Foucault News

Diana Stypinska, Social Media, Truth and the Care of the Self. On the Digital Technologies of the Subject, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

About this book
This book explores the relationship between (post)truth and subjectivity by focusing on social media as a site of digital subjectification. These days, truth is cheap. Anyone can claim it. Indeed, most do – impudently and without any recourse to facts or objective reality. Truth-claims today are nothing but power grabs, employed in the permanent popularity contest that our culture and politics have become. Correspondingly, our very sense of reality is perpetually uprooted. Post-truth sets us adrift. Navigating by smartphones, we pursue endless mirages, coming to wonder whether the shoreline itself is a myth.

The book examines the ways in which different digital practices – such as influencing, trolling and digital activism – operate as technologies of the subject, shaping how we relate to ourselves, others and the world. It argues that social media facilitates the progressive eclipsing of our subjective (dis)positions by the economic imperative. Positioning post-truth as the outcome of unbridled economicization, it exposes the true costs of its supremacy. The critical reflections on the relationship between digital subjectification and the social offered by this book will be of relevance to academics and students working in the fields of sociology, media and cultural studies, politics, and philosophy.

Carol Bacchi, What’s the Problem Represented to Be? A New Thinking Paradigm, Routledge, 2025

Description
Originally developed as a mode of critical policy analysis, ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’: A New Thinking Paradigm extends the thinking behind the innovative ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach to new areas of investigation. It poses a challenge to problem-solving as the dominant way of thinking about human existence and human endeavours and offers a fresh alternative that turns attention to the contours of designated ‘problems’.

By focusing on proposed ‘solutions’ to conditions labelled ‘problems’, the WPR approach produces a dynamic form of analysis and critique targeting how ‘problems’ are represented. This critical analytic posture is extended from ‘problems’ to a wide range of putative conditions, including ‘indeterminate situations’, ‘issues’, ‘controversies’ and ‘matters of concern’. In this new thinking paradigm, items, such as buildings and maps, are analysed as proposals for change and hence as problematisations, with important political implications. The book brings together the theoretical resources underpinning the WPR approach and considers important methodological ramifications. A table of WPR questions incorporates changes to the approach signalled in the book.

This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, early career researchers and academics in a wide range of fields, including public policy, education, law, international relations and disability, Indigenous and feminists’ studies.

The Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Stephen Legg, Spaces of Anticolonialism. Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, University of Georgia Press, 2025.

Interview on the New Books Network, 23 January 2026

A historical geography of spaces of anticolonialism in the capital of contemporary India

Spaces of Anticolonialism is the first book-length account of anticolonialism in Delhi, as the capital of Britain’s empire in India. It pioneers a spatial governmentality analysis of the networks, mobilizations, and hidden spaces of anticolonial parrhesia, or courageous speech and actions, in the two decades before independence in 1947. Reading across imperial and nationalist archives, newspapers, memoirs, oral histories, and interviews, Stephen Legg exposes subaltern geographies and struggles across both the new and old cities, which have traditionally been neglected in favor of the elite spaces of New Delhi.

Presenting the dual cities as one interconnected political landscape, Legg studies Indian National Congress efforts to mobilize and marshal support between the mass movements of Civil Disobedience (1930–34) and Quit India (1942–43). The book’s six chapters compare the two movements in terms of their public spaces of nonviolent anticolonialism, their problematization by violence, and their legacies.

This bottom-up analysis, focused on the streets, bazaars, neighborhoods, homes, and undergrounds of the two cities, foregrounds the significance of physical and political space; it highlights the pioneering role of women in crafting these spaces; and it exposes the microtechniques that Congress used to encourage Gandhi’s nonviolence and to tolerate its testing in the face of the rising popularity of the radical left.

Legg’s rereading of Michel Foucault’s final lectures on parrhesia produces a bold new approach to questions of postcolonialism, resistance, and South Asian governmentalities. This allows anticolonialism to be read not as an outside but as a coherent and bottom-up project of self-transformation and space-making that was elite coordinated but whose sovereignty lay with a disobedient and not always nonviolent public. This book provides an innovative and restive historical geography of spaces of anticolonialism in the capital of contemporary India’s 1.4 billion people.