On resistance in the post-political city: conduct and counter-conduct in Vancouver

Abstract

The paper contributes to understandings of contestation and resistance in urban politics, using a land use struggle against a "big-box" development in Vancouver, Canada as an example. It surveys Foucault's work on "governmentality," highlighting the centrality of the notion of resistance in this work before focusing in particular on Foucault's yet underexplored conceptions of "conduct" and "counter-conduct". These concepts offer an analysis of urban politics beyond the binary of successful implementation of city policies or their failure, and of cooption or revolt; therefore, proving especially useful in the analysis of urban governance which is increasingly characterised as "post-political".

From Being a Problem to Having Problems: Discourse, Governmentality and Chinese Migrant Workers

“…Instead, different discourses engage in a continuous struggle to fix the meaning of the social. While governmentality scholars have already demonstrated how individuals and groups distort and resist governmental projects [see for instance [1,11,15,31,44], I argue in this article that discourse theory offers an additional perspective that is well suited to analyze how governmentality is contested. In particular, the use of discourse analysis opens up for examining not only how subjects of government themselves contest governmental projects, but also the media's role in such contestations.…”

How to make them walk the talk: governing the implementation of energy and climate policies into local practices

“…Resistance in this context is not perceived as a process exterior to power but instead as an integral part of all social relations that is not targeted against any singular ruler but is broader and more subtle in the sense that it refers to all forms of "resistance to power as conducting" (Foucault, 1978:195), culminating in the concept of "counter-conduct". Rosol (2014) develops these ideas further in order to address explicitly those practices in urban development that oppose the existing form of being governed with the goal "not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them" (Foucault, 1978:44). This concept of counterconduct makes it possible to focus on practices which oppose the dominating view on the energy transition and climate change or which are targeted against technologies that are used for their implementation.…”

Methods, discourse, activism: comparing institutional ethnography and governmentality

“…For instance, Randy Lippert (2005) deploys and reflects critically on the concepts of sovereign power and pastoral power in analyzing instances of the provision of sanctuary within Canada, arguing that these practices are not adequately accounted for within a literature that has tended to focus analytic attention on liberal and advanced liberal approaches to governing. As another example, Carl Death (2010) has built on Foucault's discussion of counter-conducts in Security, Territory, Population (2007, 191-226) to explore the relationship between protest activities enacted at several international summits and governing programs in order to redress the limited place that resistive practices have generally been afforded within governmentality research (see also, e.g., McKee 2011;Rosol 2014). This type of analytic engagement with conceptual understandings worked up within scholarly literatures lies beyond what institutional ethnography is designed to accomplish.…”