Decentering Responsibilization: Towards a Nomos of Governmentality in Mexico

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Guy Emerson
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
The Self ◽  
Civic Responsibility ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Institutional Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Individual Participation

Abstract This paper charts the mechanics of civic responsibility in preventing violence. Attention centers on divergent practices of responsibilization in Puebla, Mexico, which emanate from both state rationales associated with citizen security initiatives and from community-based measures that confound such official logics. Situated in the workings of governmentality beyond advanced liberalism, the paper proposes a decentering of responsibilization. This requires two steps. First, analysis returns to governmentality as the intersection of technologies of domination and the self but locates the former in relation to nomos rather than logos. That is, responsibilization occurs not exclusively in relation to codes of conduct consistent with official determinations (logos) but also as a socially developed order that exceeds the political, economic, and rational dimensions of government (nomos). Second, it positions technologies of the self amid Michel Foucault's work on the empiricohistorical construction of care of the self. This is a situated care, wherein a responsible individual emerges from the constituent complexity of the social order and her interdependence with other living forms. Far from an art of government wherein individual participation becomes the corollary to the withdrawal of the state, civic responsibility in Puebla is socially embedded and, therefore, need not align with institutional power.

Digital Storytelling

2004 ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin W. Tharp ◽  
Liz Hills
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Digital Storytelling ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Digital Medium ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
Community Cultural Development ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter considers the significance of digital storytelling as a force for community cultural development in global and regional contexts and as a means of transforming regions. The primary focus is on practice, which will prove useful to both the community informatics practitioner and ethnographic or participative action researchers. This is achieved by contrasting the traditional ‘top down’ approach to media and cultural production with the rise of community-based digital storytelling. The authors argue that community-based digital storytelling must take seriously the realities of the digital divide, and must consider the social, political, economic and cultural contexts of communities and their specific ‘relationship’ to digital technologies to ensure that communities have both access to, and the literacy and skills to engage with, the digital medium. The authors consider specific examples that illustrate this approach and conclude by reiterating that access to digital technologies should be combined with community-based training programs, community based-goals and initiatives, and a commitment to principles of regional and global social justice.

scholarly journals BabyVeillance? Expecting Parents, Online Surveillance and the Cultural Specificity of Pregnancy Apps

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630511770718 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Barassi
Keyword(s):  
Personal Data ◽  
The Self ◽  
Economic Dimension ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Digital Surveillance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Significant Research ◽  
Cultural Tensions ◽  
Information Ecologies ◽  
Political Economic

The rapid proliferation of self-tracking pregnancy apps raises critical questions about the commodification and surveillance of personal data in family life while highlighting key transformations in the social experience of pregnancy. In the last 2 years, we have seen the emergence of significant research in the field. On one hand, scholars have highlighted the political economic dimension of these apps by showing how they relate to new practices of quantification of the self. On the other hand, they have focused on users’ experience and on the affective, pleasurable, and socially meaningful dimension of these technologies. Although insightful, current research has yet to consider the cultural specificity of these technologies. Drawing on a digital ethnography of the 10 most reviewed pregnancy apps among UK and US users at the beginning of 2016, the article will show not only that the information ecologies of pregnancy apps are extremely varied but also that users’ interaction with these technologies is critical and culturally specific. By discussing pregnancy apps as complex ethnographic environments—which are shaped by different cultural tensions and open-ended processes of negotiation, interaction, and normativity—the article will argue that—in the study of infancy online—we need to develop a media anthropological approach and shed light on the cultural complexity of digital technologies while taking into account how users negotiate with digital surveillance and the quantification of the self.

scholarly journals GoverningWellin Community-Based Research: Lessons from Canada’s HIV Research Sector on Ethics, Publics and the Care of the Self: Table 1.

2016 ◽  
pp. phw024
Author(s):  
Adrian Guta ◽  
Stuart J. Murray ◽  
Carol Strike ◽  
Sarah Flicker ◽  
Ross Upshur ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Community Based Research ◽  
Research Sector ◽  
Hiv Research

scholarly journals On the Unbearable Lightness of John Key

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 143
Author(s):  
Warwick Tie
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
The Self ◽  
Efficient Operation ◽  
Psychological Traits ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
The Social

The neoliberal reforms of the 1980s produced, going into the new millennium, a contradiction within capitalism that is illuminated by the unprecedented popularity of John Key as prime minister. This contradiction concerns an impasse in political economy that develops as a consequence of capital’s inability to create experiences of self required for its own reproduction. In short, the contradiction signals a crisis in the social reproduction of capital, a crisis in the reproduction of capitalist subjectivity. The requirement upon people to become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ or units of self-actuating ‘human capital’ produces insufficiently coherent experiences of selfhood, accompanied by a widespread development of compensatory states of narcissistic grandiosity. Different social formations produce particular kinds of subjectivity, and come to privilege specific public figures as ideals of the psychological traits favourable to the efficient operation of the prevailing social order. That order, in our case, is neoliberal capital of an increasingly authoritarian populist kind, and Key exemplifies its ideal subject. Resistance to the logics by which a given social order is functioning turns, in part, upon the dislocation of its central figures. Against the individualistic contentedness projected by the figure of Key, a need arises to imagine how a collective, cooperative, subject might form anew in this situation. This essay will move towards Jodi Dean’s discussion of the party form to think through what such a project might entail.  

scholarly journals Managing by Data: Algorithmic Categories and Organizing

2020 ◽  
pp. 017084062093406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Alaimo ◽  
Jannis Kallinikos
Keyword(s):  
Data Management ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Online Music ◽  
Management Techniques ◽  
Organizational Activities

Data and data management techniques increasingly permeate organizations and the contexts in which they are embedded. We conduct an empirical investigation of Last.fm, an online music discovery platform, with a view to unpacking the work of data and algorithms in the process of categorization. Drawing on Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues, we link the making of categories with the construction of basic objects that function as key filters or registers for perceiving and organizing the world and interacting with it. In contexts such as the ones we have studied, basic objects are made out of data rather than expert or community-based knowledge. In such settings, basic objects work as pervasive reality filters and as the entities on which other organizational objects and categories are built. As they diffuse, such objects and the categories they instantiate become naturalized, increasingly reconfiguring the social order of organizations and their environments as a data order. Once key organizational activities such as the making of objects and categorizing are rearranged by data and algorithms, organizations can no longer be framed as separate from the technologies they deploy.

Disrupted Moral Order: A Conceptual Framework for Differentiating Reactions to Loss and Trauma

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 817-829 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Rafman ◽  
Joyce Canfield ◽  
Jose Barbas ◽  
Janusz Kaczorowski
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Clinical Status ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Moral Dimension ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Child Victim ◽  
Psychological Consultation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Attribution Of Blame

To discern what turns a child victim of war into a patient, categories relevant to a disrupted moral dimension were applied to play sessions of two groups of children. Both groups had experienced familial loss in the context of war but differed in their clinical status: 7 children (all boys), aged 3 to 10 years, had been referred for psychological consultation and 15 community-based children (9 boys), aged 4 to 6 years, had not been so referred. Both groups exhibited vulnerability and vigilance. Whereas community-based children re-enacted scenarios of parental loss, the loss of a rule-governed universe characterised the play of referred children. Roles of perpetrator, victim, and witness shifted rapidly as moral ambiguities permeated fragmented scenes. Retaliation fantasies were intense but attribution of blame uncertain. Ambiguity and secrecy distinguished parents' narratives in the referred group. The concept of disruption in the moral order as well as the social order was useful as a framework in distinguishing children of differing clinical status.

The Social Market Economy

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-44
Author(s):  
Peter C. Caldwell
Keyword(s):  
Market Economy ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Free Market ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Market Economy ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Market

The social market economy was a first key term used in the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany, firstly to describe how a market economy (i.e. capitalism) could contribute to social order, and secondly to suggest that the market alone could not preserve social order but required social supplements. The term was initially associated with the self-described neoliberals (now known as ordoliberals), and justified a return to the free market. Even within this group, however, there were differences about how a market economy could be “social” and what kinds of measures were necessary to make capitalism compatible with social order and democracy. Beyond this group, Social Democrats also adopted similar ideas at the same time. Despite the intentions of the most economically liberal of the ordoliberals, the idea of a social market economy came to include extensive state intervention to preserve social order.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document