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This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

The inclusion of race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sex/gender in biomedical and epidemiologic research often constitutes routine and taken-for-granted practices that are based on particular notions of bodily “differences” and their roles in health and illness. Such practices legitimate constructions of race, class, and gender as attributes of atomistic individuals—rather than as intersectional dimensions that structure social relationships—and render invisible how relations of power contribute to the stratification of well-being and disease. This paper offers applications of two theoretical perspectives to illuminate these arguments. Firstly, epidemiologic research exemplifies in many ways Foucauldian notions of biopower and Panopticism. It individualizes bodies and bodily differences; at the same time, it disindividualizes power, embedding it within the diffuse and pervasive acts of biomedical knowledge production and subsequent imperatives of self-judgment and surveillance. Secondly, epidemiologic research embodies processes of racial, class, and gender formation, and constitutes a kind of racial, class, and gender project. Such projects mediate between the discursive definitions of bodily differences and the institutional forms in which those definitions are routinized and standardized. As such, biomedical knowledge production is an active participant in the construction and institutionalization of social meanings of “difference”. However, my contention is not that we should abandon the epidemiologic use of racial, class, and gender categories. Instead, race, class, and gender must be reconceptualized as social relations of power that are located not just in the biological bodies of individuals but in the social spaces between them, producing and stratifying the distribution of health and illness.

Association Football (football) is currently recognised as the world's most popular women's sport (Andersson & Barker-Ruchti, 2019; Dunn & Welford, 2017). In this chapter, we build upon a Foucauldian-informed feminist body of work (e.g. Barker-Ruchti & Tinning, 2010; Liao & Markula, 2009; Markula, 2003) to analyse the impact of the ‘shift in approach and purpose’ in the women's game (Rosso, 2010). And, in doing so, seek to explore how the relations of power operating in the context of women's elite and professional football have changed over the last 20 years. Moreover, we consider the implications of these changes for both elite female players and those responsible for their development and welfare. To achieve our aim, we compare the experiences of two players (Christine and Maria, pseudonyms) from opposite ends of the last 20 years, all the while recognising that the partial and situated insights we provide in relation to these shifts are inevitably tied to the intersections of marginalised (female) and privileged (white, able-bodied, heterosexual, middle-class) subject positions.

This paper will provide an overview of the contemporary surveillance environment in the age of Big Data and an insight into the complexities and overlap between security, bodily and informational surveillance as well as the subsequent impacts on privacy and democracy. These impacts include the ethical dilemmas facing librarians and information scientists as they endeavour to uphold principles of equality of access to information, and the support of intellectual freedom in private in an increasingly politicised informational environment. If we accept that privacy is integral to the notion of learning, free thought and intellectual exploration and a crucial element in the separation of the state and the individual in democratic society, then the emergence of the data age and the all-encompassing surveillance and exposure of once private acts will undoubtedly lead to the reimagining of the social and political elements of society.