1:15 PM, 25 November 2015 to 2:15 PM, 25 November 2015 at Harold Wilson Building, HWG/05, University of Huddersfield
“The Dark Knight Rises”: Foucault, Power and Social Welfare
Speaker: Professor Jason Powell (University of Chester)
Abstract: Health, care and welfare have emerged as key vehicles used to legitimise and position the identities that older people adopt in contemporary modernity. Both contain continually changing technologies that function to mediate relations between older people and the state. Medico-technical and care management discourses have been presented as adding choice and reducing limitations associated with adult ageing. However, they also represent an increase in professional control that can be exerted on lifestyles in older age and, thus, the wider social meanings associated with that part of the ageing process.
This research seminar presents a genealogical analysis based on the conceptual tools of Michel Foucault. Foucault writes from the ‘dark side’ of social theory and his concepts are influential in examining social welfare. More specifically, this paper identifies the inter-relationship between phases and ‘practices’ of social welfarism and older people in terms of power, surveillance and normalisation. Professor Powell's talk highlights how and why older people are the subjects of legitimising professional gazes through the dark side of modernity.