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Purpose: This chapter explores how Russian fashion designers, as cultural intermediaries operating in the marketplace, interpret patriotism, which has become a noticeable phenomenon in Russia.

Methodology/Approach: Patriotism is approached as an appeal to patria and is considered as a socially constructed category. To explore the construction of patriotism, this research uses Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. In the market, the state, commercial companies, media, and consumers co-produce the dispositif of patriotism, which conducts the creative conduct of fashion designers and encourages them to follow patriotic fashion. At the same time, fashion designers have freedom to conduct themselves and act in different ways.

Findings: Interpretations of patriotism within a patriotic dispositif are explored vis-à-vis the interpretations of patriotism articulated by fashion designers. In addition to patriotic fashion, the forms of their creative conduct or counter-conduct are manifested in such subtypes of patriotism in fashion as cosmopolitan patriotism, economic patriotism, cultural patriotism, and fashion localism.

Research Limitations/Implications: The research is mainly limited to a perspective of fashion designers, and to some extent of the government, and does not consider the perspective of consumers.

Originality/Value: The research develops a theoretical argument of patriotism as a tool of governmentality, juxtaposing it to the approach of patriotism as an ideology. This chapter also contributes to the studies of resistance, adding the perspective of cultural intermediaries contrary to the commonly studied perspective of consumers.

Actors of territories faced with new managerial innovations have to develop new knowledge and behaviours to seize these innovations and create a vision of the territory. This is part of what we call governance learning: the ability of individuals to create new knowledge and behaviour for collective action within the territory. The purpose of this chapter is to explore this concept.

Drawing from a case study of a periurban territory in France, we analyse how the board members of a Community of Communes can learn to work together, articulating organisational learning theories, actor-network theory and the concept of organisational myths.

We explore the enrolment process necessary to ‘build’ the network and interest them in using the innovation; identify three types of governance learning that turn the network into a collective: sensemaking, instrument-seizing and sensegiving; show how these myths are necessary to turn collective knowledge into organisational knowledge.

With both a behavioural and evolutionary approach to governance, we show that power, relationships and learning processes are tightly intertwined within the governance networks. Our use of organisational learning theory also demonstrates how it can be used in a more systematic way to describe the learning processes witnessed in governance situations.

This research brings new light to the understanding of how territorial governance can be developed and how managerial innovations can provoke learning situations and more specifically how stakeholders learn to define common goals and a shared vision of their territory to enable collective action.

Drawing upon recent interests in Michel Foucault’s anti-essentialist conception of the state, I provide an analysis of state power in colonial slave societies that is attentive to the ongoing processes of “statification” and governmentalization of the state. This approach represents an alternative to classic state theory, which seems inadequate to describe the diverse political context of Caribbean colonial slave societies.

I apply the Foucauldian conception of the state to the empirical case of the Danish West Indies in the second half of the 18th century. Here, I focus on the problem of public order and its formation in relation to growing concerns over general economic, social, demographic, and political risks that the institution of slavery posed to colonial society. I argue that the slave laws of the 18th century can be seen as a governmental strategy to manage the risks of slavery by constituting a public order that would be subject to policing by the state. I also argue, however, that the specific circumstances of colonial slavery shaped the regulative practices toward the necessities of a flexible, adjustable, responsive government. I suggest that this should be interpreted as a governmental strategy calibrated to the realities of the specificities of colonial rule, rather than simply a reflection of incoherence and incompetence on the part of colonial authorities. The larger argument is that actual state practices have to be seen as results of problems of government in a given context, and as a function of the dynamic and reciprocal processes of government.

The classification of psychological suffering stumbles on the challenge of quantifying the ‘un-quantifiable’ upon the systematic categorising and description of affective and mental states and their transformation into illnesses and disorders. In this chapter, the author will explore the affect of anxiety through a critical recent history of its diagnosis and treatment in the context of psychological care. By unpacking the strategies employed by mainstream psychiatry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association since the mid-twentieth century, it is possible to unveil the dynamics of a reduction of the subject to a productive-biological body in the last decades. This chapter thinks through what happens to the equation ‘body-world’ through the critical genealogy of affect and its relation to diagnoses and treatments of anxiety and depression. It grapples with the ethics of techno-scientific global financial capitalism – heralded by pharmacological corporations and governmentality – which replicates a modern scientific view of the body, affect and suffering in a world of renewed paradigmatic demands. The author argues that by consistently pathologizing and working towards the elimination of anxiety, the hegemonic clinic erases the possibility of such ‘subjective truth’, reducing the subject to the status of ‘dividual’.

Today, pedagogy does not innovate by proposing new methods but by creating learning conditions conducive to the autonomy of learners. During training, students learn to set goals for acquiring knowledge, control their activity and persevere in the face of difficulties. Innovative teachers favour an integrative approach to human activity to jointly develop the relationship with the learning environment or work environment, the socio-cognitive characteristics of learners and their sense of responsibility for the consequences of action and metacognitive management of the activity.

Learners thus evolve in a learning ecosystem that includes the learner himself and his physical and social environment: his tools available (notepad, tablet, etc.), his resources (procedures, methods, instructions, course materials, notes, documentation, etc.) and his partners who also have some knowledge (pair, teachers, expert network, colleagues, etc.). This ecosystem can be seen as a virtual learning space in which technologies that contribute to learning (hardware, software and network) are used with the aim of fostering interactions between stakeholder and content communities. The knowledge is distributed and accessible through the memory of the learner himself or through his tools, resources or partners. It is therefore in the elaboration of the learning mechanism mobilising all the actors to meet the needs of the learners that the innovation can be efficient and effective.

Within this frame of reference, we propose some reflections from pedagogical practice that can develop the learners’ power to act – Which IT environments are needed for specified actions? What pedagogies need to be implemented using these IT environments? What collaborative and reflective tools are needed for professional and university training? Which methods energise learners’ agentivity in the digital age? Three case studies focussing on these questions will offer some recommendations for innovation in pedagogy.