This article analyzes three video-recorded asylum interviews, their written records and the corresponding decisions by the Finnish Immigration Service. The goal is to identify the causes and consequences of vulnerability in instances that are particularly important when assessing whether the asylum seeker has a well-grounded fear of persecution. A combination of linguistic, psychological and epistemic perspectives on vulnerability shows that these three dimensions are closely intertwined in asylum interviews. Linguistic vulnerability is linked for the most part to interpreting, whereas psychological (...) vulnerability stems from the difficulty in recounting traumatic experiences. Both linguistic and psychological vulnerabilities are central forces that also lead to epistemic vulnerability. Epistemic vulnerability, we claim, gives rise to certain practices within the asylum procedure, which again represents the materialization of the discourses of reporting, truth and credibility. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 49, Issue 4, Page 622-637, December 2021.

Christian theology can and should interact with modern philosophical trends and ideas to remain relevant to contemporary society. The roots of critical engagement between theology and philosophy are ancient, going back to the nature of the Triune God and the Bible itself and his broad kingdom redemptive commission to the Church. Scripture is finite, anchored in space and time, but the truths within it can generate responses to new situations. Theology sits alongside other disciplines in a relationship of ‘first among (...) equals’, benefitting from and critiquing human thought. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the social constructionist view found in Foucault''s work does not condemn one to a deterministic portrait of the ''self.'' Attention to the early and late writings allows one to articulate a weak notion of autonomy even under the heavy-handed descriptions found in Foucault''s early work. By recognizing autonomy as a public task, and not as a notion of freedom relegated to particular individuals, one is entitled to view autonomy as present in Foucault''s work - (...) and not merely in those writings dedicated to the ''techniques of the self.'' Far from emphasizing practices of freedom, I demonstrate that we need not always think of autonomy as contained in necessary 0resistance. It is this that permits reading autonomy as a product of social construction, and not an objection to it. (shrink)

This essay develops a new account of the work the self must perform on itself in disciplinary relations through the cultivation of resources from Foucault’s later work. By tracing the ethical self-relation from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Benedictine monastery, I am able to provide insight into the relationship of self-renunciation that underlies disciplinary docility and obedience. This self-renunciation undermines individuals’ ability to lead themselves and makes them reliant on another who has mastery of the truth through which the subject must (...) be constituted. Disciplinary relations were thus seen to be doubly efficacious in producing relations of domination: they attempt to eliminate the self- leadership of the individual which not only un- dermines the individual’s potential to resist; it leaves them in need of the dominating training that disciplinary relations institute. This insight into the activity of the individual in the produc- tion of their own docility was then used to clarify and develop aspects of two perennially enigmatic but powerful areas of Foucault’s work, his focus on “bodies and pleasures” and his turn to the “aesthetics of existence.”. (shrink)

The leadership development industry regularly claims to aid in developing effective, ethical leaders, using 360-degree psychometric assessments as key tools for so doing. This paper analyses the effects of such tools on those subjected to and subjectivised by them from a Foucauldian perspective. We argue that instead of encouraging ethical leadership such instruments inculcate practices and belief systems that perpetuate falsehoods, misrepresentations and inequalities. ‘Followers’ are presumed compliant, malleable beings needing leaders to determine what is in their interests. Such techniques (...) pursue productivity and profitability, rather than ethical leadership. We examine the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, a widely used 360-degree tool that measures transformational leadership, as an illustrative case study to substantiate these criticisms. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article attempts a properly critical and political analysis of the “police power” immanent to the form and logic of academic rankings, and which is reproduced in the extant academic literature generated around them. In contrast to the democratising claims made of rankings, this police power short-circuits the moment of democratic politics and establishes the basis for the oligarchic power of the State and its status quo. Central in this founding political moment is the notion of the Arkhè, a necessarily (...) asymmetric “distribution of the sensible” that establishes the basis of the political order, in this case an oligarchic political order. Drawing on Foucault and Rancière, the article argues for a necessary “dissensus” with both the ranking practice and its attendant academic literature, as the first step towards a politics of ranking that is properly critical, and therefore genuinely political. (shrink)

Smart cities are now an established context in which data and digital technologies shape urban politics. Despite increased scholarly focus on algorithmic governance, smart cities and their data production still heavily rely on human labor, raising questions about how that labor is recruited and the implications of different recruitment strategies. In this paper, we illuminate the relations and practices mobilized to recruit the labor required to produce, analyze, and enact data that produce smart cities. We argue that smart cities recruit (...) such digital labor by producing and circulating moral values and sentiments to claim that such participation is a social good. In this article we draw on a 6-year ongoing project in Calgary, Canada to explore how these “moral economies” underwrite smart city ecosystems. We explore three projects related to data and digital labor in the Calgary smart city: a wearable technology collaborative project, a civic hacking group, and the community social media platform Nextdoor. We suggest that moral economies of smart cities signal a new juncture between urban planning and profiting from data, with the potential for creating new socio-political risks. These moral economies signal a shift toward a “new spirit of capitalism” in which labor is managed through indirect persuasion rather than direct compulsion and mandate. (shrink)

Charles Taylor and Michel Foucault offer two very different descriptions and analyses of modern identities. While it can be argued that Taylor and Foucault are thematizing two very different aspects of identity — Taylor is focusing on first-person, subjective, affirmed identity, and Foucault is focusing on third-person, or ascribed, category identity — in practice, these two are very much intertwined. I argue that attention to identities of race, gender, class and sexual orientation demands that we combine a Foucauldian power analysis (...) with a Taylorean understanding of authenticity. Taking Nancy Fraser's and Linda Gordon's example of the `single black mother on welfare' as the `icon of dependency' in America and Charles Taylor's example of the `householder' who understands himself in relation to an ideal of independence, I show that neither individual can develop either self-knowledge or freedom without engaging in a quest for authenticity that involves both analysis of relations of power and identification with resistant identities. This requires moving beyond both Taylor and Foucault to an understanding of identity in terms of critical relations with defining communities. Key Words: authenticity • critique • Michel Foucault • freedom • identity • meaning • power • self-knowledge • social being • Charles Taylor. (shrink)

Foucault’s critique of early modern political theory aimed at displacing sovereignty as the principle of intelligibility of power. In the genealogical literature since Foucault, sovereignty has become a residual category lacking analytic specificity, largely displaced by governance, in turn equated with politics. We argue that Foucault and the Foucauldians have not understood that the flourishing of governance has presupposed a symbolic regime with a division of knowledge-power-law characteristic of the democratic sovereign. The conflation of governance with politics, together with the (...) sliding of sovereignty under governance, has left Foucauldians unable to diagnose the dangers present in varying possible sovereignty-governance configurations. (shrink)

In this article I undertake an analysis of erotic sexual intercourse - commonly, and more accurately, designated as love-making - in the spirit of Durkheim's social analysis of religion. Thus, based on a phenomenological semiotic analysis of the peculiar things we do and feel in the course of making love, I propose, first, to uncover the implicit `logic' that generates and governs these distinctly sociable doings and sociable feelings. Second, I proceed to suggest that the sameself logic, albeit in an (...) attenuated version, also generates and governs the broad class of `social occasions proper', and that this homology calls for gathering erotic and social occasions under one and the same rubric, which I propose to call the `socio-erotic' (since the term `social' has been denatured through overuse). Third, I conclude with a discussion of how socio-erotic domains fit into a larger world structured and governed mainly by interest-driven and power-driven conflictual fields. (shrink)

The question of how gender might inflect and affect philosophy as a way of life has been somewhat neglected, as has the role of philosophical modes of living for historical female philosophers. This essay draws on Michel Foucault’s multifaceted, Hadot‐inspired conception of philosophy to show how transformative philosophical practices of the self function as feminist praxis in the work of the early modern feminist philosopher Mary Astell. Philosophy in Astell’s texts, the essay argues, is a spiritual practice of the self (...) that at the same time functions as a feminist critique both of sexist social structures and of the self that undertakes the practice. It facilitates women in achieving internal freedom. Finally, the essay discusses potential feminist concerns about Astell’s proposed philosophical way of living, before suggesting that it may have value for women today. (shrink)

Since the early 1970s humanistic psychology has struggled to remain a relevant force in the social and psychological sciences, we attribute this in part to a conceptualisation of the self rooted in theoretically outmoded thinking. In response to the issue of relevancy a sociocultural turn has been called for within humanistic psychology, which draws directly and indirectly on the conceptual insights of Michel Foucault. However, this growing body of research lacks a unifying conceptual base that is able to encompass its (...) new perspectives and the movement’s theoretical antecedents. This analysis suggests a way forward by offering a potential reconceptualisation of the self in humanistic psychology through the existential-phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. We argue that Heidegger’s conception of the self takes account of subjectivities produced in discourse and institutional practice, while acknowledging the human capacity for actualisation in his concept of the authentic-self. (shrink)

Foucault famously claimed that in political theory the king’s head still needs to be cut off, proclaiming the imperative to move beyond a centralized and prohibitive conception of power and toward a more distributed, relational and productive understanding of power in political society. Ironically, Edmund Burke, famous for criticizing an actual revolutionary regicide in France, can be read as an ally in Foucault’s project of theoretical regicide and conceptual revolution. For although he staunchly defended existing monarchies in France and Britain, (...) Burke’s political theory in many ways encapsulates the kind of approach that Foucault sought to call forth. In this article, I argue for three particular resonances between Burke’s and Foucault’s views on power’s place and role in political society: one, power precedes subjects; two, power exceeds subjects; and three, subjects must negotiate with existing power relations (as opposed to ignoring or destroying them). Combined, these resonances remind us that political practice, reform and resistance are (almost) always situated in an unchosen context, thus happening in the middle of things rather than on a blank social canvas. Recognizing Burke’s interest in reform conditioned by the socio-cultural and historical circumstances and Foucault’s concern for resistance even though we can never be outside power allows us to appreciate the unchosen constraints that shape political practice of individual and collective subjects alike. (shrink)

(1997). Refocussing the subject: The anarchopsychological tradition revisited. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 89-106. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.1997.tb00530.x.

ABSTRACT This corpus-assisted critical discourse study examines news reports published by China’s official English-language media from 2000 to 2018, with the goal of understanding how they represent LGBTQ+ issues within the China’s socio-political context. Analysis reveals that the discussion of LGBTQ+-related topics has been consistently discouraged in China’s official English-language media, and the few news reports which have appeared in these media sources have focused on preventing the spread of HIV/aids through homosexual behaviors, on promoting LGBTQ+ rights, and on advocating (...) for the liberalization of sex education in China. The range of these focuses indicates that, despite widely-held negative stereotypes regarding homosexual behaviors and their relation to the spread of HIV/aids, the official English-language media of China have endeavored to project a positive image of the Chinese central government’s efforts to construct a society that is open, inclusive, and tolerant of LGBTQ+ individuals. This study also discusses positive changes in the social well-being of LGBTQ+ persons in China as evidenced first by the more liberal attitudes that gradually have resulted from the efforts of Chinese netizens to influence LGBTQ+-related governmental policies and second, by the more positive representations of LGBTQ+ issues being communicated to global audiences through the China’s official English-language media. (shrink)

This corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of news reports on air pollution published from 2008 through 2015 by China Daily, China’s largest official English-language newspaper, reveals a significant attitudinal shift around the end of 2011 as regards public awareness of increasing air pollution levels in China and related public criticism. It also constructs a clear image of the increasing determination and resolve of the Chinese central government over the course of this 8-year period to take action to effectively reduce air pollution. (...) This study highlights the submissive role played by the official Chinese press in their reporting on air pollution under the strict censorship system of the Communist Party of China, as well as the socio-political role that international sporting events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games played in raising both public and governmental awareness of environmental issues. (shrink)

This article offers a critical contribution to the debate on a problematic ‘type’ of injecting drug use referred to as needle fixation. At the heart of this debate, is a questioning of the existence, prevalence and usefulness of the needle fixation concept for academics and drug treatment practitioners working with injecting drug users. The aim of this article is to extend and develop this discussion by examining the historical conditions of the needle fixation discourse. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s concept of (...) governmentality, it uses primary and secondary sources from the 19th century to the present to trace the historical trajectory of the problematic relationship between the injecting drug user, the syringe and truth. By reconceptualizing needle fixation as a technology of government, this article will argue that needle fixation can be seen to be incompatible with contemporary rationalities found in treatment policy and practice, suggesting that we have moved beyond needle fixation as a way of governing injecting drug use and into the domain of risk management. Beyond revealing this tension, the article highlights new lines that are currently being drawn between the injecting drug user, the syringe and truth from the field of neuroscience and the risk-management potential of psychopharmacology. (shrink)

The constitution has clearly provided legal protection toward rights of citizen. Constitutionalism regime contains the idea of power restriction and secures civil rights through constitution. Nevertheless, some places in which agrarian conflicts occur, the ignorance of civil rights seem to be prominent. People living in the forest area of register 45 Mesuji Lampung is the picture of people who, for more than twelve years, are missing their constitutional rights. Local government does not recognize them as resident just because they occupy (...) forest area which its management is delegated to private party. The critical legal studies perspective is constantly examining legal performance with the authority behind the law and the power within a community. Critical legal theory is focusing on the importance of a legal study which not only criticizes the substance of rule but also takes the whole aspect of social life and law into account. Keywords: Agrarian Conflict, Ignorance, Constitutional Rights, Citizen. (shrink)

African philosophy of higher education and its concomitant link to teaching and learning on the continent, is a concept that remains contestable, as much about African thought and practice is presumed to exist in narrative form. However, even if African thought and practice were to have existed in narrative form only, it would not necessarily be justifiable to dismiss an idea of African philosophy of higher education as seminal works by leading African scholars over the last few decades corroborate the (...) significance of higher education in Africa. In this article, I attempt to offer an account of African philosophy of higher education, in particular teaching and learning, underscored by a notion of ubuntu—human interdependence and humaneness—on the grounds that such a view of African thought and practice is constituted by meanings that could engender a credible defense of higher education in Africa. From my analysis of the concept ubuntu, practices such as social responsibility, deliberative engagement, and an attentiveness to others and otherness seem to be most salient in enacting a reconsidered view of African higher education. (shrink)

By questioning the attribution of a primary role to the eyes as bearers of identity within traditional Western culture, this paper will problematize the agentivity performed by the lower mereology of the face, identified with the mouth-nose assemblage. In particular, the study will focus on the manipulation of such facial spatiality through the intervention of three “lower face” artifacts: the grill, the ball gag and the gas mask. This piece of work will examine their plastic and figurative dimensions in the (...) technological interaction with the facial organs. Furthermore, we will take into consideration the sociocultural context of wearability performed by the different bearers with the aim of grasping the identity shift that the artifacts trigger. The study, therefore, will organize the corpus as a sequence that starts inside the oral cavity where the grill is worn; then moves to a progressive exteriority with the ball gag that emerges from the mouth through the straps fastened around the head; eventually dealing with the exterior projection operated by the gas mask which by means of its filters portends beyond the anatomical face. Ultimately the three artifacts are presented as a threefold articulation of a liminal agency towards an expanded form of humanity including animality embedded within and without the space of meaning represented by the face. (shrink)

This article focuses on a specific political ethos of current developed societies, on what we call ‘self-service democracy’. The ethos essentially springs from the technologies, policies, structures and ideas promoting the ‘individualization trend’ in the provision of services as opposed to the allegedly passivizing system of the classical welfare state of the 1970s and the early 1980s. We review the conceptual history of self-service, its current core features, and the forms it has assumed in the political regimes of post-war Western (...) societies. The focus has moved from the services provided by the state to the activities and responsibility of individual citizens and organizations. Consumerist citizenship and personal responsibility, with the assistance of new information technologies, can open up novel channels for interaction and participation, but at the risk of rendering common political concerns into individual matters. The article investigates the political implications of this new emphasis on individualized, self-service-centred governance processes for democracy, and democratic participation and representation in particular. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the possibility of conceiving a form of social critique that has its locus in the human body. Therefore I engage in a close reading of the work of Butler which can be analysed as an elaboration of a Foucaldian critical ‘virtue’. In order to elaborate and to refine my ideas I go deeper into the criticisms McNay has uttered regarding the very impossibility of taking any distance from a given social or political order within a (...) Foucaldian–Butlerian framework. I show that there is no need to have recourse to a phenomenological perspective, as McNay claims, in order to achieve ‘critical distance’. On the contrary, I argue that it is imperative to explore a register of bodily experience that entails self-expropriation and which is linked to an attitude or ‘ethos’ that renounces any judgemental perspective. (shrink)

This article compares the ways in which Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety and Cressida Heyes’ Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalization, unlike current governmentality studies, employ the later Foucault’s ethical theory. By explaining the theoretical framework of the ‘middle’ Foucault and the ‘later’ Foucault and then comparing Mahmood and Heyes’ use of Foucault’s work, it is argued that Mahmood and Heyes’ analyses, though thought-provoking and incisive, overlook aspects of Foucault’s later work, ultimately preventing them from offering productive ‘feminist strategies’. The (...) author seeks to link this discussion to contemporary debates and analyses of agency, freedom and Muslim women in the media. The article concludes with an assessment of how Foucauldian feminist perspectives might be drawn on to establish effective ‘cross-cultural feminist strategies’, and closes by presenting a case of a cross-cultural media strategy aimed at countering the stereotypical images of Muslim women in the media. (shrink)

Dit essay begrijpt het project van Krisis vanuit ‘het epistemologische probleem van de kritische theorie’, namelijk: vanuit welk standpunt is emancipatoire kritiek überhaupt mogelijk? Door de kritische theorie in brede zin op te vatten, worden vormen van politieke contestatie en de theoretisering daarvan die vaak als 'identiteitspolitiek' worden weggezet besproken in relatie tot de vroege denkers van de kritische theorie en het late werk van Foucault over tegengedrag.

This Introduction to the Special Issue of Theory, Culture & Society on Michel Foucault draws out from the papers included the possibilities for new critiques of the present and new directions for the future, both for research in the social sciences and for imagining alternative ways of being. It highlights the innovative aspects of all the papers, and thus demonstrates that, in spite of the shortcomings in Foucault’s work which are picked out in the papers, his explorations of power, subjectivity (...) and what it means to be and to think continue to be relevant as a starting point for a range of reflections about our own times. (shrink)

This article displaces the terrain upon which the question of power in modern societies has been framed by reference to the concept of hegemony. It presents a genealogy of power which pays attention to what has been at stake in the shifts in the effectivity of the concept of hegemony for cultural theory from the 1960s, correlating the mutations in the analyses of power to shifts in the analysis of the relations of culture, politics and the economy. Questions of the (...) relation of internality or externality of power with regard to the governed, and issues of counter-conducts and 'counter-hegemonic' struggles will guide the development of this genealogy. The article brings to bear on the issues the point of view of hybrid forms of sovereignty, such as imperial governmentality and implications relating to the emergence of biopolitics in the 19th century. It is argued that the situation today regarding global governance and new forms of rule compels us to re-examine the problem of consent and consensus by turning to the apparatuses for constituting hybrid publics that work through biomedia and new strategies of securitization and insecuritization. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is continuity in Foucault?s thought, as opposed to the common division of his work into three phases, each marking a distinct field of research - discourse, power, subject. The idea is that there are no radical turns in his work that justify this division; rather, there is a shift of focus: all crucial concepts are present in all periods of his thought and in all of his undoubtedly differently-toned and oriented works. This is shown through (...) examining the characteristics of archaeology and genealogy, their relation, as well as the relation of discursive practices and strategies of power to knowledge. The retrospective and interpretation intend to shed light on the constant interplay between concepts that demonstrate continuity in Foucault?s thought. The viewpoint, based in the integrity of Foucault?s work, offers a better starting point for understanding certain aspects of his theories. (shrink)

Self-cultivation—taking pedagogical action to educate oneself—is an integral part of non-formal adult education. Ever since Greek antiquity, it has been a central ingredient in the western philosophical and educational tradition. However, we argue that the global challenges that have emerged in the present era of the ecological crisis call for a new kind of understanding of this basic educational phenomenon. Based in particular on recent work in dark ecology and its central concept of the ‘uncanny’, we outline a few key (...) features of our time in relation to the contemporary challenge of self-cultivation. We then review extant literature on self-cultivation to ascertain whether the theoretical resources that have been used to conceptualise it in the past are capable of addressing these new aspects of self-cultivation. We conclude that each of the theoretical resources analysed here offer valuable insights into the novel challenges facing self-cultivation, though not all important questions can be answered. By specifying the contributions and limitations of these theoretical resources, we pave the way for future work on conceptualising self-cultivation for our times. (shrink)

This paper examines the prevalence of the ideal of “independence” in intellectual disability care in the Netherlands. It responds to a number of scholars who have interrogated this ideal through the lens of Michel Foucault’s vocabulary of governmentality. Such analyses hold that the goal of “becoming independent” subjects people with intellectual disabilities to various constraints and limitations that ensure their continued oppression. As a result, these authors contend, the commitment to the ideal of “independence” – the “ethic of autonomy” – (...) actually threatens to become an obstacle to flourishing in the group home. This paper offers an alternative analysis. It does so by drawing on a case study taken from an ethnographic study on group home life in the Netherlands. Briefly put, the disagreement stems from differing conceptualizations of moral life. Put in the vocabulary of moral anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly, the authors propose to approach the group home more from a “first-person” perspective rather than chiefly from a “third-person” perspective. They then draw on Mattingly to cast the group home as a “moral laboratory” in which the ethic of autonomy is not just reproduced but also enacted, and in which the terms of (in)dependence constantly get renegotiated in practice. What emerges is not only a new perspective on the workings of the “ethic of autonomy” in the group home, but also an argument about the possible limitations of the vocabulary of governmentality for analysing care practices. (shrink)

This article attempts to draw the scope and content of contemporary Political Theology, based on a review of the 2013 publication titled, Political Theology: Contemporary challenges and future directions, edited by Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Klaus Tanner and Michael Welker. The book is a collection of contributions which explore the contemporary content and potential future of the subject discipline. ‘Political Theology’ as critical theology and as a ‘theology with its face towards the world’ is committed to ‘justice, peace and the integrity (...) of creation’ and is multifaceted. It represents a discipline with which theologians reflect on political-theological objectives across continents and paradigms. The article concludes with a brief investigation of the implications of insights offered in the book for the South African context. (shrink)

Profiling technologies are the facilitating force behind the vision of Ambient Intelligence in which everyday devices are connected and embedded with all kinds of smart characteristics enabling them to take decisions in order to serve our preferences without us being aware of it. These technological practices have considerable impact on the process by which our personhood takes shape and pose threats like discrimination and normalisation. The legal response to these developments should move away from a focus on entitlements to personal (...) data, towards making transparent and controlling the profiling process by which knowledge is produced from these data. The tendency in intellectual property law to commodify information embedded in software and profiles could counteract this shift to transparency and control. These rights obstruct the access and contestation of the design of the code that impacts one’s personhood. This triggers a political discussion about the public nature of this code and forces us to rethink the relations between property, privacy and personhood in the digital age. (shrink)

This article examines how incidents are governed in a Belgian Nuclear Research Center by way of an incident reporting system named Retour d’Experiences. Drawing on a documentary analysis of incident reports, interviews, and focus groups with personnel, it illustrates how REX enacts a safety governmentality centered on identifying incident causes and culprits. As this governmentality mode obscures the epistemic and political character of incidents, it closes down important opportunities for collective learning about safety and safety governance. It is argued that (...) joint reflection about incidents and resistances toward incident reporting serve as fruitful starting points for a more reflexive safety governance that makes explicit how decisions are made in high-risk contexts. Social scientists can enhance governance of this kind by pointing to different perceptions and evaluations of incidents and by insisting that contending interpretations are confronted and accounted for. (shrink)

This paper investigates the roles that Danish government has played in the development of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Denmark has emerged as a first mover among the Scandinavian countries when it comes to CSR. We argue that government has played a pivotal role in making this happen, and that this reflects strong traditions of regulation, corporatism and active state involvement. However, there is no unitary “Danish model of CSR” being promoted by government. Although Danish society is often associated with a (...) model of consensus, our claim is that Danish government policy on CSR is characterized by a lack of common direction and that we need to approach it on such terms. In order to provide a critical account of ‘the Danish model’ we apply a governmentality perspective that allows us to stress political difference. We argue that Danish government policy consists of three distinct regimes of practice and show how they subject CSR to different modes of rationalization and action. We conclude that the problem with public policy being split into three is not different as such, but the failure of each regime to recognize the value of the others. As a result, government tends to add to the confusion and opaqueness of CSR. (shrink)

The digital game Dog's Life (Frontier Developments, 2003) attempts, by means of its “Smellovision” feature, to communicate something of the alterity of canine perception: the greater field of view, the lower visual perspective, the dichromatic colour vision, as well as the spectacularly impressive sense of smell. At the same time, it encourages players to identify with the game's protagonist: you “are” Jake, digging up bones, marking territory and chasing chickens, as you make your way through the developing narrative. In this (...) essay I argue that Dog's Life effectively comprises an “anti-environment” of the sort described by McLuhan, which altercasts players as dogs and thereby prompts them to notice conventional, anthroponormative assumptions regarding the pre-eminence of human modes of perception. By insisting on an experience both of alterity and identity, the digital game medium here combats clichéd notions of animality and subjectivity, whilst requiring players to reconsider the complex and uneven nature of interspecific, interpersonal control. (shrink)

This article seeks to provide a set of pointers for methodological reflections on Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the exercise of power. Michel Foucault deliberately eschewed methodological schemata, which may be why so little has been written on the methodological implications of his analyses. While this article shares the premise that we should refrain from a standardized methodology, it argues that providing broad pointers for analyses informed by the critical ambition and conceptual framework offered by Foucault is both desirable and possible. The (...) article then offers some reflections and general guidelines on how to strengthen the methodological quality of Foucauldian analyses. We argue that the quality of Foucauldian-inspired analysis of modern power may gain from methodological reflections around four pointers: curiosity, nominalism, conceptual grounding and exemplarity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: With this article, I advance a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability. I argue that Foucault’s insights offer the most astute tools with which to engage in this intellectual enterprise. Genealogy, the technique of investigation that Friedrich Nietzsche famously introduced and that Foucault took up and adapted in his own work, demonstrates that Foucault’s historicist approach has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for analyses of disability than his critics in disability studies have thus far recognized. I show (...) how a feminist philosophy of disability that employs Foucault’s technique of genealogy avoids ahistorical, teleological, and transcultural assumptions that beleaguer much work in disability studies. The article also situates feminist philosophical work on disability squarely in age-old debates in (Eurocentric) Western philosophy about universalism vs. relativism, materialism vs. idealism, realism vs. nominalism, and freewill vs. determinism, as well as contributes to ongoing discussions in (Western) feminist philosophy and theory about (among other things) essentialism vs. constructivism, identity, race, sexuality, agency, and experience. (shrink)

This article is a feminist intervention into the ways that disability is researched and represented in philosophy at present. Nevertheless, some of the claims that I make over the course of the article are also pertinent to the marginalization in philosophy of other areas of inquiry, including philosophy of race, feminist philosophy more broadly, indigenous philosophies, and LGBTQI philosophy. Although the discipline of philosophy largely continues to operate under the guise of neutrality, rationality, and objectivity, the institutionalized structure of the (...) discipline implicitly and explicitly promotes certain ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies as bona fide philosophy, while casting the ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies of marginalized philosophies as mere simulacra of allegedly fundamental ways of knowing and doing philosophy and thus rendering these marginalized philosophies more or less expendable. This article is designed to show that legitimized philosophical discourses are vital mechanisms in the problematization of disability. (shrink)

Male-dominated and sex segregated elite professional and amateur sport1 in North America constitutes a "sport nexus" (Burstyn, 1999; Heywood & Dworkin, 2003) that combines economic and cultural influence to reinforce and perpetuate gender injustice. The sport nexus is an androcentric sex-segregated commercially powerful set of institutions that is highly visible and at the same time almost completely taken for granted to the extent that its anti-democratic impetus goes virtually unnoticed. The sport nexus’s hegemonic role in defining sporting norms (Coakley & (...) Donnelly, 2004) means that its role in shaping lower level amateur and recreational sporting institutions and cultures is highly significant. Fraser (2007) defines gender justice, and hence democracy, in terms of "participatory parity," that is, material and cultural equality for women. The sport nexus itself is characterized by highly gendered occupational segregation (Coventry, 2004). It further contributes to gender injustice, homophobia and transphobia by promoting the ideology of the two sex system (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and gendering citizenship as fundamentally male (Burstyn, 1999). Feminist strategies for sport reformation attempt to reduce or eradicate the role of the sport nexus in legitimating and perpetuating gender injustice. In this article I consider the potential of these strategies and conclude with a set of recommendations for transforming organized sport at both elite and recreational levels. (shrink)

This article considers neoliberalism through the “peaceful violence” of its social spaces that are stratified and ordered around raciality whilst abjuring the explicit presence of racialised power. Many dominant analyses of neoliberalism in the social science have figured racial injustices as ideological fossils to be swept away by a fundamentally neutral political economy that has shaped all human activity according to market principles. As such, racial injustices are understood as material deviations from conditions of economic power on the one hand, (...) and cultural deviations in hegemonic common sense on the other. Against the grain of these approaches, I argue that racialised power is better understood as a productive technology fundamental to the structuring of our worlds, their neoliberal organisation just one iteration of ongoing coloniality. Contrary to popular analysis and this account of neoliberalism, contemporary racialised violence and nationalist discourse are, therefore, not only consistent with the power of neoliberal classes but also result from weaknesses in their hegemonic power. (shrink)

This article considers neoliberalism through the “peaceful violence” of its social spaces that are stratified and ordered around raciality whilst abjuring the explicit presence of racialised power. Many dominant analyses of neoliberalism in the social science have figured racial injustices as ideological fossils to be swept away by a fundamentally neutral political economy that has shaped all human activity according to market principles. As such, racial injustices are understood as material deviations from conditions of economic power on the one hand, (...) and cultural deviations in hegemonic common sense on the other. Against the grain of these approaches, I argue that racialised power is better understood as a productive technology fundamental to the structuring of our worlds, their neoliberal organisation just one iteration of ongoing coloniality. Contrary to popular analysis and this account of neoliberalism, contemporary racialised violence and nationalist discourse are, therefore, not only consistent with the power of neoliberal classes but also result from weaknesses in their hegemonic power. (shrink)

This article considers neoliberalism through the “peaceful violence” of its social spaces that are stratified and ordered around raciality whilst abjuring the explicit presence of racialised power. Many dominant analyses of neoliberalism in the social science have figured racial injustices as ideological fossils to be swept away by a fundamentally neutral political economy that has shaped all human activity according to market principles. As such, racial injustices are understood as material deviations from conditions of economic power on the one hand, (...) and cultural deviations in hegemonic common sense on the other. Against the grain of these approaches, I argue that racialised power is better understood as a productive technology fundamental to the structuring of our worlds, their neoliberal organisation just one iteration of ongoing coloniality. Contrary to popular analysis and this account of neoliberalism, contemporary racialised violence and nationalist discourse are, therefore, not only consistent with the power of neoliberal classes but also result from weaknesses in their hegemonic power. (shrink)

In recent years a number of writers have defended and attacked various features of structural, or neo-realist theories of international politics. Few, however, have quarrelled with one of the most foundational features of neorealist theory: its assumptions about the nature of science and scientific theories. In this essay I assess the views of science underlying much neorealist theory, especially as they are articulated in the work of Kenneth Waltz. I argue not only that neorealist theories rest on assumptions about science (...) and theory that have been questioned by postpositivist philosophers and historians of science, but also that the failure to consider the work of these writers yields theories of international politics that are deficient in several respects: they are weak theories in the sense that they cannot illuminate crucial features of international politics, they presuppose and sustain a narrow view of power and power relations, they reify practices and relations in the international arena and they offer little promise of producing the sort of Copernican Revolution for which Waltz called (or, more modestly, even a minimally satisfactory theory of international politics). In light of these shortcomings, I sketch an alternative approach to the study of international affairs, one that has been termed prototype studies. I contend that such an approach provides scholars with a rigorous way of studying international politics, without being a theoretical science. (shrink)