Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish (In-Person)

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, first published in France in 1975 to immediate acclaim, is now the most influential study of the modern carceral system in the West. It is also an ideal introduction to Foucault’s thought and method, which changes over the course of his intellectual life and career. How do modern states and modern societies punish? How have practices of punishment changed over time? What can a history of punishment tell us about how power works and how we relate to it? What are the powers at play in the prison and how are they reproduced across the social field, from the schools to the asylum?

In this course, we will read the entirety of Discipline and Punish, spending each week on one of the four sections of the book: torture, punishment, discipline, and prison. We will examine how the body and the soul of the prisoner became the site of new technologies and techniques of power, how the use of torture relates to the production of knowledge, how the spatial organization of the prison shapes a specific kind of subject through the “panopticon”, and how disciplinary power relates to other forms of power that Foucault identifies and theorizes. We will discuss the relationship of this work to Foucault’s earlier “archeological” histories and his later “genealogies” of the subject. We will also consider more recent developments in critical carceral studies, from Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore to Laleh Khalili to Banu Bargu.

Course Schedule

Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
January 27 — February 17, 2026
4 weeks

$335.00

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