A Workshop on Foucault’s Historical Method

Tuesday 27 September 2022

To be held from 1.00 to 5.00 p.m. in the Level 6 Seminar Room, Forgan-Smith Tower, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities

Foucault’s historical method is often understood to have had two overlapping phases or alternating modalities: an archaeological one and a genealogical one. His accounts of historical “biopower,” of scholarly “ascesis” and of “history of the present” have all stimulated new historical forms of inquiry in several disciplines in the twenty-first century.

We propose to delve beneath the widespread influence of Foucault in historical inquiry to ask what it means to engage with history in a Foucauldian manner.

For example, the notion of a genealogical method is now in widespread use among historians. While Nietzsche often serves in that regard as a philosophical predecessor, that does not in itself provide a circumstantiated account…