Abstract This essay outlines the main aspects of Foucault's notion of governmentality as a historically contingent and dispersed form of power seeking to act on the action of others and on the self. It explores conceptual dimensions of governmentality and its connections to Foucault's historical philosophical investigations of truths, rationalities and the subject. As a focus of geographical analysis, Foucauldian approaches first appear in historical geographies of disciplinary institutions, but this focus on the enclosed spaces of discipline also raises questions about the management of populations beyond the institutional walls. Governmentality approaches are now found in nearly every sub‐field of human geography, forming the basis of much innovative work exploring the significance of space in projects of government.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 154 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.