Class notes

Lecture on Governmentality

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Course
SOCI203 (SOCI2O3)

Institution
Concordia University ( )

The text explores several sociological themes, focusing on surveillance, risk, and social justice. It discusses how surveillance systems, such as molecular HIV surveillance, can stigmatize and criminalize individuals, particularly those with HIV. It also highlights the need for informed consent in ...

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Uploaded on January 5, 2025
Number of pages 6
Written in 2024/2025
Type Class notes
Professor(s) Daniel dagenais
Contains Lecture on governmentality

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-How organizations use surveillance to manage risk.
-Understand the social justice implications of those processes.
In other words: Who is advantaged by these processes and who might be disadvantaged by
these processes.

If you write the word slot machine into YouTube you will see thousands of videos of people
winning big jackpots. But there’s videos about all kinds of things.
-To view these videos sociologically is understanding them through a wider context like for
example: in the context of affordability prices.

-For many it is getting harder and harder to afford the basic necessities in life. ù
 Last year, Quebec food banks recorded that for the 4th year in a row, demands for
assistance increased.
 They also estimated that food banks across the province received 872,000 requests for
assistance each month. (that’s a lot)

So, let’s understand the context of these YouTube videos:

In this context, we have to understand it as a form of advertising. A form of advertising that
incentivises people to be entrepreneurial, to take risks. You cant get ahead without taking some
risks. It’s a discourse that says why don’t you try a slot machine? It could change your life!

Slot machine videos make it seem like slot machines are always paying out but in reality if you
play a slot machine over time, you’re going to experience a net lost. The house always wins.
-Slot machine are programed probability speaking to favor the house.

How are people flagged as risky subjects.
In other words, how do risk discourses and practices work.
-How do they work moreover to stigmatize people.
-How do they stream people designated as risky into different systems of control.

We have a system of laws in Canada.
The system includes things like the Canadian charter of rights and freedom. And section 15 of
the charter of rights and freedom states that everyone is equal under the law. People should
not be discriminated against on the basis of race, national or ethnic origine, colour, religion, sex,
age or disability.

Unfortunately, when we think of how our laws and rights actually work in practice. When we
think of critically form a sociological perspective, we often see profound differences between
what should happen and what actually does happen.

As the social science of HIV non discloser (…), the criminal code has been applied since the late
1990s in Canada in a way that discriminates people with HIV.

, Not only did they discriminate based on HIV status but this form of discrimination also
intersects with a lot of differences that sociologists are interest in like racial differences. Like
black people are more likely to get prison sentences compared to white people.

What about me. Do I have any idea why I’m here, studying sociology? There are a lot of
different reasons why we want to study sociology. In a sense, there are many answers to our
question.

Our teacher thinks its focussed on social patterns. What are the kind of persistent patterns,
forms of discrimination for example. How do we think about that and how do we actually affect
that.
-One of the things that has always attracted my teacher to sociology is the disciplines lost in
history trying to equip people to aggravate for progressive social change.

The reading that we did for this week tries to show: How can we use sociological analysis to
change things for the better.
-Teacher wanted us to read Harriett Martineau’s work is because he thinks it shows us this
activist or transformational potential of sociology.

Martineau is less famous as Marx, but teacher would say just as worthy of our attention.

Interesting fact: More than a decade before Marx and Engels were arguing in the German
ideology for the point of social theories was to change the world. Martineau was writing about
political autonomy.
The communist manifesto that is still Marx and Engels complicated ideas. The german ideology
is a tome while the communist manifesto is slimer, easier to recollect. It wasn’t published until
1848.
Martineau was trying to translate the principles of political economy into something people
could digest well before this.
She noted that in her first volume of her illustrations of political economy that it wss an
interesting book but it was not suited to teach the people. And this is what Martineau wanted
to do.
The spirit of uplifting people is really characteristic of Martineau’s sociology especially her
activist writtings.

Quotation by Harriet Martineau: (from her piece of writing in 1869):
"It is your business to lift up your voices within your homes, your neighborhoods, and the
church to which you belong, against injustice of every kind." – Harriett Martineau

Think about the importance of centering lived and living experiences in sociological analysis of
medicine and public health.

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