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Foucault

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Schedule and Expectations, Presentations Mobility, Neoliberalism, and Worlds in Motion: Play, Travel and Knowing Foucault Appadurai (+ Yasmeen) Valentine & Holloway – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Foucault


1
Schedule and Expectations, Presentations
Mobility, Neoliberalism, and Worlds in Motion
Play, Travel and Knowing
Foucault Appadurai ( Yasmeen) Valentine
Holloway Michele, de Castell Jenson
2
Plan about 15 minutes of Presentation, Bring your
Top three Questions, Make good use of your peers
to get feedback, and pull apart conceptual
problems -- your unhelpfully grey areas.
Mary Paulina
Linda Michele
Dai Pearl
Rachel Indira
Yasmeen Valerie
Jocelyne Gordon
3
Mobility, Neoliberalism, and Worlds in Motion
Play, Travel and Knowing
4
Foucault and Subjectivity.
  • A History and Critique of Reason.
  • Foucault in this tradition.
  • Examines historical circumstances that gave rise
    to the modern type of person.
  • Madness, Punishment, Government, and Sexuality
    and subjectivity.
  • Linked to his history of the subject is a history
    and critique of reason.
  • Critique of the Enlightenment

5
Knowledge as a new form of power.
  • Knowledge, for Foucault, doesnt develop in a
    vacuum.
  • Inextricably linked to emergence of institutions.
  • Knowledges involve doing things with bodies.
  • They invade the self-determination of the
    individual body.
  • Power of rational expert invades/ moulds/ shapes
    the individual body

6
Governmentality, Science, Knowledge and Power.
  • Statistics - make it possible to think in an
    entirely new way .
  • Government impossible without statistics.
  • Counting, classifying and recording of people
  • People and populations a new object of analysis
    and manipulation.
  • Sociology can be conceived of as part of this
    tradition.
  • For Foucault the state is not a thing - a single
    centre of power- it is the accumulation of many
    centres of governmental expertise.

7
Technologies of the Self.
  • Normalisation through sexuality -one aspect of a
    wider process that Foucault calls the development
    of technologies of the self.
  • Great projects of objectification, knowledge and
    normalisation turned inwards into a project of
    self mastery, self discipline and self control.
  • A technology of the self.

8
An historical shift in the nature of social
identities.
  • Pre-modern identities emphasise membership of
    collectivities
  • Modern forms of identity emphasise the importance
    of the subjects ability to articulate and reflect
    upon private experience.

9
Issues Questions Raised by reading Foucault.
  • How are we merely products of an exercise of
    power that we dont always recognise?
  • Are we better off for this discipline?
  • Power is not just something that represses.
  • Power produces things, it produces the insane, it
    produces, the delinquent, it produces sexuality,
    and it produces the free, rational subject.
  • The Enlightenment linkage between knowledge,
    removal of power, and emancipation - that runs
    through German Idealism, Marxism, the Frankfurt
    School and so on - is broken.
  • Whats left? (of agency, subjectivity)

10
Ubiquitous mobility
Everyone it seems has the ability to be mobile
and networked these days, even some groups who we
do not typically associate with mobility Read
the article Call to give the homeless broadband
http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4396372.stm
How do you think that social exclusion is
impacted by being on the wrong side of the
digital divide?
11
You may have heard of the wandering scribe, a
homeless women living in her car whose blog has
found an international audience Read about her
in the article Park and write by Sean
Coughlin http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4923
488.stm It's a tale of our time - about being
cut off from everything around you but still
connected to people thousands of miles away
12
Liz Jensens (2001) novel The Paper Eater
begins thus If theres one thing to be said
about life in captivity, its that you get to
travel. This sentence juxtaposes two images
that dont normally go together prisoners and
mobility Recently, it has come to light that
the US has been sending terrorist suspects to be
interrogated in countries where torture is often
used on prisoners (so-called rendition
flights) Read the article CIA jails
allegations http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ame
ricas/4495730.stm
13
Networks, flows and mobility
  • Networks, flows, and mobility are some of the
    most important ideas associated with
    globalization, and some of the biggest themes
    right now in the social sciences
  • Today, we will focus on three theoretical
    approaches
  • Manuel Castells work on network society
  • Arjun Appadurais work on scapes and flows
  • John Urrys work on mobility

14
Castells on globalization
For Castells, networks are a key feature of
globalization. Networks have no centre, but
consist of nodes and linkages. A world of
nation-states (space of places) has been replaced
by a world of networks (space of flows)
Dominant networks are those of global
capital, management, and information The
network state is the response of political
systems to the challenges of globalization. The
European Union may be the clearest manifestation
of this emerging form of state (Castells 2000
364)
15
Read an excellent interview with Castells
entitled Identity and change in the network
society Parts 4,5,6 of the interview are most
relevant to this lecture The interview can be
found at http//globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/
Castells/castells-con0.html
Castells on network society
16
Castells on the network society
Read a short essay by Castells on The network
society at www.jmk.su.se/global99/carin/netwsoc
.html The network society is a capitalist
society. This brand of capitalism is different
from its historical predecessors. It is global
and it is structured around a network of
financial flows
17
Urry on mobility
John Urry argues that the idea of society is
no longer as useful as it once was Trans-nationa
l networks and the flows of people, money, and
information mean that it is mobility that we
should be studying He looks at the example of
airports increasingly air terminals are
becoming like cities, and in the frisk society
cities are becoming like airports (Urry, 2004
32) What do you think he means by the frisk
society? Read Urrys article on new
mobilities at www.sfb536.mwn.de/veranstaltungen/
B3_Workshop_0104_Dokumentation.pdf
18
Why staying at home is the new going out
Zygmunt Bauman (1998 77) says that nowadays we
are all on the move We are on the move even
when we are at home we are glued to our
chairs and zap the cable or satellite channels
jumping in and out of foreign spaces with a
speed much beyond the capacity of supersonic
jets and cosmic rockets, but nowhere staying
long enough to be more than visitors Do you
think he is suggesting that too much mobility
means that we are never really at home?
19
Appadurai is best known for the idea of scapes
outlined in his essay Disjuncture and difference
in the global cultural economy (Appadurai,
1990) Under conditions of globalization economy,
culture, and politics can no longer exist in
unity, as they did within the nation-state You
can read an except on this theme by Appadurai
at www.intcul.tohoku.ac.jp/holden/MediatedSocie
ty/Readings/2003_04/Appadurai.html
Arjun Appadurai
To Yasmeens .ppt/facilitation
20
Valentine and Holloway Overview
  • Valentine and Holloway weave together an
    examination of how on-line and off-line worlds
    are integrated and interdependent in young
    peoples lives. The relationship between these
    spaces is often posed in a zero/sum game in which
    time spent with the former detracts from and
    reduces young peoples engagements with the
    latter. They suggest this simplifies the way
    young people move back and forth between these
    spaces and the interdependencies between each
    realm. Centrally, the article is an challenge to
    those who are either simplistic boosters or
    detractors about the role of ICTs in childrens
    lives. To take one or the other of these
    positions, they argue, is to interpret ICTs in
    terms of older narratives that have typically
    surrounded the development of new technologies.
    This underestimates the way ICTs are used and
    absorbed into students lives and the way such
    technologies might act as a catalyst for change.

21
Utopian/Dystopian Thinking
  • A great deal of utopian thinking surrounded the
    early development of ICTs.
  • In conjunction with this, fear-mongering
    suggested potential threats from this technology
  • Children are at the centre of these debates

22
The Problem
  • Little is still known about how children actually
    employ ICTs within the context of their everyday
    lives
  • Because children remain relatively
    under-researched and there are few empirical
    studies of peoples actual use of ICTs

23
Boosters
  • Delivers users from constraints of physical
    bodies/material limitations, offering users
    utopian possibilities to create and play with
    on-line identities (304)
  • Creates new forms of social relationships that
    are potentially global in reach. This allows for
    the development of more genuine relationships
    because they are formed on the basis of genuine
    interests
  • It is a hyperrealization of the real all the
    best features are accelerated and made easier to
    access a zone of freedom, fluidity, and
    experimentation that is insulated from the
    mundane external realities of the material world
    (304)

24
Detractors
  • The virtual is a bad imitation of the real world
    disembodied identities are inauthentic and
    on-line communication is commodified, privatized
    and individualized in contrast to the more
    communal forms of face-to-face communication
    (304).
  • Invites people to become detached from the social
    world, removed from full human experiences
  • Children in particular are threatened they turn
    away from the real, withdraw from social life
    and social space
  • The real is a fragile world under threat from
    the lure of the virtual (304)

25
Theoretical Framework
  • Premised on a rejection of the real/virtual and
    the booster/detractor dichotomies
  • Working with a dialectic of technology where
    humans are understood to be inextricably
    entwined with our material surroundings, to the
    point that we need to recast the social to
    include nonhumans (306).
  • This principle underlies Actor Network Theory
    where society is produced in and through
    patterned networks of heterogeneous materials in
    which the properties of humans and nonhumans are
    not self-evident but rather emerge in practice
    (306) See my example of film and vision in our
    online discussion.

26
Theoretical Frame Cont
  • Computers are envisioned as things that
    materialize for children as diverse social
    practices We recognize that computers may
    play different roles within childrens different
    communities of practice and so emerge as very
    different tools, depending on the way different
    communities of practice make use of them.

27
The Study
  • ICTs allow children to reconfigure their social
    relationships and identities in on-line spaces
    (313).
  • The anonymity of virtual spaces allows children
    to produce on-line spaces separate from their
    off-line worlds.
  • But off-line worlds still impact on-line
    identities. In fact, these identity spaces are
    interconnected.
  • Suggest four ways children incorporate off-line
    into on-line worlds
  • childrens on-line identities directly re-present
    off-line selves and activities
  • even when children make up new identities on-line
    these often depend on off-line identifies and
    communities
  • on-line identity worlds reproduce class/gender
    relations
  • economic and temporal realities limit affect how
    kids can be on-line

28
The Study II
  • Childrens virtual worlds are incorporated into
    their real worlds because
  • Children use on-line activities to maintain and
    reconfigure distant and local off-line
    relationships/friendships.
  • Kids use ICTs to find info about their off-line
    hobbies and interests
  • Kids talk on-line about their off-line interests
    and make virtual friends
  • Participation with ICTs can reconfigure kids
    off-line identities in positive and negative ways.

29
Conclusion
  • The Internet-connected PC does not have any
    inherent properties or universal impacts. Rather,
    it emerges as a very different tool for different
    groups of children in what we might call
    communities of practice (316)

30
What are scapes?
The term scapes indicates that the cultural
flows that Appadurai is talking about are
perspectival constructs rather than fixed
relations Flows and scapes impact on people in
different ways Different actors (governments,
businesses, individuals) will have different
perceptions of their place within global processes
31
  • According to Appadurai there are five scapes
    which constitute the shifting political terrain
    and endless mobility of a world in motion
  • ethnoscapes people in motion migrants,
    tourists, refugees
  • mediascapes media images of the world
  • technoscapes transborder communications
  • finacescapes global flows of capital
  • ideoscapes conflicts between state and non-state
    ideologies

32
The key thing about these scapes is that they
show a world in which it is not possible for
economy, politics, culture to fit together
easily It is the disjunctures between these
elements that facilitate global
flows Appaduarai points to a world of
fragmentation and uncertainty, but also to the
imagining of new political possibilities
33
The importance of imagination
  • Imagination is the means by which individuals
    connect with new global possibilities.
    Imagination is no longer
  • fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is
    elsewhere)
  • escape (from a world defined principally by more
    concrete purposes and structures)
  • an elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives
    of ordinary people)
  • Imagination is now central to all forms of
    agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key
    component of the new global order (Appadurai,
    1996 31)
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