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In this article, we examine the professionalization coaching in Norway, focusing on the years between 1990 and 2020. During this period, Norway started to perform comparatively well in international elite sport. Data are drawn from two relatively separate fields of Norwegian elite sport, namely elite football for men and the Norwegian organization for elite sports' (Olympiatoppen) programme for future elite sport coaches. In our analysis, we rely on two sets of concepts: Giddens' notion of reflexivity in late modern society, and Foucault's concept of pastoral power. When concepts and methods from both the natural and the social sciences enter the clutches of elite sport, academic perspectives transform into recipes that aim to help athletes achieve more. The more the coach knows about the athlete, the better she can plan for training sessions. On the other hand, it creates a risk of manipulation and abuse of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the concept of pastoral power as presented by Fr Valentine Sventzitsky in his text “Six Readings on the Sacrament of Penance in its History”, which is significant for contemporary Russian Orthodoxy. Opposing the practice of general confession in the 1920s, he contrasts it with private confession, basing his arguments on pre-revolutionary studies of penitential practices and priesthood. At the same time, in Sventzitsky’s text, academic theses undergo a significant transformation in connection with his historiosophic and religious-philosophical ideas. First of all, he uses in this context the theory of the gradual unfolding of the Church's self-consciousness in history and projects this theory onto the theological reflection on the development of the forms of the Sacraments. In the same vein, in relation to ecclesiastical practices, he applies the theory of the historical differentiation in the Church of good and evil. In this context we analyze Sventzitsky's ideas about the secularization of the Church, to which he contrasts the active spiritualization of all life and formulates this call in the idea of a monastery in the world. The article shows what place the priest has in the formation of the monastery in the world. Against this background, the analysis of representations of pastoral power both in the “Readings” and in other texts by Sventzitsky, and correlating them with the sources on which he relies, allows us to highlight his thesis about the transformation of this type of power in history. The author of the Readings identifies three characteristic periods in which pastoral power changed from its public dimension in the ancient Church, communal — in Byzantine monasteries and Russian parish churches, and, finally, personal-psychological — in the context of the Soviet period. These three types of pastoral power are analyzed by Sventzitsky in connection with the transformation in historical perspective of the forms of confession, the continuity of the “power of the keys” in the Church, and the actualization of obedience in church life. From this perspective, Sventzitsky offers a theological justification for the established practice of confession, which he constructs as a bricolage of Russian academic theology and philosophy.

Contemporary thinkers studying biopolitics find little interest in Foucault's "vague sketch of the pastorate". Described by Foucault as an inherently "benevolent" "power of care", the concept seems inadequate to describe the deadly forms of carelessness that characterize the current government of life. Sovereign power, as a power of decision over life and death that works by distinguishing populations whose lives are worth affirming from social groups whose lives are not, therefore takes precedence in the examination of the governmental connection between care, violence, and biopolitics. Yet, what we might call the "sovereign turn" in the field of Foucault studies is not without a significant drawback. The focus on the logic of exclusion through which governments "care about" specific groups and "take care of" them, while actively producing subjects that cannot or must not be cared for, often overshadows the analysis of how care is currently given and received. More often than not, the post-Foucauldian critique of governmental concern for life neglects the long-standing feminist critique of how support for life, in the form of care work, has historically been organized along lines of gender, race, and class. In contrast, this article argues that delving into the relationship between pastoral power and governmentality enables the development of a framework that encompass both these critiques, shedding new light on the mechanisms at play in the current "crisis of care". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Foucault's essay 'The Subject and Power' has seen four decades. It is the most quoted of Foucault's shorter texts and exerts a persistent influence across the social sciences and humanities. The essay merges two main trajectories of Foucault's research in the 1970s: his genealogies of legal-disciplinary power and his studies of pastoral power and governance. This article connects these two trajectories to Althusser's thesis on the ideological state apparatuses, demonstrating affinities between Althusser's thesis and Foucault's diagnosis of the welfare state as a 'matrix' of individualising and totalising power. The article suggests that Foucault's essay straddles between two different concepts of subjectivation. First, one encounters the citizen 'internally subjugated' by disciplinary and pastoral power, whereas, at the end, we find a 'flat' subject of governance; a form of power which intervenes only in the environment in which individuals make their rational, self-fashioning choices. The implication of Foucault's newfound concept of governance is a weakening of the link between subjectivation and the formation of the state, which also meant that the state's role in reproducing capitalism receded into the background of Foucauldian scholarship. Finally, the article suggests extending Foucault's analytical 'matrix' to current techniques of subjectivation associated with the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, which buttress the expansive technique of predictive profiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If you possess a smartphone and use applications that are functionally bound to location, you are familiar with locative media. This genre of digital platform enables navigation and wayfinding, as well as promotes and rewards exploration. Surprisingly, the touristic significance of this has been seldom investigated. This article unpacks the capacity of TripAdvisor to facilitate and limit spatial exploration by analysing its non-digital antecedents, including travel agencies and guidebooks, attending to the dual governance they enact. It is argued that TripAdvisor acts as a geo-pastoral technology which orders the conduct of spatial subjects – both mobile and mapped – and the environments in which they move about and operate. This Foucauldian-Latourian framework is elaborated with findings from an ethnographic project exploring the social life of TripAdvisor within a literary-inspired touristic scene in Edinburgh, Scotland. In doing so, it positions this concept as a tool for analysing how human social actors become involved with locative media platforms in their efforts to navigate environments characterised by the now mundane dynamics associated with algorithmic governmentality. The modes of governance identified through this genealogy have ontological implications for how we research, teach about, and manage hospitality work, tourism services and geographies in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people in the Nordic countries have many options and face obligations to participate in career guidance and counselling (guidance). In Finland, young people are subjected to multiple institutionalized guidance practices especially in educational transition phases. Guidance has various objectives as a public policy, thereby setting a framework for guidance professionals too. By using Foucault's conceptualization on 'pastoral' power, we studied how guidance professionals ('shepherds') guide young people ('the flock') towards 'wellbeing'. Our aim was to analyse how pastoral power is manifested in guidance practices by asking what governmental discourses the guidance professionals refer to when talking about guidance and how these discourses are practiced in guidance. Our data comprise Finnish guidance professionals' interviews (n = 15). As a result, dominant governmental discourses of employability, economic efficiency and lifelong learning were identified. Guidance involved pastoral power and demanded employability and educability for the young. Guidance professionals have a crucial role in implementing governmental discourses into guidance practices. These practices create a narrow perspective for young people and guidance professionals, who are simultaneously the mediators and targets of governmental power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are organizational projects for refugee and migrant inclusion always trapped with the logic of exclusion and inequality that they seek to dismantle? Existing literature on critical diversity and inclusion studies has demonstrated how the "doing" of inclusion in organizations tends to come with paradoxical effects: well-intended efforts to include migrants and refugees construct them as vulnerable, non-autonomous subjects who need help, within a hierarchical order that is taken for granted. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how three civil society organizations (CSOs) navigate these paradoxical effects and the unduly constraining power relations involved through practices that we theorize as counter-conduct against the pastoral government of a national refugee and migrant integration regime. The analysis identifies three practices of counter-conduct through which organizations "do inclusion differently": contesting constraining categorizations, problematizing hierarchical power relations, and questioning the assimilationist goals and principles of the integration regime. We argue that through continuous critique and renegotiation of the ways in which boundaries of inclusion/exclusion are drawn within the integration regime, organizations work toward conditions in which power relations remain fluid and allow for strategies to alter them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACTYoung people in the Nordic countries have many options and face obligations to participate in career guidance and counselling (guidance). In Finland, young people are subjected to multiple institutionalized guidance practices especially in educational transition phases. Guidance has various objectives as a public policy, thereby setting a framework for guidance professionals too. By using Foucault’s conceptualization on ‘pastoral’ power, we studied how guidance professionals (‘shepherds’) guide young people (‘the flock’) towards ‘wellbeing’. Our aim was to analyse how pastoral power is manifested in guidance practices by asking what governmental discourses the guidance professionals refer to when talking about guidance and how these discourses are practiced in guidance. Our data comprise Finnish guidance professionals’ interviews (n = 15). As a result, dominant governmental discourses of employability, economic efficiency and lifelong learning were identified. Guidance involved pastoral power and demanded employability and educability for the young. Guidance professionals have a crucial role in implementing governmental discourses into guidance practices. These practices create a narrow perspective for young people and guidance professionals, who are simultaneously the mediators and targets of governmental power.

The objective of this article is to present in its most general terms Foucault's analysis of Christianity, with the aim of pointing out what is unique about it. To do this, we will focus our attention on the four books published within the project of a History of sexuality, the first three volumes of which were published in 1976 and 1984, while the last volume only in 2018. This analysis, in turn, presupposes genealogy of the subject of desire, which we can consider as Foucault's last research program. To this end, it is necessary to return to the comparison made repeatedly by Foucault between the Greek experience of aphrodisia, the Christian experience of the flesh and the modern experience of sexuality. This deviation will make it easier for us to understand the singularity of Christianity linked not to the repression of sexuality, but to a new form of governmentality, that of pastoral power, based on the "government of conduct", within which the body and its pleasures assume a central place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given Michel Foucault's immense influence on anthropology, assessing his account of pastoral power is an inescapable task for anthropologists who aim to make 'pastors and priests' into distinct objects of ethnographic inquiry. I develop a variation on this Special Issue's theme by returning to Foucault's Security, Territory, Population and Omnes et Singulatim, and also the essay, 'The Subject and Power' to consider what Foucault had to say about pastoral institutions within the genealogy of pastoral power outlined in these works. In the first two sections, I propose taking up a speculative and associational mien in response to Foucault's provocative claims about the declining vitality of pastoral institutions in the modern West. In the third section, I sketch out how the questions generated through this interpretive practice can help frame an ethnographic inquiry towards understanding the problems and purposes cultural professionals embrace and develop through their involvement in a Hungarian government-funded effort to canonise 'Transylvania's good pastor', the deceased bishop a Catholic archdiocese in Romania, Márton Áron (1896–1980). In the conclusion, I identify the contemporary politics of Catholic memory in the wake of the Second Vatican Council as a blind spot in Foucault's work, a lacuna akin to his lack of analytical interest in other major twentieth-century political trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coupling "know thyself" with anatomical illustrations produced a spatialized understanding of the self, providing preconditions for "brainhood," the view that "we are our brains." To picture oneself, whether in anatomical illustrations or neuroimaging, is to know thyself. This paper traces the historical development of the conflation of self-image and self-knowledge. First, I explore the Renaissance development of linear perspective. Second, I look at how the soul becomes spatialized in psychology as a science of the soul and its relationship to anatomical dissection. Third, I investigate the innovation of anatomical illustration and how it intersects with Renaissance visual culture. Finally, I show how these varied developments manifest "know thyself" in anatomical illustrations and its significance for how we see ourselves. I conclude that, according to the ideology of the neuro, we still "know thyself" through pictures of the body, but with neuroimaging as the new anatomical illustration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assess the extent to which accounting discourse was used during the aftermath of the Second World War as a way of reconceptualising the notion of a person with disabilities from welfare recipient to income earner. Drawing on Foucault's notion of pastoral power, we interpret archival documents from this important period in the development of disability policy in Australia, which is so far unexplored in the accounting literature. We reveal the role of accounting in rationalising and operationalising government initiatives and programs assembled to address the 'problem of disability'. We show that accounting terminology and techniques were mobilised as a way of justifying the transference of people with disabilities into sheltered workshops, a process that aimed to transform them into income earners who could contribute to the national economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay responds to the emergence of the plant as a new subject in contemporary theory. It focuses on two recent books that put vegetable life at the center of their analyses in an effort to reassess the political landscape of Western modernity from the ground up. Yet in the face of increasingly urgent climate disasters, these books seem oddly demobilizing in their injunction to cultivate a more contemplative, less decisive disposition. To make sense of this paradox, I look to Henry David Thoreau’s botanical ruminations in Walden. Notwithstanding plant theory’s claim that 19th century Western thought entirely disregarded the importance of plant life, Thoreau explicitly troubles the assumption that one has the “right” to kill and use certain plants for one’s benefit. Not unlike our plant theorists, he invites his readers to adopt a “much slower” pace so they may gain a “more intimate” knowledge of the living economy in which they partake. But Thoreau goes beyond elaborating a speculative ethics modeled after the way plants live. What he models, rather, is a pragmatic politics of planting that confronts head-on the thorny issues of death and violence and, as such, delineates the contours of a biopolitics capable of accounting for vegetal life.

Michel Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics is generally acknowledged as a pioneering study of neoliberalism, presenting it not merely as an economic theory but also as a mode of government. There is much debate, however, on Foucault's intentions in analysing neoliberalism and the place of the genealogy in his broader critical project. The Birth of Biopolitics itself lacks both an explicit judgement of neoliberalism and an explicit ethical program. In this article, I maintain that Foucault's genealogical work on neoliberalism is complementary to his notions of agency. From this perspective, Foucault's genealogy is not a judgement of neoliberalism in terms of right or wrong but rather serves as a breeding ground for ethical conduct. The notion of the critical attitude in particular shows that Foucault's genealogical work stands in the service of the subject's autonomy. However, Foucault is reluctant to fill in his ethical program too much because it should gain substance only in local struggles and through the subject's own considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates contemporary understandings of the ethics of care. While the ethics of care is predominantly known as showing empathy and support to others, analysing the complex relationship between institutional and personal values of clerical leaders and the congregation in the Roman Catholic Church in England reveals very different understandings. The sociological and psychological concepts of authority, pastoral care and identity are used to analyse the role of a female youth work leader in a Roman Catholic parish who is exposed to different (conservative and liberal) leadership approaches. She explains how her views on care, gender and participation differ from those of three clerical leaders and powerfully illustrates the resulting conflicts between the priests but also towards the congregation. This story shows that individual agency influences strong conservative institutional values and that leadership in faith-based organisations needs to embrace the complex interplay between institutional and personal dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Person centred approaches to rehabilitation are promoted as an ethical means of addressing paternalistic power relations in clinician dominated medical encounters and improving outcomes. However, they fail to account for the complex nature of power. We sought alternative ways to explain the use of power in health service provision. A poststructural discourse analysis using the view of power offered by Michel Foucault was undertaken. Foucault's concept of governmentality is useful to explain the way health services deploy technologies of power to achieve objectives of the state. Governmentality refers to not just political structures but all the strategies and procedures for directing human behaviour. Our investigation uncovered a web of strategic relationships operating that were both potentially productive and problematic and illuminate how client centred approaches in neurorehabilitation intertwines its subjects in strategic power relationships that involve webs of obligations and responsibilities. The client-professional relationship promoted in neurorehabilitation as a moral way to practice can be a tool for mastery of one over the other, and assist the client to achieve their desired ends, but also has the potential to marginalise others who are unable to shape themselves into the desired ideal client. This analysis shows how power is subtle and productive in that it produces knowledge and roles for both clients and practitioners. It demonstrates how neurorehabilitation's disciplinary practices assist the client to achieve their recovery goals. It reveals how certain clients might be marginalised when they cannot shape themselves into the ideal rehabilitation client. As a final point we hope that by being aware of how power works in neurorehabilitation, practitioners can become aware of opportunities for challenging disciplinary practices that do not serve the best interest of the client. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract I denne artikkelen undersøkes bekymringssamtalen, som ofte blir omtalt som et sentralt verktøy i norske myndigheters arbeid med å forebygge radikalisering og voldelig ekstremisme. Slike samtaler blir gjennomført med personer som er antatt å være i risiko for radikalisering. Hensikten er å innhente informasjon, korrigere atferd, identifisere behov for hjelp, samt å tilby hjelp dersom det trengs. Inspirert av Foucault og hans tenkning om pastoralmakt analyserer vi bekymringssamtalen som myndighetsutøvelse, der til dels motstridende agendaer – av statlig kontroll og statlig omsorg – kommer sammen i det som konseptualiseres som «bekymring». Videre argumenterer vi for at bekymringssamtalen eksemplifiserer og synliggjør mer overordnede dilemmaer og konflikter i myndighetenes forebyggingsinnsats på dette feltet, hvor bekymring gir mening og legitimitet til det vi ser som en problematisk sammenstilling av omsorgs- og kontrolltiltak og av sosialpolitiske og sikkerhetspolitiske agendaer. Abstract In this article we set our sights on what is often referred to as a key instrument for countering violent extremism in Norway, the conversation of concern [Bekymringssamtale in Norwegian], usually referred to in English as the police conversation intervention. The conversation is conducted with individuals assumed to be at risk of radicalisation with the aim of obtaining information, modifying behaviour, identifying any needs for help, and offering help if needed. We argue that this intervention clearly demonstrates certain dilemmas and conflicts inherent in the Norwegian Government’s recent policies on counter-extremism, where the concept of «concern» [bekymring] encompasses control and care, and includes agendas related to security and welfare, respectively. Applying a Foucauldian conceptual framework, we analyse the conversation of concern as a technique of pastoral power in which conflicting agendas interact in problematic ways, and the exercising of state power and control is neutralised through a notion of a general common good; «concern».

This paper explores expert guidance of parenting in Switzerland and discusses the work of the mothers' and fathers' advisors (MVBs), a state-funded service providing counselling to parents of preschool children. The data presented here draws upon ethnographic research which investigates parenting as a site of 'governance'. Based on semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation with MVBs and parents, this paper examines (power) relationships between early childhood experts and parents. The findings demonstrate that the practices deemed appropriate for the surveillance and guidance of parenting today are a clear example of what Michel Foucault dubbed 'pastoral power' and include the gathering and archiving of information, as well as hierarchical observation. Reconnecting insecure or overly intellectual mothers with their 'maternal instincts', which some advisors felt were at risk of being lost, involves the facilitation of technologies of self. The paper also explores 'resistance' against pastoral care, which is not necessarily perceived as well-intentioned or helpful by parents, who may strive not to implement advice or completely reject 'accompaniment' by advisors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recovery, a model of care aimed at patient‐led nursing practice emphasizing autonomy, hope and self‐determination, has in recent years been adapted for the secure forensic psychiatric setting. Often referred to as 'secure recovery', this model suggests the aims of recovery are achievable even in highly restrictive settings. This paper will adopt a Foucauldian perspective to offer a critical analysis of recovery in forensic settings. In providing recovery‐oriented care, nurses utilize pastoral power in guiding patients to institutionally preferred outcomes. Akin to Christian religious conversion, nurses engage in a neo‐religious conversion of patients to a neoliberal subjectivity of homo‐economicus. This path of recovery is grounded in an ethos of personal responsibility and self‐government, inseparable from the greater context of neoliberal governmentality. Despite attempts at transforming forensic nursing practice into more egalitarian directions, recovery remains a coercive practice, and fails to meet the overall goals of this paradigm in secure settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a time of accelerating ecological crises, captive care performed by zoos and aquariums increasingly plays a central and controversial role in attempts to resuscitate species and ecosystems rapidly disappearing from the planet. Here I use the Giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) exhibit at the Vancouver Aquarium to examine practices involved in capture and captive care at a prominent Canadian institution. As I trace how octopuses come to the Aquarium and how people work to keep them alive and healthy in this environment, I examine the complex ways violence and domination interact with care practices. Centering octopuses and their material relations in this analysis thus allows me to connect everyday care practices to systems of governance and extraction that support captive ecologies and also generate the categories used in care. Through this investigation, I find that pastoral power organizes care practices at the Vancouver Aquarium and maintains anthropocentric order in this space. Slow violence here results from the imperfect replacement of lifegiving relations, and the nature of this harm is shaped by different beings' relationships to anthropocentric order. Hierarchical categorizations structure care practices here, and when care directed at keeping animals healthy fails, slow violence often becomes acute. Elusiveness best characterizes how octopuses confound attempts to know and care for them within this anthropocentric power structure. The theoretical lens and language I offer seeks to describe moments of rupture in anthropocentric power without romanticizing animal endangerment as liberation or (conversely) accepting the logic that harm in captivity can only diminish if care improves. Through this work, I showcase both the violence and possibilities embedded in different ways of living and relating with ecological others amidst crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the productive political-philosophical concepts Foucault developed is that of governmentality. According to Foucault, governmentality is in many respects the heir of pastoral power. However, Foucault has never conclusively demonstrated the genealogical link between pastoral power and governmentality. The hypothesis that I want to put forward is that the "missing link" in this genealogy should be situated in the governmental transformations that took place in the period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, more specifically in the period of the "confessionalization". To substantiate this claim, I briefly discuss the ideal-typical relationship between pastoral power and governmentality while indicating how Foucault accounts for this relationship. I then criticise his account by showing that it fails to expose the genealogical link between pastoral power and governmentality. Finally, I show how, from a genealogical point of view, the confessionalization theory makes a convincing connection between the revival of pastoral power during the Reformation and the development of a "confessional governmentality" in which religious and secular authorities intersect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to fill the gap in the literature that on the one hand adopts productively a Foucauldian genealogical approach to analyze religious phenomena yet on the other hand offers only minimum details, or no account, of methodological criteria and analytical procedures. Drawing retrospectively on the methodological experiences and insights of the author's previous genealogical exercises, and the findings of some of the works above, the paper develops a contextual genealogical approach to study the religious in colonial and post-colonial settings with a Christian background. Based on a critical adoption of Nietzschean and Foucauldian tenets and six strategic analytical axes, the approach is presented as an open and flexible context-oriented methodological alternative for the necessarily constant rethinking of the religious in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of scholarly studies have focused upon mapping the relationship between race, police power, and the sovereign capacity of law onto the coordinates of repressive force. No doubt, the racialized circuits of police violence, underpinned by the mystical foundation of sovereign authority, constitute a coercive apparatus that is marshaled by risk and security. However, rather than reduce mythic police violence to the singular vector of repression, I suggest that the propensity to punish the racialized body and make it suffer through police practices of the confessional and pastoral power imbricate with the pre-liberal Christian theology of redemption and atonement. Upon consideration of decolonial and theological-political concepts, I suggest pastoral forms of racialized police power have been articulated to utilitarian secular-liberal democratic justifications to increase community safety, suppress crime, and reify social and political solidarity through the appropriate dispensation of suffering, and, potentially death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws on Mary Douglas' theory of institutional styles of thinking to analyze the debate about how and when the Coronavirus crisis can be brought to an end. The dominant approach, I show, frames the problem in utilitarian terms, akin to what is known among philosophers as "the trolley problem." I point out the pitfalls of this framing and contrast it with a counter-frame taken from the Judeo-Christian tradition of pastoral leadership. The lacunae of this institutional style of thinking are pointed out as well, in order to develop the critical distance necessary for a reasoned intervention in the crisis.

Food banks across the UK are offering basic food supplies and a range of support services to people who have been affected by years of welfare cuts and the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis. Despite a growing research interest in the drivers and experiences of food bank use, their own role in constructing and managing poverty as a social problem has been neglected. Adopting a Foucauldian approach, this study critically explored how power is exercised and subjects are formed inside three UK food banks. The localised care for the poor is shown to work through a pastoral power, which requires confessions of crises and obedience to an expert regime in the diagnosis and treatment of poverty as an individual condition. By making food aid conditional on active engagement with other support agencies, volunteers negotiate and translate neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility and active citizenship. Findings are linked to a wider critique of neoliberal government, which works through therapeutic discourses and retains disciplinary and paternalistic elements in managing poverty at a distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on Foucault's concept of pastoral power, the article scrutinizes the role of religious officers who are employed by Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and serve Turkish Muslim communities in Europe. It investigates how state-led diaspora institutions operate at a micro-level and what they reveal about the state's governmentality outside its territory. In order to parse the pastoral actors' empirically visible agency, the work draws on ethnographic observations of the religious officers' activities in the Diyanet's mosques in Austria. It outlines (i) how Diyanet officers' pastoral practices go beyond the mosques and manifest in a wide range of socio-cultural religious services aimed at reaching diaspora communities, (ii) the relation between Diyanet officers' activities and the Turkish state's extraterritorial practices and discourse aimed to promoting obedience to the authorities and love for the motherland, and (iii) how the interaction between Diyanet officers and the flock shape people's perception of themselves as a community while remapping the boundaries of a Turkish and Muslim belonging in essentialist terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to better understand the modern evolution of the workplace not only as a place to work but also increasingly as a place to live. Current research largely excludes the instrumental aspects of this blurring of personal and professional spheres at work, as manifested in an intentional dissolution of the boundaries between work and non-work activities. To understand the meaning and implications of these new workplaces, which rely on a central tension between care and control and tend to reinterpret paternalism as an organizing principle, this study develops a conceptual framework derived from Michel Foucault's concept of pastoral power. This framework helps make sense of a caring mode of power that marks modern organizations. The application of this framework—using a qualitative case study of a French company's home-like working environment—suggests a processual and constructivist conceptualization of these workplaces as a manifestation of pastoral power, embedded in a broader governmentality strategy. It emphasizes the material and discursive construction of the workplace as a place to live and highlights the emergence of neo-paternalism as a new form of care and control. This critical perspective informs discussion on the implications of this caring mode of control for workers, in a hopeful call to stay alert to modern capitalist intrigues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present here the normative argument that the role of the democratic-liberal state is to ensure solidarity between the public educational system and the parents of students, during routine times and during emergency times. I shed light on the weakness of the values of solidarity and equality, which have characterized the relations of the Israeli educational system and the parent population, especially during the COVID-19 crisis. Based on Michel Foucault's ideas, this article uses the productive-constructive possibilities of power that Foucault termed "pastoral power" for the creation of solidarity between the educational system and parents, especially during emergency period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cecil the Lion lived in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe and was a part of an Oxford conservation study until his death by poaching, outside of Park boundaries, at the hands of an American hunter, in July 2015. Cecil's death caused unique levels of international outrage, though wildlife poaching in general remains an all-too-ubiquitous phenomenon. This paper enquires as to why this particular death caused such outrage. I will examine this question through two Foucauldian lenses: first, through the Parks' discursive production of subjects – human and nonhuman animal; and secondly, by investigating Parks' practices of understanding biopower and pastoral power. I argue that though wildlife conservation in the National Parks is generally interested in conserving the species, not individuals, Cecil's status as a named individual in a scientific study resulted in the outrage and speaks to the paradox at the heart of Foucault's idea of pastoral power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault's genealogy of pastoral power as "a power of care" challenges us to think of modern medical institutions and practices in terms of political theology by emphasizing their continuities with older ecclesiastical practices. Both ecclesiastical and medical forms of pastoral power generate forms of resistance or "counter-conduct" with theological and biopolitical implications. Foucault's prescient remarks on the relationship between forms of religious counter-conduct and modern movements to resist vaccines and other public health measures raise questions about the legacy of pastoral power in the contemporary world and the limits of rhetorical appeals to science and medical rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, our aim is to provide a critical analysis of the phenomenon of judiciarization of people suffering from a mental illness and its impact on nursing practice. To explore the issues inherent to this phenomenon, we employed the methodology of discursive analysis greatly inspired by the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. The results of this analysis push our reflection on the experiences and practices that take place at the psychiatric and judicial interface, engaging in a critic of underlying goals of public protection, social control, and coercion being incorporated to nursing practice. While acting in seemingly humanistic and therapeutic roles of care, nurses are simultaneously and inevitably fulfilling a mandate to social control which, to date, remains relatively under documented.

Abstract The architecture of security is often thought of in terms of situational crime prevention and defensible space. In this article, we argue that the emergence of smart cities and smart technology compel a broader conceptualisation of the design of security, which has the potential to transform the governance of our urban landscape. Drawing on the case of the city of Eindhoven’s “De-escalate” project—in which sound, smell and lighting programming combined with data analysis is used to reduce violence and aggression in the inner-city entertainment area—we show that the securitisation of urban space can also be pursued by positive triggers for behaviour. The case allows us to rethink the architecture of security in terms of pastoral power—Foucault’s notion of governing individuals and populations through care and protection. In sharp contrast with more hostile forms of situational crime prevention and defensible space, which seek to “design out” unwanted behaviour by closing off spaces, pastoral architecture is inclusive and provides “scripts” for desirable behaviour in public space. Moreover, this architecture is incorporated and designed into the existing built environment, operates through psychological triggers rather than physical ones, and is principally developed by private companies rather than the state.

This special issue deals with the political ideas developed by different authors, and which have their source in the commentary of texts inherited from the Greeks, or in government knowledge developed from the beginning of Islam. It seeks to underline the richness of these intellectual traditions, whether purely philosophical, juridicaltheological or historical-literary and proposes to make their contents known to readers, by renewing the reading of the political themes and issues they contain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil has the third largest prison population in the world and the largest in Latin America, a reality marked by mass incarceration, penal selectivity and the practice of torture. However, while prisons appear as outrageous and unacceptable, it is as if they were natural and intrinsic to social life. Faced with this sad and distressing situation, it is opportune to pursue the intertwining between theologies and prisons, in order to point to other solutions for overcoming state violence. This article seeks to present the results of the Master's research defended in the Graduate Program in Theology on incarceration, which was approved with honors, with an indication for publication. To understand the intertwining between theologies and prisons, as well as to draw contributions to the overcoming of incarceration, based on Public Theology, it was necessary to make use of the theoretical contributions of Michel Foucault. In this way, we will expose what we have called the pastoral of incarceration, as a type of power that, dedicating itself to detail, develops the matrix of the political government of men that will develop in modernity, as well as based on the extraction of truth and atonement for faults produces modern subjectivity. The article is based on the works of Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (1975), Securité, territoire et population (1978) and Du gouvernement des vivants(1980), presenting, respectively, disciplinary power, governmentality and pastoral power, and real acts. At the end, I outline some final considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]