Governmentality

Recently I read two articles on governmentality, which I first learned from Patrick Joyce in Manchester several years ago. It recalls my refreshing memory of our seminar on governmentality and I was the first being asked about it.

Bronwyn Davies and Peter Bansel, "Governmentality and Academic Work: Shaping the Hearts and Minds of Academic Workers," Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol. 26, No. 3, 2010, pp. 5-20. Drawing on Foucault's analysis of neoliberalism, and its practices of shaping individuals through specific modes of government in order to analyse the phenomenon of the market oriented, audit university, the authors analyse the discourse taken up by managers and academics.

Stephanie Rutherford, "Green Governmentality: Insights and Opportunities in the Study of Nature's Rule," Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2007, pp. 291-307. I need some more time to read this through and through. Rutherford highlights three key aspects of governmentality - its analytics of power [disciplinary power], biopolitics [ecopolitics], and technologies of the self and subject formation. From this article, I was introduced to Philip Howell's "Race, space and the regulation of prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong," Urban History, Vol. 31, Issue 02, 2004, pp. 229-48.