THESE days, the fashion for postmodernism is wearing pretty thin. Too many counter-intuitive claims have been made in its name, too many hostages have been offered up to its political misfortunes. To recap: the intellectual world of the late 1970s, if not exactly...

The "Stop It, It Hurts Me" national seminar was held in Wellington over 18-19 June 2004. The seminar was organised by the Children's Issues Centre of Otago University in association with the Office of the Commissioner for Children. Interest in the seminar...

Foucault begins where all truly original minds begin, in the present. Such minds are not ahead of their times; it is the rest of us who are dragging our feet. His passion is to seek out the new, that which is coming to birth in the present—a present that most of us are unable to see because we see it through the eyes of the past, or through the eyes of a 'future' that is a projection of the past, which amounts to the same thing. Foucault's interest in the past is guided by that p...

In Discipline and Punish [Foucault] is back asserting some by now familiar Foucaultisms. "Man" as an individualistic, psychological entity is an invention, and not a very good one, of the last two hundred years ("A meticulous observation of detail … a political awareness of these small things, for the control of men…. From such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism is born"). Institutions, for all their rationalism, create what they pretend to perceive (�...