Fake News and the Illusion of Truth: The Influence of Media on German Political Discourse in the Wake of COVID-19

This paper explores the phenomenon of fake news and conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany with special focus on the emergence of the Querdenker movement. Through a post-structuralist lens complemented by the work of Michel Foucault, the concept of truth will be analyzed to understand its role in society and democratic discourse as well as how the production of knowledge and truth has changed with emergence of the internet and social media. In this context it becomes apparent how fake news can be threatening to political discourse by undermining basic scientific information necessary for effective decision-making processes. Insights of this analysis will then be used to develop legal propositions to tackle the problem of fake news without interfering too much with the determination of truth and public discourse. © 2022, Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law. All rights reserved.

The dual nature of constraints on foreign worker participation in sports and physical activity in South Korea during COVID-19.

This study provides a different understanding of the constraints imposed by the pandemic and the official and unofficial restrictions that accompanied it. It is an empirical effort demonstrating that the pandemic's effects are not purely negative, but rather, also helped to produce positive and productive practices that draw upon both the inhibiting and enabling features of the constraints it triggered. Engaging with "productive power" in Foucault by considering constraints as practices that both inhibit and enable, the empirical goal of this paper is to explore how pandemic-related constraints on sports and physical activity prohibit foreign worker participation in sports and physical activity. It also examines how the constraints encourage them to pursue an active life in new and unique ways. To achieve this goal, the paper examines the South Korean context, particularly unskilled foreign workers with E-9 visas for non-professional employment in the fishing, farming, and manufacturing industries and their involvement in sports and physical activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings address three "inhibitors" that specifically prevented foreign workers from getting actively involved, then demonstrate that explicit restrictions on sports and physical activity can be transformed into four "enablers" that encouraged foreign workers to participate. The conclusion offers critical reflections on Foucault's "ethical subject," followed by the limitations and implications of the study.

Bodies in Transit: Speculation and the Biopolitical Imaginary

This essay explores the Bodies in Transit archive, an artifact of mid-nineteenth-century public health administration in New York City. The ledgers, which tracked the transit of every corpse that moved through the island of Manhattan between 1859 and 1894 and categorized entrants by their cause of death, nationality, and occupation, present a unique lens through which I explore the intersections of speculation, biopolitics, and urban space. I first establish a conceptual framework of "speculation" by dissecting its etymological genealogy, the roots of which share a preoccupation with vision and sight. I note that in practice, the ing and rationalizing tendencies of speculation operate by envisioning, calculating, and coercing specific outcomes into realization. I apply this framework to Bodies in Transit to historicize the ways in which biopolitics, the means through which the state forms, represents, and manages populations, are indexed to speculative economic practices. I read Bodies in Transit through the framework of speculation to articulate a field of meaning that illuminates the complex material and epistemic conditions surrounding its implementation and utility. As I argue, the ledgers were a response to the acceleration of real estate speculation in Manhattan, a trend that incentivized property owners to disinter burial grounds to relocate corpses to rural areas, and thereby connected the speculative logics of real estate to those of public health, spatial order, and surveillance. By thinking across and through the layered meanings of "speculation," this essay illuminates how the state's economy of knowledge is intimately related to biopolitical practices of surveillance and representations of financial value in the modern city.

Pandemic modelling and model citizens: Governing COVID-19 through predictive models, sovereignty and discipline.

Pandemic modelling functions as a means of producing evidence of potential events and as an instrument of intervention that Tim Rhodes and colleagues describe as entangling science into social practices, calculations into materializations, abstracts into effects and models into society. This article seeks to show how a model society evinced through mathematical models produces a model not only for society but also for citizens, showing them how to act in a certain model manner that prevents an anticipated pandemic future. To this end, we analyse political speeches by various Norwegian ministers to elucidate how various model-based COVID-19 responses enact a 'model citizen'. Theoretically, we combine Rhodes et al.'s arguments with Foucault's concepts of law, discipline and security, thus showing what a model society might imply for the model citizen. Finally, we conclude that although the model society is largely informed by epidemiological models and liberal biopolitics that typically place responsibility on individual subjects, sovereign state power remains manifestly present in the speeches' rhetoric.

Ambivalent thinking amid pandemic biopolitics

This review article surveys recent work in political theory that has brought together biopolitics and the COVID-19 pandemic. Centered on 2021 books by Giorgio Agamben and Benjamin Bratton, the essay outlines prominent visions of "negative" (Agamben) and "positive" (Bratton) biopolitical responses to the pandemic, engages public reactions to these approaches, and reassesses the position of biopolitical thinking in light of these. In doing so, the article recalls the foundations and original interventions of biopolitical theory, calling for a renewed engagement with the perspectives afforded by biopolitics that pushes past the negative/positive binary. Ultimately, the essay gathers together major developments in biopolitical thinking today, counters moves to discard the theoretical approach despite the limitations of recent examples, and repositions biopolitics as an ambivalent tool for political thought and practice going forward.

The Negacionismo of Brazilian Government before the Covid- 19 Pandemic Based on the Works of Michael Focault

This study will address discussions about the government of Bolsonaro in order to contribute to debates and reflections on issues involving the order of discourse and the archeology of knowledge from the perspective of Foucault, considering these as thought triggers that operate during the (dis)government policy. The objective of this study is to reflect on the current Brazilian government from the Foucauldian theory, under the negationist and necropolitics aspect that was accentuated in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a theoretical essay, based on works by Michel Foucault that discuss relevant aspects in their studies on how to think about contemporary reality, the relationship between discourse, ethics and politics from a critical perspective. Thus, with this study it was identified that the existence of the SUS greatly implies in the crossings of the fight against social inequalities and, mainly, in the defense of life and health in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Three policy problems: biocreep and the extension of biopolitical administration

This paper critiques recent developments in educational discourse through an analysis of two UK Government White Papers and three specific problems. We argue that the latter herald forms of ‘biocreep'. Echoing the analysis of such phenomena in the work of Michel Foucault, this gradual extension of ‘biopolitics' into the field of education is a tendency which has accelerated with the Coronavirus pandemic and raises many questions for policy analysis. First, we show how the White Papers' approach to life and its related assumptions embody an attempt to further entrench the techniques of biopolitical population management in secondary and further education settings. Second, our analysis of the two Papers shows not just a deepening discursive shift towards ways of instrumentalising educational processes, but also identifies a triple problem of political assemblage: primo, this shift relies on the assemblage of a ‘problematic subject';secondo, it simultaneously assembles the problem of value extraction;and tertio, it obscures the problem of desire or unruliness of the assemblages created. Just as discursive practices of instrumentation, administration and evacuation try to manage these assemblages, they remain unable to contain the three problems they enshrine. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Topologies of power in China's grid-style social management during the COVID-19 pandemic

This article analyses the organization of Chinese grassroots social management during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a range of local cases researched through policy documents, media coverage and interviews, we scrutinize the appropriation of emergency measures and the utilization of grid-style social management since the outbreak of COVID-19. Grid-style social management – a new grassroots administrative division aiming to mobilize neighbourhood control and services – is a core element in China's pursuit of economic growth without sacrificing political stability. Conceptualizing grids as confined spaces of power, we show how the Chinese party-state is able to flexibly redeploy diverse forms of power depending on the particular purpose of social management. During non-crisis times, grid-style social management primarily uses security power, casting a net over the population that remains open for population elements to contribute their share to the national economy. Once a crisis has been called, sovereign power swiftly closes the net to prevent further circulation while disciplinary power works towards a speedy return to a pre-crisis routine. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Security Dialogue is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Genealogías discursivas sobre la pandemia de covid-19. Reflexiones sobre un mundo postpandemia

El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar una reflexión crítica sobre la idea de un mundo postpandemia, a partir de la deconstrucción de genealogías discursivas sobre la pandemia de la covid-19. Se utilizó como punto de partida la idea de Michel Foucault de historia del presente, en términos de la deconstrucción de los relatos que dan cuenta tanto lo novedoso, en esta caso de la pandemia de la covid-19, como de las inercias discursivas del pasado que perviven en el presente. Se deconstruyeron cinco genealogía discursivas sobre pandemia. En primer lugar, se abordó el problema de la propia definición de pandemia, a partir de la crisis de la gripe A, gripe porcina o H1N1. En segundo lugar, se reflexionó sobre el impacto que tuvo la gestión de la crisis del H1N1 en las representaciones y prácticas discursivas de la pandemia de covid-19. En tercer lugar, se discutieron los marcos interpretativos y epistemológicos del gobierno de las crisis pandémicas en las sociedades del Norte Global. Por su interés discursivo se analizaron, por una parte, la construcción discursiva del gobierno de las epidemias, considerando las ideas de confinamiento y vacunación y, por otra parte, el gobierno de las infraestructuras vitales, como origen de la utilización metáfora de la guerra para el gobierno de riesgos y amenazas. En cuarto lugar, se reflexionará sobre el discurso de la (in)seguridad y sus dificultades pragmáticas en el gobierno de este tipo de crisis. Se utilizará la idea de la disonancia pragmática para dar cuenta de los problemas del discurso de la seguridad. En quito lugar, se criticó el discurso de la salud global y sus implicaciones en esta crisis, tomando como referencia tres relatos o narrativas: el relato sobre la seguridad en salud global, el relato sobre el mercado de productos sensibles, como los equipos de protección personal (mascarillas) y el relato sobre la producción de vacunas. A partir de la deconstrucción de estas genealogías discursivas plantearemos, a manera de conclusión, la idea de la crónica de un fracaso global, en relación con el gobierno de la crisis de la covid-19, agravada por la irrupción de una nueva crisis, la guerra de Ucrania. Proponemos finalmente una reconstrucción del discurso virus-céntrico, a partir de la idea de una espacialidad territorial y simbólicamente constituida organizada, configurada y materializada por múltiples tecnologías de significación, vinculadas bajo la figura de una red de actores propuesta por Bruno Latour.Alternate abstract:The objective of this paper is to carry out a critical reflection on the idea of a post-pandemic world, based on the deconstruction of discursive genealogies on the Covid-19 pandemic. First of all, attention is drawn to the fact that the countries of the Global North, apparently better prepared to face this crisis, have experienced a severe impact, particularly in the so-called first wave. This fact becomes even more relevant if we consider that the different indices that predicted a better capacity of these countries to face this type of crisis were initially distorted by the cases of Italy and Spain and, later;by other Global North countries such as the United States.To carry out these discursive genealogies, Michel Foucault's idea of the history of the present was used as a starting point, in terms of the deconstruction of the stories that account for both the novelty, in this case of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the discursive inertias of the past that survive in the discourses on the representations and the government of this type of phenomena. Five discursive genealogies on the pandemic were deconstructed. In the first place, the problem of the definition of a pandemic was addressed, based on the crisis of influenza A, swine flu or H1N1 and the criticism made by the Council of Europe in 2010 of the declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). Secondly, we reflected on the impact that the management of the H1N1 crisis had on the representations and discursive practices of the Covid-19 pandem c. The dissonance between the low impact of this crisis and the high spending by the countries of the Global North marked the initial management of the Covid-19 crisis, particularly in terms of reducing the perception of insecurity and the overvaluation of capacities. It became evident how the story of the impact of the crisis in Italy and Spain deeply marked the representations that were initially held about this crisis. Third, the interpretive and epistemological frameworks of the governance of pandemic crises in societies of the Global North were discussed. Due to its discursive interest, we analyzed, on the one hand, the discursive construction of the government of epidemics, considering the ideas of confinement and vaccination and, on the other hand, the government of vital infrastructures, such as the origin of the use of the metaphor of war to the governance of risks and threats in these societies. Fourth, we reflected on the discourse of (in)security and its pragmatic difficulties in governing this type of crisis.The idea of pragmatic dissonance is used to account for the problems of the security discourse. In fifth place, the global health discourse and its implications in this crisis were criticized.The survival of colonial and neocolonial narratives in global health, the weakening of the WHO due to the incorporation of interests of private actors such as multilateral agencies, banks linked to development discourses, multinational corporations and philanthropic companies were highlighted. The relevance of the biotechnological and biomedical discourse was also evident, based on the idea of the magic bullet. The critique of the global health discourse had three stories or narratives as its central reference: the story about global health security, the story about the market for sensitive products, such as personal protective equipment (masks), and the story about the production of vaccines. The problematization of the discursive genealogies related to the Covid-19 crisis made it possible to highlight the great difficulties we currently have in building a discourse that gives intelligibility to this type of crisis, especially from a global perspective. This difficulty allowed us to propose, by way of conclusion, the idea of the chronicle of a global failure (everything that could go wrong finally did go wrong), in relation to the government of the Covid-19 crisis, from the idea of the infelicity of the speech act proposed by Austin. This chronicle has been aggravated by the emergence of a new crisis, the war in Ukraine. We also propose the irruption of a disaster capitalism whose discursive performativity in relation to the pandemic was felicity, which is to say they achieved what they wanted: to significantly increase their profits. Finally, we propose as an alternative a reconstruction of the virus-centric discourse, which has permeated the discourse of experts, proposing the idea of a discourse based on territorial spatiality and symbolically constituted, organized, configured and materialized by multiple technologies of meaning, linked under the figure of a network of actors proposed by Bruno Latour. The virus is one more actor in this human and non-human network. What the virus does is expose the power relationships (knowledge/power) that account for the way this network is configured. More than the virus, it is these power relations that account for the vulnerabilities we experience due to the Covid-19 crisis. Everything seems to indicate that the new discursive practices in relation to this type of crisis should point in this direction.

The government of science. Reflections from the social theory on health policies during the Covid-19 "pandemic”

Following the declaration of a pandemic in 2020 by the World Health Organization (who), some health policies were implemented in various countries that would be essential to avoid an unprecedented catastrophe. These policies were presented as the product of science, particularly the health sciences, and the rulers who adopted them always legitimized this decision by arguing that they were simply "following the science”. This article draws on a range of leading social science theorists to analyze the relationship between science and politics, and the processes by which policies are legitimized appealing to science. The reflections are mainly based on the work of Michel Foucault, beginning with a historical overview of the links between medical science and the State in modernity. This allows us to demonstrate to what extent those health policies can be considered as the contemporary expression of what Foucault called biopower and security devices. On the other hand, this analysis takes elements from the sociology of science, referring to authors as Bruno Latour, who warns us about the persistent myth of "pure”, asocial and ahistorical natural sciences, a purity that would render them immune to any criticism, especially from the social sciences. There would be a kind of "belief ” or "faith in science” that is analyzed in the light of what was produced by Émile Durkheim and Ulrich Beck. The latter also makes it possible to note the growing political influence of the health sciences, that can even subordinate the legal system. It is concluded that health policies constitute a form of globalized biopower, since they are applied throughout the planet and are defined from supranational power organizations. Thus, organizations as the who centralize the relevant information and present themselves as the place of knowledge/power that produce the projections and precepts that everyone should follow, influencing the lives of billions of people © 2023, Revista Colombiana de Sociologia.All Rights Reserved.

Biopolitics, essential labor, and the political-economic crises of COVID-19

Biopolitics is the power to control life. In the early global reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people's daily labor functions have been placed into stark relief, with a tripartite typology forming between those labor functions that are "essential," those labor roles that have been lost, and those that have transitioned to an online format. For those whose labor has maintained, as well as those who seek to return to pre-COVID-19 labor conditions, a crude biopolitical calculus takes place where the functioning of our capitalist political economy is weighed against the maintenance of life itself. The current pandemic exposes and highlights many of the unsustainable fault lines characteristic of contemporary capitalism, where the uneven exploitation of labor renders lives associated with some labor functions as more expendable than others. This places us in political-economic crisis, where we have choices to enact more just, equitable, and sustainable systems moving forward. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

"Society must be controlled” "Green Pass” and the experiment of a society of control in Italy

Purpose: The introduction in Italy in July 2021 of the "COVID-19 Green Certification”, known as the "Green Pass”, was a particularly important moment in the political and social history of the country. While its use for health reasons is debatable both logically and scientifically, its effects should be measured at the general sociological level. The "Green Pass” allowed Italian social life to be shaped according to a social and political profile that can be traced back to a "society of control”. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issue. Design/methodology/approach: This paper, of a theoretical nature, intends to verify such an interpretation through a critical survey of Gilles Deleuze's well-known Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle (1990) and relating the theories to it from cybernetic science, sociology of social systems and the continental philosophy, specifically Michel Foucault. After a short introduction on the history of the instrument's introduction, the paper, divided into parts reflecting the set-up of Deleuze's text, examines the systemic social effects of the "Green Pass” with regard to its logic, and concludes with a reflection on the program of the instrument's future developments. Findings: The "Green Pass” put into practice a model of a society of control as anticipated by Deleuze, verified with particular reference to some instances of Luhmann's theory of social systems, and in the perspective of a Foucault's "normalizing society” in the process of definition and affirmation. Social implications: The "Green Pass” has been a controversial tool that has caused forms of social discrimination and exclusion and has seriously questioned the architecture of the rule of law. The conceptual paper tries to reflect on the premises and implications of this instrument. Originality/value: The approach to the problem both in a critical key and according to concepts and theories of the sociology of social systems, cybernetics and continental philosophy. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The infant/toddler teacher as willful subject: A critical narrative analysis of gendered discursive regimes in US-based early care and education

Dominant narratives of teacher emotion in early care and education rely on historical discourses of white femininity and white maternalism to position early childhood teachers as naturally adept and selfless caretakers of young children. Missing from these narratives, however, is the reality that emotion-display rules and norms are often enforced on teachers through surveillance and social control, and that teachers whose emotion displays veer outside the bounds of the dominant narratives experience punitive professional and personal backlash. This qualitative case study utilizes critical narrative analysis and post-structural feminist perspectives to explore the emotional experiences of Lauren, a white, female infant/toddler teacher, as she navigated the emotional experience of teaching during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA. The data is drawn from a larger study guided by the following research question: "What are the emotional experiences of early childhood teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic?” The findings in this article leverage Michel Foucault's concept of the "docile body” and Sara Ahmed's concept of the "willful subject” to interpret themes of discursive enforcement and teacher resistance to teacher emotion-display norms and rules. These findings problematize the dominant construction of the idealized emotional landscape of early care and education and present in its place a portrait of surveillance and resistance in a discursive struggle of power against emotional will. © The Author(s) 2023.

The regime of ‘post-truth': COVID-19 and the politics of knowledge

The emergence of ‘post-truth' is often associated with the rise of conspiracy theories and the lack of trust in scientific knowledge. This article attempts to theorise the complex division of labour in this regime of ‘post-truth', with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic/infodemic. First, we argue that the ‘post-truth' condition mirrors what Foucault called the ‘will to truth', and that this challenges the procedures and systems by which truth and knowledge are ordered. Second, through Basil Bernstein's extension of Foucault's work, we argue that the era of post-truth has two features regarding the condition of knowledge: (1) that conflicts in the field of knowledge recontextualisation, that is, the pedagogisation of knowledge, are becoming more intense and visible, and (2) that greater exposure to high-stakes, uncertain scientific knowledge, which grows at exponential rate, increases social anxieties and leads to biopoliticisation of neoliberal responsibilisation.

Practising care in a pandemic: Accounting for everyday life during COVID-19 among people who inject drugs.

From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears have been raised worldwide regarding the unique challenges facing socially marginalised people such as those who inject drugs. This article draws on in-depth interviews conducted during the first year of the pandemic with people who inject drugs living in urban and regional Australia. Perhaps the most surprising finding to emerge was the number of participants who reported minimal disruption to their everyday lives, even improved wellbeing in some instances. Attempting to make sense of this unanticipated finding, our analysis draws on the concept of 'care', not as a moral disposition or normative code but as something emergent, contingent and realised in practice. Working with Foucault's ethics and recent feminist insights on the politics of care from the field of Science and Technology Studies, we explore how care was enacted in the everyday lives of our participants. We examine how participants' daily routines became objects of care and changed practice in response to the pandemic; how their ongoing engagement with harm reduction services afforded not only clinical support but vital forms of social and affective connection; and how for some, care was realised through an ethos and practice of constrained sociality and solitude.

The discourse of literacy statistics: biopolitics in managing the risk of child illiteracy caused by the Covid-19 pandemic

The problem of literacy among Brazilian children spans decades of discussions and is accentuated after almost two years of remote teaching, due to the covid-19 pandemic. In face of this scenario, this article aims to analyze how literacy statistics discursively produce a notion of risk related to the learning of the child population with the pandemic period as an aggravating factor. Methodologically, it uses discourse analysis inspired by Michel Foucault. The empirical consists of the following documents,analyzed as monuments: 1) Technical Note "Impacts of the pandemic on children's literacy" (TODOS PELA EDUCACAO, 2021) e 2) Executive Summary of the report "The State of the Global Education Crisis: A Path to Recovery (UNESCO;UNICEF;BANCO MUNDIAL, 2021). Based on the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, the power-knowledge relationship put into operation by statistics to govern the population is discussed. The analyses of the empirical material make visible the risk of child illiteracy linked to four factors: 1) socioeconomic factors;2) gender factors;3) racial factors;and 4) Risk projection.

The infant/toddler teacher as willful subject: A critical narrative analysis of gendered discursive regimes in US-based early care and education

Dominant narratives of teacher emotion in early care and education rely on historical discourses of white femininity and white maternalism to position early childhood teachers as naturally adept and selfless caretakers of young children. Missing from these narratives, however, is the reality that emotion-display rules and norms are often enforced on teachers through surveillance and social control, and that teachers whose emotion displays veer outside the bounds of the dominant narratives experience punitive professional and personal backlash. This qualitative case study utilizes critical narrative analysis and post-structural feminist perspectives to explore the emotional experiences of Lauren, a white, female infant/toddler teacher, as she navigated the emotional experience of teaching during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA. The data is drawn from a larger study guided by the following research question: "What are the emotional experiences of early childhood teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic?” The findings in this article leverage Michel Foucault's concept of the "docile body” and Sara Ahmed's concept of the "willful subject” to interpret themes of discursive enforcement and teacher resistance to teacher emotion-display norms and rules. These findings problematize the dominant construction of the idealized emotional landscape of early care and education and present in its place a portrait of surveillance and resistance in a discursive struggle of power against emotional will. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Ambivalent thinking amid pandemic biopolitics

This review article surveys recent work in political theory that has brought together biopolitics and the COVID-19 pandemic. Centered on 2021 books by Giorgio Agamben and Benjamin Bratton, the essay outlines prominent visions of "negative” (Agamben) and "positive” (Bratton) biopolitical responses to the pandemic, engages public reactions to these approaches, and reassesses the position of biopolitical thinking in light of these. In doing so, the article recalls the foundations and original interventions of biopolitical theory, calling for a renewed engagement with the perspectives afforded by biopolitics that pushes past the negative/positive binary. Ultimately, the essay gathers together major developments in biopolitical thinking today, counters moves to discard the theoretical approach despite the limitations of recent examples, and repositions biopolitics as an ambivalent tool for political thought and practice going forward. © The Author(s) 2022.

Beyond School. The challenge of co-producing and commoning a different episteme for education

This paper develops previous work in which we deployed a form of Foucauldian critique to clear a space in which it might be possible to think education differently. Here, in that space, we are hoping to 'get lost' in some unexplored spaces of possibility. We sketch some starting points, some 'lines of flight' for such thinking. To do this, we identify a concatenation of three crises and discuss briefly their inter-relationship. But the paper focuses primarily on education. The first of these crises, COVID, offers a moment, a space, in which we might think of ourselves, others, and the world differently. The second, climate, brings to bear a pressing urgency for change in the way that we think of our relation to the world in practical, political and epistemological ways. The third, education in relation to crises, is an opening within which some thinking might be undertaken about what it means to be educated, and in which the relation between education, community and sustainability, in a variety of senses, might be pursued. In the final sections, using concepts from Foucault, Olssen, Lewis and others, we seek to find inspiration from and an accommodation between Foucault's self-formation and commoning - a practice of collaborating and sharing to meet every day needs and achieve the well-being of individuals, communities, and environments - as a new way to think education beyond modern episteme.

Science, power, and subjectivity: Vaccine (mandate) resistance and 'truth telling' in times of right-wing populism

This paper employs Michel Foucault's History of Sexuaity: Confessions of the Flesh to shed light on the perplexing phenomenon of vaccine (mandate) resistance. It argues that vaccine (mandate) resistance, while seemingly irresponsible and selfish, is entangled with the same modes of 'truth-telling' that have been part of the basic structure of modern Western governance for centuries. The paper begins by introducing the problem of vaccinate (mandate) resistance as a pedagogical problem for educators who want to teach social responsibility as informed by sound scientific knowledge and research. It then outlines the triad of knowledge/science, power/governance, and subjectivity/being at the heart of Foucault's research as a necessary frame for understanding the sociopolitical and historical entanglements of science in modern Western governance. Lastly, the paper traces Foucault's study of early Christian writers such as St. Augustine in terms of how they help establish basic practices of truth-telling that still impact how subjects relate to power today. The ultimate goal of the paper is to show how exploration of the social, historical, and political realities of science related issues are vital for understanding issues of collective existence today.