Sade has had many titles over the centuries. He was ‘Marquis’, a noblesse d’épée, sitting in his château atop Lacoste; ‘Wolf-man’, on the run from the authorities, a cause célèbre for his notorious sexual adventures; ‘Citizen’, a turncoat royalist, a functionary within the bureaucracy of the new French Assembly, eulogizer of the revolutionary heroes, Marat and Le Pelletier; and ‘Divine’, a patron saint of Romantic poets like Flaubert and Baudelaire, and later, the same for the Surrealists. Sade has yet to be given the name: ‘Scientist’. In my dissertation I lay out the ground work for defending this choice of designation by situating Sade and a sampling of his works within a defining period in the history of the object of scientific inquiry: from the eve of the 1789 French Revolution until its dénouement following the death of Robespierre. The three works of focus are Les 120 Journées (1785), Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman philosophique (1795) and La Philosophie dans le Boudoir (1795); and each one is strategically selected to bring to light singular events, marking important changes in humankind’s relationship with the natural world. This intense focus on Sade magnifies many times over the position Foucault had already assigned him in Les Mots et les chose (1966) when, in offering his own version of the evolution of the object of scientific inquiry from the Classical to the Modern Age, he isolates Sade as a heuristic bridge linking the two eras of his focus, using Sade’s erotic novels Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797) to support his argument. However overly pithy Foucault’s application of Sade may have been, it is felt that he lays a sufficient groundwork, one that I take up in my dissertation and push to even further depths. More than simply conforming to Foucault’s employment of Sade as the “midwife” to Modern science, I do two things of notable difference: 1) I take up the challenge Foucault set in the “Foreword to the English Edition” of Les Mots et les chose when he professes “embarrassment” over not being able to account for how “[…] instruments, techniques, institutions…” (p. xiii) of empirical sciences came to match in complexity those individuals and societies that would come to use them. On the one side, Foucault expresses a clear limitation; on the other, he offers up what he believes is half of what it takes to get at this limitation: “I left the problem of cause to one side. I chose instead to confine myself to describing the transformation themselves, thinking that this would be an indispensable step if, one day, a theory of scientific change and epistemological causality was to be constructed” (p. xiv). This dissertation offers up a heuristic framework to account for the relationship between both these sides Foucault can only adumbrate: the side of an emergent scientific knowledge and the ontological status of the producers of this knowledge. 2) I position Sade as a representative of an older scientific tradition, one overshadowed in Foucault’s emphasis on Sade and Modern science. Since Iwan Bloch compared Les 120 Journées to Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 manual of sexology, dedicated to documenting qualitatively all possible sexual deviancies in human behavior, most readings of Sade in the History of Science have taken him to be on the modern most end of the timeline of the History of Science (Foucault, 1966; Harari and Pellegrin, 1973; Morris, 1990; Vila, 1998; Polat, 2000; Quinlan, 2006; Quinlan, 2013). Some writers in recent years, however, have had the acuity to highlight older scientific influences on Sade’s oeuvre. Armelle St-Martin is one such example, who has written extensively on the influence of Italian science on Sade. Such a focus is a departure from a trend that sees English empiricism defining the scientific mindset in France that, it is believed, would have influenced Sade’s ideas. This would have included the “spirit of exactitude and method” (p. 91) D’Alembert (1751) speaks of in his panegyrics of Bacon, Locke and Newton in Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie de Diderot or Voltaire’s popularization (1763) of all things English in Dictionnaire philosophique. The legacies of both these perspectives have weighed heavily on Caroline Warman’s reading of Sade, who sees him (2002) through a more “positive” prism of “sensationist materialism” in Sade: from materialism to pornography. St- Martin sees Sade’s scientific orientation directed rather towards much older and ulterior forms of scientific “objects”, ones much less “positive”. Casamaggi and St-Martin see pneumatological themes like miasmas and corruptions in Histoire de Juliette, arriving from Sade’s own explorations in such places as amongst the swamps and famously licentious denizen of Venice, the namesake for that special contagion: “maladies vénériennes”. Both these departures from Foucault’s conceptualization imply the need to articulate what I call a “negative” trajectory within the History of Science. This term plays an important part in how I engage with Sade and his contemporaries and its explication constitutes a significant aim throughout the course of my dissertation. Sade’s own inquiry into the object of scientific inquiry came at a time of great upheaval and he relied on one approach hitherto capable of articulating such “negativity”: metaphysics. The very notion of metaphysics was anathema for many, such as D’Alembert who even labeled it a despicable science in the relevant entry in L’encyclopédie de Diderot. This dissertation will situate Sade within this battle over the future of science in what was that all crucial period of history when the die was cast in favor of Modern science and its penchant for “positivity”; the period of the French Revolution.

This thesis brings together democratic theory's calls for an understanding of the actually existing democratic state and anthropological work on innovative forms of citizen participation. Building on the work of Joao Biehl and Steven Robins, the research focuses on access to knowledge and claims of expertise as grounds upon which politicians and bureaucrats exclude citizen participation. It argues, using an ethnographic case study of South African student activist group Equal Education, that authors such as Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and James Scott are wrong to imply that citizens cannot train themselves in the technocratic manner frequently deployed by the state's representatives. It also argues, however, that the state's representatives are often not the technocrats they are hypothesised to be or that they claim to be, and their knowledge practices cannot be separated from politics. This makes the process through which citizens establish expertise and credibility with the government more complicated than simply training themselves in the government's knowledge practices. Drawing on the work of Danielle Allen and Francesca Polletta, the thesis thus also examines how questions of personal experience and identity on grounds of lived experience as well as claimed or perceived identity often interact with claims to knowledge, opening up or shutting down citizens' ability to participate. Even when citizens are able to leverage their technocratic expertise to successfully influence policy creation, they may still find it difficult to effectively participate in the implementation thereof beyond external monitoring and accountability enforcement. The thesis concludes that the current democratic theory ought not be so pessimistic about the spectre of a know-nothing citizenry, but nor ought it presume that education and expertise alone will be sufficient for democratic governments to take seriously an involved and engaged citizenry.

This scientific essay is research for how and why exercises of power appear between teachers with different educations but also how much the identity and different experience in a human can affect it? Based on own self-experienced stories that took place in our workplaces for a couple of years ago our investigation in this essay is to look for possible causes for behaviors and situations that arise in the school system. Among other things, we will examine the impact that the school and the background of the leisure center have when it comes to the power relations that we see exist in the school. We will try to understand how it affects our assignment as a leisure center teacher in the compulsory school and what consequences it has for our room for maneuver. We will also reflect and investigate how we by ourselves could bridge the gap that can arise between leisure center teachers and school/subject teachers. The purpose of seeking a deeper understanding of this is also to be able to create a broader knowledge about the struggle for power and status we can see exists between the school and the leisure center. An important part of this essay is to see if it`s the different leadership and teacher roles that exist in the school system that govern power and status, or if it may be the human identity that is the most decisive for how it appears. With the help of Aristotle's theories of knowledge and Michel Foucault's theories of power, we will examine this in the hope of a deeper understanding of the situations that we after-school teachers in school can end up in and knowledge of how these can be understood from different points of view.

This is a study conducted at, and for, the National Museum of History in Stockholm. The aim of the study was to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis that visitors in a traditional museum environment might not take part in interactivity in an interactive exhibition. And if they do the visitors might skip the texts and objects on display. To answer this and other questions a multiple method was used. Both non participant observations and exit interviews were conducted. After a description of the interactive exhibits, theory of knowledge and learning is presented before the gathered data is presented. All together 443 visitors were observed. In the observations the visitors were timed on how much time they spent in the room, the time spent on the interactivity, texts and objects. In the 40 interviews information about visitors’ participation in the interactivity was gathered. What interactivity the visitor found easiest, hardest, funniest and most boring.The result did not confirm the hypothesis. All kinds of visitors, children and adults, participated in the interactivities. The visitors took part in the texts and objects and the interactive exhibits.