Using Foucault's Methods

by Gavin Kendall, Gary M. Wickham

As a companion to Foucault's original texts, carefully showing what he's done and why - and how that could be applied elsewhere - it's outstanding' - "www.theory.org.uk "Very much a hands-on' tool kit of a book, scholarly but accessible.... a very useful textbook which approaches its subject in an original way' - "Sociological Research Online"At last, a student-friendly guide that answers the "Yes, but how do you "do" Foucault?" Kendall and Wickham address the thorny question of how-to-Foucault in a clear, distinctive manner that stands out in the secondary literature on this important thinker' - "Toby Miller, New York University"This book provides a clear, straightforward guide to those who want to apply the work of Foucault to their own field of interest. The authors employ an accessible style to encourage readers to engage with Foucault's work by tackling the issues that students most often raise.The book is organized around the following history, archaeology, genealogy and discourse as the cornerstones of Foucault's methods; and science and culture as important objects of analysis for those using Foucault's methods. The book enables the reader to understand how Foucault's contribution to social thought can be applied and opens up possibilities for researchers to use Foucault rather than merely discuss him.

Genres: Sociology, Philosophy, Academic

176 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Mē-chan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book explores three separate problems while pointing the correct use of Foucault's method in various analyses.
First part of the book (some 50 pages in) explains basic Foucault's concepts like archaeology, genealogy, discourse and so on and how they relate to Foucault's methodology in general. Personally, I found this part of the book most interesting and useful.
Second part of the book, and most extensive one deals with philosophy of science and sociology of science, mainly theories of Bruno Latour and Thomas Kuhn. It gives an account of the usage of Foucault's method by the thinkers like Latour (Michel Callon). This part has left much to be desired from, as it doesn't really concentrate on Foucault, but Latour. Whether Latour really uses Foucault method or not is open to discussion.
Third part deals with employing Foucalt's methods in culture studies. It gives and example of reading classes for children. The focus point of this example is analyses of how the culture acts as management rather then factory of meaning in creating new citizens.
The book also uses fictional characters of students who study Foucault. The purpose of this is to show where they use Foucault's methods in the wrong way or how they transcribe their meaning to the Foucault's ideas in the process of taking various classes on Foucault.
Initially I found the concept inventive, but then I think it started to get in the way of actually discussing Foucault's method.
Overall the book could have been better if it concentrated more on Foucault as promised by the title.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a leading title that barely matches its contents. Rather than a rumination on Foucault, what you've got here is a series of essays more about other people than Foucault, with a minimum of connection back to Foucault's work; it is also not the primer in Foucault that it bills itself as, but rather requires a decent amount of prior knowledge of Foucault's work to even understand the authors' own attempts to understand and explain Foucault. This isn't to say that the book is entirely useless. It does provide some useful information on Latour and supplies a nice entryway into debates about modernism and postmodernism, and the final chapters end up being pretty engaging and even important. But that doesn't excuse the remainder of the book, which ends up being intensely misleading, and which also contains a pretty lame set of fictional situations that helps set up/explain the sections of the chapters but--again--not Foucault's actual work.

[B]

Great intro to methodology but also to some key ideas.

[Kyaw Zayar Lwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars for the first 3 chapters