Hate groups targeting unauthorized immigrants in the US: discourses,narratives and subjectivation practices on their websites

The narratives and images on websites of US hate groups that oppose undocumented immigrants represent and reproduce discourses that contribute to the subject formation of group members, who feel ethically obliged to counter unauthorized immigration. Left alone by the government, which is seen as unreliable and uncaring of patriotic values, they position themselves as heroic saviours of the nation. We argue that these hate groups’ ‘games of truth’ develop in response to the perception that irregular immigration threatens specific social orders and values, for instance about citizenship, national identity and otherness. This article helps to understand the ways in which anti-immigrant narratives serve the functions of countering these threats and of asserting the group members’ ethical obligation as a form of care of the self. In other words, from a Foucaultian viewpoint, we interpret the problematizations of ‘illegal’ immigration as discursive practices for the subject formation of hate group members.     

Reimagining policy: Power,problems, and public stories

The authors of various practitioner and scholarly documents suggest markedly contrasting understandings about the nature of “policy.” These divergent conceptions raise the question: What is at stake by understanding the nature of policy in one way as opposed to another? The purpose of this philosophical inquiry is to interrogate the nature of “policy” as it relates to music education and to question the values that do and might underlie and propagate through contrasting understandings of “policy.” Subsequently, I examine two aspects of policy, problem identification and meaning-making, that have gone largely unexplored in the arts education literature.

Using Foucault's writings, I argue that power-laden policy texts often have the greatest impact, not when they are mandated, but when they go misrecognized as common sense. I also advocate for the consistent use of the terms “policy texts” and “policy actions,” including as an alternative to the imbalanced designations of “soft policies” and “hard policies.” Drawing on Dewey arts educators might form “publics” around problems having consequences that they deem far-reaching, recurrent, and irreparable. Individual and collective political narratives, including what Ganz explains as “stories of self,” “stories of us,” and “stories of now,” can foster the meaningful connections necessary for forming “publics” who address pressing problems in arts education.     

Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist": Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology

This article proposes the possibility of a neo-Boasian anthropology conceived at the intersection of Foucauldian genealogy, Boasian historicism, and the epistemic rethinking of the discipline's Self/Other binary. Shifting from a perspective of posing the ethnographic object as Other toward a Boasian conception of the past as the principal site of inquiry, the piece thus advocates an anthropological project grounded in the history of the present. This conception, it is argued, can overcome several of the dilemmas currently facing the discipline, the awkward status of "native anthropology" foremost among them.     

Scientia sexualis versus ars erotica: Foucault, van Gulik, Needham

This paper begins with a discussion of the scientia sexualis/ars erotica distinction, which Foucault first advances in History of Sexuality Vol. 1, and which has been employed by many scholars to do a variety of analytical work. Though Foucault has expressed his doubts regarding his conceptualization of the differences between Western and Eastern discourses of desire, he never entirely disowns the distinction. In fact, Foucault remains convinced that China must have an ars erotica. I will explore Foucault’s sources of authority. To this end, I introduce the work of famous Dutch sinologist Robert Hans van Gulik, who published the tremendously influential Sexual Life in Ancient China in 1961, and also explore Joseph Needham’s view on Chinese sex. I argue that, Foucault, in his fierce polemic against the “Repressive Hypothesis”, himself imagined a utopian Other where pleasure and desire were organised differently. I end on a discuss on Orientalism and the project of “Sinography” of comparative literature scholars Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot and others.     

Stories and Selves: Managing the Self through Problem Solving in School

This study examines how a curriculum that aimed to instill in students a way of solving their everyday social problems instead became a site for replaying students' understandings of solutions approved by teachers and thus was limited in shaping their subjectivities. We draw on research in the ethnography of speaking, particularly in school settings, to refine current anthropological interest in the Foucauldian notion of technologies of the self. As a result, we highlight the contextual quality of practices, such as problem solving, used to manage the self.     

Of Chicks,Lice and Mackerel: Carnival and Transgression in a Cosmopolitan Spanish Enclave in Morocco

In 2006, a group of Ceutan Carnival performers were sued for their anti-Muslim lyrics, resulting in a convoluted trial that took six years to resolve. Ceuta is a small, cosmopolitan Spanish enclave on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. Its Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish communities are tenuously held together by the City-led ideology of convivencia, that challenges mono-cultural models of Spanishness in favour of the idea that that Ceuta's ethno-religious groups live in harmony, all being validly Spanish. This paper contends that the Ceutan Carnival does not fit functionalist theories describing it as a stress-tap that reproduces power-relations by temporarily allowing their transgression. The long-drawn-out trial, which incurred vicious feuds, spiked tensions between Christians and Muslims, collapsed ‘convivencia’, and challenged the authority of State institutions, suggests that the Ceutan Carnival is an uncomfortable space, better understood if treated as a Foucaultian ‘mirror’, a space where society appears to itself as dangerously anarchistic, making individuals long for, not resist, State control.     

Ecology: modern hero or post-modern villain? From scientific trees to phenomenological wood

This paper sets out to launch a challenge to the usual modernist view of the relationship between ecology and ethics. Two post-modern interpretations of this relationship are considered. The first deep interpretation holds that ecology reveals that nature has intrinsic value. The second interpretation derives from the work of Michel Foucault. The aim of his critique is to reveal how certain values are taken for granted by the acceptance of certain scientific models, and how the acceptance of those models as true makes it impossible to articulate alternative values. I end by suggesting, contra Foucault, that phenomenological enquiry could serve to articulate alternative and perhaps more eco-friendly values.     

A historic photomicrograph of a parasite (Trichomonas vaginalis)

Knowing that Alfred Donné was the discoverer of an important human parasite, and finding that he was also a pioneer of photomicrography, it occurred to me that his parasite might well have become a subject of his photography. It was a simple matter to confirm that this was indeed the case. The parasite he discovered was Trichomonas vaginalis; and, in collaboration with Foucault, Donné made a photomicrograph showing several protozoan parasites lying among vaginal epithelial cells. His publication of an engraved image of the photomicrograph in 1845, was a landmark in the history of photography and microbiology.