Michel Foucault/Reading group

"Here we seek to describe how power seeps into the very grain of individuals, reaches right inside their bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work with other people” (Foucault: 1979: 28)"

A reading group for discussion of Michel Foucault's Governmentality.

If you are interested in these events, please add your name to the participants list at the event you'd like to attend.

Meetings
Unpacking neo-liberal technologies of government in Australian higher education social work departments Journal of Social Work April 2011 11: 222-236, doi:10.1177/1468017310386696 Article can be found at -http://jsw.sagepub.com/content/11/2.author-index “ I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring a work, a book, a sentence, and idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes ‐ all the better. Criticism that hands down sentences send[s]me to sleep; I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms”. (Foucault, 1997:323)
 * /27 May 2011/ - Professions and experts- University of Canberra Teaching Commons 10.00 am - 12.00 noon
 * /13 April 2011/ - The Birth of Bio Politics
 * /23 February 2011/ - Starting the reading group
 * 27th of June 2011 in Teaching Commons at 10.00 am/ - Reading by Bay, Uschi
 * 25th of July 2011 in Teaching Commons at 10.00 am/ Reading by Bent Flyvbjerg, "Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for Civil Society?" British Journal of Sociology, vol. 49, no. 2, June 1998, 208–233. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foucault/Habermas_debate
 * August date TBA - I was thinking we might have a discussion around this quote

Current reading list

 * 1) Johnson, T. 1993 "Expertise and the State" in Gane, M and Johnson T (eds) Foucault's New Domains. London:Routledge. I am trying to find out how to download the pdf file!!

Related readings

 * 1) Ivan Illich, 1978. Disabling Professions
 * 2) Raymond Geuss on Real Politics - Philosophy Bites Sun, 19 October 2008. Raymond Geuss wants political philosophers to focus on real politics rather than abstract notions. In this interview with Nigel Warburton for Philosophy Bites he explains why he believes philosophers such as Robert Nozick and John Rawls were fundamentally misguided in the way they approached political philosophy.

Introductory resources

 * Foucault: 25 years on - A conference hosted by the Centre for Post-colonial and Globalisation Studies, Adelaide, 25 June 2009. Proceedings Edited by Ian Goodwin-Smith. Published online by the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, Underdale, SA, 2009. These conference proceedings have been peer reviewed. ISBN 978-0-86803-827-8
 * Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 1 of 7 A series of audio recording published to Youtube. This is the first in a series of three lectures in which French philosopher Michel Foucault examines Western culture's conceptual development of individual subjectivity. He gave these lectures, in English, at UC Berkeley, beginning on April 12, 1983, roughly a year before he died. There are some negligable distortions in the tape. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/