Problematization as an Activist Practice: Reconsidering Foucault

This article proposes a new understanding of problematization as a collaborative activist practice that enables social change by unsettling existing ways of thinking. An important term in Michel Foucault's late work, problematization is usually understood as a form of philosophy that entails ethical self-transformation. Considering Foucault's scholarship alongside his activism with the Prisons Information Group (GIP), I theorize problematization as a way of responding to prison protests that seeks to amplify their disruptive power by calling into question the logics used to adjudicate them. Understood in this way, I suggest, problematization could help push the limits of prison reform today.