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Can anyone explain Foucault's knowledge-power nexus in simple terms? : r/sociology

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Foucault was interested in situating how knowledge develops within specific disciplinary institutions (hospitals, schools, the barracks, prisons etc...). This is point one: all knowledge is always embedded in some kind of institutional context, which means there are relations of power that we can observe over the production of knowledge (e.g. a medical authority is said to have expertise over the body, can diagnose you has having some kind of illness, and prescribe a regime of treatment/care). Point two: His 'genealogies' of knowledge/power across his main works (e.g. discipline and punish, history of madness, birth of the clinic, history of sexuality) trace a history of how institutional knowledge emerged to normalize specific understandings of the self within a modern context (e.g. what is normal/abnormal; what is sane/insane; what is criminal/permissable, etc.) . Caveat: While Foucault does sometimes goes very far back in history (e.g. how the Romans understood sex as an 'ars erotic

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