Exception? What exception? Foucault’s state of convention
- Authors: Eyssens, Terry
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Paper presented at Foucault : 25 years on : A conference hosted by the Centre for Post-colonial and Globalisation Studies, Adelaide, South Australia : 25th June 2009
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- Description: 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 antifoundationalist 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.
- Description: 2003008018
'You're no-one if you're not a netball girl': Rural and regional living adolescent girls' negotiation of physically active identities
- Authors: Mooney, Amanda , Casey, Meghan , Smyth, John
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Annals of Leisure Research Vol. 15, no. 1 (2012), p. 19-37
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP0990206
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Despite the widely articulated health implications of physical inactivity, declines in youth participation levels, particularly for adolescent girls, have fuelled social and moral panics about the importance of regular physical activity. Recent attempts to explain these participation trends have focused on the institutional and cultural discourses that are drawn on to construct particular identities and social practices connected with sport, physical education and leisure interests. In this paper we report on the findings of data collected through interview and focus group sessions with 138 females ranging from 14 to 16 years of age across six rural and regional communities in the state of Victoria, Australia. Adopting a feminist poststructuralist methodology and drawing on the work of Foucault, we explore the impact that dominant discourse-power relations operating in the context of rural and regional sport and physical education can have in the negotiation of physically active identities for adolescent girls.
'Power, regulation and physically active identities' : the experiences of rural and regional living adolescent girls
- Authors: Casey, Meghan , Mooney, Amanda , Smyth, John , Payne, Warren
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Gender and Education Vol. 28, no. 1 (2016), p. 108-127
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP0990206
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- Reviewed:
- Description: Drawing on interpretations of Foucault's techniques of power, we explored the discourses and power relations operative between groups of girls that appeared to influence their participation in Physical Education (PE) and outside of school in sport and physical activity (PA) in rural and regional communities. Interviews and focus groups were conducted in eight secondary schools with female students from Year 9 (n = 22) and 10 (n = 116). Dominant gendered and performance discourses were active in shaping girls' construction of what it means to be active or sporty', and these identity positions were normalised and valued. The perceived and real threat of their peer's gaze as a form of surveillance acted to further perpetuate the power of performance discourses; whereby girls measured and (self) regulated their participation. Community settings were normalised as being exclusively for skilled performers and girls self-regulated their non-participation according to judgements made about their own physical abilities. These findings raise questions about the ways in which power relations, as forged in broader sociocultural and institutional discourse-power relations, can infiltrate the level of the PE classroom to regulate and normalise practices in relation to their, and others, PA participation.
Schoolchildren, governmentality and national e-safety policy discourse. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education.
- Authors: Hope, Andrew
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education Vol. 36, no. 3 (2015), p. 343-353
- Full Text: false
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- Description: The introduction of widespread school Internet access in industrialised countries has been accompanied by the materialisation of what can be labelled as a national school e-safety agenda. Drawing upon Foucault's notions of discourse and governmentality, this paper explores how e-safety policy documents serve to constrain the conceptual environment, seeking to determine and limit individuals' thoughts on this matter. Analysing UK and US government texts, it is argued that four main themes arise that subvert critical, informed debate about children online. Namely, the discursive construction of e-kids, the muting of schoolchildren's voices, the responsibilisation of students and ‘diagnostic inflation’ through realist risk discourses. These issues can be interpreted as an attempt to engender control through particular strategies of governmentality. While recognising that students may resist such attempts at control, it is concluded that the issue of children's digital rights need to be more prominent in e-safety policies.
Advocates or corporates : constructions of clinical nursing practice in Australia with regards to the idealisation of advocacy and autonomy
- Authors: Cole, Clare
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- Description: Although the idealisation of nurses as advocates is popularised in nursing literature and supported within nursing frameworks, codes and standards, there has been little critical examination of these ideas within contemporary Australian healthcare settings and nursing practice. The Australian Healthcare system is a complicated system of interacting service providers and consumers. Institutions that regulate healthcare professionals and organisations normalise understandings of nursing and nursing practice, including conceptualisations of the importance of autonomy and advocacy and how each is to be supported and/or practised. This study used the perceptions of practising Registered Nurses (RNs) to examine the actualities of advocacy and support for autonomy as they are carried out within clinical practice, and to highlight, problematise and then analyse differences between the rhetoric and realities of practice. Firstly, a phenomenological lens, including an ethnographic model of observation, was used to thematically map and examine the RNs’ lived experience of their practice, paying particular attention to their conceptions of and responsibilities toward advocacy and autonomy. This thematic analysis brought to the fore a range of assumptions that, although clearly normative within nursing practice, are in evident tension with one other. These were then re-examined using a range of Michel Foucault’s concepts concerning the construction and maintenance of regimes of truth. Designed to unpack the operations of power and knowledge, and to make visible the techniques of disciplinarity and governmentality that inform and support them, an engagement of these concepts has allowed this thesis to critically examine the normative constructions and enactments of nursing practice with regards to ideas and practices concerning advocacy and autonomy. What this thesis provides is a detailed examination of the contrasting constructions of power and knowledge within nursing practice in relation to advocacy and autonomy, how and why these concepts have been operationalised within nursing practice, and how they could be re-visioned into the future.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy