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