New Paper: Re-evaluating Foucault’s legacy

New paper:
Agency and Change: Re-evaluating Foucault’s Legacy
Raymond Caldwell, Birbeck College, University of London, London, UK
Michel Foucault’s work marks an important break with conventional ontological dualism, epistemological realism and rationalist and intentional notions of individual action and human agency. In these respects his ideas have had an enormous influence on postmodern [...]

New paper: Madness and Historicity

New paper:
“Madness and Historicity: Foucault and Derrida, Artauld and Descartes.”
Wendy Cealey Harrison, History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 20, No. 4, 79-105 (2007).
Abstract
Wendy Cealey Harrison
University of Greenwich at Medway, Central Avenue, Chatham Maritime, Kent ME4 4TB, UK, W.P.A.CealeyHarrison@gre.ac.uk
The article examines the inter-implication between Foucault’s and Derrida’s representations of one another’s work in the [...]

Offensive

As the author of a popular Foucault blog can I just say that I found the following to be totally offensive. Does this author really think that Britney Spears is talking about Foucault’s Discipline and Punish? I mean there is simply no comparison at all. Well, OK they did both shave their heads but that’s [...]

The Biopolitical Justification for Geosurveillance

My new article The Biopolitical Justification for Geosurveillance is about to come out in the Geographical Review.
Here’s the abstract and an image of the first page:
Abstract. Biopolitical use of geosurveillance can create and sustain a politics of fear. Although the majority of surveillance literature focuses on individuals, in this article I focus on groups and [...]

My file on Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was an influential journalist who founded the New Republic and was heavily involved with the American government during World War I. He wrote of journalism as a system for “manufacturing consent,” a phrase famously picked up by Noam Chomsky in his book Manufacturing Consent.
Sidney Blumenthal writes in an afterword to a recently [...]

CFP: A Foucault for the 21st Century

Call for Papers:
(NB this overlaps with the AAG conference in Boston so AAG attendees may want to also submit to this or to pop in to see some of the papers.)
The Fifth Annual SOCIAL THEORY FORUM
April 16 and 17, 2008
University of Massachusetts Boston
A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New [...]

AAG switches from Blackwell to Routledge

In this month’s AAG Newsletter [sorry no link as it is behind a membership wall!], Executive Director Doug Richardson announced that the AAG journals would be switching from Blackwell to Routledge, a division of Taylor and Francis.
If you have been following the absolute furore over the way the AAA (American Association of Anthropologists) handled a [...]

Documentary on Zimbabwe, power and Mugabe

If you’re in the London area tonight check out this documentary. The director Shrenik Rao writes:
“Once upon a time, in Africa, in a land called Rhodesia, there was a man. He was a humble teacher. He seemed to be full of ideas and ideals. He seemed to have dedicated to his life for a cause [...]

What it’s like to be a student in Arnold Davidson’s course

What it’s like to be a student in Arnold Davidson’s course:
I’m reading Davidson’s book for his course on Foucault and the history of sexuality. The course is really superb so far. What Davidson is doing in The Emergence of Sexuality is sketching how one engages in “historical epistemology”. Davidson’s position is complementary — very much [...]

Too funny!

This is great:
Anyways, the other day on “The View” I nearly fell off the couch when I heard Ms. Elisabeth Hasselbeck start talking about Michel Foucault. Now, I loves me some Hasselbeck like I love no other crazy bottle-blonde right-winger, but girlfriend made some serious mistakes talking about the guy.
I’m borrowing a fellow blogger’s paraphrase [...]