Power Discourse And Resistance

Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.

Examining at a wide range of issues such as violence, poverty, feminism, racism, and privatization of healthcare, the contributors to this collection use a variety of analytical approaches to posit that the social, economic, and political issues confronting Canadians are shaped by social inequity. At the same time, these essays show how these inequalities are being successfully resisted individually and collectively. This fourth edition adds chapters on youth politics, higher education, technology and work, and immigration.

This edited collection is an eclectic and provocative volume taken from presentations that reflect the scholarship of the inaugural AQR/ DPR Down Under conference that was held in Cairns in 2011 in Australia. This was a ground-breaking conference that brought together scholars, researchers and practitioners from across Australia, UK, Japan, Italy, Finland, New Zealand, Luxembourg, South Africa, Vietnam, Malaysia, Tanzania and Mexico. The theme of the conference represented at the conference and in this volume was that of: Politicizing Qualitative Research. Delegates presented papers that sought to challenge research practices that too often can delegitimize Other ways of knowing. Confronting, disrupting and resisting the epistemological ‘common sense’ way of doing research within the academy can be a risky business and is often a fraught and contested endeavor. However, as the papers in this volume illustrate, contestation promises opportunities for re-perceiving, re-interpreting, and productively disrupting the orthodoxies of disciplinarity. – ‘Many thanks to Ignacio Rojas whose patient assistance and expertise as an artist in designing the cover proved invaluable in bringing this book to print.’

This book provides a detailed sociological explanation of why Strangeways, one of the largest prisons in Europe, erupted in violent protest in April 1990. The book locates the complexities of prison life in central problems in social theory and makes a major contribution to sociologically informed criminology.

This edited collection is an eclectic and provocative volume taken from presentations that reflect the scholarship of the inaugural AQR/ DPR Down Under conference that was held in Cairns in 2011 in Australia. This was a ground-breaking conference that brought together scholars, researchers and practitioners from across Australia, UK, Japan, Italy, Finland, New Zealand, Luxembourg, South Africa, Vietnam, Malaysia, Tanzania and Mexico. The theme of the conference represented at the conference and in this volume was that of: Politicizing Qualitative Research. Delegates presented papers that sought to challenge research practices that too often can delegitimize Other ways of knowing. Confronting, disrupting and resisting the epistemological 'common sense' way of doing research within the academy can be a risky business and is often a fraught and contested endeavor. However, as the papers in this volume illustrate, contestation promises opportunities for re-perceiving, re-interpreting, and productively disrupting the orthodoxies of disciplinarity. - 'Many thanks to Ignacio Rojas whose patient assistance and expertise as an artist in designing the cover proved invaluable in bringing this book to print.'

The "structuralist" theories of power show that the subject is produced and reproduced by the investment of power: but how then can we think of the subject's resistance to power? Based on this fundamental question, Power and Resistance interprets critically the (post-)structuralist theory of power and resistance, i.e., the theories of Foucault, Deleuze/Guattari, Derrida and Althusser. It analyses also the mechanism of power and the strategies of resistance in the era of neoliberalism. This meticulous analysis that completely renewed the theory of power is already published in French, Japanese, and Korean with success.

For the first time in English, Glyn Williams draws together current debates in linguistics and social theory, and provides the first study in English of the principles and theories of French discourse analysis.