Foucault’s historical mappings of the networks of social reality

This article advances the ‘dispositive’ (le dispositif) as a key conception in Foucault’s work. As developed in his annual lectures in 1978 and 1979, the dispositive represents a crucial constituent of societal analysis on par with the familiar analytics of power/knowledge and the governmentality perspective – indeed it forms a lesser known intermediary between these. Foucault’s dispositional analysis articulates a history of connected social technologies that we have constructed to relate to each other. Expounding these points, the article distinguishes various dispositional prototypes and develops key ‘socio-ontological’ implications of the analy-sis. Reinstating the proper analytical status of the dispositive contributes to the reception of the important notion; the interpretation of Foucault’s entire oeuvre; and a resourceful approach to the study of contemporary societal problems

The Academic Dispositif: Towards a Context-Centred Discourse Analysis

This contribution outlines the dispositif approach, which combines a linguistic discourse analysis of texts with a sociological study of the social context (i.e. the dispositif understood as an institutional arrangement of practices and structures). The authors use the discourse of academic researchers to exemplify this approach. By articulating correspondence analysis of self-representations on researchers’ homepages with institutional data of sociology professors in the United Kingdom, they outline a research design that consists of three components: a linguistic analysis of texts, a sociological analysis of institutional contexts, and a theoretical account of how the two are related in the academic dispositif. The dispositif perspective on discourse aims to respond to a demand for systematic discourse research on the social and institutional contexts of discursive practices

The Anthropocene: Comparing Its Meaning in Geology (Chronostratigraphy) with Conceptual Approaches Arising in Other Disciplines

The term Anthropocene initially emerged from the Earth System science community in the early 2000s, denoting a concept that the Holocene Epoch has terminated as a consequence of human activities. First associated with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, it was then more closely linked with the Great Acceleration in industrialization and globalization from the 1950s that fundamentally modified physical, chemical, and biological signals in geological archives. Since 2009, the Anthropocene has been evaluated by the Anthropocene Working Group, tasked with examining it for potential inclusion in the Geological Time Scale. Such inclusion requires a precisely defined chronostratigraphic and geochronological unit with a globally synchronous base and inception, with the mid-twentieth century being geologically optimal. This reflects an Earth System state in which human activities have become predominant drivers of modifications to the stratigraphic record, making it clearly distinct from the Holocene. However, more recently, the term Anthropocene has also become used for different conceptual interpretations in diverse scholarly fields, including the environmental and social sciences and humanities. These are often flexibly interpreted, commonly without reference to the geological record, and diachronous in time; they often extend much further back in time than the mid-twentieth century. These broader conceptualizations encompass wide ranges and levels of human impacts and interactions with the environment. Here, we clarify what the Anthropocene is in geological terms and compare the proposed geological (chronostratigraphic) definition with some of these broader interpretations and applications of the term “Anthropocene,” showing both their overlaps and differences.Plain Language SummaryThe Anthropocene concept, that modern human impacts on Earth have been sufficient to bring in a new geological epoch, is only two decades old. In that short time, its use has grown explosively, not only in the Earth sciences but also far more widely to spread through the sciences generally, to spill over into the social sciences, arts, and humanities. This has led to welcome discussions between diverse scholarly communities, though also to some very different interpretations of the Anthropocene, when interpreted through different disciplinary lenses. Notably, the geological interpretation used as basis for a potential unit of the Geological Time Scale, of a time unit starting planet-wide and synchronously in the mid-twentieth century with the massive changes triggered by industrialization and globalization, jars with interpretations of an Anthropocene that ranges back many millennia to encompass early human environmental impacts. We analyze and compare these diverse standpoints and their effect upon evolving disciplinary practices, and discuss approaches that could make communication clearer and enhance cross-disciplinary exchanges.</div