Foucault, the Family & Politics
Friday, 12 November 2010Location: King's College, Keynes Hall
Review of Foucault, the family and politics
Keynes Hall, Kings College, Cambridge, November 12th, 2010.
The conference went off well. Four visiting speakers arrived the night before and a fifth came from London on the day. Of the 187 names on the list 110 appeared at some point during the day and about 60 people were present throughout. The majority came from Cambridge and included several undergraduate students although the timing in term meant that those surveyed felt unable to stay for the whole day. Visitors from elsewhere were mainly graduate students or researchers from London but some attenders had come from far afield to be there. There was much productive conversation in the spaces between papers. The speakers were organized and disciplined and presented clearly and kept to the theme of the conference. Their papers were full and lively, and related well to each other with a growing recognition of the benefit of comparative study and the development and limits of Foucault’s ideas in disciplinary discourses ranging from sociology through history, film, literature and psychology to politics.
