Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life synthesizes and extends the disparate strands of scholarship on Foucault's notions of governmentality and biopower and grounds them in familiar social contexts including the private realm, the market, and the state/military. Topics include public health, genomics, behavioral genetics, neoliberal market logics and technologies, philanthropy, and the war on terror.

This book is designed for readers interested in a rigorous, comprehensive introduction to the wide array of interdisciplinary work focusing on Foucault, biopower and governmentality. However, Nadesan does not merely reproduce existing literatures but also responds to implicit critiques made by Cultural Studies and Marxist scholarship concerning identity politics, political economy, and sovereign force and disciplinary control. Using concrete examples and detailed illustrations throughout, this book extends the extant literature on governmentality and biopower and helps shape our understanding of everyday life under neoliberalism.

About the Author

Majia Holmer Nadesan is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Arizona State University at the West Campus. She authored Constructing Autism: Unravelling the 'Truth' and Understanding the Social (Routledge, 2005). Her Foucauldian-inspired work bridges cultural studies and political economy while addressing everyday concerns and practices specific to the workplace, child-rearing, and education.

Reviews

"A much needed update of the governmentality framework to account for new developments in biopower and sovereignty. This is both an excellent introduction to key terms in recent Foucauldian political theory as well as a thorough accounting of the various spaces and practices of governing in the contemporary US context."

Jack Z. Bratich, Rutgers University

"This is an ambitious text explaining the convergence of neoliberal economics, the neoconservative security state, and social conservatism using the lens of Foucaultian governmentality... Recommended." -- Choice, March 2009

"Majia Nadesan's new book is a welcome addition to the critique of neoliberalism, and will be of interest for those concerned with the rising practices of surveillance and normalization in the name of improving life."

- Brian Sluggett, University of Alberta, Surveillance & Society

Overall, this collection of essays provides a number of compelling and novel observations on cancer in the twentieth century, and hopefully it will serve to inspire further scholarship in this area. Mark Parascandola, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda

Book Information
ISBN 9780415897969
Author Majia Holmer Nadesan
Format Paperback
Page Count 258
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 480g