Michel Foucault

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage 1979)

Earlier we encountered Foucault’s critique of Jeremy Bentham's ideas about panoptic prison systems (1787). Below are versions of Bentham's panopticon discussed by Foucault. We used Foucault’s critique to consider the ways in which institutions create technologies of surveillance, which can affect the ways students of color move through educational systems and courses, and may even produce particular psychologies (both socialized and individual ones).