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This chapter contributes to the field of educational standardisation by analysing and discussing the relationship between risk conceptions, standards and subjectivation in education. The empirical case for investigation is the implementation of a new interdisciplinary topic in Norwegian curriculum, called ‘health and life skills’, a topic that has gained momentum in educational systems worldwide in recent decades. We perform a theoretical reading of policy and curriculum document through the perspective of Foucault's notion of governmentality. Our reading suggests understanding ‘health and life skills’ as a soft governance practice, instigating ‘standards of the self’ that direct and control the conduct of young people in the Norwegian curriculum. Furthermore, the chapter discusses how becoming a subject in modern education implies acquiring a set of standard skills derived from societally perceived risks thought to affect the mental and physical health of young people. Building on this analysis, we discuss if standards can be regarded as measures aimed at managing and safeguarding against societal risks, and the consequences this may have for subjectivation processes in education.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between recent transformations of labour and corresponding predictions made to gender equity. It reflects in particular the German discussion on the subjective turn in labour, termed as subjectivation of work, and the diagnosis of a feminization of gainful labour work given in this context, by focusing on the governing of the psyche.

The paper is both a theoretical reflection as well as a presentation of empirical findings. It refers to Foucault's concept of governmentality, thereby considering “psychopolitics” as a new type of power, and taking it as an approach for qualitative empirical research. The empirical findings are based on narrative biographical interviews with female and male employees working in the ICT sector.

Due to an under‐elaborated conception of the subject (and its interrelation to power), the diagnosis of a subjectivation of work as a feminization of work is inadequate and misleading. Instead, the empirical analysis gives evidence to the argument that the feminization of work turns out as a (re)masculinization of life and existence.

By drawing on considerations within governmentality studies, the concept of “psychopolitics” offers a new and fruitful approach for research, implying also a dynamic concept of the subject. The empirical analysis provides new insights on the discussion on the issue of gender equity within the realm of gainful work.

The role of caregivers and issues of parenting are controversial in research on disability. While appreciating the historical and political reasons to critique power relations in care systems and care relations, we argue that it is important to consider parents' and other caregivers' positions. A reconsideration provides insights into pervasive effects of ableism defining not only the individual child but parents and other relatives as well. We draw from extensive research on couples parenting a child with disability in Germany (Tröndle, 2022a). This study seeks to understand how parents of a child with disability cannot avoid understanding themselves as “special parents.” Through analyzing shared life stories of couples and individual biographies, the study reconstructs how identities evolve differently depending on their work-sharing arrangements. Based on our findings, the couples experience difficulties in maintaining dual employment arrangements. They become “unable” to step outside of the logic of welfare and health provision and structures of the labor market. Couples begin to explain their situation and the discrimination they experience by reflecting themselves as “special parents.” Heteronormative and ableist expectations hinder them in articulating resistance and gaining agency as allies of their children, facilitating positions of complicity. We argue that the approach suggested by this study – namely including the ambiguous situation of caregivers in Disability Studies – can encourage other researchers to consider othering and ableism of and by caregivers.

This chapter contributes to the field of educational standardisation by critically discussing the recent preoccupation with social and emotional abilities as performance standards in education policies and curriculum. The chapter is philosophical-theoretical in scope and sheds light on standardisation of social and emotional abilities through the different theoretical layers of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. By bringing the writings of the late Foucault to the fore, I will argue that the power structures imbued in social and emotional standards are not merely oppressive and vertical structures of subjection, but can also be seen as enabling, relational and productive means for subjectivation. Thus, although social and emotional standards certainly can be seen as governmental measures in the production of a flexible, diligent, self-managing workforce, ensuring the kind of transferable non-cognitive skills that are so much needed in the knowledge economy, educators can ambiguously also construct public spaces for political-ethical self-creation and resistance in context of these ‘standards of the self’.

The purpose of this paper is to test if activism by civil society organisations (CSOs hereafter) in successfully mobilising resistance to the Government of Ghana “collateralization” of gold resources and other mineral royalties in 2020 (dubbed the “Agyapa deal”) espouse tenets of Foucault’s (2009) “governmentality” and “counter conduct” dispositions.

This paper draws on Dean’s (1999) discussion of government analytics to highlight how CSO activism can simultaneously challenge government practice and share in it. This paper uses an evidence-based and interpretive qualitative content analysis approach. This paper relied on secondary data sources from 1 January 2020 to 21 August 2021. Data collection involved an extensive review of secondary materials concerning the Agyapa deal, relying on the author's local knowledge to identify the likely sources of information.

This paper exposes how the counteractions of CSOs, underpinned by the desire for so-called “good governance”, invariably extend governmentality and other neo-liberal ideals. In this case, CSOs' actions espoused the ideals of marketisation, extended governable spaces, engrained subjectivation and treated citizens as incapable of formulating and advancing their desires without overt help. Secondly, it provides evidence that massive deployment of accountability and other calculable practices, however wilful, complement efforts at shaping public opinion.

CSO counter-conduct is merely symbolic rather than substantive. Substantive counter-conduct requires the citizenry to actively lead the problematisation process, holding CSOs accountable for acting on their behalf. The current trajectory where CSO accountability is primarily to their international financiers, predominantly neo-liberal advocates, raises questions about “in whose interest they seek another form of governance?” Practically, the splinter of interests that may emanate from citizenry directly led counter-conduct can affect garnering the critical mass needed to force a policy change. That said, however, there is a case for citizenry “making themselves” rather than “being made” within the governmentality process.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first application of the Foucauldian and Dean framework to a data set from Ghana.

The debate concerning the Quantified-Self Movement (QS) has been extremely polarised. As Tamar Sharon has pointed out, each aspect of the lifestyle promoted by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly has provoked opposite reactions, generating a debate that revolves around some basic conceptual dichotomies: empowerment versus surveillance, self-awareness versus reductionism, and personalised healthcare versus disintegration of public assistance (Sharon, 2017). The aim of this chapter is to provide a critique of QS, namely an assessment of its limits and its (technological and social) conditions of possibility. In particular, the author’s analysis will focus on the relationship between technology and subjectivity, and its main theoretical framework will be Michel Foucault’s research on the notion of ‘care for the self’ (Foucault, 1986, 2005). Quantification is an essential and unescapable aspect of our present technological environment. The devices that make our onlife (Floridi, 2014) possible are connected with a complex technological system made of GPSs, satellites, computers, and networks. Health is no longer managed through a distinct set of practices within the limits of a well-defined space (the hospital or the ambulatory), but it rather becomes a dataset integrated into a system where all aspects of life (health, law, leisure, work, social relations) are treated and managed simultaneously. This technological condition implies a new form of cognitive and practical delegation (Ippolita, 2016; Morozov, 2013), which makes the very notion of ‘self-tracking’ at least problematic. Individuals do not track themselves anymore: on the contrary, they are tracked by prosthetic extensions of their own bodies. This, however, does not mean that they do nothing. Our digital devices require a specific set of practices, a determinate way of life. The author will argue that these practices are the product of design, understood as a specific way of conceiving and organising the interaction between subject and technical object (Flusser, 1999). Through our technological environment, design reshapes the social and political function of bodies, their interaction and the set of practices connected to them (Bratton, 2015; Dyer, 2016; Vial, 2014). Automated quantification is an aspect of our designed user experience. As such, this chapter discusses design as a key element to understand the role of quantification in our digital milieu. It analyses the QS movement as a specific way of responding to our new technological condition. The main research question will be the following: is QS to be regarded as a simple acceptance of a new form of delegated – and thus alienated – subjectivity, or is it a kind of practice that allows the subject to overcome his passivity, and to take part in the process through which quantification is designed and managed? Is it possible to understand QS as a technology of the self (Foucault, 1988, 2005)?

The contribution draws upon the protests against a proposed trade deal between the European Union (EU) and the United States as an example of the potential to identify as European citizens. It is relevant given the multiple challenges the EU is currently facing, particularly a crisis of democratic legitimacy. While trust in EU institutions is at a historic low, some citizens – such as the Anti-Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) protestors – want to have a say in EU decision-making. The resulting conflicts should not be misunderstood as a threat. Instead, the author’s suggestion here is that democratic conflict has the potential to contribute to the politicisation and the identification of citizens with the European project. Following this line of thought, the potential of the Anti-TTIP protests lies in a civic democratisation of the EU through conflict. The author focusses on protestors’ participation experiences and their self-understanding processes as European citizens. The author explores the different ways in which protestors experience themselves as European citizens which aims to open up the discourse about the multiplicity of European citizenship. This variety of meanings ascribed to European citizenship is not regarded as a danger, but as the potential to enrich Europe with new ways of being and acting as European citizens.

While in Art Spiegelman's non-fiction narrative Maus (1980–1991), the voice of the mother Anja is silenced, Eunsung Kim's non-fiction graphic narrative My Mother's Story (2020) revives a mother's voice that has been hardly heard in the history of Korean literature and culture. Just as the narrative in Maus is based on the interview between a son and his father, who has survived the Holocaust or the concentration camp in the Second World War, in My Mother's Story, a mother in her eighties tells the story of her entire life to her daughter. The writer's mother underwent Japanese colonization, the Korean War and the following years of industrial modernization, migrating from one place to another throughout her life. By visualizing a woman's personal memory, which has been forgotten for quite a long time, the Korean graphic narrative incorporates the subjective and subaltern voice into history. Thus, appropriating Michel Foucault's notion of subjectivation, which generally refers to the construction of the individual subject, I would argue that this visualization or revitalization of the silenced voice of the old woman can be called a process of ‘resubjectivation’, or reconstruction of the marginalized and thereby discarded subject of an aged woman in Korea. But this essay is not exactly a comparative study, paralleling the two different graphic narratives together. Instead, it focuses on uncovering ontological meanings of the feminine narrative in Korean culture as the process of resubjectivation involves not only the recovery of an individual woman's lost voice, but it is also related to the retrieval of a lost cultural legacy.

This chapter explores to what extent the Quantified Self, and in general the self-tracking culture, could be considered as a ‘technology of the self’: hermeneutical apparatuses generating new processes of subjectivation. Quantified Self, described by Wolf as a ‘self-consciousness through numbers’ (Wolf, 2010), refers both to the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with devices and to a community of creators and users of self-tracking technologies. In this context, the author considers mainly the first aspect of this phenomenon and examines how its uses are diffused throughout the social mainstream. The author begins with the author’s own personal experience using self-tracking devices, then the author considers the phenomenon of self-tracking in relation to its historical context described by Floridi as the era of the ‘4^th Revolution’ (Floridi, 2014). The second part of the chapter deals with the theoretical framework. The author discusses the Quantified Self from the perspective of the Material Engagement Theory (Malafouris, 2013) in order to outline the genealogical and anthropological perspectives of the relationship between man and technology. The author concludes that man and technology have always had a biunivocal relation; man shapes technologies that shape man, both materially and cognitively. In the final part of the essay and through the lens of Foucault’s and Agamben’s theories, the author discusses the Quantified Self as a ‘technology of self’ to underline the ambiguous nature of the phenomenon and its social and biopolitical implication in the age of transparency (Han, 2015) and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019).

This study aims to analyze the processes of introducing apps (Easy Taxi and Uber) in the work routine of taxi and private drivers, exploring their work relations and identifying new forms of relationship between them and their passengers. The authors expose the complexity in which such processes occur in a dialogical way, aligning poststructuralist notions of actor–network theory with theorizations on subjectivity production.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 drivers of Easy Taxi and Uber apps in three Brazilian capitals.

Apps came to play a central role in the work practice of the drivers interviewed. The authors suggest that they offer more security, convenience, accessibility and agility, going beyond dependent forms of working and living, in overlapping networks and connections, enacting entities that guide workers and users to an increasingly programmed way of life.

New forms of thinking managerial relations with taxi and private drivers work and their work relations with other drivers and passengers.

This kind of technology not only generates new social relations but also activates mechanisms of subjectivation that reverberate new forms of relating, working and living in contemporaneity.

Approaches on subjectivity regarding the adoption of technology in the practice of work in the contemporaneity, with the emergence of new working relations mediated by e-hailing technology.