Foucault and Mobilities Workshop

After a hectic December and a break over the festive season I am at last able to write a new and long overdue post. At this moment I am in Lucerne and the workshop on Foucault and Mobilities that I co-organised with Katharina Manderscheid and David Tyfield has just finished. It has been a wonderful experience: great people, great papers, great discussions, great atmosphere.

I have learnt a lot about how others work with and along Foucault in studying im/mobilities in a great variety of contexts: water management in Singapore, fire in County Durham, madness in Scotland, prisons in Belgium and electric transportation in China are only some of the topics that have been discussed. And I have also learnt a great detail about how others understand (and sometimes struggle with) such concepts as the dispositif/apparatus and discursive practice, as well as Foucault’s methods.

There was a strong sentiment that our discussions about Foucault and mobilities should be taken forward, and we will be setting up some sort of internet platform or resource, where publications on Foucault and mobilities will be brought together and where discussions can be conducted. The powerpoint presentations from the workshop may be made available there as well. More on this will follow shortly.

 

Good news

After a longer-than-intended summer break I want to catch up with a short post with two pieces of positive news. One is that the two-day workshop on ‘Foucault and Mobilities Research’, which I wrote about before, will be funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and thus will take place in January 2013 in Lucerne. I am very much looking forward to this event, and am sure it will be one of next year’s highlights!

The second item is that, from January 2013, I will be the editor-in-chief of Journal of Transport Geography for an initial period of three years. So I will succeed Richard Knowles, the journal’s founding editor who has been extremely successful in making JTG a top journal in the fields of both transport studies and geography. This will be a very difficult task but I’m confident that JTG’s great associated editors — Kevin O’Connor, Karen Lucas, David Keeling and Susan Kenyon — and myself can maintain the journal as a key outlet for the publication of state-of-the-art research on issues relating to transport and geography.

Foucault and Mobilities II

This is just a short note to announce that we — Katharina Manderscheid, David Tyfield and myself — have received an overwhelming response to the call for papers on Foucauldian mobilities research, which I posted in my previous message. Many more abstracts than we can accommodate have been submitted, and we have selected a number of submissions for the planned two-day symposium on the basis of fit with other presentations and the parts of Foucault’s oeuvre that the papers sought to engage with. We are very sorry for not being able to accommodate all the submitted abstracts and everybody for their interest in participating. It is clear that Foucauldian mobilities research is a rapidly expanding and vibrant constituent of both the wider mobilities paradigm in the social sciences and Foucauldian scholarship in human geography, sociology and beyond.

At the moment I am working on a paper for the upcoming RGS/IBG conference in which I explore the usefulness of Thomas Schatzki’s recent book The Timespace of Human Activity. But I will write more on this in one of my next posts.

Call for Papers: Foucault and Mobilities

Together with Katharina Manderscheid and David Tyfield I am organising a two-day symposium on Foucauldian thought and mobilities research and we are currently solliciting abstracts (until 10th June). Here’s the call for papers — Do get in touch if you would like to participate!

Call for Papers : Foucault and Mobilities Research

A Two-Day Symposium, 6th and 7th of January 2013, Lucerne, Switzerland

The publication in English and in German of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the years 1970-1984 has been a key driver of the recent renaissance of research inspired by his work across the social sciences. As part of this, sociologists, geographers and others in the academic world have begun to draw on and work with a wider range of Foucauldian concepts than in earlier studies. Foucault’s thinking on power/knowledge, panopticism, discourse, the role of the sciences, and so on still resonates strongly across the social sciences but it is the topics that he lectured on at the Collège that arguably attract the bulk of attention: a surge of interest has occurred among social scientists in his writings on apparatuses/dispositifs, governmentality, self-government and ethics to name but a few concepts. The translation of the lectures into German and English has also brought to the fore a greater focus on the liveliness of the world, the non-discursive realm, materiality and resistance than Foucault is usually credited for. In fact, and as Philo (2012) has noted, the lectures show more than his published books that Foucault was closer to Deleuze than is often assumed.

Foucault’s work has been employed and embraced enthusiastically by ‘mobilities’ scholars (e.g. Adey, 2009; A. Jensen, 2011; Merriman, 2007; Paterson, 2008, Richardson and Jensen, 2008; Schwanen et al, 2011; Manderscheid, 2012). It can nonetheless be argued that mobilities researchers have not yet fully explored or exhausted the potential of Foucault’s philosophy for understanding mobilities. Against this background we seek to bring together scholars from across the social sciences with a shared interest in both mobilities and Foucauldian thinking. Mobilities are here understood broadly as the flows (or lack thereof) of people, artefacts, money, ideas, practices, and so on across a wide variety of spatial and temporal scales, both in contemporary societies or in the past. More specifically, we are soliciting conceptual and/or empirical papers that address one or several of the following topics or a related theme:

• The governmentalities that shape mobilities

• The government of im/mobile others and selves

• Mobility dispositifs

• Mobile subjectivities

• Formation and contestation of material landscapes of mobilities

• Ethics of mobility and mobile ethics

• Discourses surrounding and underpinning mobilities

• Mobilities as an object of knowledge

• The ‘disciplining’ of mobilities

• Techniques of im/mobility and im/mobile techniques

• Conceptualisation of mobilities in regards to biopolitics and territory

The two-day symposium aims at connecting scholars from different disciplines with an interest in this range of topics. If you are interested in participating in this event with a paper, we ask that you prepare an abstract of no more than 250 words and send this to one of the organisers no later than 10th June 2012.

Katharina Manderscheid, Lucerne University, Tim Schwanen, University of Oxford, and David Tyfield, Lancaster University.

 

New forms of surveillance in public space?

It is more difficult to discipline myself into blogging, particularly at busy times, than I had imagined. Nevertheless, I still want to devote this post to the (draft) paper I presented at the AAG meeting last month in New York.

The paper I gave discussed a shift in the surveillance of public spaces that seems to be taking place in the Netherlands. The key idea was as follows: “As part of neoliberalisation, under the influence of shifting discourses and enabled by socio-technological developments, the Netherlands are currently witnessing a broadening of surveillance in public spaces from the government of others to ethical government of the self, which demands us to further rethink surveillance theory in human geography and beyond”. This is of course quite a complex sentence but what I tried to convey is this:

In various ways citizens are urged to monitor the behaviour of others and to intervene if they misbehave — for instance, when they bully or harass paramedics, police officers or other emergency service providers: In such a situation ‘good citizens’ are expected to ask others for help and come up to the perpetrator; call the national emergency number (112), stay with and give care to the victim; and make photos for the police and report themselves as witness. This at least is the central message of a media campaign launched by national government. And recent information and communication technologies are used in creative ways in this campaign. Not only is there a dedicated website (http://www.nederlandveilig.nl/veiligheidopstraat/, only in Dutch) and are Facebook and Hyves (a Dutch social networking site) used to disseminate the message (and creative watchful subjectivities); the campaign also assumes that people have access to mobile phones equipped with cameras and deploys this notion to regulate public spaces. What is more, in the city-centres of Rotterdam and Amsterdam short movie clips are shown on large screens in public space, which combine real-time footage of public space with pre-recorded scenes in which ambulance personnel is attacked by a few youth. The effect is that people walking past the screen see themselves projected into the scene with ambulance personnel in real time. In this way they are directly confronted with the consequences of passivity and non-intervention among passersby.

What we see here is that video-technology is not so much used to keep people under surveillance, as with CCTV (closed-circuit television). Rather it is used only to induce a process of self-government in users of public spaces. That is, we see a shift from using camera footage to govern others to using video technology to trigger government of the self. Note that this is a relative shift, for self-government is also part of the CCTV logic. After all, a key reason for installing CCTV relates to its presumed preventative function. The idea is that potential perpetrators who see a CCTV camera will become less inclined to commit a crime, given that the ‘cost’ of undertaking that course of action increases (or is assumed to increase) when the whole situation is filmed. Nonetheless, drawing on the work of Foucault, we can still say that the balance or matrix of self-government and the government of others is different in the regulatory regime promoted in the recent media campaign vis-a-vis the more traditional regime centred on CCTV.

And this brings me to the final part of the key idea that I presented in New York. For if we, as social scientists, are to make sense of the regulatory processes that currently take place with regard to public space in the Netherlands, it is ever more important that surveillance theory is rethought with regard to the effects of watching and being watched. To use some more jargon, more attention needs to be paid to the subjectivities — the ways of being and doing — for the people who are watching and/or are being watched. The developments in the Netherlands make it clear that it is no longer adequate — if it ever was — to think of the people who are being watched as passive receptacles of the view of others. Nor does it suffice to think of watching and being watched in terms of domination and resistance (as with artistic or other protests against the installment of CCTV systems). Thus, thinking theoretically about CCTV and video technology in public space more generally needs to really move beyond Foucault’s panopticism and concepts that are directly indebted to this, such as counterveillance or sousveillance. Instead we need to embrace the thinking by Hille Koskela and others. Koskela has elaborated four ‘modalities of surveillance’ of which traditional panopticism and counterveillance are only two. One of the other two is what she terms ‘humble servants‘ and consists in public authorities mobilising the ‘eyes on the street’ to supplement official surveillance and so realise their political agendas around security. This, then, is the modality of surveillance that we currently see becoming more important in Dutch public space.

Unlike some surveillance scholars, I still think that Foucault’s philosophy is very helpful in understanding the humble servant modality (and other forms) of surveillance. In fact, the largest part of the paper I gave in New York was devoted to the following argument: Rather than moving away from Foucault altogether, we need to draw a wider set of ideas and concepts from his oeuvre and combine these with notions form (post) phenomenology. For understanding the humble servant modality we can use Foucault’s writings on self government and ethics very well. And if we combine this with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Iris Young and Don Ihde we can even better understand the significance and consequences of the media campaigns of the past months in the Netherlands.