"The Foucault Effect 1991-2011," Birkbeck College, University of London, June 3-4, 2011.

Published seven years after Michel Foucault’s death, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality provided access to a little known and major new area of his later research, accompanied and illustrated by a rich collection of complementary studies by his co-researchers. The volume has served over the past 20 years as an influential and widely cited source, stimulating new work in many fields. In the past decade its effects has been accompanied by the acclaimed, ongoing publication of Foucault’s lectures, including the full original sources of The Foucault Effect. Foucault’s work on governmentality is now recognised as one of the important developments in later twentieth-century reflection on the political, whose implications may not yet have been fully registered.

This event brings together the editors and several contributors to The Foucault Effect, along with leading international scholars who have taken up and explored its themes in several interconnected areas, engaging with the history and issues of a changing present. Among them are editors of two important new publications: Lectures on The Will to Know (Foucault’s first College de France lecture series, edited by Daniel Defert) and Mal Faire, Dire Vrai (his 1981 Louvain lectures on confession, criminology and social defence, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, to be published in French by Louvain University Press and in English by Chicago University Press). Both of these new publications are likely to modify our understanding of Foucault’s enterprise and of its relevance to our time.

The programme and contributions will be structured around five topic areas:

- Global and postcolonial dimensions
- Law, rights, justice, punishment
- Problematising the political and the left
- The history of governmentality
- Social defence in the 21st century

Provisional Programme:

Daniel Defert: The emergence of power in Michel Foucault’s 1970-71 lectures.
Colin Gordon: Governmentality and the genealogy of politics*
Graham Burchell: Reflections on governmentalities and political culture (with Italy in mind)
Paul Patton: tbc
Peter Fitzpatrick and Carolina Olarte: Foucault and the Laws of Death
Ben Golder: The Limits and Possibilities of a Foucauldian Politics of Rights*
Fabienne Brion: Governmentality, citizenship and dangerousness*
Bernard Harcourt: tbc
Giovanna Procacci: From social insecurity to human security*
Peter Miller: The calculating self
Jonathan Simon: tbc

* exact title to be confirmed

Visit: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/law/news/the-foucault-effect-1991-2011-conference-3-4-june.