This Special Issue addresses two interrelated themes that have emerged both from within philosophy and from within education. The first has to do with reading across philosophical traditions in order to address what educational and contemplative practices have to say to one another; the second concerns the recent ‘contemplative turn’ in education, with its focus on mindfulness and other forms of mind/body work that are incorporated into the curriculum based on scientific research, on the one hand, and their spiritual origins, (...) on the other. (shrink)

This article considers the ‘creative education’ of influential Aotearoa/new Zealand art educator Elwyn Richardson, which is based on what he calls the ‘discovery method’: the ‘concentrated study of material from [students’] own surroundings’. Through a game that his students play with tyres, we explore the role that tools play in Richardson’s classroom and in the imaginary ‘worlding’ of his students’ play. By taking the ‘early world’ of the children’s development to be a product of the tools through which they describe (...) it, we reveal Richardson’s educative process to be essentially technological. His idea of the whole child who emerges through a process of experience and observation—of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, in the well-known phrase of Wordsworth cited by Richardson—conflates the nature of the child and nature of the ‘natural’ world. By this act of ‘natural settlement’ not untypical of settler narratives in Aotearoa/new Zealand, the child’s—and, by implication, other settlers’—relation to the world of nature is naturalized. Instead, we would argue that the child’s relation to nature is altogether unnatural: it is imprinted by the technological means through which she explores the world and makes it her own—and by which she is made over. The ‘tyre-child’ is no child of nature, but a child of technology, for whom creative errors—acts of ‘mis-taking’ like the ones Richardson’s children make in playing with tyres—reveal an imaginary capacity at once theoretical and unsettling. (shrink)

Based upon research into small community-based organisations, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can be interpreted as a technology that emerges from complex environments of support, teaching, and community development. While the ICTs investigated are commonplace and relatively simple systems (personal computers, Internet), they are part of complex and extended systems of action, knowledge, information, and support that reach into local communities. This basket of processes and skills, oriented around social justice principles, can be conceived of as ‘technologies of care’, strongly (...) influenced by the values and work activity primarily concerned with supporting people in need. Furthermore, prior research has tended to take a dystopic view about the use of technology by women, who are the major workforce in such environments, but a more nuanced approach is taken her, demonstrating that while workers are competent with ICTs, they is only one element in a process which relies upon communicative and interpretive independence. This understanding of the place of ICTs in human services work has important implications for those implementing or designing ICTs, though clarifying workers’ tacit understandings is a research challenge. Based on more recent research, suggestions are also made about the limitations of the study and the need to take into account other ways of articulating tacit, practical knowledge about ICT relationships through methods such as CO-MAP. (shrink)

As archaeologists, we have to deal with the dead, and as David Clarke once said, we like to keep our archaeology dead. From an epistemological perspective, alienation from the dead seems almost inevitable; otherwise, we would only project today’s conditions onto the past. Therefore, the past must be, and must remain, a foreign country. These alienating processes have ethical implications, however, especially when it comes to the study of human remains. In this article, we analyze the structures within the scientific (...) discipline of archaeology that normalize practices, such as the labeling of human bone material during excavations and the object-like display of skeletons in museums. We argue that archaeologists have an – often rejected – ethical responsibility towards subjects from the past. We, therefore, seek to open up a debate concerning alternative strategies for the treatment of the dead. (shrink)

In this article we examine the figure of the doctor in animated debates around public sector medicine in contemporary South Africa. The loss of health professionals from the South African public system is a key contributor to the present healthcare crisis. South African medical schools have revised curricula to engage trainee doctors with a broader set of social concerns, but the disjunctures between training, health systems failures, and a high disease burden call into question whether junior doctors are adequately prepared (...) or whether conditions of care extend beyond medical training. A concern with 'resilience' suggests a correct ethical relation to a putative obligation to provide care in a struggling system. By examining the ways in which trainee doctors are expected to 'cope' with the demands of medical practice, to adopt the correct moral posture in relation to the urgency of care, and to enact a desirable ethical relation to the broader social and political context of medical practice, we examine the picture of humanist concern that animates the subjectivities and techniques of the self called for by this training, and advocate for endurance as an alternative framework for understanding the political and ethical relations between doctors, patients and health systems. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of an aging world population increasingly affected by a diverse range of abilities and disabilities as well as the rise of ubiquitous computing and digital app cultures, this paper questions how mobile technologies mediate between heterogeneous environments and sensing beings. To approach the current technological manufacturing of the senses, two lines of thought are of importance: First, there is a need to critically reflect upon the concept of assistive technologies as artifacts providing tangible solutions for a specific (...) disability. Second, the conventional distinction between user and environment requires a differentiated consideration. This contribution will first review James Gibson’s concept of “affordances” and modify this approach by introducing theories and methods of Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory. Then, we present two case studies where we explore the relations between recent “assistive” app technologies and human sensory perception. As hearing and seeing are key in this regard, we concentrate on two specific media technologies: ReSound LINX2, a hearing aid which allows for direct connect with iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and Camassia, an IOS app for sonic wayfinding for blind people. We emphasize the significance of dis-/abling practices for manufacturing novel forms of hearing and seeing and drawing on sources like promotional materials by manufacturers, ads, or user testimonials and reviews. Our analysis is interested in the reciprocal relationships between users and their socio-technical and media environments. By and large, this contribution will provide crucial insights into the contemporary entanglement of algorithm-driven technologies, daily practices, and sensing subjects: the production of techno-sensory arrangements. (shrink)

In 2011, Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic novel by British author E.L. James, took the publishing world by storm. This article examines the lack of a feminist backlash to the book by comparing it to The Story of O (1954) and the backlash that that book engendered. In addition to parsing the terms of the existentialism that underlies The Story of O, this article unpacks the neoliberal logic of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Increased consumer usage of the internet has highlighted a number of problematic online marketing practices, including the use of online platforms to research consumers without full consumer awareness. Despite current debates regarding online research ethics from a marketing perspective, scant research has been published on consumers’ concerns with how they are researched online, which is a knowledge gap this paper seeks to address through qualitative research with UK consumers. This is an important yet neglected topic, given that consumer voices have (...) been under-represented in the online research ethics debate over the years. The paper makes a significant theoretical contribution as it extends the ethics of care and responsibility to an online context, which can frame ongoing online research ethics discussions where problematic power asymmetries may exist between researchers and consumers. (shrink)

Analyses of government have had little to say about the management of people within the modern corporation. This paper seeks to remedy this neglect by examining the transformation of the principles and practices for governing the factory which occurred in the USA across the last two decades of the twentieth century. This transformation included changes to the technology and physical layout of factories, changes to the concepts according to which manufacturing is organized, and changes in the public discourse concerning work (...) and the worker. The reshaping of identities for workers and managers, and the construction of new ideas of economic citizenship, represented new ways of governing economic life. “Rethinking the factory” meant both a physical reconstruction of the factory, as well as a reconstruction of ideas and practices about how to govern the actions of persons within the reengineered customer-driven factory. (shrink)

Bodies and Pleasures has been characterized as a confessional discourse that manages to subvert confessional practice. Here it is characterized and discussed as an askesis that works to transform confessional practice as it transforms the writer/reader. Two questions emerge through that transformation: How is race to be lived? What are the possibilities for political subjectivity in the absence of dualism and the intensification of awareness of our normalization?

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar la emergencia reciente del discurso político-corporativo en torno a la noción de smart city, describiendo el vínculo entre las tecnologías digitales que conforman su infraestructura básica y las relaciones de poder que subyacen a sus modos de aplicación y gestión en el espacio urbano. Adoptamos el enfoque analítico de los estudios de gubernamentalidad, pues esta perspectiva crítica de las racionalidades de gobierno sobre las conductas de la población considera tanto los dispositivos de control (...) como los procesos de subjetivación y resistencia que atraviesan a las nuevas formas de gobierno smart-neoliberal de la vida urbana. El análisis de las estrategias gubernamentales de las smart cities mostrará que sus apuestas de gobierno en las ciudades consisten principalmente en la programación de las dinámicas urbanas. De ese modo, apuntaremos a una necesaria reflexión sobre las disputas tecnológico-políticas que surgen en el corazón de las llamadas ciudades inteligentes, tensionando así tanto sus premisas como sus prácticas de gestión de la población asociadas a las tecnologías digitales. (shrink)

A Foucauldian assessment of the common presumption that genetic information is potent and thus oppressive demonstrates that the concern may be misplaced. Foucault's concept of “technologies of self” reveals that genetic power originates not only from the potency of genetic information but from the penchant of individuals to victimize themselves in the name of optimal health, enhanced intelligence, perfect babies, or would-be immortality. Rather than seeking liberation from the power of the new genetics, Foucault's reinterpretation of the ancient understanding of (...) concern for the self offers the possibility to avoid control by the scientific discourse. His ethical response calls for resistance rather than opposition and places responsibility for resistance in the hands of the subject. Characteristically, he avoids a generalizable form of morality but clarifies that resistance includes acknowledging the human appetite for perfection and subordinating science to ethical and aesthetic matters. (shrink)

This article adds to previous research, by connecting the concept of resistance to practices of self-making and the embodying of various gendered images. In this article, I advance that women politicians, activists and NGO workers in Cambodia, who seem to repeat and maintain established gender discourses, actually use these discourses and the existence of a multilayered figuration as a ‘hiding place’. This can be understood as various gendered discourses and figurations being utilised as resistance. In order to further explore this (...) pattern, the article introduces the concepts of hide-and-show resistance and layer-cake figurations. The notion of figurations, as situated and culturally differentiated, becomes an important starting point, displaying resistance that originates from the way we are constituted in a local–transnational, material and fast-changing world. (shrink)

This paper falls under the rubric of the sociology of knowledge, which bridges the gap between phenomenological philosophy and the human sciences. It presents an empirical investigation of the communicative construction of psychotherapeutic reality. I examine therapeutic talk and psychotherapists' reconstructions of the transition from state socialism in Germany in 1989. In both instances I show how psychotherapists' commonly shared interpretative conventions and rules of reasoning produce typical accounts. The first part of the paper shows how certain interpretative conventions and (...) rules of reasoning organize therapeutic talk and interaction in general. The second part focuses on how the interpretative conventions typical of therapy also inform psychotherapists' interpretations of the transition from state socialism. (shrink)

Foucault’s invitation to the subject is to become free of themselves by learning to think differently. Such a project has as its goal the mastery of the self, and can be understood as a Foucaultian ‘politics of ourselves’. Foucault’s ethical turn is an invitation for subjectivity to undertake its own radical education. Whilst this invitation has characteristics unique to Foucault’s philosophical discipline, I argue that it sheds light upon a diversity of practices of subjectivity from the psychotherapeutic and mystic traditions. (...) By seeing these currently available technologies of self in the Foucaultian lens we are given the opportunity to appreciate their work on subjectivity as necessarily political and social, a radical education not limited to the realm of individualistic aspiration and narcissistic temptations. The paper concludes by drawing attention to some implications for education, and for a teacher education that embraces the ‘radical reflexivity’ of some psycho-spiritual practices. (shrink)

Colleges and universities exist within a political arena where external demands for accountability materialize within a market-driven environment. As a result, government agencies pressure colleges and universities to rely on assessment and transparent reporting to become more market-driven assuming that the competition within the market, led by public choice and institutional selection, will drive improvements in learning and will also self-govern the institutions. This article explores how Foucault informs our conception of neoliberal governmentality through political rationality and technologies of self-governance (...) in order to inform our understanding of accountability in higher education and to challenge institutions to develop a counter dialogue which meets institutional obligations to the public and market. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how meditation apps, such as Headspace and Calm, are imbricated within public discourse about technology addiction, exploring the consequences of this discourse on contemporary mental life. Based on ethnographic research with designers and users of meditation apps, I identify a promise put forth by meditation app companies that I call attention by design: a discursive strategy that frames attention as an antidote to technology addiction, which is ostensibly made possible when design is done right. I argue that (...) attention by design is a promise unfulfilled. Meditation app companies construct attention as socially valuable by endlessly pointing out its purported opposite, technology addiction. Attention by design is promissory in that it keeps promising even when it doesn’t deliver what it promises, compelling the user to return to a practice that represents socially desirable traits that can never be fully acquired—and that often recede further from reach as the person becomes distracted by other obligations and communication mediated through the smartphone. Despite this broken promise, users believe they are becoming more attentive. The promissory attention designed into meditation apps reflects a new form of governmentality, in which users receive a mental nudge to reinterpret similarly designed experiences as different. (shrink)

This article traces three features of contemporary educational thought that at first sight appear to be quite different and distinct, but are, it is argued, linked in a discursive formation that constitutes a regime of truth in educational thinking and policy. Using Foucauldian categories, it argues that a discursive formation connects the identity of the ‘autonomous learner’ with the ‘evidence-based’ movement, via the powerful scientific discourse of cognitive psychology—in particular through the notion of ‘metacognition’. Despite the rhetoric of personal empowerment (...) and science that seems to legitimate each of these three elements, the regime of truth that results from their combination confirms us as prisoners in Plato’s Cave—manacled so that all we can see is the shadow-play on the walls of our prison. (shrink)

Cosmetic dentistry is a divisive discipline. Within discourses that raise questions of the purpose of the dental profession, cosmetic dentistry is frequently criticised on the basis of it being classified as a non‐therapeutic intervention. This article re‐evaluates this assertion through examination of ethics of care of the self, healthcare definitions and the social purpose of dentistry, finding the traditional position to be wanting in its conclusions. The slide of dentistry from a healthcare vocation towards being a predominantly business‐focused interaction between (...) clinician and consumer conflicts with traditional notions of dentistry as a profession. Whilst it is undeniable that cosmetic dental treatment particularly lends itself to the commercial paradigm, this is not exclusive to this area of professional practice. The cultural basis of dental appearance and the potential of the dental profession to exert coercive pressure upon the public to undergo treatment that is based upon social norms is discussed. This essay concludes that cosmetic dentistry is undeniably part of the professional purpose of 21st Century dentistry. However, the caveat that may be placed upon this, is that this status is conditional upon the professional conduct of dental practitioners remaining resilient to commercial practices not compatible with professional obligations. (shrink)

Much has been written about creativity in education policy and about how the concept is mediated in institutions like schools and universities. Although constructs like ‘creative teachers’ and ‘tea...

Much recent work in the study of popular culture has emphasized the extent to which it is not only a site of signifying practices, myths, meanings and identifications, but also an arena of intensities, of affective flows and corporeal state-changes. From this perspective, many areas of popular culture (from calisthenics to social dance to video gaming) can be seen as sites at which rich and complex—if sometimes dangerous—processes of embodied learning/teaching take place. By comparison, the world of formal education can (...) seem hopelessly clumsy in its inattention to such issues. From a personal perspective, I can attest that nothing surprises my students more than when I try to get them to think about the ergonomics of studying, or advise them that getting some exercise and cutting down on sugar will probably improve their work as much as further studying will, or when I advise graduate students that their mood and physical state will make as much difference to the quality of their lectures as will their level of formal preparation; and yet experience has convinced me of the accuracy of these assertions. I would aver that I have learned more about successful lecturing—in particular about the improvisational skill of ‘reading’ a room, and adjusting an affective–informational flow accordingly—from DJing in dance clubs than from any formal training in pedagogy that I have received. What conclusions could be drawn from these observations, and how do they relate to existing strands of pedagogic theory? These are the questions which this article will ultimately seek to address. (shrink)

This article examines a genetic ancestry testing program called the Living History Project that was jointly organized by a nonprofit educational institute and a for-profit genealogy company in South Africa. It charts the precise mechanisms by which the LHP sought to shape a postapartheid genome through antiracist commitments aimed at contesting histories of colonial and apartheid rule in varied ways. In particular, it focuses on several tensions that emerged within three modes of material-discursive practice within the production of the LHP: (...) subject recruitment, informed consent, and participant reflections. In the end, it argues that several contradictory tensions were central to the making of the LHP’s postapartheid genome and that it should be understood as nonracial rather than antiracist. (shrink)

Health industries attempt to influence the public through the news media and through their relationships with expert academics and opinion leaders. This study reports journalists' perceptions of their professional roles and responsibilities regarding the relationships between industry and academia and research results. Journalists believe that responsibility for the scientific validity of their reports rests with academics and systems of peer review. However, this approach fails to account for the extent of industry-academy interactions and the flaws of peer review. Health journalists' (...) retention of a critical stance regarding industry-academia relationships will include advocacy for and adoption of mandatory reporting of these relationships. (shrink)

This special issue fosters joint exploration of personal identity by both philosophers, on the one hand, and scholars and researchers in Internet Studies, on the other. The summary of articles gathered here leads to a larger collective account of personal identity that highlights embodiment and thereby the continuities between online and offline senses and experiences of selfhood. I connect this collective account with other contemporary works at the intersections between philosophy and IS, such as on trust and virtual worlds, thereby (...) entailing further questions and debates. I close by exploring how these collective insights illuminate larger themes regarding technology—specifically, the debate between a distinctively modern Augustinian–Cartesian account emphasizing control, liberation, and immortality by way of escape from the body, vs. more contemporary alternatives in feminist, environmental, and information philosophies that highlight autonomy through, rather than against, embodiment. (shrink)

To understand how we have become what we are requires, following Foucault, not a theory but an `analytics' which examines how technologies of power and knowledge have, since antiquity, intertwined and developed in concrete and historical frameworks. Distilling from Foucault's oeuvre as a whole a rough periodization of western political rationalities, this article shows how the processes whereby some people discipline or govern others are frequently closely connected to procedures of identity-constitution and knowledge-production. Platonic, Stoic and Christian pursuits of self-mastery (...) and self-knowledge, often via the intervention of an external master, were initially confined to an elite, but thereafter were amplified and generalized to encompass entire populations in conjunction with the rise of the modern state. Via techniques of confession and ascetic conduct, faith and empiricism, and selfreflection and everyday reality, western political rationalities, in the form of combined totalization and individualization technologies whereby some (struggle to) discipline others even as all (are exhorted to) discipline themselves, have come to dominate the globe. (shrink)

Personality disorders: illegitimate subject positions The diagnosis of personality disorder is common in mental health nurse settings and is a term often used without critical consideration. In clinical practice, the term personality disorder has pejorative connotations, which arise out of the way in which these behaviours are constructed as behavioural rather than psychiatric. The discursive construction of categories of personality disorder are inculcated into clinical practice and become taken‐for‐granted by those in practice culture. The construction of some personalities as disordered (...) and, therefore, illegitimate becomes natural. This paper provides a critical analysis of the diagnosis and suggests an approach to mental health nursing care that is more legitimising for those people who receive psychiatric diagnoses. (shrink)

Motivation is a concept more frequently found in venues concerned with educational psychology than in ones concerned with educational philosophy. Under the influence of psychology, and its typically dualistic way of making sense of the world, motivation in education has tended to be viewed in dichotomous terms, for example, as intrinsic or extrinsic in character. Such psychology-derived theories of educational motivation operate within a dichotomous ontology, traceable to structuralist notions of agency versus (rather than within) structure, while exemplifying the tendency (...) in psychology that philosopher R. S. Peters identified over half a century ago, of seeking to provide totalizing, comprehensive theories of human behaviour in emulation of the achievements of the natural sciences. This article offers an alternative reading of motivation in terms of Foucauldian ethical self-formation that attempts to recognize motivation as arising from the individuals? socially situated and constrained agency, and that focuses on how individuals pursue learning as a way of creating a particular desired version of the self. We illustrate this approach through a vignette of Wolfgang, a Hong Kong learner of German as a third language. Although we are certainly not seeking to supplant other approaches to theorizing motivation, we believe that the approach we elaborate here contributes significantly to the repertoire of motivational research in education. (shrink)

In her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C. Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. This essay addresses this gap and focuses on the influence of the fetish on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by focusing on Graham Harman’s conception of objects and Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of arche-fossils. In short, I am offering a posthumanist theorization (...) of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light. (shrink)

The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of thirty-seven issues of The DDU Review, a newsletter produced by residents of the Dual Diagnosis Unit, a residential unit for people who had diagnoses of developmental disability and serious mental illness in the Central State Hospital. The analysis of the newsletters produced between September 1988 and June 1992 revealed three major themes: 1) the mundane; 2) good behavior; and 3) advocacy. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, the discourse of medicalization—such as relations with physicians, (...) diagnoses, and medications—receive little attention. Instead, the patient-journalists focus on prosaic aspects of institutional life. The patients used their writing as a form self-definition and advocacy. The authors argue that even though it is tempting to consider the patients’ emphasis on good behavior as evidence of institutional control, internalized discipline, and medicalization, a more nuanced interpretation, which focuses on how the patients’ understood their own experiences, is warranted. Researchers must also recognize the ways in which The DDU Review reveals the patient-journalists’ experience of an institutional life that includes non-medical staff, varied social relationships among patients, and negotiated freedoms. (shrink)

This paper critically investigates the ethical perspectives and practices of individuals and organizations who make persuasive technologies. An organization that claims to be at the forefront of ethical persuasion is behavioral software company Boundless Mind. Yet Boundless Mind sells ostensibly oxymoronic software products: an Application Programming Interface for third-party applications that optimizes the capture of end user attention, and an application for end users on how to make third-party applications less persuasive. Drawing upon Foucault’s interpretation of ethics as an “aesthetics (...) of existence” and the related concept of “therapeutic authority,” I argue Boundless Mind justify the “poaching” and “protecting” of user attention based on a view of the human subject as fixable and their capability to instrumentalize user subjectivity to socially desirable ends. I walkthrough Boundless Mind’s technology-habit-breaking application Space and highlight a behavioral technique administered by Space called stimulus devaluation, which enables the user to develop a transformative relationship with their technology habits and persuasive applications. I conclude the paper by arguing that a persuasive technology ethics based on fixing the user obfuscates the power of persuasive technologists by limiting the scope of ethical inquiry to the activities of the user. (shrink)

This paper discusses some problems with the field of educational studies and considers the role of post-structuralist theory in shifting the study of education away from a 'technical rationalist' approach (as evidenced in the case of much research on educational management and school effectiveness) towards an 'intellectual intelligence' stance that stresses contingency, disidentification and risk-taking.

This paper notes how Jim influenced my own use of Foucault and also focuses on two of James Marshall's New Zealand oriented texts. In the first, Discipline and Punishment in New Zealand Education he provides a Foucauldian genealogy of New Zealand approaches to both punishment and discipline, in particular corporal punishment. The second, his 1996 book co‐written with Michael Peters, Individualism and Community: Education and Social Policy in the Postmodern Condition, analyses political philosophy and social and educational policy as New (...) Zealand changed from being a welfare state since the 1930s to a neoliberal one since the mid 1980s. Foucauldian understandings about power, bio‐power, governmentality, autonomy and subjectivity are brought to bear in their analysis. (shrink)