CFP Michel Foucault’s Lectures on Governmentality, Biopolitics and Neoliberalism (Extended Deadline)

Michel Foucault’s Lectures on Governmentality, Biopolitics and Neoliberalism (Extended Deadline)

Graduate Student Summer Institute in Rhetoric and Public Culture

July 19-23 (Tuesday-Saturday), 2016 at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208

This year’s institute theme is: “Michel Foucault’s Lectures on Governmentality, Biopolitics and Neoliberalism”. We will focus on three volumes of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France: Society Must Be Defended (1975-76); Security, Territory, Population (1977-78); and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79). In these volumes, Foucault provides a complex analysis of two complimentary forms of power that circulate and shape conduct in modern societies: the disciplinary power directed at governing individual bodies and the biopower directed at governing the population. He explains how the shift towards the prominence of the biopower occurs gradually over several centuries to the present in Western societies by giving an account of changing and accumulating techniques and arts of governing (and systematic reflection about those techniques and arts) from the Christian pastorate through raison d’Etat  to liberal govermentality. This shift in focus (without erasure or!
  supplanting) from the “anatomo-politics of the human body” to “the bio-politics of populations” in these three volumes of Foucault’s lectures will be one of the main themes of this summer institute.

The institute will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by Verena Erlenbusch (Philosophy, University of Memphis), Johanna Oksala (Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki), Keith Topper (Political Science, University of California-Irvine), and Penelope Deutscher (Philosophy, CLS, and Critical Theory, Northwestern). Each faculty member will deliver an afternoon lecture, lead a seminar discussion on selected readings (assigned in advance) the following morning, and attend a colleague’s presentation that afternoon. The overlapping format enables student and faculty participants to continue informal scholarly discussion during group lunches and dinners.

The institute is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication, an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University School of Communication. The Center will subsidize transportation (up to $250), lodging (double-occupancy), and some meals (breakfast and lunch every day and two group dinners) for admitted students. Applicants should send a CV, a brief letter of nomination from their academic advisor, along with a one-page statement explaining their interest in participating in this year’s institute, to the summer institute coordinator LaCharles Ward LacharlesWard2017@u.northwestern.edu. We will adopt a policy of rolling admissions.  Priority will therefore be granted to strong applications that are submitted in a timely fashion, preferably by June 30th. All inquiries should be directed to LaCharles Ward.

This summer institute is convened by Center for Global Culture and Communication(CGCC), an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University School of Communication. Dilip Gaonkar (Rhetoric and Public Culture) is the Director of CGCC.

Thanks,

LaCharles