In 1978, Michel Foucault introduced his genealogy of the modern state, or alternatively, what he termed governmentality in which politics is understood as the product of rationalities which make up rule. Foucault’s problematic was to uncover the rationalities of bio-power or bio-politics which is situated within liberal rule. For Foucault, liberalism is to be viewed as a philosophy of rule that concerned itself with the rationality that the state may be governing too heavily and which increasingly divested itself of its regulatory capacities and consequently sought to guide the conduct of the population through often indirect and distanced means. Subsequently, others have built upon Foucault’s work on liberalism and have concluded that the phrase governing through freedom adequately characterizes liberal philosophies of rule. However, numerous critiques have been raised concerning the contention that liberalism brought with it a substantiated increase in freedom. It is this critique that the current research wishes to expand upon by using the case of the Aboriginal peoples throughout Canada between the eighteenth and nineteenth century to display that the concept of governing through freedom is far too restricted and that the governmentality literature often presents an incomplete account of classical liberalism. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2011-04-28 15:32:18.11

Pensionssystemsreformer har på senare år blivit allt mer individualiserade, introduktionen av PPM systemet under 2001 har gett individen mer frihet över sin egen pensionsförvaltning, men samtidigt även ett större ansvar och risktagande. De senaste åren har även hushållens skuldsättning ökat drastiskt i förhållande till disponibel inkomst, medan tillgångarna ökar i liknande takt som skulderna. Således blir individen allt mer beroende av tillgångspriser i allmänhet och finansiella marknader i synnerhet. Detta fenomen brukar betecknas som en variant av ’finansialiseringen’ ur ett individuellt perspektiv. Då finansialisering påverkar oss individer i allra högsta grad, blir det värdefullt att studera hur vi reagerar och förhåller oss till denna utveckling och huruvida de lever upp till de förväntningar som ett ökat ekonomiskt ansvarstagande förutsätter. Syfte: Syftet med denna studie är att öka förståelsen för hur individer relaterar till privatekonomiska företeelser i spåren av en svensk finansialisering, genom skapandet av idealtyper med specifika drivkrafter och mentaliteter. Metod: Vi har använt oss av en abduktiv forskningsansats där vår ambition varit att skapa ny teori. Detta med hjälp av en kombination av tidigare forskning och en kvalitativ studie av bankrådgivares uppfattning kring individers privatekonomiska agerande och uppfattningar i relation till vad som är privatekonomiskt optimalt. Resultat: Med hjälp av tidigare teori och intervjuer med privatekonomiska bankrådgivare har vi lyckats skapa typiska idealtyper som belyser privatpersoners olika mentaliteter och drivkrafter i deras privatekonomiska liv och företeelser. Vi kan även utifrån studiens resultat dra slutsatser kring de förväntningar som teoretiskt ställs på individen, att denne har en hög grad av finansiell litteraritet, för att klara sig privatekonomiskt optimalt är överdrivna. Detta då det ofta räcker att visa intresse och ta hjälp av de stödfunktioner som finns att tillgå, bland annat bankens privatrådgivning. / The Swedish pension system has become more and more individualized in recent years. The introduction of the PPM system in 2001 has given the individual more freedom and flexibility in their management of the pension portfolio, but it has also given the individual more responsibility and risk exposure. In recent years, the households’ indebtedness has also increased drastically in ratio with their disposable income, while their assets are increasing in roughly the same pace as the debt. This leaves the individual with more dependence towards asset prices in general and financial markets in particular. This phenomenon is often labeled as ‘financialization in the perspective of the individual. Because of the financialization’s extensive influence on the individual, it’s valuable to examine how individuals react and relate to this development. It’s also valuable to see if the individuals are living up to the expectations that come with a higher economic responsibility. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to enhance the understanding of how the individual relate to issues regarding personal finance in the wake of the Swedish financialization, by creating ideal types with specific incentives and mentalities. Method: We have been using an abductive research methodology where the ambition has been to create new theoretical knowledge. This was achieved by a combination of previous research and a qualitative study of bank councilors´ perception of individuals acting in their personal finance in relation to what the councilors find optimal or most rational. Conclusions: With the aid of previous theory and interviews of bank councilors, we have been able to create typical ideal types which highlight individuals’ different mentalities and incentives regarding their personal finance. From the result of the study, we were able to derive conclusions regarding the theoretical expectations that is put on the individual, that they have a high degree of financial literacy, to get an optimal personal finance is overrated. The reason for this is that it´s often enough to take interest in the personal finance and to use the support functions available, the banks personal finance counseling among others.

By tracing intertextual shifts in policy over time, I examine how discourse is constructed in particular ways within the same institution, at different times. I look at the ways in which the construction of EFA by the World Bank can be compared and contrasted between 2001 and 2007. Guiding my inquiry are considerations of how education has been linked to economic rationality and has become understood as a means through which to improve well-being, particularly for those who are from lower income states. The questions that have guided my inquiry are as follows: How is it that education comes to be exercised as a tool for integration in the international political economy? What type of knowledge informs the creation of the key documents and how are the appropriate ends, as constructed by the particular form of knowledge, manifested in EFA documents? / Theoretical, International and Cultural Studies in Education

The overall aim of this thesis is to examine how Easy-to-Read information, used by governmental agencies, facilitates and limits the field of possibilities for the intended recipient, based on the information.This, in anera of e-government.The theoretical framework is based on two Foucauldian concepts governmentality and discourse analysis. Representatives from five Swedish governmental agencies have been interviewed and the results have been analyzed based on the following questions: (1) How do the representatives construct the category Easy-to-Read? (2) How do these representatives construct the recipients of Easy-to-Read? In order to broaden the understanding of Easy-to-Read, an important national level policy document, containing a summary of strategies and goals for e-government has also been analyzed based on the following questions: (3) How is the e-government constructed in the text? (4) How is the citizen constructed and positioned in the text? The collected material is analyzed using a discourse analysis inspired by Foucault.With the results from the interviews and the analyzis of the policy document, Easy-to-Read information has been discussed and examined as a technology to meet the needs of people with reading difficulties, putin an era of e-government.The findings of the study include the following: (1) The e-government is constructed as a service agency and the citizens are positioned as clients. Furthermore, the citizens are expected to participate digitally and be digitally competent. (2)Some of the representatives does not know, with certainty, to whom the texts are directed or if they are used. Also, the agencies themselves does few or no user surveys. (3) Easy-to-Read information as a technology makes parts of the information more available for the recipients. The information is constructed as a complement to the other text, and is not fully complete. Therefore it can be seen as a technology that mostly facilitates the field of possibilities for those who are able to read other texts as well.

This study examines the mentalities and sensibilities of government that get (re)produced in one programmatic narrative about ‘child abuse’ and child homicide. It shows how a perspective of governance takes shape through the lens and language of risk, and how a discourse of risk can take very different forms even within one governmental programme. Empirically the study examines the major report released from the Public Inquiry into Pediatric Forensic Pathology in Ontario (known after its chairperson as the Goudge Inquiry/Report). The Goudge Inquiry (2008) was commissioned by the Ontario government in the wake of a Chief Coroner’s Review into the problematic practices of Dr. Charles Smith, the province’s most trusted paediatric forensic pathologist for nearly 15 years. The resultant Goudge Report presents a rationalization of Ontario’s paediatric death investigation system and its failures. It presents an ideal-typical narrative that carves out the image of a fully formed and perfected risk management complex for combatting ‘child abuse’. To understand the mentalities and sensibilities of government that shape and get shaped by the Report’s risk management narrative, this study probes what ‘risk’ does in the Goudge Report. Risk discourse in this case proves to be entangled in a ‘volatile and contradictory’ set of ‘superficial’ connections, associations and activities, one that operates at the nexus of ‘common sense’ mentalities and populist sensibilities. That the Report depends for its rhetorical power on the silencing of alternative claims, discourses and rationales is central to this analysis. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-31 16:33:55.671

This thesis seeks to unpack the notions of Michael Foucault's late work on governmentality and what insights it might have for understanding the ‘governing of nature’. In doing this it also operates as a critique of what is often termed 'resourcism', a way of evaluating nature which only accounts for its utility for human use and does not give any acceptance to the idea of protecting nature for its own sake, or any conception of a nature that cannot be managed. By utilizing a study of the govern-mentalities emerging throughout liberalism, welfare-liberalism and neoliberalism I argue that this form of 'knowing' nature-as-resource has always been internal to rationalities of liberal government, but that the bracketing out of other moral valuations to the logic of the market is a specific function of neoliberal rationalities of governing. I then seek to offer an analysis of the implications for this form of nature rationality, in that it is becoming increasingly globalized, and with that bringing more aspects of nature into metrics for government, bringing new justifications for intervening in ‘deficient’ populations under the rubric of ‘sustainable development. I argue, that with this a new (global) environmental subject is being constructed; one that can rationally assess nature-as-resource in a cost-benefit logic of wise-use conservation. This acts to both marginalize those people that have alternative understandings for our relationship with nature is destructive to nature itself, further embedding the more-than-human into the economic rationality of neoliberal resourcism. / Thesis (Master, Environmental Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-28 19:06:20.246

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Thesis advisor: Seth Jacobs / Counterinsurgency doctrine, as an intellectual project, began as a response on the part of liberal world powers to the dual crises of decolonization and the Cold War. Unlike earlier means of suppressing rebellions, counterinsurgency sought not to quash, but to channel the revolutionary energies of decolonization into a liberal, developmentalist direction. Counterinsurgency would simultaneously defeat communists and build a new and better society. As early efforts at developmentalist counterinsurgency failed in Vietnam in the early 1960s, the counterinsurgent’s methods and goals changed. The CORDS Project, starting in 1967, replaced the emphasis on building a new society with altering present societies in such a way as to prioritize surveillance and the removal of subversive elements. From its inception, the political visions that counterinsurgency seeks to implement have shifted alongside – and at times prefigured – changes in liberal governance more broadly. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

The Question(s) of Youth, of what to do with them, of how to school them, or police them, or regulate them, or house them, or employ them, or prevent them from becoming involved in any number of Risky (sexual, eating, drug (ab)using or peer cultural) practices are questions which have a substantial historical aspect. In the Liberal Democracies at the end of the millennium the Crisis of Youth (at-Risk) is a key marker in theoretical, political and popular debates about Youth. This thesis explores the 'conditions of possibility' which enable discourses of Youth at-Risk to function as true (Henriques et al 1984). I argue that the truth of Youth at-Risk rehearses, in part, the historical truths of Youth as Delinquent, Deviant and Disadvantaged. I will also argue that a historically novel aspect of the truth of Youth at-Risk is that, potentially, every behaviour, every practice, every group of Youth can be constructed in terms of Risk. This thesis is not about the practices, behaviours and dispositions of young people. Rather, my concern is with the ways in which institutionally structured processes of expert knowledge production construct the truths of Youth (at-Risk). The thesis is concerned with the processes by which these largely autonomous systems of expert knowledge production are constitutive of both the 'institutional reflexivity' which characterises contemporary settings, and the forms of identity which emerge in these settings (Giddens 1994 c). I am also concerned with the ways in which these systems of expertise mobilise categories of Risk in diverse attempts to regulate the behaviours and dispositions of certain populations of young people under the conditions of 'reflexive modernization' (Beck, Giddens & Lash 1994). The thesis argues for a productive convergence between theories of reflexive modernization and governmentality. This convergence enables Youth at-Risk to be examined at two (interconnected) levels. In the first instance Risk is understood as constituting a metanarrative in an Age of Manufactured Uncertainty. In the second instance the identification of Risk factors and populations at-Risk will be understood as techniques mobilised in diverse attempts to 'make up' rational, choice making, autonomous, responsible citizens within (Neo)Liberal projects of government (Rose 1996). Foucault's (1991) theory of governmentality foregrounds the practices and relations implicated in the processes whereby 'human beings are made into subjects' (Foucault 1983). Governmentality is a useful and strategic analytic for understanding the diverse attempts by various experts and centres of expertise to regulate young people's identity through the construction of populations of Youth at-Risk. Processes of reflexive modernization are marked by the emergence of a degree of collective awareness that our contemporary conditions of existence are characterised by the thoroughgoing penetration of the social and the natural by reflexive human knowledge. Such a situation leads, not to a position in 'which collectively we are the masters [sic] of our destiny'; but rather to a series of settings in which we are confronted with the possibility that, as a 'consequence of our own doings', the future becomes 'very threatening' (Beck, Giddens & Lash 1994). In problematising the truth of Youth at-Risk this thesis will also engage with various problematisations of Left (critical) intellectual and political practices in domains which take Youth as their object. This thesis is explicitly located in the space of 'critical' (Educational) scholarship in Anglo settings which is structured, historically, by the 'European Marxist social philosophy' of the Frankfurt School and Gramscian (British) Cultural Studies, and French and Italian Feminism and Post (Structuralism and Modernism) (Popkewitz and Brennan 1997). The thesis argues that in order to problematise the truth of Youth at-Risk it is necessary, also, to problematise the processes of truth production mobilised from the Left in an engagement with the material and discursive realities which enable Youth at-Risk to function as a truth. Examining the truth of Youth at-Risk in the frameworks enabled by a convergence of theories of reflexive modernization and governmentality is a contribution to the processes of rethinking the intellectual and political positions which the Left might mobilise at the end of the millennium, when, as Beck (1994 ) argues, 'uncertainty returns'. I will argue that Left intellectual and political practice has no choice but to be open to the uncertain nature of truth telling which characterises processes of reflexive modernization. The tensions generated within these processes are not resolvable. Nor should the 'return of uncertainty' be seen as immobilising in the context of political and intellectual practice. The thesis argues that theories of reflexive modernization and governmentality highlight the dangers of intellectual and political positions which invest heavily in 'modernity's war on ambivalence' (Bauman 1990 b). In settings where the practices and activities of expertise have so thoroughly penetrated the natural and the social, where these processes of colonisation have resulted in the 'return of uncertainty', then the practices and activities of expertise promise, paradoxically, to 'exterminate ambivalence' by telling the truths of Youth at-Risk (Bauman 1990 b). This thesis argues that in an Age of Manufactured Uncertainty the mobilisation of rationally grounded Risk discourses in attempts to regulate Youth emerges as a paradoxical, and dangerous, Quest for Certainty (Bauman 1990 a).