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In:Studies of Discourse and Governmentality: New perspectives and methods
Edited by Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 66] 2016
► pp. 353–386

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Revealing the governmentality of demographic change in Germany with the manifold discourse-analytical ‘toolbox’ of Foucault

Published online: 29 June 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.66.12mes
German discourses of demographic change are characterised by alarmism. A continuously growing number of publications in the mass media address population aging and shrinking by depicting mostly dystopian future scenarios. Some governmental strategies employ demographic discourse to prompt individuals to react to ‘objective’ scientific facts in their everyday life. If the state is allegedly no longer able to provide social security systems and the society is doomed to suffer from a ‘generation-conflict’, citizens as ‘entrepreneurs of the self ’ are expected to endorse private social insurances and later retirement. Michel Foucault’s early to late works are used to analyse the underlying orders of knowledge in textual, numerical, and graphical forms in order to examine the governmental rationale that relies on this knowledge.
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