Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, Church St Newtown, Sydney. (14th, June,2017) Alex Page and I are coordinating a Unit for Winter School, the Sociology of Deviance and Difference , and we wrote a brief note for the Unit of Study to convey the ethos and importance of such a topic.  Here it is: A Brief Note From Your Course Coordinators: We would both like to formally welcome you to the Winter School version of Sociology of Deviance and Difference for 2017!  In this intensive unit over the next two and half weeks we – Mathew Toll and Alex Page – will be working with you to unpack the nature of deviance and difference and ask questions like:   what is deviance? Is it socially constructed? And if so, how and why is it constructed in certain ways? Who gets to set the rules? Who gets to label someone a deviant? How is deviance and difference experienced? And, what are the relations of power at play that determine constructions of normalcy? Why this way and ...

Michel Foucault (2002, p. 343) once wrote: “a society without power relations can only be an abstraction”. In contemporary sociology, the ubiquity of power is beyond contestation and forms a fundamental axiom of the field. Beyond this however, the exact nature and dimension of power dynamics are subject to varied interpretations and formulations. Foucault’s discussion of power, disciplinary society, panopticism, and related concepts offer substantive contributions to further studies of relations and economies of power within advanced capitalist societies. The notion of panopticism has enjoyed particular resonance, and contributed to the development of surveillance studies (Simon, 2005, p. 2). Moreover, Foucault’s metaphoric use of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon is a standard reference for theorists who advance the “surveillance society” thesis; such theorists contend that the primary mechanism of social control in modern society is surveillance and the internalization of surveillance by...