Foucault and Mobilities Research
A Two-Day Symposium
| Date: | 6 – 7 January 2013 |
|---|---|
| Location: | Lucerne, Switzerland |
The publication in English and in German of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the years 1970-1984 has been a key driver of the recent renaissance of research inspired by his work across the social sciences. As part of this, sociologists, geographers and others in the academic world have begun to draw on and work with a wider range of Foucauldian concepts than in earlier studies. Foucault’s thinking on power/knowledge, panopticism, discourse, the role of the sciences, and so on still resonates strongly across the social sciences but it is the topics that he lectured on at the Collège that arguably attract the bulk of attention: a surge of interest has occurred among social scientists in his writings on apparatuses/dispositifs, governmentality, self-government and ethics to name but a few concepts. The translation of the lectures into German and English has also brought to the fore a greater focus on the liveliness of the world, the non-discursive realm, materiality and resistance than Foucault is usually credited for. In fact, and as Philo (2012) has noted, the lectures show more than his published books that Foucault was closer to Deleuze than is often assumed.
Foucault’s work has been employed and embraced enthusiastically by ‘mobilities’ scholars (e.g. Adey, 2009; A. Jensen, 2011; Merriman, 2007; Paterson, 2008, Richardson and Jensen, 2008; Schwanen et al, 2011; Manderscheid, 2012). It can nonetheless be argued that mobilities researchers have not yet fully explored or exhausted the potential of Foucault’s philosophy for understanding mobilities.
Against this background the workshop will bring together scholars from across the social sciences with a shared interest in both mobilities and Foucauldian thinking. Mobilities are here understood broadly as the flows (or lack thereof) of people, artefacts, money, ideas, practices, and so on across a wide variety of spatial and temporal scales, both in contemporary societies or in the past.
The preliminary programme of the workshop consists of 7 sessions with overall 2 keynotes and 11 papers. The contributions are bundled into thematic groups.
- Foucault and (im)mobility
- Mobile Subjectivities
- Controlling/Securing Mobilities
- Mobility dispositifs
- Knowing and Calculating Mobilities
- Immobilisations
The workshop is organised by:
Katharina Manderscheid, Lucerne University
katharina.manderscheid@unilu.ch
Tim Schwanen, University of Oxford
tim.schwanen@ouce.ox.ac.uk
David Tyfield, Lancaster University
d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk
in collaboration with the Cosmobilities Network (www.cosmobilities.net)
and funded by the Swiss National Foundation (www.snf.ch).
For all organisational and practical questions, please contact:
Laura Schneider, Lucerne University laura.schneider@stud.unilu.ch
Venue:
Day 1 (6.1.2013): KKL, Lucerne
Day 2 (7.1.2013): University of Lucerne
