History & Philosophy Photo Gallery

 
Agency After Foucault
GSCOPE
PES 2008 - Cambridge, MA
PES 2007 - Atlanta, GA

GSCOPE

Agency After Foucault - 14 april 2007

Maureen Ford developed a workshop entitled "Agency After Foucault", which brought together 19 scholars from four countries, to produce an edited collection that reframes political agency in postmodern global contexts.

Contemporary crises of democracy - which result in part from rapid changes in national boundaries, identities, and sense of community belonging - require new accounts of agency: specifically, how individuals and communities envision social transformation. Often understood in terms of dominant ethical, political, and educational mores of modern societies, agency is frequently cast in terms of metaphors of "voice," "efficacy," "responsibility" or "impact." Agency as a quality of life is seen as an indices of personal and social thriving. However, this common framing of agency poses a stumbling block in contemporary political theory because it assumes a reductive and causal conception of social change that lacks the complexity required for the current context of globalization. The project draws on the work of Michel Foucault as one of a number of scholars who pushes the limits and possibilities of agency in a world where the meanings of national boundaries and the integrity of identities are re-written, virtually, on a daily basis by changing faces of democracy. Famously, Foucault is known to assert that "everything is dangerous" while also claiming "we are freer than we think". The book generated from the Agency After Foucault workshop will take up these paradoxical strands of Foucault's historical ontology and his ethic - as well as similarly generative discourses such as those of Deleuze, Bakhtin, or Butler - in projects that contribute new conceptions of agency, subjectivity, responsibility and aesthetics.  



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Orientation 2007