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Start date: 2021Subject: search.filters.subject.biopolitics

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    The unravelling of person-centred care: The value and necessity of analysing power relations in contraceptive services
    (SAGE Publications, 2025-04-30) Morison T; Macleod CI; Ndabul Y
    Global research indicates ongoing challenges in delivering person-centred contraceptive care. Much of the contraceptive research investigates this issue using systems-focussed approaches to map institutional constraints (e.g. institutional or health system barriers to accessing contraception). The assumption underlying this research approach is that simply removing structural barriers can address issues and enhance contraceptive autonomy, but this is not the case. Our research shows how discursively constructed power relations undermine bodily integrity and contraceptive agency even as contraceptive providers endorse the principles of patient-centred care. Using a synthetic narrative/discourse approach to analyse provider interviews in South Africa and New Zealand, we draw on Foucauldian analytics of biopower to show how an idealised person-centred care narrative collapses under the weight of discourses of medicalised risk, protectionism, and biomedical expertise, signalling practices of power through confession, responsibilisation and surveillance. Our findings highlight an essential perspective frequently missing in systems-focussed research on contraceptive care: the crucial dimension of power and reproductive politics. Thus, we argue for the necessity of investigating this dimension, in addition to systemic challenges. Our work demonstrates the value of frameworks that illuminate power dynamics, such as the Foucauldian analytics of biopower we undertook. Expanding the range of research perspectives in contraceptive research can deepen understandings of how systems constraints and power relations together undermine relational person-centred contraceptive care.
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    The discourse of delivering person-centred nursing care before, and during, the COVID-19 pandemic: Care as collateral damage.
    (2023-08-15) Byrne A-L; Harvey C; Baldwin A
    The global COVID-19 pandemic challenged the world-how it functions, how people move in the social worlds and how government/government services and people interact. Health services, operating under the principles of new public management, have undertaken rapid changes to service delivery and models of care. What has become apparent is the mechanisms within which contemporary health services operate and how services are not prioritising the person at the centre of care. Person-centred care (PCC) is the philosophical premise upon which models of health care are developed and implemented. Given the strain that COVID-19 has placed on the health services and the people who deliver the care, it is essential to explore the tensions that exist in this space. This article suggests that before the pandemic, PCC was largely rhetoric, and rendered invisible during the pandemic. The paper presents an investigation into the role of PCC in these challenging times, adopting a Foucauldian lens, specifically governmentality and biopolitics, to examine the policies, priorities and practical implications as health services pivoted and adapted to changing and acute demands. Specifically, this paper draws on the Australian experience, including shifting nursing workforce priorities and additional challenges resulting from public health directives such as lockdowns and limitations. The findings from this exploration open a space for discussion around the rhetoric of PCC, the status of nurses and that which has been lost to the pandemic.
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    YouTube's modulatory apparatus : young children's participation in YouTube's political economy : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Media Studies, Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2023) Bastos Mareschi Aggio, Amanda
    YouTube is a favoured digital destination for young children between five and six years old. In contrast to accounts that celebrate YouTube as an empowering and democratising platform, this research project examines young children’s interactions with YouTube using political economic and biopolitical approaches which situate children’s participation in the platform as unpaid and exploited labour. The thesis employs thematic analysis drawing on 47 interviews with young children, their parents, and teachers, alongside observations of young children’s usage of YouTube. The key findings are organised around the themes of happiness, attention, popularity and control, which unpack and question notions of digital labour, biopower and the attention economy in relation to the functioning of YouTube and its impact on young children’s lives. Within this analysis I develop the concept of the YouTube’s Modulatory Apparatus (YTMA), a strategic formation composed of the interplay of YouTube’s technical components and the platform’s commercial rationales. My findings suggest children’s feelings, behaviour and subjectivities are influenced by a trustful, intimate and emotional rapport established between young children and the YTMA. The analysis of participants’ accounts of YouTube highlights narratives that can suggest YouTube’s commercial strategies or justify practices of and through its platform.
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    Airbnb and the paradox of the body: The biopolitical management of hosts in four tourist towns in New Zealand.
    (SAGE Publications, 1/04/2021) Pennell S
    irbnb is emblematic of a set of business practices commonly known as ‘the sharing economy’. It is a disruptive business model of homestay accommodation that has exploited conditions of growing precarity of work since 2008. Work precarity is particularly evident in regional tourist areas in New Zealand, which historically experience seasonal, part-time work and low wages. Airbnb draws specifically on the rhetoric of micro-entrepreneurism, with focus on individual freedom and choice: appealing concepts for those experiencing precarity. This article challenges the rhetoric of Airbnb and investigates notions of home, authenticity and hospitality that are reconceptualized under a specific regime of digital biopolitics. Drawing on research conducted in four regional tourist towns in New Zealand this article analyses the biopolitical interpellations that impact hosts’ subjectivities as entities in motion and considers the ways that the rationalities of Airbnb’s algorithms modulate the embodied behaviours of its hosts.