Foucault Appadurai (+ Yasmeen) Valentine & Holloway + Michele, de Castell & Jenson

1. Schedule and Expectations, Presentations Mobility, Neoliberalism, and Worlds in Motion: Play, Travel and Knowing Foucault Appadurai (+ Yasmeen) Valentine & Holloway + Michele, de Castell & Jenson

2. Plan about 15 minutes of Presentation, Bring your Top three Questions, Make good use of your peers to get feedback, and pull apart conceptual problems -- your unhelpfully grey areas….

3. Mobility, Neoliberalism, and Worlds in Motion: Play, Travel and Knowing

4. Foucault and Subjectivity. • A History and Critique of Reason. • Foucault in this tradition. • Examines historical circumstances that gave rise to the modern type of person. • Madness, Punishment, Government, and Sexuality and subjectivity. • Linked to his history of the subject is a history and critique of reason. • Critique of the ‘Enlightenment’

5. Knowledge as a new form of power. • Knowledge, for Foucault, doesn’t develop in a vacuum. • Inextricably linked to emergence of institutions. • Knowledges involve doing things with bodies. • They invade the self-determination of the individual body. • Power of rational expert invades/ moulds/ shapes the individual body

6. Governmentality, Science, Knowledge and Power. • Statistics - make it possible to think in an entirely new way . • Government impossible without statistics. • Counting, classifying and recording of people • People and populations a new object of analysis and manipulation. • Sociology can be conceived of as part of this tradition. • For Foucault the state is not a thing - a single centre of power- it is the accumulation of many centres of governmental expertise.

7. Technologies of the Self. • Normalisation through sexuality -one aspect of a wider process that Foucault calls the development of “technologies of the self”. • Great projects of objectification, knowledge and normalisation turned inwards into a project of self mastery, self discipline and self control. • A “technology of the self”.

8. An historical shift in the nature of social identities. • Pre-modern identities emphasise membership of collectivities • Modern forms of identity emphasise the importance of the subjects ability to articulate and reflect upon private experience.

9. Issues & Questions Raised by reading Foucault. • How are we merely products of an exercise of power that we don’t always recognise? • Are we better off for this discipline? • Power is not just something that represses. • Power produces things, it produces the insane, it produces, the delinquent, it produces sexuality, and it produces the ‘free’, ‘rational’ subject. • The Enlightenment linkage between knowledge, removal of power, and emancipation - that runs through German Idealism, Marxism, the Frankfurt School and so on - is broken. • What’s left? (of ‘agency’, ‘subjectivity’…)

10. Ubiquitous mobility Everyone it seems has the ability to be mobile and networked these days, even some groups who we do not typically associate with mobility Read the article ‘Call to give the homeless broadband’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4396372.stm How do you think that social exclusion is impacted by being on the wrong side of the ‘digital divide’?

11. You may have heard of the ‘wandering scribe’, a homeless women living in her car whose blog has found an international audience Read about her in the article ‘Park and write’ by Sean Coughlin http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4923488.stm “It's a tale of our time - about being cut off from everything around you but still connected to people thousands of miles away”

12. Liz Jensen’s (2001) novel The Paper Eater begins thus: ‘If there’s one thing to be said about life in captivity, it’s that you get to travel.’ This sentence juxtaposes two images that don’t normally go together: prisoners and mobility Recently, it has come to light that the US has been sending terrorist suspects to be interrogated in countries where torture is often used on prisoners (so-called ‘rendition flights’) Read the article ‘CIA jails allegations’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4495730.stm

13. Networks, flows and mobility Networks, flows, and mobility are some of the most important ideas associated with globalization, and some of the biggest themes right now in the social sciences Today, we will focus on three theoretical approaches: • Manuel Castells’ work on network society • Arjun Appadurai’s work on scapes and flows • John Urry’s work on mobility

14. Castells on globalization For Castells, networks are a key feature of globalization. Networks have no centre, but consist of nodes and linkages. A world of nation-states (space of places) has been replaced by a world of networks (space of flows) Dominant networks are those of global capital, management, and information The ‘network state’ is the response of political systems to the challenges of globalization. The European Union may be the clearest manifestation of this emerging form of state (Castells 2000; 364)

15. Read an excellent interview with Castells entitled ‘Identity and change in the network society’ Parts 4,5,6 of the interview are most relevant to this lecture The interview can be found at: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Castells/castells-con0.html Castells on ‘network society’

16. Castells on the ‘network society’ Read a short essay by Castells on ‘The network society’ at: www.jmk.su.se/global99/carin/netwsoc.html “The network society is a capitalist society. This brand of capitalism is different from its historical predecessors. It is global and it is structured around a network of financial flows”

17. Urry on mobility John Urry argues that the idea of ‘society’ is no longer as useful as it once was Trans-national networks and the flows of people, money, and information mean that it is mobility that we should be studying He looks at the example of airports: “increasingly air terminals are becoming like cities, and in the ‘frisk society’ cities are becoming like airports” (Urry, 2004: 32) What do you think he means by the ‘frisk society’? Read Urry’s article on ‘new mobilities’ at www.sfb536.mwn.de/veranstaltungen/B3_Workshop_0104_Dokumentation.pdf

18. Why staying at home is the new going out Zygmunt Bauman (1998: 77) says that ‘nowadays we are all on the move’ We are on the move even when we are at home; ‘we are glued to our chairs and zap the cable or satellite channels … jumping in and out of foreign spaces with a speed much beyond the capacity of supersonic jets and cosmic rockets, but nowhere staying long enough to be more than visitors’ Do you think he is suggesting that too much mobility means that we are never really at home?

19. Appadurai is best known for the idea of ‘scapes’ outlined in his essay ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’ (Appadurai, 1990) Under conditions of globalization economy, culture, and politics can no longer exist in unity, as they did within the nation-state You can read an except on this theme by Appadurai at: www.intcul.tohoku.ac.jp/~holden/MediatedSociety/Readings/2003_04/Appadurai.html Arjun Appadurai To Yasmeen’s .ppt/facilitation

20. Valentine and Holloway: Overview • Valentine and Holloway weave together an examination of how on-line and off-line worlds are integrated and interdependent in young people’s lives. The relationship between these spaces is often posed in a zero/sum game in which time spent with the former detracts from and reduces young people’s engagements with the latter. They suggest this simplifies the way young people move back and forth between these spaces and the interdependencies between each realm. Centrally, the article is an challenge to those who are either simplistic boosters or detractors about the role of ICTs in children’s lives. To take one or the other of these positions, they argue, is to interpret ICTs in terms of older narratives that have typically surrounded the development of new technologies. This underestimates the way ICTs are used and absorbed into students’ lives and the way such technologies might act as a catalyst for change.

21. Utopian/Dystopian Thinking • A great deal of utopian thinking surrounded the early development of ICTs. • In conjunction with this, fear-mongering suggested potential threats from this technology • Children are at the centre of these debates

22. The Problem • Little is still known about how children actually employ ICTs within the context of their everyday lives • Because children remain relatively under-researched and there are few empirical studies of people’s actual use of ICTs

23. Boosters • Delivers users from constraints of physical bodies/material limitations, offering users utopian possibilities “to create and play with on-line identities” (304) • Creates new forms of social relationships that are potentially global in reach. This allows for the development of more genuine relationships because they are formed on the basis of “genuine interests” • It is a hyperrealization of the real – all the best features are accelerated and made easier to access –“a zone of freedom, fluidity, and experimentation that is insulated from the mundane external realities of the material world” (304)

24. Detractors • The virtual is a bad imitation of the real world – disembodied identities are “inauthentic” and on-line communication is commodified, privatized and individualized in contrast to the more “communal” forms of face-to-face communication (304). • Invites people to become detached from the social world, removed from full human experiences • Children in particular are threatened; they turn away from the “real”, withdraw from social life and social space • The “real” is a fragile world under threat from the “lure of the ‘virtual’” (304)

25. Theoretical Framework • Premised on a rejection of the real/virtual and the booster/detractor dichotomies • Working with a dialectic of technology where humans are understood to be “inextricably entwined with our material surroundings, to the point that we need to recast the social to include nonhumans” (306). • This principle underlies Actor Network Theory where “society is produced in and through patterned networks of heterogeneous materials in which the properties of humans and nonhumans are not self-evident but rather emerge in practice” (306) See my example of film and vision in our online discussion.

26. Theoretical Frame C’ont • Computers are envisioned as things “that materialize for children as diverse social practices … [W]e recognize that computers may play different roles within children’s different communities of practice and so emerge as very different tools, depending on the way different communities of practice make use of them.”

27. The Study • ICTs allow children “to reconfigure their social relationships and identities in on-line spaces” (313). • The anonymity of virtual spaces allows children to produce on-line spaces separate from their off-line worlds. • But off-line worlds still impact on-line identities. In fact, these identity spaces are interconnected. • Suggest four ways children incorporate off-line into on-line worlds: • children’s on-line identities directly re-present off-line selves and activities • even when children make up new identities on-line these often depend on off-line identifies and communities • on-line identity worlds reproduce class/gender relations • economic and temporal realities limit affect how kids can be on-line

28. The Study II • Children’s virtual worlds are incorporated into their real worlds because: • Children use on-line activities to maintain and reconfigure distant and local off-line relationships/friendships. • Kids use ICTs to find info about their off-line hobbies and interests • Kids talk on-line about their off-line interests and make “virtual” friends • Participation with ICTs can reconfigure kids off-line identities in positive and negative ways.

29. Conclusion • “[T]he Internet-connected PC does not have any inherent properties or universal impacts. Rather, it emerges as a very different tool for different groups of children in what we might call …‘communities of practice’” (316)

30. The term ‘scapes’ indicates that the cultural flows that Appadurai is talking about are ‘perspectival constructs’ rather than fixed relations Flows and scapes impact on people in different ways Different actors (governments, businesses, individuals) will have different perceptions of their place within global processes What are ‘scapes’?

31. According to Appadurai there are five ‘scapes’ which constitute the shifting political terrain and endless mobility of a ‘world in motion’: • ethnoscapes: people in motion; migrants, tourists, refugees • mediascapes: media images of the world • technoscapes: transborder communications • finacescapes: global flows of capital • ideoscapes: conflicts between state and non-state ideologies

32. The key thing about these ‘scapes’ is that they show a world in which it is not possible for economy, politics, culture to fit together easily It is the disjunctures between these elements that facilitate global flows Appaduarai points to a world of fragmentation and uncertainty, but also to the imagining of new political possibilities …

33. The importance of imagination Imagination is the means by which individuals connect with new global possibilities. Imagination is no longer: • fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere) • escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures) • an elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people) Imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order” (Appadurai, 1996: 31)