Policymaking is guided by many approaches. Research into any particular area can no longer be framed by a select number of disciplines, or exclusively through abstract models. The texts featured here are influenced by philosophy, theories on complexity, and heterodox economics. They are tools to reset our thought processes, to engage our doubts, and to broaden debate.
Michel Foucault’s theory on the body releases its materiality from biology. Strategies of ‘corporeal oppression’ ‘discipline’ bodies to render them ‘docile’ and amenable to systems of organisation constructed through dynamics of power. Foucault argues there is no single centralised authority: rather, power dynamics exist between groups of people that regulate and discipline bodies to keep them docile. His seeming disregard for the issue of sexual difference is consistent with his strategies of thinking in terms other than the polarities of the masculine and the feminine. Given that the construction of sexuality around sexual difference has been a tool of subjection for centuries, his suggestion for a different emancipatory strategy aims towards a redefinition of the body and of the spaces it occupies.
The ‘underside’ of visual and textual representations celebrate ‘all the violence, deception and inhumanity’ that would otherwise attempt to pacify themselves, and us (Didi-Huberman, 2005).
