
Foucault: 25 years on
The Centre for Post-Colonial Studies and Globalisation is marking the
25th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault with a conference to
reflect on the influence of his work.
Provocation:
Twenty five years after his death, reflecting on Foucault is an
enormous task. His influence permeates disparate and innumerable
fields and informs so much of our thinking, along with that of many
great theorists who have followed him. Foucault’s influence is one
of ramifying and far reaching interdisciplinary complexity, but he
draws us together too, providing a common theoretical baseline to
diverse disciplinary endeavours. He shows us the connections between
things. Just as his life and his work connects up theoretical
pursuits as diverse as queer theory and postcolonial studies, so his
influence draws together and draws bridges between theorists. In so
doing, Foucault’s legacy muddies the theoretical waters, forcing
strange synergies and theoretical configurations such as the
antifoundational humanist. Growing from the murky ferment of French
colonial history, the father of poststructuralism’s story is as
complex as that encounter, and his legacy is as mutating, unsettling
and transformative. A reflection on Foucault needs to accommodate a
consideration of the enormity of the shadow which such a legacy casts
over continuing intellectual production.
ABSTRACTS & BIOS
BARRY HINDESS
KEYNOTE: Liberalism and History
Barry Hindess is Professor of Political Science in the Research
School of Social Sciences at ANU. He has published widely in the
areas of social and political theory. His most recent works are
Discourses of power: from Hobbes to Foucault, Governing Australia:
studies in contemporary rationalities of government (with Mitchell
Dean), Corruption and democracy in Australia and Us and them: anti-
elitism in Australia (with Marian Sawer). He has published numerous
papers on democracy, liberalism and empire, and neo-liberalism.
IAN GOODWIN-SMITH
Foucault: 25 Years on
Twenty five years after his death, reflecting on Foucault is an
enormous task. His influence permeates disparate and innumerable
fields and informs so much of our thinking, along with that of many
great theorists who have followed him. Foucault’s influence is one
of ramifying and far reaching interdisciplinary complexity, but he
draws us together too, providing a common theoretical baseline to
diverse disciplinary endeavours. He shows us the connections between
things. Just as his life and his work connects up theoretical
pursuits as diverse as queer theory and postcolonial studies, so his
influence draws together and draws bridges between theorists. In so
doing, Foucault’s legacy muddies the theoretical waters, forcing
strange synergies and theoretical configurations such as the
antifoundational humanist. Growing from the murky ferment of French
colonial history, the father of poststructuralism’s story is as
complex as that encounter, and his legacy is as mutating, unsettling
and transformative. A reflection on Foucault needs to accommodate a
consideration of the enormity of the shadow which such a legacy casts
over continuing intellectual production.
Ian Goodwin-Smith is a lecturer in social theory and social policy at
the University of South Australia. His research interests orbit
around an intersection of postcolonial theory and social policy. He
has a particular interest in new theoretical directions for
progressive politics with a focus on culture, social identity,
subjectivity and social democratic citizenship, as well as an
interest in critiques of expertise and professionalism.
BEN GOLDER
Foucault, Anti-Humanism and Human Rights
Responding to recent engagements with Foucault, and in part to the
provocation of this conference, this paper argues that in his late
work Foucault does not submit to the ‘moral superiority’ of
humanism and introduce a liberal humanist subject. Rather,
Foucault’s late investigations of subjectivity constitute a
continuation and not a radical departure from his earlier positions
on the subject. Such a reading helps us to assess Foucault’s late
supposed ‘embrace’ of, or return to, human rights, which is here
re-interpreted as a critical anti-humanist engagement with human
rights, conducted in the name of an unfinished humanity. In this way,
the paper engages not only with the way in which mainstream accounts
of human rights tend to assimilate anti-foundational and post-
structural challenges, but also with the quality of Foucault’s own
political legacy and future in the age of human rights, 25 years on.
Ben Golder is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, UNSW, with an
interest in legal theory and post-structuralist philosophy. He has
written several articles on Foucault and is, with Professor Peter
Fitzpatrick, the author and editor, respectively, of Foucault’s Law
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2009) and Foucault and Law (under contract with
Ashgate, to come out in 2010).
JIM JOSE
De-radicalising Foucault: Governance Discourse and the Taming of
Foucault?
The paper explores the alleged links between contemporary
understandings and uses of ‘governance’ and Foucault’s ideas.
Scholars working in quite diverse disciplines have asserted, with
increasing frequency, their debt to Foucault for the idea of
‘governance’. However, it is doubtful that Foucault ever used the
word ‘governance’, or that he would have accepted having his ideas
grouped under that term. This paper argues that positing Foucault as
an intellectual progenitor of the concept of ‘governance’
conflates two quite different and incompatible discourses. The
political effect is to undermine the emancipatory impulse embedded
within Foucault’s political philosophy. In effect, this serves to
reposition him within a framework that de-radicalises his
intellectual legacy and renders him safe for mainstream scholarship.
Jim Jose is Associate Professor in Politics at the University of
Newcastle. He is the author of Biopolitics of the Subject: an
Introduction to the Ideas of Michel Foucault (1998) and articles on
political theory, feminist theory, and Australian politics. His
research interests include political theory, governance and post-
colonialism.
BRURIA BERGMAN & THOMAS NORDGREN
Disambiguating the Prague Trial
Through his media studies, Michel Foucault has liberated retrenched
viewpoints by showing how the assumptions underlying specific
systemic structures open those structures to manipulation for
purposes of influence, subjugation, punishment and elimination (cf.
death). This paper applies Foucault's methods to the examination of
an exhaustively exhumed Czechoslovakian ‘show trial’ of the 1950s,
informally termed the ‘Slansky Trial’. Dr. Bergman, one of the co-
authors, recently published another paper entitled ‘The Prague
Trial – a Pre1967 Verifactory Case in the Study of Contemporary Anti-
Semitism Camouflaged as Anti-Zionism, and Pointers towards Undoing
the Camouflage’. Through demonstrating the anti-democratic/anti-
Semitic nature of the Slansky Trial, the authors hope to enable long-
closed democratic mechanisms to reassert their primacy in
contemporary Czech culture and promote the idea that such analyses
might be carried to other nodes of injustice as well.
Bruria Bergman received her PhD from the Middle Eastern Department of
the University of Melbourne where she redefined Metaphor in terms of
Semiotics and Mathematics with examples from Hebrew Literature. Her
thesis was examined by Thomas Seobok, Editor of Semiotica. She
earlier obtained a major in Modern European history from La Trobe
University.
Thomas Nordgren received his Ph.D. from the English Department of the
University of Houston, where he specialized in postmodernism and
rhetorical analysis. He retired in 2006 as Senior Lecturer in
Rhetoric and Contemporary Literature from the Humanities Department
at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.
DAVID MCINERNEY
Oriental Despotism and the Political Monsters of Michel Foucault's
‘Les Anormaux’
On 29 January 1975 Foucault spoke of two figures of the Despot in
revolutionary France, one of them incestuous (the king), the other
cannibalistic (the crowd). The figure of the Despot constitutes a
norm of political conduct, if we understand the ‘normal’ as
constituted in its relation to its spectral, abnormal ‘Others’. In
1959 Foucault’s tutor Louis Althusser had suggested that the
‘Oriental despot’ was a spectre or 'scarecrow' (épouvantail)
constitutive of Western political thought. Foucault's lecture, on the
other hand, suggests something of a specific mode through which these
figures suddenly assumed a material form. This paper extends these
theses through an analysis of how James Mill articulated his
political theory in The History of British India (1818) around the
thesis that 'the fear of insurrection' constitutes the necessary
impetus for the movement from 'semi-barbarous' to 'civilized' society.
David McInerney is a Lecturer at the University of South Australia’s
School of Communication, International Studies and Languages. He is
completing a book on James Mill for publication in 2009, and has been
involved in the borderlands project since 1996, including editing a
2005 special issue of borderlands e-journal (Althusser & Us).
KATRINA JAWORSKI
Deliberate Taking: The Author, Agency and Suicide
In the essay ‘What is an Author?’, Michel Foucault contends that
‘the author does not precede the works’. If this is the case, then
what happens when the notion of the author as never outside discourse
is grafted to suicide? What happens when suicide – most commonly
defined as a deliberate taking of one’s life – is read through the
idea that the one who is doing the taking does not precede it? Does
this not obliterate agency in suicide: the key ingredient necessary
to marking the individual as the sole author of their death? I
respond to the questions by first considering what Foucault’s
contention might offer to understanding the constitution of agency in
the act of suicide. I then draw on elements of Judith Butler’s work
to consider a way of thinking of suicide, which furthers Foucault’s
contribution. I suggest that positioning suicide as already part of
discourse does not undermine the individual as the author of death,
or makes the act of taking one’s life any less deliberate. I
conclude with a comment on Foucault’s position on death being
power’s limit, and what this might mean for understanding suicide.
Katrina Jaworski works as a researcher in the Divisions of Health
Sciences and Education, Arts and Humanities, University of South
Australia. Her research interests include: gender, bodies, death,
dying and suicide in particular.
MARTIN HARDIE
From Barthes to Foucault and beyond – Cycling in the Age of Empire
Cycling is a game in flux. It is not the myth or an epic as Roland
Barthes wrote. Mont Ventoux is a moonscape, bare, barren and rising
out of the lavender plains of Provence. They are no longer heroes of
epic proportions but bare life, homo sacer competing for all to see
in the desert of the real. The precarity of this existence better
depicts the state of the peloton today: free as the birds to soar to
the greatest heights Simpson, Pantani, Armstrong et al … the list is
endless; but free to be shot down at a whim. Cycling has always been
an assemblage and a line of flight – from the factory, the farm,
from the peloton itself. Cycling finds itself in the eye of the storm
as the processes of globalisation seek to reform it in their own
image. On the frontline is the very body of the cyclist – this is
the object of control. We need to contextualise the globalisation of
professional cycling in the age of Armstrong and the successive
doping crisis as events which signify the coming of Empire and the
permanent state of exception.
Martin Hardie has managed bands and worked in Aboriginal Art and
Craft centres. He has been a solicitor and a barrister. He has also
been an advisor to various members of the former East Timorese
resistance and government, a university lecturer, a cyclist, cycling
journalist and team manager. He now teaches law at the School of Law
at Deakin University.
MICHAEL DUTTON
KEYNOTE: 911 and the Afterlives of Colonial Governmentality
Beginning in Hong Kong with the treatment of the SARS virus and
moving quickly onto 911 in New York, the paper argues that two quite
distinct renditions of power are captured in these two events. One
refers back to concerns of population while the other is locked into
what Foucault refers to as the ‘Nietzschian-repressive’
hypothesis. Together these two forms re-emerge, somewhat
paradoxically in a formation known as ‘colonial
governmentality’ (Scott, Prakash, etc). This notion is inspired by
the Saidian binary (Europe and its other), but simultaneously
recognises the power of Foucault’s focus on the correct distribution
of people and things. Joined as a form of governmentality, the
lessons of the colonial offer new insights not just into the colonial
past but more importantly into our modern world. This form of power
further complicates the already detailed work undertaken by many on
questions of power, sovereignty and politics.
Professor Michael Dutton is the Research Professor of Political
Cultures at the Griffith Asia Institute and Professor of Politics at
Goldsmiths, University of London. He was the founding co-editor of
the journal Postcolonial Studies and has written extensively in
journals such as Public Culture, Social Text and Positions. His books
include Policing and Punishment in China (CUP 1992), Streetlife China
(CUP 1999), and Policing Chinese Politics: A History (Duke 2005). The
last of these books won the American Asian Studies Association
Levenson Prize for the best book on contemporary China in 2007. His
most recent book is co-authored. Called Beijing Time, it was
published by Harvard UP in 2008.
ALEXANDER LAMBEVSKI
Discipline, Resistance and Emotions: Subjectivity and Freedom in the
Works of Gay, Lesbian and Queer Followers of Foucault
David Halperin’s brave book What Do Gay Men Want? (2007) is a
paradigmatic example of the struggle that so many ‘Foucauldian’
lesbian, gay and queer scholars have had with the various ways in
which Foucault’s work tends to efface (emotional) experience, agency/
subjectivity, meaning, and (the possibility of) relative freedom from
the arbitrary rule of various discourses. The passionate queer
scholars’ embrace of Foucault’s refusal to provide a model of
subjectivity (for fear of contaminating their analyses with the
insidious disciplining and normalising effects of psychology) has
resulted in a virtual embargo on any meaningful investigation of
queer subjectivities. Using as points of departure Halperin’s book
and Foucault’s references in The Use of Pleasure to the importance
of emotions to the subject’s surrender to or resistance to
disciplinary power, this paper will outline the usefulness of
microsociology and interactional ritual theories for building a non-
normative, sociological model of queer subjectivity.
Alexander Lambevski is a founding editor and publisher of Sextures,
an online international refereed academic journal for sexualities,
cultures and politics, and an independent scholar from Sydney. He has
published numerous refereed journal articles and book chapters, and
currently is working on a book on queer emotions and sexual citizenship.
STEPHEN KERRY
Are You a Boy or a Girl? Foucault and the Intersex Movement
The world’s first intersex organisation, the Turner’s Syndrome
Association of Australia, formed in 1983. It is at that time, a year
prior to Foucault’s death, we witness the first stirrings which echo
Foucault’s articulations. The Intersex Movement coalesced around an
articulation of the voice that challenges modern medicine’s power to
name and diagnose counter normative bodies. This author is not the
first to argue that the Intersex Movement’s call to arms is the
literal embodiment of poststructuralism, queer theory and Foucault.
The interplay between lived experiences, bio-power and theory has
been articulated within the narratives, actions and theorisation of
intersex individuals and their peers. In the author’s recent study
of Intersex Australians one individual locates Foucault in their life
and their re-conceptualisation of sex and gender: Foucault ‘taught
me that binary classifications are only one means to order the
world’. This paper will explore how the Intersex Movement has
reclaimed the subjugated knowledges of their bodies.
Stephen Kerry employs feminist, gender and queer theories to
understand and give a voice to those people who live on the margins
of sex, gender and sexuality. As a queer identifying Buddhist
Trekkie, Stephen has brought theory into practice through 20 years of
participation in student and queer activism and volunteering for not-
for-profit peer support organisations. Stephen is a lecturer in the
Sociology Department at Flinders University.
KATE SEYMOUR
Problematisations: Violence Intervention and the Construction of
Expertise
Foucault’s (2007: 141) ‘history of problematizations’ draws
attention to the ways in which ‘things’ become ‘problems’.
This paper focuses on the dichotomisation and categorisation of
violence as, either, ‘serious’/‘abnormal’ (non-gendered)
violence or gendered (‘domestic’ violence), reflecting the
transformation of some forms of violence into problem violence.
Evident here, based on the findings of an exploratory study of the
ways in which practitioners who work with male perpetrators of
violence construct and understand violence, is the creation of
particular realms of intervention, divided along disciplinary lines,
each associated with distinct domains of knowledge, authority and
expertise. In the process certain behaviours are ‘claimed’ as
the ‘territory’ of a professional group. As emphasised by Foucault
(2007: 71), ‘for knowledge to function as knowledge it must exercise
power’. Expertise thus performs a powerful, exclusionary function,
controlling who can speak authoritatively about an issue. It is
argued that this partitioning of certain behaviours, as representing
particular ‘types’ of problem and particular ‘types’ of
people, and the ‘territory’ of some professional groups and not
others, reflects the broader context of (gendered) power and
disciplinary knowledge and has significant implications for the ways
in which male violence is conceptualised, named and addressed.
As a qualified social worker, Kate Seymour has worked extensively in
the areas of child protection, public housing, vocational
rehabilitation and correctional services (with adult offenders). She
commenced her current role, as a lecturer in criminology and justice
studies with Charles Sturt University in NSW, in 2004. Kate’s
research interest and activity is focused on gender and violence,
specifically the relationships between masculinities, power,
sexuality and violence.
DEIRDRE TEDMANSON & DINESH WADIWEL
The Governmentality of New Race / Pleasure Wars? Foucault,
‘Neoptolemus’ and the NT Emergency
In the ‘Society Must be Defended’ lectures, Foucault notes that
‘the problem of war’ is linked to the state’s bio-political
power to destroy not only political adversaries, but also ‘the enemy
race’ (1976: 257). This paper conceptualises the Northern Territory
Emergency Response (NTER) as a novel form of racialised combat: a
form of neoptolemus or ‘new war’. The paper argues that new
configurations of race/pleasure wars reinforce elements of biopower
and population management foundationally connected to sovereignty
within the Western tradition (Foucault, 1976; Agamben, 1998). The
paper suggests that there is a correlation between new
governmentalised bureaucratic regimes of race war and the prurient,
sexualized and intensely moralizing national public discourse about
the NTER. The regimes of legitimation, violence and racialisation
that accompany Western sovereignty, also inculcate economies of
pleasure connected to sex, sexuality and reproduction that are
defined and decided upon through a law of continuing racial domination.
Deirdre Tedmanson is a lecturer at the School of Psychology, Social
Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. Deirdre
is a core researcher for the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable
Societies and actively involved with its Social Policy Research Group.
Dinesh Wadiwel is an adjunct researcher at the Hawke Research
Institute for Sustainable Societies Social Policy Research Group.
Dinesh currently heads a national non government peak disability
organization.
HELEN MCLAREN
The Challenge with Foucauldian-Informed Feminist Poststructuralist
Discourse Analysis
This paper discusses the challenges that the author faced when using
poststructuralist feminist interpretations of Foucauldian discourse
analysis as a research methodology, which emphasised the enmeshment
of the researcher’s subjective self in the research. Analysis of the
'self' involved the author being stripped of her ‘creative role and
analysed as a complex variable function of discourse’ (Foucault
1977, p. 138). In a struggle to deconstruct personal 'truths', the
author repeatedly questioned her multiple subjective positions and
life narratives and continually checked these against feminist
concepts within literature, with colleagues and research
participants. Sensitivity towards personal 'truth', and the author’s
power over the interpretation of data, became an object of discourse
analysis in its own right. This paper argues that reflexive
engagement strengthened the discourse analysis through broadening the
author’s own discursively defined views and by exposing how
constructions and subjective experiences interacted with research.
Helen McLaren is a lecturer at the School of Psychology, Social Work
and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. Her key
research interests have centred on oppression, exclusion,
disadvantage, inequity, shame, blame and silencing. Helen has used
victims of sexual abuse, domestic violence and bad heteronormative
relationships as vehicles in which to view these phenomena.
TERRY EYSSENS
Exception? What Exception? Foucault’s State of Convention
The notion of the ‘state of exception’ (i.e. the sovereign
decision to suspend some or all of the suite of rights, freedoms and
obligations associated with the social contract) understands that
such rights and obligations normally exist and function as
protections. Giorgio Agamben’s work figures the contract suite’s
institutionalised presence in terms of this conceptualisation, and
then contemplates a permanent state of exception. However, in
Foucault’s work on ‘governmentality’, the contract suite
functions as a conceptual veneer in the service of the state’s self-
preservation, rather than as protection for citizens. This
perspective has implications for the usefulness of the notion of the
exception as a way of understanding modern political obligation and
authority. It is in this context that anti-foundationalist synergies
between Foucault, Hume and others will be considered, particularly
with regard to the role of convention in a governmentalist
understanding of the relation between citizens and the state.
Terry Eyssens is a Doctoral Researcher and teacher in Philosophy at
the University of Ballarat. His research is focussed on the state’s
monopoly on politics and political positions in contemporary society,
and on questions around the possibility of politics without the state.
JACK ROBERTS
A Genealogy of Public Relations in the Context of War
Foucault’s genealogical critiques of liberalism in the 1970s
inspired a whole school of thought which is now known as post-
Foucauldian governmentality theory. Recent debates on the ethics of
public relations (PR) have centred on problems of ‘truth’ and
the ‘public interest’ especially with regard to the Iraq War
(2003-). How can this theory be adapted to the important study of the
contemporary role of PR in war? Nikolas Rose and Mitchell Dean have
proposed that liberal ‘technologies’ of government such as PR can
be understood by mapping out historical transformations in
liberalism. The history of PR that discussed in this paper may not
neatly fit into their schema. Nevertheless, the author argues that by
using it to analyse the genealogy of PR and how it has constituted
‘the truth’ and ‘the public’, we can gain a very satisfying
understanding of the contemporary role that PR plays in war.
Jack Roberts is currently undertaking PhD research aimed at
developing a Foucauldian framework for understanding the role of
public relations in war and using a case study of Australia and the
War on Terror in 2002-2003.
MATTHEW CHRULEW
Foucault’s Genealogy of Christianity in the Return of Religion
For all Foucault’s influence in the humanities and social sciences,
including theology and biblical studies, a number of factors
(including decisions on publication and norms of interpretation) have
meant that his genealogy of Christianity as confessional and pastoral
apparatus has rarely been taken into proper account. For all its
flaws and incompleteness, Foucault provides a valuable analysis of
Christianity’s unique and shifting regime of subjectification and
its persistence and modification in secular modes of governance.
Today, religion has once again become a central topic of theoretical
debates. Amid widespread discussion of the theologico-political and
the legacy of Paul, Christianity is presented as self-deconstructing
religion or essential touchstone of radical politics. This paper will
provide a number of reasons why Foucault’s fragmented and recursive
genealogy of Christianity is still an important resource for this
debate.
Matthew Chrulew is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Studies in
Religion and Theology at Monash University. From July he will be a
postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Inclusion at
Macquarie University. He has published essays on animal studies,
Foucault, and biblical studies, as well as a number of short stories.
RATNAM ALAGIAH & JANEK RATNATUNGA
Theories About Theories: Accounting Theories After Foucault
Foucault’s works demonstrate how power creates knowledge, how
knowledge creates power, and how ‘the human’ is both the object of
knowledge and is also subject to knowledge. Applying Foucault’s
genealogy, we analyse a series of discourses present within
accounting about income. Income is regulated by the institution of
social welfare in Australia, leading to the creation of the ‘poor’
who are then categorised, marginalised, excluded and ultimately,
controlled. Only as we understand this historical process, of how we
have come to be as a society, are we able to liberate human
intelligence from its shackles.
Ratnam is a lecturer in accounting at the University of South
Australia. He specialises in financial accounting, company
accounting, accounting theory and international accounting, and has
research interests in the impact of a single global currency on
accounting, international accounting and in critical perspectives on
accounting.
Professor Ratnatunga joined the School of Commerce at the University
of South Australia as Head in February 2009. Previously he was the
Chair in Business Accounting at Monash University, a position he held
for eighteen years. His research interests are very wide and he has
worked in the profession as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG, and has
been a consultant to the World Bank on a number of international
projects
MATTHEW BALL
Policing the Use of ‘Foucault’: Three Case Studies from Legal
Education Scholarship
This paper will outline the first three major research projects that
adopt Foucault’s work to understand Australian legal education, and
will consider each of these as case studies through which the
‘use’ of Foucault can be investigated. While remaining sensitive
to the many potential readings and uses of Foucault’s ‘tool-
box’, as well as his problematisation of the author as an organising
tool of discourse, this paper will demonstrate that the way
researchers unify and understand Foucault as an author, and what they
seek to do with their own research, has an important effect on how
they use his work. In addition, these particular case studies offer
an opportunity to consider the introduction of Foucault’s concepts
to a discipline that is notoriously insular and hesitant in its
engagement with interdisciplinary thinking, and examine this
intersection of theoretical perspectives in numerous ways.
Matthew Ball is an associate lecturer in the School of Justice at
Queensland University of Technology. His doctoral research used
Foucault’s work to understand the production of the legal identity
at three Australian law schools. Matthew’s other major research
interest is examining violence within male same-sex intimate
partnerships.
LEONIE MCKEON
Learning to Speak Mandarin and Understanding Chinese culture is
Different not Difficult
Learning Mandarin is considered to be difficult, and acquiring a deep
understanding of Chinese culture is thought to be near to impossible.
The author has redesigned the conventional way Mandarin is taught so
that learners are able to speak Mandarin with confidence very
quickly. This method of learning Mandarin helps participants to
understand Chinese cultural rules and therefore to be able to behave
appropriately in a business context with Chinese people. The author
has identified and applied some key points of Michel Foucault’s
works that have influenced the theoretical underpinning of her
business, Chinese Language and Cultural Advice (CLCA). Foucault’s
works on discourse and power and knowledge have enabled the author to
develop a teaching methodology which makes Mandarin and Chinese
culture easily learnable and therefore accessible.
Leonie McKeon lived in Taiwan where she studied Mandarin, taught
English as a second language and edited a series of children’s ESL
books. She returned to Australia and studied Anthropology, which
included studies of Michel Foucault’s works. In 1998 she won an
entrepreneurial scholarship to commence her business Chinese Language
and Cultural Advice (CLCA)
STEVEN HODGE
A Foucauldian Strategy for Vocational Education and Training Research
Vocational education and training (VET) is an area of research
dominated by positivist approaches. Such approaches complement the
behaviourist educational philosophy known as ‘competency-based
training’ (CBT) that underpins Australia’s VET system. This paper
reflects on a quandary encountered by researchers examining the
history of competency-based education at a TAFE institution in South
Australia. The issue was how to account for a series of mutations in
the way CBT was understood and practiced that subverted the largely
unquestioned expectation of progress. The researchers found that
Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ approach allowed for the construction
of a mode of intelligibility which lends the history a disturbing
coherence. At the centre of this construction is an understanding of
CBT as a highly permeable system whose configurability supports the
reticulation of multiple forms of power. In this discussion some
other attempts to introduce Foucault’s ideas into VET research are
considered in relation to the main case.
Steven Hodge is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Research in
Education, Equity and Work at the University of South Australia,
where he is researching learning in vocational education. He was a
secondary art teacher and also studied philosophy. Steven has worked
in the vocational education sector over the last decade, becoming
interested in epistemological problems in Australia’s vocational
education system along the way.
TONY FLETCHER
The War Against Aboriginal Australia: Foucault, Racism and Social
Work Education
In a series of lectures at the College de France 1975-1976 entitled
‘Society Must Be Defended’ Michel Foucault delivers the (dis)
position; ‘… sovereignty’s old right—to take life or let
live… came to be complemented by … the power to ‘make’ live
and ‘let’ die…’(2004:241). Foucault connects this (dis)
position with socio-political events to produce his concept that
modern societies - though describing their machinations as in a state
of peace - are internally at war with those subjects/bodies produced
as members of an ‘inferior species’ (Foucault, 2004). This paper
discusses the application of a Foucauldian (dis)position regarding
this concept of ‘racism’ when connected to the concepts of
‘fields of visibility’, ‘spatial distribution’ and
‘biopower’ with social work students, to explore respectful
practice when working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Tony Fletcher is a PhD candidate in the School of Psychology, Social
Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. His
research interests include gendered violence, masculinities,
whiteness and finding ways to make connections with poststructural
scholarship that support the foregrounding of potential and the
loosening of grids of possibility in social work practice.
CHRIS HORSELL
Foucault, Social Policy and Homelessness
Foucault’s work provides fertile ground for an analysis of areas of
significant concern to students of social policy through his
development of the ideas of discourse, power/knowledge, surveillance
and the metaphor of the panopticon and the way populations are
constructed as included and excluded. His development of these
concepts allows an insight into the development and function of
policy not always apparent in traditional social policy analysis. In
this paper, the author explores why these concepts are pertinent to
understanding how homeless populations are constructed as objects of
social policy, particularly with respect to contemporary discourses
of inclusion and exclusion. The author argues that the use of these
ideas challenges some of the less obvious assumptions permeating
current developments in policy and service provision to homeless
people, while also enabling an ability to respond more contextually
to shifting frameworks of power.
Chris Horsell is currently a PhD candidate at Flinders University’s
School of Social Work. His area of study is homelessness and social
exclusion in Australia, with a particular emphasis on a critical
analysis of the South Australian Social Inclusion Initiative. Chris
is currently employed as a Senior Project Officer with the Department
of Families and Communities (SA).
PAL AHLUWALIA
KEYNOTE: The Poststructural and the Post-colonial
Post-colonial theory is many different things to many different
people. It serves many different purposes. It is drawn from the
unique conditions which its adherents inhabit and from the unique
experiences upon which they draw. For many of us, and for post-
colonial theory at its broadest, a reading of Edward Said is a
central experience, and it is that reading which puts Foucault at the
heart of post-colonial thinking, or which contributes to the
embedding of the poststructural in the post-colonial. But there is an
alternative reading, and closer analysis demonstrates how the
relationship between the poststructural and the post-colonial can be
read as the inverse of one which embeds poststructuralism at the
beginning. Looking at the suite of experiences which were formative
in the development of Foucault and other central poststructuralists,
it can be argued that the post-colonial is embedded at the root of
poststructural thinking.
Prior to commencing as Pro Vice Chancellor, Professor Ahluwalia was
Research SA Chair and Professor of Post-colonial Studies in the Hawke
Research Institute and Director of the Centre for Post-colonial
Studies. At the same time he was a Professor in the Department of
Ethnic Studies at the University of California. His main research
interests lie in the areas of African studies, social and cultural
theory, in particular, postcolonial theory and the processes of
diaspora, exile, and migration. On 14 October 2008, Professor
Ahluwalia was appointed a UNESCO Chair in Transnational Diasporas and
Reconciliation Studies.
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