Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body (Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415183413 ISBN 13: 9780415183413

Publisher: Routledge, 1998

Synopsis

This book, along with its companion volume Assessing Reading 2: Changing Practice in Classrooms, was originally conceived as the major outcome from an international seminar on reading assessment held in England. It focuses particularly on theoretical and methodological issues, though with a clear series of links to practices in assessment, especially state and national approaches to classroom-based assessment in the USA, the UK and in Australia, at both primary and secondary levels. Chapters offer new perspectives on the theories that underlie the development and interpretation of reading assessments, national assessments and classroom-based assessment, challenging readers to think in different ways.

About this title

Product Description:

Though Foucault is now widely taught in universities, his writings are notoriously difficult. This vital guide critically examines the implications of his work for students and researchers across the range of social sciences.

Synopsis:

No thinker has had so great an impact upon the intellectual life of the last couple of decades as Michel Foucault. Foucault's work, however, was dense and remains controversial. As we approach the tenth anniversary of his death, it is appropriate to re-examine his ideas and their influence in many areas of the social sciences and the history of ideas and culture. Foucault's work has proved provocative on a number of different planes. In terms of methodology, he challenged the outlooks of the history of ideas, denying continuity and progress and the stability of disciplines. In specific fields of enquiry, such as the history of madness or of prisons, he set out to expose the essentially mythic nature of the established narratives and analytical frameworks. And, most concretely, he produces radically new readings of central figures and bodies of thought, not least of Freud and psychoanalysis. Through his iconoclastic accounts Foucault won many followers and created many enemies. Reassessing Foucault sets out neither to bury Foucault nor to praise him, but to subject his key teachings in many fields to close scrutinay.

Chapters dealing with his methodological and philosoph writings, his ideas about prisons, hospitals and other institutions, his views on madness, health and disease, and his thinking about the body successively engage with principal aspects of his thought and relevance, and suggest ways in which Foucault's influence will continue to dominate cultural history and the social sciences.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0415183413
• ISBN 13: 9780415183413
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Jones Colin, Porter Roy