Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning international literature which develops the potential of Foucauldian-inspired notions of governmentality to understand the construction of health problems, policies and practices. This book bring these insights to bear on the Irish health policy arena through a range of empirical examples, including smoking, obesity, child health, ageing, mental health and disability, and even approaches to the dead body. It explores how specific health issues have been constructed as problematic and in need of intervention in the Irish state, and considers the strategi ... More

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning international literature which develops the potential of Foucauldian-inspired notions of governmentality to understand the construction of health problems, policies and practices. This book bring these insights to bear on the Irish health policy arena through a range of empirical examples, including smoking, obesity, child health, ageing, mental health and disability, and even approaches to the dead body. It explores how specific health issues have been constructed as problematic and in need of intervention in the Irish state, and considers the strategies, discourses and technologies involved in the art of governing health in advanced liberal democracies. Through these examples, the book demonstrates how governmentality, as a social theoretical approach, can be operationalised and utilized to reframe the way we think about health problems and practices in Ireland, and how we ‘do’ heath policy analysis. Building on the dialectic between social theory and policy, the volume also reflects on the potential of govermentality for developing a critical politics of health policy in Ireland.