This dissertation analyzes how governance and community-based politics of claims in marginalized Muslim neighborhoods of Mumbai are continually reconfigured in relation to one another. By tracing this relationship, I problematize conceptualizations of governmental forms and community that don't adequately attend to their co-constitution in practice. More specifically, I examine the intersections between state practices and claims of belonging in Mumbai neighborhoods inhabited by Muslims who, impelled by regional economic inequalities, immigrated to the city from North India and other parts of the country. A large number of them traditionally belong to artisanal communities and are today engaged in the informal sector of the economy. I am interested in understanding how competing and converging claims are made to locality, urban space, labor, and caste in the interactions between these working-class Muslim communities and the state in a city that has become highly segregated along religious and regional lines. I argue that state and marginalized community in minoritized areas are not defined by independence and isolation, but by a relationship of co-generation marked by convergence and contradiction. My analysis of the interactions between community forms and state practices explores modes of laying claim to localizing forms of belonging with respect to urban space, public religiosity, histories of labor, kinship, and 'backward' caste politics. / Anthropology

This thesis considers how statistics about adult literacy have produced a new transnational norm of what it means to “be literate” and asks what has been produced by demarcating a calculable threshold of capable literate conduct. Analyzing literacy as a form of conduct enables investigation of the political dimensions of governmental interest in literate conduct and consideration of what subjects, relationships and forms of power are produced by various problematizations. Genealogical analysis of the currently dominant governing rationality, what is termed the psychometrological regime, revealed that Level Three of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) has been constructed as a threshold between people who can act as autonomous, entrepreneurial subjects and those who cannot. In the case of Ontario, this threshold becomes an indicator of “employability” and produces a singular and problematic population who are subjected to coercive educational interventions. Tactics and techniques in the province’s Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) policy construct literacy programs as sites responsible for transforming subjects below the threshold into human capital assets; this represents a significant departure from the original mission of community-based agencies. Data from interviews with educators in these programs indicate that adult literacy workers occupy an uneasy position between the demands of policy, their pastoral relationships with learners, and the complex realities faced by adults who struggle with print. While these educators may choose to disobey some policy imperatives they nonetheless act, at times unwittingly, as agents of governance. By highlighting the impossibilities produced by the neoliberal problematization of literacy, and the negotiations that literacy workers perform in the face of such dilemmas, this research contributes to thinking through how to transform coercive and authoritarian tendencies currently governing literate conduct.

This thesis considers how statistics about adult literacy have produced a new transnational norm of what it means to “be literate” and asks what has been produced by demarcating a calculable threshold of capable literate conduct. Analyzing literacy as a form of conduct enables investigation of the political dimensions of governmental interest in literate conduct and consideration of what subjects, relationships and forms of power are produced by various problematizations. Genealogical analysis of the currently dominant governing rationality, what is termed the psychometrological regime, revealed that Level Three of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) has been constructed as a threshold between people who can act as autonomous, entrepreneurial subjects and those who cannot. In the case of Ontario, this threshold becomes an indicator of “employability” and produces a singular and problematic population who are subjected to coercive educational interventions. Tactics and techniques in the province’s Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) policy construct literacy programs as sites responsible for transforming subjects below the threshold into human capital assets; this represents a significant departure from the original mission of community-based agencies. Data from interviews with educators in these programs indicate that adult literacy workers occupy an uneasy position between the demands of policy, their pastoral relationships with learners, and the complex realities faced by adults who struggle with print. While these educators may choose to disobey some policy imperatives they nonetheless act, at times unwittingly, as agents of governance. By highlighting the impossibilities produced by the neoliberal problematization of literacy, and the negotiations that literacy workers perform in the face of such dilemmas, this research contributes to thinking through how to transform coercive and authoritarian tendencies currently governing literate conduct.

To investigate how federal discourse constructs adolescence, the author analyzed discussions of abstinence-only sexuality education from the U.S. Congressional Record from 2001 to 2007. He used grounded theory methodology to identify theoretical codes and construct a model from the data. The grounded theory developed focused on Congress’s maintenance of its role in mediating concern over the sexual behavior of adolescents as opposed to finding a solution to the problem it had identified. The author relates this theory to Foucault’s (1974/1991) concept of governmentality. He discusses Congress’s discourse about adolescence using Lesko’s (2001) confident characteristics of adolescence as a framework.

This dissertation explores the extent to which transnational policies can change the international development bureaucracy. Over the last decade, significant resources were invested to integrate aid effectiveness policies into the global network of donor organizations and recipient governments in an effort to improve aid delivery. These policies adhere to five principles: ownership, alignment, harmonization, managing for results, and mutual accountability. They are organized around the principle of ownership, according to which control over the development process is transferred from donor partners to recipient countries. While seemingly straightforward, underneath the perceived consensus are layers of ambiguous terminology, assorted interpretations and competing discourses that influence the policies—often dissipating the potential for transformation. This case study takes a multi-scalar approach in examining how aid effectiveness principles emerged as a transnational discourse and were embraced in Canada and Tanzania. The methods include a focus group, a policy review, qualitative observations, and interviews with practitioners from government, multilateral and civil society organizations in Canada and Tanzania. The analysis employs a reading of governmentality that focuses on the link between the microphysics of power embedded in day-to-day operations and the emergence of larger societal or discursive regimes. The dissertation found that aid effectiveness policies were repeatedly modified as they moved through the international development bureaucracy, effectively subduing significant changes in the recipient government-donor partner relationship. In Canada, aid effectiveness policies were incorporated into an already weak policy framework, which resulted in a truncated version that emphasizes accountability and managing for results. This restricted how the field staff negotiated with other donor partners and the Government of Tanzania. In Tanzania, the emphasis was on the principles of harmonization, alignment, and ownership, which generated a high level of organizational change with only minimal adjustments in terms of control over the development process. This case study found that policy modifications occurred on a daily basis as bureaucrats negotiated implementation strategies, various interpretations, and underlying discourses. This process amplified the technical aspects and subdued the transformational aspects of aid effectiveness policy. The dissertation concludes with a brief discussion of possible ways to overcome this quandary.

La divulgation dans les médias de masse des atrocités commises dans les camps de concentration nazis et soviétiques n’a pas ébranlé que les milieux politiques. Plusieurs chercheurs en sciences humaines (on pense immédiatement à l’expérience de Milgram) et en philosophie ont cherché à comprendre le fonctionnement des régimes totalitaires. Hannah Arendt, en plus d’avoir contribué à la popularisation du concept de totalitarisme, a été l’une des premières à en rechercher les origines. Bien qu’il n’ait jamais abordé de front la question du nazisme et du stalinisme, Michel Foucault a, lui aussi, ancré ses recherches sur le pouvoir dans une démarche généalogique. Plus précisément, c’est lors de ses travaux sur la gouvernementalité et la biopolitique qu’il a étudié les rationalités gouvernementales, leurs technologies et leur effet subjectivant. Les objectifs de cette recherche sont de présenter un exposé critique de ces deux approches des phénomènes de pouvoir en Occident et de produire une étude comparative du phénomène totalitaire. / The revelation to light of the atrocities committed in Nazi and Soviet concentration camps has not only shaken the political circles. Several researchers in the humanities (one thinks immediately of the Milgram experiment) and philosophy have sought to understand the functioning of totalitarian regimes. Hannah Arendt, in addition to having contributed to the popularization of the concept of totalitarianism, was one of the first to look for the origins. Although he never tackled head on the issue of Nazism and Stalinism, Michel Foucault, too, grounded his research on power in a genealogical approach. Specifically, it was during his work on governmentality and biopolitics that he studied governmental rationalities, technologies and their subjectification effect. The objectives of this research are to present a critical discussion of these two approaches of the phenomena of power in the West and to produce a comparative study of the totalitarian phenomenon.

The focus of this thesis is how identities are construed in adult education. According to the theoretical framework inspiring the study, identities are viewed as discursive constructions that are negotiated in social arenas. Hence, identities are considered versatile, plural and contradictory. The study has an ethnographic case study design and the field work was conducted 1998–2001. Various sources of data collection, such as interviews and participant observations were utilised. Every day practice at three different institutions of adult education in the case study municipality ”Nystad” were studied: Folk high school, Komvux and Liber Hermods flexgymnasium. Participants (27) were studied extensively, and a follow-up containing biographical interviews with the participants was also done 18 months after the main study. The result will show how the discourse of life long learning produce different technologies applying to different institutions of adult education defining what counts as knowledge, the relationships between actors and the demands participants will be posed with. Although the institutions of education are different, there are also similarities. The differences, however, are important in the recruitment of participants. The requirements of the education as to who you are supposed to be as a participant in adult education show a similar pattern, irrespective of the institution of education; the student with an interest in studying, prone to change, independent and well-behaved. Different strategies are detected when focusing the staging of participants’ identities, adaptive and defiant. An adaptive strategy means the adults meet the requirements of the education and a defiant strategy that they resist. The strategies may be applied by one and the same participant depending on the situation. Biographies show how different interpretative repertoires are used to stage different identities. The participants use four repertoires relevant to the subject: that of making a living, learning, earning credits and self realization. The repertoires applicable to the forms of teaching are teacher oriented, selfdirected and conversational. The repertoires used in relation to the teachers in adult education are expert, person, supervisor and administrator. The repertoires used by the adults in order to describe other participants are adult student, study mate and friend. The result of the study inspires the discussion of adult education in terms of social inclusion and exclusion.

The change in regional governance in Sweden is regularly understood in terms of a shift from ’government’ to ’governance’, from a redistributive policy to a policy that aims to encourage regional innovation, competitiveness and growth. This shift also includes the adoption of global policy models, such as ’clusters’.  In the literature on the global spread of policies it has been argued that a market for global policies has developed. This is not least evident through the expansion of global consultancy firms, international policy organisations as well as a cosmopolitan elite of travelling policy technocrats. Theoretically and methodologically this study contributes to scholarly discussions of how new forms of governance can be analysed, and especially how governmentality studies can be utilised and combined with analyses of the messy political practices of specific policies and programs. The study analyses the discursive shift in regional policy in Sweden: contested elements erased, conflicts concealed and the political order produced. By empirically departing from a ’cluster policy network’ lodged within a Swedish region, cluster policy is analysed as an assemblage of global circuits of knowledge, expertise and local relations of power. A broad range of materials for analysis have been generated through interviews, participant observations and documents. The production of policy knowledge is an overarching political rationality of contemporary forms of regional governance, translated into technologies such as benchmarking, regional comparisons, competitions, evaluations and best-practice. Based on the empirical analyses it is argued that the lack of power critique and a hyper-rational representation of knowledge produce an international market for legitimacy. It is further argued that five characteristics of the policy regime (’the regional cluster orchestra’) contributes to the reproduction of the policy regime, and relations of domination. / Baksidestext Avhandlingen tar sin utgångspunkt i vad som har beskrivits som en marknad för globala policymodeller. I Sverige har klusterbegreppet, med ursprung i ekonomisk och geografisk teoribildning, fått stort genomslag i regionalpolitiken. I den samtida regionalpolitiken har också produktionen av olika former av policykunskap utvecklats till centrala styrningsteknologier: benchmarking, best practice, utvärderingar, uppföljningar, mätningar och konkurrensutsatta tävlingar om regionala utvecklingsmedel. Genom kunskap och ständigt lärande ska Sveriges regioner frälsas. I avhandlingen studeras den scen där ett regionalt förankrat policynätverk agerar och den kunskap som produceras. Regionalpolitikens rationalitet innebär att det blir centralt för regionerna att agera som enhetliga aktörer och visa upp en lyckad och framgångsrik fasad. Det argumenteras för att bristen på maktanalys, och en hyperrationell syn på kunskap i regionalpolitiken innebär att regionalpolitikens styrningsteknologier producerar en internationell marknad för legitimitet som i sin tur reproducerar ordningen och döljer dominansrelationer.

This thesis analyses the categorisation of adult persons who need help to cope in everyday life as either older persons or persons with a disability. Despite the development of social services in the Scandinavian countries being guided by the principles of universalism and equality, adults in need of care have different rights to support depending on their current age and at which age disability occurs. This thesis aims to explore how age-based differences in access to care, support and service are legitimised. In the thesis, the concept of help is used to refer to care, support and service. Using a discourse analytic approach, Swedish elderly and disability policies and websites through which providers of help market their services were examined. The analysis, inspired by the theoretical framework of governmentality, draws attention to how users of help and helpers are constituted in two age-related discourses on help. The first discourse, help to maintain, is used mainly in relation to older persons. In this discourse older persons are constituted as subjects in need of safety, comfort and company while the helpers are represented as caring and knowing. The second discourse, help to change, constitutes younger persons with a disability as citizens in becoming. Help aims to improve the situation for younger help users in varying ways: the opportunity to fully determine the tasks performed by helpers is essential to users of personal assistance whereas personal development as regards both practical and social skills is the key to change for persons with an intellectual or mental disability. While help for younger persons is represented as a means to enhance the individual’s self-determination and ability to participate in society, help for older persons is represented as aiming to maintain past patterns of life, not aspiring towards change or improvement. It is argued that these representations support a lower ambition for eldercare than for disability services.

This study analyzes the three most recent pieces of Canadian immigration legislation: the Immigration Act of 1952, the Immigration Act of 1976, and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act of 2001 (herein referred to collectively as the documents). The intent is to contribute to the archaeology of immigration in Canadian Federal legislation, and more specifically, to the ways that the immigration applicant, immigrant, and the immigration process in Canada, have been constituted over time. This project uses a modified version of Jean Carabine’s (2001) method of Foucauldian discourse analysis to articulate the various meanings and potential effects that are produced in the documents. The work of Michel Foucault and the governmentality approach is then applied to make sense of these findings. Two main conclusions are generated. The first details how elements of state racism and bio-nationalism are apparent in all three acts, and must be regarded as complimentary to one another, as they co-exist and operate together on different planes. The second discusses a shift in the documents from a focus on welfare rationalities, to neo-liberal rationalities, using the example of the shifting portrayal of the immigrant (and immigration applicant) from someone with the potential to become a liability to the welfare state, to a neo-liberal subject.