RAD Book Club Foucault (2012) The archaeology of knowledge

Our book for March 2016 is Foucault's Archeaology of Knowledge in which he outlines the methodological process he developed in his previous works.

The entire book is avaialble as a free PDF download here.

Foucault can be quite dense to read, so help you along, here are the Spark Notes and a great review of the book over at Concept Lab, with a list of major keywords & citations throughout the book.

"To sum up Foucault’s argument (which is nearly impossible), knowledge is created through discourse. However, the discourse that becomes history is the discourse of the powerful. We must view discourse as a means of controlling the social practices and institutions in a society. This control is done by managing the knowledge of the society. Foucault argues that history should not be viewed as a continuous line of knowledge, but that we must also look deeper into the everyday documents to see how the discourse ruptures and where and when it changes. Looking at the ruptures will help to identify fragments of history that are left behind by the social and political powers." (read more from smartykatt, over at Prelims and Beyond, Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Lamar University)

Link to an electronic version of the book through UT catalogue here.

Join us at the OISE room 10-200 on March 21 from 1-3PM to share your thoughts on the book.

Learn more about RAD Book CLUb here​!