Call for Papers: 'Remembering/ Forgetting Foucault: Reassessing a Critical Legacy'

One-day workshop – June 16th 2025
Maison Française d’Oxford, DPIR, University of Oxford

Nearly forty years after the death of Michel Foucault, the time may be ripe for a critical reassessment of his place in contemporary thought. Few thinkers have left such a deep imprint on the formation of critical theory, political sociology, and the history of ideas across disciplines. Yet today, Foucault’s legacy appears increasingly unsettled. 

Critiques of Foucault have long pointed to his ontological flattening, methodological ambivalence, and a tendency to obscure structural domination in favour of dispersed power. Others have questioned the conceptual limits of his treatment of resistance. More recently, scholarship across political economy, Black studies, queer of color critique, Indigenous theory, disability studies, and decolonial thought has not only highlighted the silences within Foucauldian frameworks, but also raised the question of whether it is time to move beyond them. Yet, many of these same approaches have built on or been shaped by Foucauldian tools, creating a layered and often ambivalent intellectual inheritance. 

This workshop seeks to open a space for reassessing Foucault’s place in the academy–not to reject or defend his thought as such–but to develop (new) practices of forgetting/remembering him. What does it mean to treat Foucault not only as a thinker, but as a conceptual industry? What are the long lasting effects of his influence on practices of critique, modes of teaching, and intellectual languages? And what might this re-reading make possible: intellectually, politically, affectively, and institutionally?

We invite contributions that engage with any of the following angles:

• Conceptual and Political Limitations: Critical engagements with Foucault’s frameworks on power, discourse, governmentality, subjectivity, history, or the body.
• Histories and Institutions of Influence: Analyses of how Foucault became central to critical thought, including the institutional, geopolitical, and disciplinary dynamics that shaped his reception.
• Affective and Pedagogical Legacies:  Reflections on the affective and pedagogical attachments to Foucault: why we teach him, cite him, or return to him–and what it means to let go of formative figures. Is critique the only way to do so?
• Alternative Genealogies of Critique: Explorations of thinkers, methods, or frameworks that provided alternative starting points to the same problematics that Foucault questioned. 
• Ambivalent Uses and Critical Reappropriations: Revisions, reappropriations, and hybrid uses of Foucauldian concepts in dialogue with other traditions, or accounts of working within and against his legacy.

We welcome academic papers, theoretical provocations, historiographical reflections, or experimental interventions from across disciplines. The workshop will be discussion-focused, with pre-circulated papers and a single-stream format to prioritise collaborative exchange.

Please send abstracts of up to 500 words, along with a short bio (max 100 words), to lucile.richard@sciencespo.fr and maya.gavin@politics.ox.ac.uk by  May, 10th, 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by mid-May.

For any questions, feel free to contact Dr. Lucile Richard and Maya Gavin.
We are committed to fostering an inclusive, respectful, and accessible space for all participants.