Foucault – Altered States of Academia

4th Jul 2026

Constructing the Great and Terrible Wizard: Four Sociological Perspectives on Power in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Claire Birkenshaw “I have fooled everyone for so long that I thought I should never be found out.” (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) One of the most memorable plot twists in children’s literature occurs in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum, 1900) when the collapse of a carefully constructed façade reveals that the seemingly omnipotent Wizard of…

Thinking with Foucault and Ferris

Claire Birkenshaw “Hey Cameron, do you realise if we’d played by the rules right now, we’d be in gym?” (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986) Scholars Hunter and Frawley (2022, p.14) argue that use of film as a ‘pedagogical tool’ can help students better understand abstract theoretical concepts to aid their application in imaginative ways. For…

Discipline, Incorporated

Claire Birkenshaw “By means of strange incantations, they conjured up a new incarnation of evil, another grinning mask of fear, home to the constantly renewed magic of purification and exclusion” (Foucault, [1972] 2009, p.3). Film, as Sian Barber (2015, p.4) reminds us, is a “crafted artefact”, which is “never produced in a cultural and social…