Foucault: 25 Years On
Forthcoming Foucault conference at the University of South Australia on June 25 2009
For more information see: http://www.unisa.edu.au/hawkeinstitute/cps/news.asp
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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