• Bluwstein Jevgeniy

• Bluwstein Jevgeniy

This seminar will dive into some of Foucault’s work that only in the last years became widely available to the non-francophone world through a translated edited volume. In a series of eleven lectures given at the Collège de France from 1970 until his death in 1984, Foucault revisited and revised some of his previous work while charting new territories of inquiry and thought. In particular his notion of governmentality and biopolitics have reinvigorated debates in critical geography, resulting in a nascent but growing body of research from nature conservation to climate change mitigation and adaption, from geopolitics to international relations and environmental politics, from biology to bioethics and genetics, just to name a few.

In this reading-intensive seminar, students are expected to read, analyse, and discuss three lecture series, as well as to participate actively in the seminars. Depending on the size of the class, students will prepare for the seminar individually or in groups of two. A good command of spoken and written English is necessary in order to succeed.

Learning objectives

In the context of a reading-intensive seminar, students will advance their reading and analysis capacities, and they will deepen their skills in argumentation, critical reflection and communication.

Students will enhance their abilities to summarize and synthesize the texts, to identify key concepts, methodologies and analytics; and to identify and highlight key questions that the texts raise, and the debates that the texts speak to or foreground.

Learning activities

In this seminar, students will co-produce knowledge by sharing different tasks; from providing a summary of the text, to highlighting key concepts, methodologies and analytics, to raising key questions, to situating the texts in key debates. This seminar stands and falls with students’ motivation and engagement, prior to the seminar preparation and during the seminar presentations and debates.

We will also try organize guest lectures by senior scholars who have drawn on Foucault’s work in their own research and writing.

The first session will introduce Foucault’s concept of governmentality and biopolitics, and his approach to history and genealogy. Moreover, key debates in human geography that draw on Foucault’s work, will be highlighted.

The second, third and fourth seminar sessions will be structured in a way that each participant is actively involved through an input, by participating in discussions, and by critically engaging with others’ inputs and contributions.

In this seminar, each participant is expected to read the following three of the eleven lectures to explore human geography from a Foucauldian perspective:

SMD: Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society must be defended: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Trans. D. Macey. New York: Picador.

STP: Foucault, M. 2009. Security, Territory, Population: lectures at the Collège De France, 1977-1978. Trans. G. Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan UK.

BOB: Foucault, Michel. 2008. The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Trans. G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.