October 30, 2004

governing citizens

This is a very useful summer course at York University, Canadia, on Foucault, governance and citizenship that is run under the auspices of the Canadian Reseach Chair in Citizenship Studies. It ties in with the posts on governmentality.

The course blurb says that in dealing with the issue of governing citizens breaks with traditional approaches. Rather than:


".... considering citizenship as an enclosed political identity (liberal, communitarian, republican, radical), we examined it as an assemblage of strategies and technologies that aim to produce governable subjects. It is through these assemblages that citizenship becomes a 'problem' insofar as its project of producing governable subjects encounter resistances, difficulties, detours and reversals to which it responds with various different rationalities. We examined this subject by drawing upon the literature on 'governmentality' as we also investigated the limits and flaws of this literature."

The first reading is an account of Foucault's unpublished governmentality lectures by Colin Gordon.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 30, 2004 11:51 PM | TrackBack
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