Foucault News

Joshua J. Kurz, (Dis)locating Control: Transmigration, Precarity and the Governmentality of Control, Behemoth: A Journal on Civilization, Volume 5, Issue 1, Pages 30–51, June 2012

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Abstract

In this essay, the author takes up William Walters’ (2006) incitement to theorize transmigration through the Deleuzian concept of control. The importance of mechanisms, or technologies, that modulate population flows are explored by paying close attention to novel strategies of migration policing and securitization in the United States, the European Union, Australia, and North Africa. These technologies no longer take the border as their “proper” site, but instead rely on processes of internalization, externalization, and excision to produce conditions of generalized precariousness. The author argues that these technologies of control resist simple categorization as biopolitics, and instead are more fruitfully considered through the lens of control societies and precarity. Ultimately, the inclusion/exclusion dialectic is put under erasure.

The author discusses the spatiality or territoriality of biopolitics as reliant upon enclosure, whereas control relies upon open/smooth space.

Keywords: transmigration, precarity, control, biopolitics, borders, migration, Foucault, Deleuze, topological borders

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O’Byrne, P. (2012). “Population Health and Social Governance: Analyzing the Mainstream Incorporation of Ethnography”. Qualitative health research , 22 (6), pp. 859-67.

Abstract
Recently, health care workers (researchers, academics, policy writers, clinicians) have begun to view ethnography as an acceptable research methodology for informing public health work. This corresponds with a change in public health practice toward population health, wherein identifiable groups are examined to identify the group-level and contextual factors that affect their health statuses. Although population health-based methodological and outcomes-focused examinations have already occurred regarding ethnography, no extant literature scrutinizes the incorporation of ethnography into mainstream public and population health work from a sociopolitical viewpoint. Consequently, such an investigation occurs here using Foucault’s concepts of discipline and Lupton’s advancement of Foucault’s ideas about the imperative of health. The outcome of this investigation is the assertion that ethnography is a strategic method for disciplining populations that do not respect the imperative of health. In other words, ethnography helps generate the data that can be used to normalize large groups of people.

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Sakellariou, Dikaios (2012). “Sexuality and Disability: A Discussion on Care of the Self”. Sexuality and disability , 30 (2), p. 187-97.

Abstract
The aim of this article is to bring together the notions of sexuality, disability and care of the self. This is done by illustrating the importance of care of the self and technologies of the self in the context of sexuality and disability. This paper is partly based on empirical data from a phenomenological study on perspectives of sexuality of Greek men with spinal cord injury. In this article we shift the focus from care offered from one person to another, to self care. Foucault’s work on the care of the self is used as an analytical lens to consider care as a discourse, with associated ideas and practices. In the care of the self what is important is the degree to which chosen practices help people live life as they choose and construct the self they desire. Like everybody, disabled people need to experiment, trying out different technologies of the self and different sexual possibilities. Care of the self is about enactment of identities and choice of how to live one’s life. In other words, it is about control of one’s body, power to guide representations of oneself and access to choices.

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Youatt, R. (2012). “Power, Pain, and the Interspecies Politics of Foie Gras”. Political research quarterly , 65 (2), pp. 346-58.

Abstract
This article examines the practices, logics, and politics of foie gras production and consumption. It argues that scholars need to rethink both pain and sentience to account for the fact that ducks are responsive, and not just reactive. Rather than using the capacities of animals to judge when power relations between species are acceptable, it suggests that scholars should start with the power relations themselves to account for how animal and human experiences are made.

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