Kevin Ryan
University of Galway, Political Science & Sociology, Faculty Member
- Kevin Ryan is lecturer at the School of Political Science & Sociology, University of Galway, and a graduate of Crawfo... moreKevin Ryan is lecturer at the School of Political Science & Sociology, University of Galway, and a graduate of Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork. In his research, he explores freedom as a practice which is socially and historically conditioned by power relations. Kevin also works with collaborative artist Fiona Whelan under the joint name of Two Fuse, and can be contacted via their website www.twofuse.com or by email at Kevin.Ryan@universityofgalway.ieedit
In this essay to mark the centenary of the Frankfurt School, I situate the (his)story of domination between critical theory and critical fabulism. The version of this (his)story crafted by the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers... more
In this essay to mark the centenary of the Frankfurt School, I situate the (his)story of domination between critical theory and critical fabulism. The version of this (his)story crafted by the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers is anchored in the idea of 'the masses', and in the first part of the article, I track this through the work of Theodore Adorno, drawing on Grant Kester's writings on 'exculpatory critique'. The second part of the paper pivots to Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulism, which affords a way of refiguring the relationship between aesthetics and politics while also refusing the idea of the masses. In contrast to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, which is an all-or-nothing wager with a future currently foreclosed and forever deferred, in the world(s) that Hartman fabulates, the revolution is always already happening.
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The biology of adversity and resilience' (TBOAR) coheres around the claim that early childhood experiences of stress and adversity get 'under the skin' and become 'biologically embedded', increasing the risk of negative health and... more
The biology of adversity and resilience' (TBOAR) coheres around the claim that early childhood experiences of stress and adversity get 'under the skin' and become 'biologically embedded', increasing the risk of negative health and behavioural outcomes later in life. Taking a genealogical approach to biosocial plasticity, this article situates TBOAR within the arc of an apparatus of power/knowledge that emerged in tandem with liberal governmentality, and which assumes childhood as a means of programming the future. The argument is that TBOAR is a normative fiction: a socially-scripted story that figures the 'resilient' child in a way that potentially sustains extant inequalities by prefiguring a future that is in step with the neoliberal present.
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Genealogy, Plasticity, Resilience, History of Childhood and Youth, and 11 moreHistory of Childhood, Michel Foucault, Epigenetics, Foucault and education, Childhood studies, Brain Plasticity, Biosociality, Child and Adolescent Risk and Resilience, Human & Biosocial genetics, Prevention of Toxic Stress in Children, and Biosocial approach
Anchored in a ‘core story’ of early childhood development, ‘the biology of adversity and resilience’ (TBOAR) is an emerging scientific paradigm that seeks to explain how and why adverse childhood experiences have consequences in the form... more
Anchored in a ‘core story’ of early childhood development, ‘the biology of adversity and resilience’ (TBOAR) is an emerging scientific paradigm that seeks to explain how and why adverse childhood experiences have consequences in the form of negative ‘outcomes’ that span health and behavioural problems. In this article, Two Fuse (Kevin Ryan & Fiona Whelan) bring TBOAR into conversation with an alternative way of producing knowledge about childhood adversity: an arts and education programme called Boys in the Making, which sees groups of boys and young men come together to collectively explore how a boy is shaped by and influences the world he lives in.
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Resilience, Early Childhood Education, Youth Work, Youth Culture, and 10 moreFamily Resilience, Social Resilience, Collaborative Learning, Community-Based Participatory Research, Childhood studies, Youth and Community Work, Early Childhood Development, Adversity, Socially Engaged Art, and Adversity and Resilience
This article is published in P.O.I. – Points of Interest. Rivista di indagine filosofica e di nuove pratiche della conoscenza (Italian Journal of Philosophical Investigation and New Practices of Knowledge), which is a bi-annual, full... more
This article is published in P.O.I. – Points of Interest. Rivista di indagine filosofica e di nuove pratiche della conoscenza (Italian Journal of Philosophical Investigation and New Practices of Knowledge), which is a bi-annual, full open-access journal published by Stamen Edizioni (Rome). Issue 8(1) 2021 can be accessed here: http://poireview.com/en/8-i-2021-feminist-philosophies-what-of-the-night/
Abstract: We have apparently transitioned to what has been described as a "postgenomic era", and the spectre of biology is again haunting philosophy and the social sciences, but not necessarily as it has figured in the past. The emerging field of epigenetic research examines how experience "gets under the skin" and regulates gene expression, and is poised to reshape age-old debates on "nature v nurture". However, as argued by critical science and technology scholars, epigenetics might also serve to reinforce extant forms of gendered and racialized inequality. The stage is thus set for a battle staged on the terrain of power/knowledge and at the intersection of science and philosophy. This article enters the fray by building on Sarah S. Richardson's work on «maternal bodies» and the «epigenetic imaginary». Taking a genealogical approach, the article shows how the maternal body has become a means of programming the future, and how the scene is set for this to continue in tandem with "the new biology of adversity".
Abstract: We have apparently transitioned to what has been described as a "postgenomic era", and the spectre of biology is again haunting philosophy and the social sciences, but not necessarily as it has figured in the past. The emerging field of epigenetic research examines how experience "gets under the skin" and regulates gene expression, and is poised to reshape age-old debates on "nature v nurture". However, as argued by critical science and technology scholars, epigenetics might also serve to reinforce extant forms of gendered and racialized inequality. The stage is thus set for a battle staged on the terrain of power/knowledge and at the intersection of science and philosophy. This article enters the fray by building on Sarah S. Richardson's work on «maternal bodies» and the «epigenetic imaginary». Taking a genealogical approach, the article shows how the maternal body has become a means of programming the future, and how the scene is set for this to continue in tandem with "the new biology of adversity".
Research Interests: History of Science and Technology, Feminist Theory, Epigenetics, Maternal and Child Health, Biosociality, and 8 moreEarly childhood adversity and physiological consequences, New Materialisms, Feminist new materialism, Post-Genomic Research, Human & Biosocial genetics, Adversity and Resilience, The New Feminist Materialisms, and Science and Technology Studies
This comment uses Judith Butler's theory of performativity to engage critically with Siniša Malešević's claim that nationalism is so deeply grounded in everyday social life that it has become 'omnipotent'. The gist of the intervention is... more
This comment uses Judith Butler's theory of performativity to engage critically with Siniša Malešević's claim that nationalism is so deeply grounded in everyday social life that it has become 'omnipotent'. The gist of the intervention is to drill deeper into the contingency of nationalism by looking at how authoritarian, racialized, mono-cultural, patriarchal and heteronormative nationalisms are vulnerable to subversive acts of improvisation that blur the boundary between aesthetics and politics.
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This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces "bodies that queer" (Volcano 2013). For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by... more
This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces "bodies that queer" (Volcano 2013). For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by vulnerability, which is how ethics arises in the form of a decision between caring and wounding. At the same time, Cavarero's deconstructive method of appropriating stereotypes restricts the scope of sexual difference to dimorphism. In examining the implications of this, I build on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler by looking to the intersexed life of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, whose suicide in 1868 at the age of twenty-nine was precipitated not through malice or cruelty, but through concerted care. This mode of care is anchored in the apparent self-evidence of how we see and how we think with and through narratives that sediment in orders of power/knowledge. While agreeing with Cavarero's critique of the autonomous "I," the article nevertheless argues for authorial audacity-the courage to name oneself-as a way of subverting asymmetrical power relations, including those that make it possible to inadvertently generate suffering through care.
Research Interests: Queer Studies, Intersexuality, Queer Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Michel Foucault, and 15 moreJudith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Care Ethics, Sexual dimorphism, Foucault power/knowledge - discourse, Sexual difference theory, Ethics of Care, Gender and power, Deconstruction, ethics, sexual difference, Gender Studies (Power Relations), Ethics of Sexual Difference, Gender and Power Relations, Michel Foucault: The subject and power, Herculine Barbin, and Intersexuation
Hannah Arendt's concept of natality spans birth and action, which combine to inaugurate the new. Natality is used here to examine childhood as a prefigurative form of biopolitics. This concerns practices that seek to actualise envisioned... more
Hannah Arendt's concept of natality spans birth and action, which combine to inaugurate the new. Natality is used here to examine childhood as a prefigurative form of biopolitics. This concerns practices that seek to actualise envisioned futures by conditioning and constraining natality, thereby shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. The article concludes by reflecting on whether this corralling of natality might be subverted with a view to refiguring childhood.
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Social Entrepreneurship, Power (social), Children and Families, Child Development, and 40 moreMichel Foucault, Arendt, Biopolitics, Social Enterprises, Children's Rights, Biopower, Social Enterprise, Hannah Arendt, Foucault and education, Anticipatory Consciousness and Prefigurative Politics, Foucault power/knowledge - discourse, Children, Biopolitics (in Agamben, Foucault and Negri), Social Power, Childhood studies, Child, Social Power and Inequality, Biopower and Biopolitics, Natality, Hanna Arendt, Foucault Studies, The Work of Hannah Arendt, Biopower, Biopolitics and Governmentality, Prefigurative Politics, Michel Foucault and the theory of Power, Biopower/biopolitics, Biopolitics and radical political philosophy, Governmentality and Biopower, Human Rights and Biopower, Foucault, Biopower, Governmentality, Michel Foucault: The subject and power, Biopolitics and biopower, Préfiguration, Politik Arendtian, biopolitics and childhood, biopower and childhood, biopower and children, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Arendt and Foucault
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Social Movements, Art Theory, Power (social), Critical Pedagogy, and 10 moreSocial Practice, Visual Arts, Protest Movements, Relational aesthetics, Political Power, Protest and resistance, Participatory and Relational Arts, Participatory Art, Art as Social Practice, and Socially Engaged Art
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Research Interests: Social Movements, Art, Contemporary Art, Community Development, Social Practice, and 14 moreCommunity Arts, Relational aesthetics, Collaborative Art Practice, Political Power, Participatory and Relational Arts, Participatory Art, Community Arts and Culture, Community participation and engagement, Art as Social Practice, Socially Engaged Art, Collaborative Art Projects, Collaborative and Participatory Arts, Participatory Art, Community and Collaborative Art, Performance Art, and Community Arts and Cultural Development
Transparency is both a powerful idea and a technology of power associated with accountability, justice and democracy, which opposes the secretive and shadowy power of surveillance wielded by states and corporations. This article examines... more
Transparency is both a powerful idea and a technology of power associated with accountability, justice and democracy, which opposes the secretive and shadowy power of surveillance wielded by states and corporations. This article examines surveillance and transparency not as a dichotomy but as a constitutive relation in the field of academia, focusing specifically on ranking and rivalry in the context of competitive performance. Transparency-as-openness (open access platforms) is enmeshed in enclosures assembled from (self-) surveillance, personal data, public institutions, and private enterprise. The analysis pays particular attention to how altmetrics and credibility metrics – used to enhance personal prestige and professional standing – reinforce the neo-liberalisation of higher education. The article concludes by engaging critically with the politics and poetics of open enclosures with a view to re-imagining the practice of academic freedom.
Research Interests: Sociology, Political Sociology, Sociology of Sport, Academic Freedom, Power (social), and 26 morePerformance Management, Metrics, Performance Measurement, Surveillance Studies, Sports Performance, Neoliberalism, Work and Labour, Academic Ranking, New Public Management and Governance, New Public Management, Transparency, Academic Performance, Biopower and Biopolitics, Academia and Neoliberalism, New managerialism, Managerialism, Doping control, Neoliberalism and Education, Doping in professional road racing, Socially Engaged Art, Doping and Drugs In Sport, Doping in Sport, Socially Engaged Arts, Neoliberalism & Governmentality, Anti Doping, and Algorithmic Governmentality
Building on Foucault’s theory of the ‘enterprise society’, this article situates the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sport in the wider socio-economic context, where generalised competition has become a strategic game of... more
Building on Foucault’s theory of the ‘enterprise society’, this article situates the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sport in the wider socio-economic context, where generalised competition has become a strategic game of innovation and enterprise. Professional sport is shaped through innovation as athletes and teams look for ways to gain a competitive edge over rivals, while the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) resorts to intrusive controls in the name of ‘playing true’ and protecting the ‘spirit of sport’. The central argument is that the problem of drugs in sport is framed as though it amounts to exceptional and excessive – thus governable – behaviour, but this overlooks the extent to which the enterprise society is itself a game of excess. Moreover, examined as a contest between competition and control, the sporting arena provides evidence of how the game of excess intensifies, and also how this institutes a tyrannical mode of governance.
Research Interests: Sociology of Sport, Governmentality, Performance Management, Performance Measurement, Surveillance Studies, and 18 moreSports Performance, Neoliberalism, Academic Ranking, Doping, New Public Management and Governance, New Public Management, Academic Performance, New managerialism, Managerialism, Doping in professional road racing, Sports Law/anti Doping/ Arbitration, Lance Armstrong, Doping and Drugs In Sport, Doping in Sport, Governmentality and Biopower, Neoliberalism & Governmentality, Algorithmic Governmentality, and governmentality sport
A decade before Foucault began to work with the related concepts of biopolitics and biopower, Gellner posed a series of questions which are suggestive of a similar line of inquiry. Gellner did not pursue this strand of his thought as an... more
A decade before Foucault began to work with the related concepts of biopolitics and biopower, Gellner posed a series of questions which are suggestive of a similar line of inquiry. Gellner did not pursue this strand of his thought as an historical sociologist however. Instead he packaged it into a functionalist account of how industrial society reproduces itself. In Gellner’s writings, biopolitics is both present and absent, like a redacted text. This is the focus of this article, which locates Gellner’s method of inquiry within a corpus of genealogical studies that includes the work of Polanyi, Weber and Foucault. What distinguishes Gellner is that the history he reconstructs is a story of achievement in the face of terrible historical odds, but this culminates in a normative genealogy that limits the scope for critical analysis. The article concludes by adopting an alternative – yet still Gellnerian – approach to the question of social reproduction, thereby using Gellner to critique Gellner.
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This article engages critically with the normative framing of socially-engaged/collaborative art as a consensual/dissensual dichotomy. The main exponents of this position are Claire Bishop and Chantal Mouffe, and while there are important... more
This article engages critically with the normative framing of socially-engaged/collaborative art as a consensual/dissensual dichotomy. The main exponents of this position are Claire Bishop and Chantal Mouffe, and while there are important differences in how they theorise the relationship between art and politics, they share the view that consensual practices amount to a form of political abdication. This way of framing participatory practices that cross between art and activism gives rise to three significant problems however: one concerns the passive positioning of viewers/participants relative to the authorial autonomy of artist/artwork; the second concerns an inadequate understanding of power; and the third is an apparent inability to think consensus and dissensus together, i.e. as features of the same arena of practice. These issues are examined through reference to specific artistic practices, drawing on concepts from the literature on social and political power which are used in conjunction with Grant Kester’s work on dialogical aesthetics. The article argues for a more open and dialogic approach to studying the relationship between politics and aesthetics, thereby avoiding the trap of using artistic practices as illustrative cases in support of conclusions that have been reached before the analysis has even commenced.
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This article examines how childhood has become a strategy that answers to questions concerning the (un)governability of life. The analysis is organised around the concept of “biosocial power”, which is shown to be a particular zone of... more
This article examines how childhood has become a strategy that answers to questions concerning the (un)governability of life. The analysis is organised around the concept of “biosocial power”, which is shown to be a particular zone of intensity within the wider field of bio-politics. To grasp this intensity it is necessary to attend to the place of imagination in staging biosocial strategies, i.e. the specific ways in which childhood is both an imaginary projection and a technical project, and to this end Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” is used to examine how biosocial power has been assembled and deployed. The paper begins with the question of childhood as it was posed toward the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on how this positioned the figure of the child at the intersection of zoē and bios, animal and human, past and future. It ends with a discussion on how the current global obesity “epidemic” has transformed this one-time vision of mastery into a strategy of survival.
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Governmentality, Obesity, History of Childhood and Youth, Giorgio Agamben, and 14 moreChildhood Obesity, Biopolitics, Agamben, Biopolitics (in Agamben, Foucault and Negri), Freedom, Biopower and Biopolitics, Overweight and Obesity, Childhood Obesity Prevention, Obesity Prevention, Child Obesity Prevention, Governmentality Studies, Governmentality and Biopower, Neoliberalism & Governmentality, and Anti-Obesity
Abstract The article takes as its starting point a new wave of researchers who use concepts such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘multiplicity’ in a bid to move the study of childhood beyond the strictures of what Lee and Motzkau call ‘bio-social... more
Abstract
The article takes as its starting point a new wave of researchers who use concepts such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘multiplicity’ in a bid to move the study of childhood beyond the strictures of what Lee and Motzkau call ‘bio-social dualism’, whereby the division between the ‘natural child’ of developmental psychology and the ‘social child’ of socialisation theory replicates a tendency in modern thought and practice to divide nature from culture. The article offers an alternative approach to understanding modern Western childhood, and argues that this emerges not through a division between nature and culture, but in the form of a ‘biosocial nexus’ which is irreducible to distinct elements and which provides a way of locating developmental psychology and socialisation theory within the same field of practice. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this for the new wave of childhood studies, which is said to re-deploy rather than escape biosocial power.
The article takes as its starting point a new wave of researchers who use concepts such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘multiplicity’ in a bid to move the study of childhood beyond the strictures of what Lee and Motzkau call ‘bio-social dualism’, whereby the division between the ‘natural child’ of developmental psychology and the ‘social child’ of socialisation theory replicates a tendency in modern thought and practice to divide nature from culture. The article offers an alternative approach to understanding modern Western childhood, and argues that this emerges not through a division between nature and culture, but in the form of a ‘biosocial nexus’ which is irreducible to distinct elements and which provides a way of locating developmental psychology and socialisation theory within the same field of practice. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this for the new wave of childhood studies, which is said to re-deploy rather than escape biosocial power.
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This article examines how citizenship can be deployed as a technology of conduct, and how it combines with the technique of empowerment in instituting the behavioural norms that constitute a neo-liberal social order. It conducts a... more
This article examines how citizenship can be deployed as a technology of conduct, and how it combines with the technique of empowerment in instituting the behavioural norms that constitute a neo-liberal social order. It conducts a detailed analysis of policy innovations in the Republic or Ireland, where children have recently been recognised as ‘active citizens’. This field of innovation is framed by the idea that children should be listened to and included in the decisions affecting their lives. The fact that this concerns children is important, because governing children is a way of acting upon the future. Moreover, governing the future is not a matter of reducing inequalities, but of ensuring the inclusion of all into the neo-liberal ‘game between inequalities’ (Foucault, 2008). In cases of failure, the fault lies with the individual player, not with the game.
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Drawing on the work of Foucault, Elias, and Bauman, this article examines how the playground has articulated specific configurations of power/knowledge. Originally designed to cultivate virtue and counteract vice, the playgrounds of the... more
Drawing on the work of Foucault, Elias, and Bauman, this article examines how the playground has articulated specific configurations of power/knowledge. Originally designed to cultivate virtue and counteract vice, the playgrounds of the past were to complete the discipline of the schoolroom, assisting the trained master to ‘direct’ the child’s thoughts, feelings and actions. From its tentative beginnings in the work Rousseau, the strategy of supervised play was intended to conceal its purpose from the child, with power exercised through discreet forms of surveillance and constraint which would, it was hoped, gradually be embodied and re-enacted as self-restraint. Contemporary playgrounds – and here the article focuses on Ireland – no longer claim to be directing the conduct of children. Public playgrounds are framed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, while commercial playgrounds provide a service to consumers of play, yet both unobtrusively act upon the child’s capacity for action, and there is a tension between these different modes of provision. Setting recent Eliasian scholarship on ‘de-civilising’ processes against Bauman’s theory of ‘liquid modernity’, and utilising Foucault’s notion of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’, the paper examines this tension and shows how it provides insight into the relationship between power, habitus, and (in)civility today.
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This article scrutinises Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology by focusing on its ontological foundations. The analytical spotlight is on the inherent tension between Elias’s stance of normative neutrality and detachment, his... more
This article scrutinises Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology by focusing on its ontological foundations. The analytical spotlight is on the inherent tension between Elias’s stance of normative neutrality and detachment, his naturalistic ontology, and an unyielding commitment to directional development. We show how Elias’s social theory does not stand apart, as an external observer, from the figurations it seeks to explain. On the contrary, it constitutes its own outside, and this has consequences when it comes to explaining the ‘dark sides’ of the present, and in particular the social sources of organised violence in modernity. It is our contention that Elias’ ontology incorrectly posits violence as the absolute Other of civilisation, so that his theory of the Civilising Process fails to adequately account for the persistence and proliferation of warfare in the modern age.
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Research Interests: Health Promotion, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Governmentality, Early Childhood Education, Public Health Policy, and 20 moreGiorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Neoliberalism, Public Health, Children, Biopolitics (in Agamben, Foucault and Negri), Social Power, Childhood studies, Freedom, Biopower and Biopolitics, Biopower, Biopolitics and Governmentality, Governmentality Studies, Governmentality and Biopower, Neoliberalism & Governmentality, Biopower, Governmentality, neoliberalism and public health, children and biopolitics, biopolitics and childhood, biopower and childhood, and biopower and children
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Refiguring Childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways... more
Refiguring Childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways in which particular childhoods are constituted and configured – the method used in the book is a transversal genealogy that moves between past and present while also crossing a series of discourses and practices framed by children’s rights (the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage, and entrepreneurship education. With an emphasis on the how, where and when of biosocial power, Refiguring Childhood will appeal to researchers and students interested in examining the relationship between power and childhood through the lens of social and political theory, sociology, cultural studies, history, and geography.
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Power (social), History of Childhood and Youth, Biopolitics, Sociology of Childhood, and 12 moreNew Social Studies of Childhood, Children's Play, Childhood studies, Socialisation, Biopower and Biopolitics, Political Power, Childhood Socialisation, Biosociality, New Sociology of Childhood, Early Childhood Studies, Governmentality and Biopower, and Ear;y Childhood Sociology of Children and Childhood
(In press: November 2020) Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Attentive to the contingency... more
(In press: November 2020)
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial
power, which demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more
encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Attentive to the
contingency of childhood - the ways in which particular childhoods are
constituted and configured - the method used in the book is a
transversal genealogy that moves between past and present, and
across a series of discourses and practices framed by children's rights
(the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage, and
entrepreneurship education. With an emphasis on the how, where and
when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to
researchers and students interested in examining the relationship
between power and childhood through the lens of social and political
theory, sociology, cultural studies, history, and geography.
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial
power, which demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more
encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Attentive to the
contingency of childhood - the ways in which particular childhoods are
constituted and configured - the method used in the book is a
transversal genealogy that moves between past and present, and
across a series of discourses and practices framed by children's rights
(the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage, and
entrepreneurship education. With an emphasis on the how, where and
when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to
researchers and students interested in examining the relationship
between power and childhood through the lens of social and political
theory, sociology, cultural studies, history, and geography.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Power (social), Children and Families, Early Childhood Education, and 10 moreBiopolitics, Children and Youth, Children's Rights, Biopower, Children's Play, Children’s Geographies, Children's Citizenship, Biopower and Biopolitics, Political Power, and entrpreneurship education
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Art Theory, Academic Freedom, Surveillance Studies, Visual Arts, and 17 morePerformance Enhancement, Relational aesthetics, Psychopolitics, Panopticism, History of Power, Rebellion and Freedom, Freedom, Political Power, Enterprise Culture, Socially Engaged Art, Psychopolitics, Communication and Culture, Performance enhancement in sport, Critique of Power and Philosophy of Freedom, Social Turn, Synopticism, power and freedom, freedom and power, and power, freedom and the subject
The politics of order has long divided those deemed fit to exercise freedom from others perceived to pose a threat to the safety and security of society, with paupers, vagabonds and unmarried mothers (among others) subjected to various... more
The politics of order has long divided those
deemed fit to exercise freedom from others
perceived to pose a threat to the safety
and security of society, with paupers,
vagabonds and unmarried mothers (among
others) subjected to various controls in
defence of social order, historical progress
and national unity. In the closing decades of
the twentieth century this relation between
inclusion and exclusion became the explicit
focus of political thought and action, in part
because the excluded organised to demand
recognition, equality and rights, but also
because of innovations which originated in
historically constituted strains and stresses
built into the mode of ordering itself.
deemed fit to exercise freedom from others
perceived to pose a threat to the safety
and security of society, with paupers,
vagabonds and unmarried mothers (among
others) subjected to various controls in
defence of social order, historical progress
and national unity. In the closing decades of
the twentieth century this relation between
inclusion and exclusion became the explicit
focus of political thought and action, in part
because the excluded organised to demand
recognition, equality and rights, but also
because of innovations which originated in
historically constituted strains and stresses
built into the mode of ordering itself.
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Although the concept of power is central to the study of politics, there is no agreement as to what power exactly is. Power is often viewed negatively, as domination, though it is also the case that power is created by people acting in... more
Although the concept of power is central to the study of
politics, there is no agreement as to what power exactly
is. Power is often viewed negatively, as domination,
though it is also the case that power is created by people
acting in concert, in which case it can have positive
effects. Making sense of this puzzle is one of the aims of
this book, which provides the reader with a clear and
coherent way of understanding the various forms and
manifestations of power. It does so by bringing together
the most important and influential perspectives on
power within the political and social sciences.
politics, there is no agreement as to what power exactly
is. Power is often viewed negatively, as domination,
though it is also the case that power is created by people
acting in concert, in which case it can have positive
effects. Making sense of this puzzle is one of the aims of
this book, which provides the reader with a clear and
coherent way of understanding the various forms and
manifestations of power. It does so by bringing together
the most important and influential perspectives on
power within the political and social sciences.
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Tom Boland and Ray Griffin (2023) The Reformation of Welfare: The New Faith of the Labour Market. Bristol University Press, 212 pp (ISBN: 978-1-5292-1133-7) £22.00 (pbk)
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Research Interests: Power (social), Social Interaction, Symbolic Interaction, Pierre Bourdieu, International Social Work, and 12 moreSocial Work Education, Bourdieu, Critical Social Work, Public Policy - Social Welfare Policy, Human Services & Social Work, History of Social Policy and the Welfare State, Erving Goffman, Symbolic Interactionism, Social Welfare, Social Work Research, Comparative Social Policy. Welfare State Research. Sociology of Work. Migration and care, and Social Work Education and Practice
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Research Interests:
In this, multidisciplinary , conference we wish to think through the imbrications of violence, space, and the political. Given that our present conjuncture is one constituted by innumerable sites of apartheid, exclusion, oppression, and... more
In this, multidisciplinary , conference we wish to think through the imbrications of violence, space, and the political. Given that our present conjuncture is one constituted by innumerable sites of apartheid, exclusion, oppression, and indeed, resistance(s), such an interrogation is both crucial and potentially productive in rethinking questions of power and radical politics. In this zeitgeist the contingency of hitherto relatively stable configurations of power have been rendered visible through the failing allure of liberal democratic politics and the dislocation conjured by, among other things, its attendant 'spectral dance of capital' (Žižek, 2008). A void has been rift from which a plurality of discourses have proliferated that seek to address this moment of crises by either caging/bounding or expanding the social. That is, at stake in many contemporary political projects currently gaining traction is the redrawing of frontiers, the very bounds of inclusion and exclusion – from international borders and multilevel governance, to the remaking of frontiers within existing polities. Violence/antagonism, in various iterations, is central to the (re)inscription of these frontiers (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Not only evident in ostensibly bellicose projects that seek to uphold, contest, or expand regimes of power through violent struggle, violence is imbricated in an other, perhaps more foundational or 'originary' sense (Arendt, 1963; Derrida, 1990). The redrawing of boundaries reconfigures differential relationships of power and propriety, which designate who has the right to speak sovereignly in a given space, who is a worthy and noble victim, and who is not, who is differentially exposed to systemic, symbolic and subjective forms of violence, whose life is 'grievable' and whose is not (Butler, 2009). By keeping the question of the spatial in view, both its making and breaking, we keep a focus not only the concrete practices of disruption, the democratic potentialities of space (Dikeç, 2015), new forms of liberation, domination, and property, but also the various spatio-political imaginaries that guide them.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Movements, Social Theory, and 42 morePsychoanalysis, Human Geography, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Violence, Genealogy, Border Studies, Power (social), Democratic Theory, Queer Theory, Space and Place, Poststructuralism, Sovereignty, War Studies, Cultural Theory, Political Science, Deconstruction, Post-Marxism, Security Studies, Political Violence and Terrorism, Politics, Ideology, Property, Populism, Resistance (Social), Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Emancipation, Political Theology, Territory (Political Theory), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Ideology and Discourse Analysis, Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, Public Space, Radical Democracy, Contemporary Political Theory, Subjectivity, and Critical War Studies
Through this conference we aim to explore the imbrications of violence, space, and the political. Given that our present conjuncture is one constituted by innumerable sites of exclusion, oppression, and resistance(s), such an... more
Through this conference we aim to explore the imbrications of violence, space, and the political. Given that our present conjuncture is one constituted by innumerable sites of exclusion, oppression, and resistance(s), such an interrogation is both crucial and potentially productive in rethinking questions of power and radical politics. In this zeitgeist the contingency of hitherto relatively stable configurations of power has been rendered visible through the failing allure of liberal democratic politics. The dislocations conjured by the ‘spectral dance of capital’ (Žižek, 2008) have rift a void from which a plurality of discourses have proliferated that seek to address this moment of crises by either caging/bounding or expanding the social. That is, at stake in many contemporary political projects currently gaining traction is the redrawing of frontiers, bounds of inclusion and exclusion – from international borders to the remaking of frontiers within existing polities. Violence/antagonism, in various iterations, is central to the (re)inscription of these frontiers (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Not only evident in ostensibly bellicose projects that seek to defend or contest regimes of power through violent struggle; violence is imbricated in an other, perhaps more foundational or ‘originary’ sense (Arendt, 1963; Derrida, 1990). The redrawing of boundaries reconfigures differential relationships of power and propriety, which designate who has the right to speak sovereignly in a given space, who is a worthy and noble victim, and who is not (Butler, 2009). Boundaries determine who is differentially exposed to systemic, symbolic and subjective forms of violence. By keeping the question of the spatial in view, both its making and breaking, we keep a focus on the concrete practices of disruption, as well as the democratic potentialities of space (Dikeç, 2015). Then the new possible modes of liberation, domination, and property, but also the various spatial-political imaginaries that guide them are rendered intelligible.