The ‘brand name’ research university goes global

This paper traces attempts by two ‘brand-name’ research universities to transnationalise: the US-based Johns Hopkins University, and the University of New South Wales from Australia. Both endeavours were located in, and supported by, Singapore, a city–state with knowledge economy aspirations. The paper explores the globalisation of the research university, and offers insights into the regimes of value that are being assembled in, and through knowledge economies. Both institutions examined in this study failed in their attempts ostensibly because of a lack of fit in goals and commitment. The paper also highlights the ethical issues that frame the globalizing rationalities of research-intensive universities and developmental states seeking competitive advantage in a neoliberalising environment.     

‘Governmentality’ in the origins of European female PE and sport: the Spanish case study (1883–1936)

The purpose of the paper is twofold: (1) to contribute to the analysis of the origins of modern European female PE and sports from a power perspective, inspired by Foucault's work; and (2) to present a detailed analysis of female PE and sport in Spain (1883–1936) as a specific European case study. It is argued that these physical activities could be conceived in the Spanish case as part of a specific kind of ‘governmentality’ with a dual nature. On the one hand they represented disciplinary ‘technologies of power’ over the female body. Selected physical activities—dictated mainly from the hygienic-moral position of the Regeneracionistas (‘Regenerationists’)—were exerted as a kind of ‘bio-power’ for the control of the female population. On the other hand, such kind of activities (especially sports) represented certain ‘technologies of the self’ for middle and upper class women. Through participation in sports, women gained a more active and public role in the Spanish society of the era, obtaining some degree of autonomy in self-governance over their bodies and their lives.     

Police Media: The Governance of Territory,Speed, and Communication

The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communication. In conclusion, we consider the possibilities for resistance in a time when digital police media have given rise to alarming strategies for surveilling populations, stifling dissent, and exerting control over public and private space.     

Finopower: Governing Intersections Between Gambling and Finance

Regulatory distinctions between “problem” and “recreational” gambling have contributed to the neglect of important discursive and cultural practices at the intersection of finance and gambling. This intersection is now sufficiently formative of everyday life and popular culture to warrant closer scrutiny within cultural studies research. Through a range of examples, I elaborate the concept of “finopower” as a specific kind of governmentality through which individuals negotiate the mutual imbrications of gambling and finance. The final part of the article draws on theories of “post-disciplinary” societies to explore social and political implications of cultural distinctions between skill and chance-based games.     

Governance through Philitainment: Playing the Benevolent Subject

This article analyzes Free Rice within the context of “the rise of the ludic sublime,” where video games are hailed as the solution to highly sophisticated political problems. As part of what we call practices of “philitainment,” Free Rice, we argue, functions within the political domain of what Jodi Dean has termed “communicative capitalism” and therefore both captures resistance and actually solidifies global capitalism. Ultimately, this case study of Free Rice reveals ways in which practices of philitainment signal the proliferation of a convergence between the technological sublime and neoliberal politics through which the disinvestment of the state from social problems is legitimized and reproduced through a reconfiguration of citizenship in terms of techno-consumerism.     

Subscribing to Governmental Rationality: HBO and the AIDS Epidemic

Between 1987 and 2013, HBO produced or distributed over twenty HIV/AIDS programs. These films trace a cultural shift from an early focus on AIDS as a public health issue to be dealt with through individual “safe-sex” practices and ethical citizenship to a later focus on AIDS as a global pandemic where the explicit strategy becomes a reliance on non-state actors to combat AIDS. This article argues that HBO's HIV/AIDS films are embedded within a cultural approach to AIDS that relies on governmental logics and neoliberal solutions – not direct action, but directing action.     

Universities,research impact and public engagement

Universities and graduate education are increasingly viewed as part of the emerging lifelong learning and education system and we see the evidence of this as the average age of graduate students increases. We are also seeing an increasing emphasis on education for employment in the lifelong learning and education literature, and this discourse is now infiltrating universities and graduate education; graduate education is increasingly referred to as graduate training and is being recast as vocational training. In this meditation I examine these changes in graduate education in light of the developmental needs of graduate students in the second half of life viewed through the lens of Jungian psychology, and discuss implications of the developmental needs of graduate students in the second half of life for graduate education. This is followed by examining the implications that changes in graduate programs have for graduate students in the second half of life.     

‘Thrash yourself Thursday’: the production of the ‘healthy’ child through a fitness-based PE practice

Saturating the Canadian landscape are media and health industry discourses representing childhood physical ‘(in)activity’ and ‘obesity’ as being at ‘epidemic’ proportion. Increasingly identified as a focus of concern within such representations is the school setting, simultaneously positioned both as a cause of and a key institutional site for redressing these ‘pathologies’. Drawing on qualitative research carried out at a Canadian elementary school, this discussion offers a Foucaultian governmental analysis of one school's navigation of this gauntlet of accountability to improve children's health. Specifically, the school-wide fitness-based initiative known as ‘Thrash yourself Thursdays’, whose objective is the production of ‘healthy’ students, is examined to understand the power relations enacted through it, and how the target of this practice (i.e. the children) negotiated such efforts to shape their bodily conduct. This in turn, offers a unique contribution to the governmental literature, which is more characterised by attending to discourses and strategies of government rather than how the subjects of such strategies respond to such efforts.     

The politics of student voice: unravelling the multiple discourses articulated in schools

For almost two decades student voice has been used and enacted in educational settings for a range of purposes. Student voice theorists have framed it in sociocultural, social constructionist and poststructural terms. It has been located in a range of schooling discourses and there have been powerful critiques of instrumentalist uses of student voice. It has been reified for its potential to leverage schooling reform, associated with accountability, governmentality and technologies of control, and also heralded as a process to activate radical collegiality in educational settings. This article investigates how school leaders from Aotearoa/New Zealand discursively locate the complex and contested construct of student voice in their schooling settings. Drawing data from principal interviews, discourses inherent in school leader comments are analysed to consider the contribution of student voice. A consideration is provided of how young people are ascribed positions as agents in contemporary Aotearoa schools.