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2,273
result(s) for
"Governmentality"
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Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective
2017
This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other. (Race, language ideologies, colonialism, governmentality, enregisterment, structural inequality)*
Journal Article
Forced governmentality: from technology to techne
2023
‘Success replaces legitimacy’ (Foucault, 2004). This assertion serves as the premise for this paper, exploring corporations that accept responsibility—or are being forced to take responsibility—for certain public issues because they are successful and, therefore, are seen as legitimate actors in the defence of individual rights in the digital age. Specifically, this paper extends the theoretical utility of applying a Foucauldian perspective of governmentality to the corporation, as set out in Collier and Whitehead’s (2021) Corporate Governmentality: Building the Empirical and Theoretical Case. In particular we seek to extend one of the Collier and Whitehead’s proposed typologies: forced governmentality. Using the Foucauldian analytical language of governmentality, it is possible to illuminate aspects of corporate governmental ambition that were previously unavailable through the current discourses. The crux of the issue consists of modern technologies that create governmental problems but are governed by the companies that created them. Consequently, the private sector actors that contribute to the creation technological problems are being forced to manage related action spaces. Using Facebook as a case study, this paper identifies the characteristics of forced governmentality through a critical reading of Mark Zuckerberg’s Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement.
Journal Article
Subjectivity as a site of struggle: refusing neoliberalism?
This paper extends the author's previous enquiries and discussions of governmentality and neoliberal policy technologies in a number of ways. The paper explores the specificity and generality of performativity as a particular contemporary mode of power relations. It addresses our own imbrication in the politics of performative truths, through our ordinary everyday life and work. The paper is about the here and now, us, you and me, and who we are in neoliberal education. It draws upon and considers a set of ongoing email exchanges with a small group of teachers who are struggling with performativity. It enters the 'theoretical silence' of governmentality studies around the issues of resistance and contestation. Above all, the paper attempts to articulate the risks of refusal through Foucault's notion of fearless speech or truth-telling (parrhesia).
Journal Article
The digital turn in postcolonial urbanism: Smart citizenship in the making of India's 100 smart cities
2018
The smart city as a “digital turn” in critical urban geography has gone largely unnoticed in postcolonial urbanism. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of new forms of postcolonial citizenship at the intersection of digital and urban publics. In particular, I investigate the production of a “smart citizen” in India's 100 smart cities challenge – a state‐run inter‐urban competition that seeks to transform 100 existing cities through ICT‐driven urbanism. By examining the publicly available documents and online citizen consultations as well as observations of stakeholder workshops in four of the proposed smart cities, I illustrate how a global technocratic imaginary of “smart citizenship” exists alongside its vernacular translation of a “chatur citizen” – a politically engaged citizen rooted in multiple publics and spatialities. This takes place through three key processes – enumerations, performances and breaches. Enumerations are coercions by the state of an urban population that has so far been largely hidden from analogue technologies of governance and governmentality. Articulations are the performances of smart citizenship across digital and material domains that ironically extend historic social inequalities from the urban to the digital realm. Finally, breaches are the ruptures of the impenetrable technocratic walls around the global smart city, which provides a window into alternative and possible futures of postcolonial citizenship in India. Through these three processes, I argue that subaltern citizenship in the postcolony exists not in opposition, but across urban and digital citizenships. I conclude by offering the potential of a future postcolonial citizen who opens up entangled performances of compliance and connivance, authority and insecurity, visibility and indiscernibility across political, social, urban and digital publics.
Journal Article
FOREST POLITICS: (POST)FOUCAULDIAN SUBJECTIVITY, THE GENEALOGY OF RESISTANCE, AND ARBORISM
2025
The article proposes a Foucauldian genealogy of the forest as a political, ethical and ontological subject. By tracing the historical role of forests as active agents in human resistance in Slovenia, the discursive and institutional formations that govern them, along with the ideological system of “arborism” – a culturally embedded hierarchy among tree species analogous to carnism within speciesism – forests are reconceptualised in this article not merely as ecological spaces but as sites and subjects of power, resistance, and cultural-value production. Drawing on posthumanist, ecological and decolonial thought, an expanded view of subjectivity is called for that includes the forest as a co-constitutive agent in human and nonhuman histories. Keywords: Forest Subjectivity, Governmentality, Biopolitics, Arborism, Environmental Political Science.
Journal Article
Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital
2017
This article examines the contemporary embrace of feminism by the mainstream media and among high-powered women. I begin by showing that not only is a neoliberal variant of feminism on the rise but that this feminism is producing a new form of neoliberal governmentality for middle-class women, one based on careful planning and smart self-investments in the present to ensure enhanced returns in the future. Providing two representative examples-the glorification of college hookup culture and the new technology of egg freezing being offered as part of corporations’ benefits packages-I demonstrate how upwardly mobile middle-class women are being encouraged to invest in their professions first and to postpone maternity until some later point. By encouraging these women to build their own portfolio and to self-invest in the years once thought of as the most fertile, I further suggest that neoliberal feminism is increasingly interpellating middle-class women as human capital. Yet, given that reproduction continues to present a stumbling block in this conversion process, reproduction and care work are increasingly being outsourced to other women deemed disposable because not properly responsibilized. Hence, the emergent neoliberal feminism not only forsakes the majority of women by splitting female subjecthood into the few worthy capital-enhancing female subjects and the disavowed rest, it also facilitates the creation of new and intensified forms of racialized and class-stratified gender exploitation.
Journal Article
GOVERNING THROUGH ENGAGEMENT: EUROPEAN CLIMATE PACT AMBASSADORS AND THE POSTPOLITICAL GREEN TRANSITION
2025
The article critically examines European Climate Pact Ambassadors as a concrete mechanism launched by the European Commission as part of the European Green Deal framework. Through an analytical Foucauldian eco-governmentality approach and discursive analysis of 839 ambassador profiles, the study investigates two key aspects. First, it demonstrates how the ambassadorship does not merely function as a support tool, but as a mechanism of power that exercises governance through a post-political form. Second, the research reveals how the Ambassadors construct environmental and climate problem-solution frameworks that reinforce neoliberal economic rationalities, depoliticise the green transition, and systematically constrain alternative possibilities for ecological action. Keywords: European Climate Pact, ambassadors, eco-governmentality, discourse, post-politics.
Journal Article
Algorithms, Governance, and Governmentality: On Governing Academic Writing
2016
Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls \"social sorting.\" Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin.
Journal Article
The COVID-19 office in transition: cost, efficiency and the social responsibility business case
2020
PurposeThis study aims to critically evaluate the COVID-19 and future post-COVID-19 impacts on office design, location and functioning with respect to government and community occupational health and safety expectations. It aims to assess how office efficiency and cost control agendas intersect with corporate social accountability.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically informed by governmentality and social accountability through action, it thematically examines research literature and Web-based professional and business reports. It undertakes a timely analysis of historical office trends and emerging practice discourse during the COVID-19 global pandemic's early phase.FindingsCOVID-19 has induced a transition to teleworking, impending office design and configuration reversals and office working protocol re-engineering. Management strategies reflect prioritisation choices between occupational health and safety versus financial returns. Beyond formal accountability reports, office management strategy and rationales will become physically observable and accountable to office staff and other parties.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research must determine the balance of office change strategies employed and their evident focus on occupational health and safety or cost control and financial returns. Further investigation can reveal the relationship between formal reporting and observed activities.Practical implicationsOrganisations face strategic decisions concerning both their balancing of employee and public health and safety against capital expenditure and operation cost commitments to COVID-19 transmission prevention. They also face strategic accountability decisions as to the visibility and correspondence between their observable actions and their formal social responsibility reporting.Social implicationsOrganisations have continued scientific management office cost reduction strategies under the guise of innovative office designs. This historic trend will be tested by a pandemic, which calls for control of its spread, including radical changes to the office at potentially significant cost.Originality/valueThis paper presents one of few office studies in the accounting research literature, recognising it as central to contemporary organisational functioning and revealing the office cost control tradition as a challenge for employee and community health and safety.
Journal Article
Algorithmic Censorship by Social Platforms: Power and Resistance
2021
Effective content moderation by social platforms is both important and difficult; numerous issues arise from the volume of information, the culturally sensitive and contextual nature of that information, and the nuances of human communication. Attempting to scale moderation, social platforms are increasingly adopting automated approaches to suppressing communications that they deem undesirable. However, this brings its own concerns. This paper examines the structural effects of algorithmic censorship by social platforms to assist in developing a fuller understanding of the risks of such approaches to content moderation. This analysis shows that algorithmic censorship is distinctive for two reasons: (1) in potentially bringing all communications carried out on social platforms within reach and (2) in potentially allowing those platforms to take a more active, interventionist approach to moderating those communications. Consequently, algorithmic censorship could allow social platforms to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over both public and private communications. Moreover, commercial priorities would be inserted further into the everyday communications of billions of people. Due to the dominance of the web by a few social platforms, this may be difficult or impractical to escape for many people, although opportunities for resistance do exist.
Journal Article