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Focusing on “new regimes of calculation” and the limits and possibilities of mobilizing critical theory to make sense of such shifts, the author uses Roderick Ferguson’s Foucauldian call for a reordering of things to rethink of quantitative inquiry. The author is especially interested in race and the twists and turns of how the institutionalizing of the interdisciplines of area studies in higher education functioned to manage difference. The author pays particular attention to parallels between the institutionalization of the interdisciplines of area studies with the emerging interdisciplines– those forming between the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences and the mathematical sciences, computer sciences, digital studies, and the natural sciences. By elaborating both sociological and media studies disciplinary perspectives, something “beyond biopolitics and neoliberalism” becomes thinkable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent theorizations of biopedagogies, drawing on Foucault’s thinking about biopower and biopolitics, coupled with contemporary understandings of pedagogy as a cultural practice, provide a useful analytic for interrogating the workings of obesity discourses. In this article, we aim to extend thinking about biopedagogies through a reading of public health research texts that produce “evidence” about obesity and Brown bodies. We consider the role public health researchers may play as pedagogues in the art and practices of life. We chart how some public health research utilizes normalizing practices and produces discourses of ignorance that constitute bodies as objects to be worked on and taught. Finally, we flag up our concern that biopedagogical efforts to solve public health issues may occlude potential detrimental effects for individuals and their health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that mass media representations of obesity operate biopedagogically and, in doing so, teach viewers how to think and feel about what it means to be fat. These teachings are what we call “life lessons”—that is, lessons aimed at instructing viewers in how to relate to both their own bodies and the bodies of others—and are readily discernible in a wide variety of magazines, radio segments, and television shows. We suggest that life lessons of this sort are neither separate nor entirely distinct from public health campaigns, but rather overlap with and, at times, intensify their messages. With this in view, we undertake a four-part analysis of how the North American mass media represent obesity. In the first part, we outline contemporary theories of biopower, biocitizenship, and biopedagogy and how they can be used to make sense of these representations. In the second part, we contextualize them by providing an overview of relevant public health policy such as the United State’s Let’s Move campaign and the World Health Organization’s Prioritizing Areas for Action in the Field of Population-Based Prevention of Childhood Obesity. In the third part, we present a systematic review of the critical literature on representations of obesity with an emphasis on the North American media landscape. And in the fourth part, we submit an episode of the popular television program Nip/Tuck to an in-depth critical examination as a case study of how mass media representations of obesity function biopedagogically. In the end, we show that the representations we discuss not only reflect public health priorities but also reproduce neoliberal ideas about how to manage the life of the human body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the intersecting vectors of power, surveillance, and identity relating to technologies of material culture as located within the skort or running skirt. A cultural history of the skort, situating it within historical debates over femininity and sport, and contemporary arguments over the commercial branding of the feminine ideal is presented. The author's findings of participant-observation that she performed in a group fitness studio are also presented and discussed.

The article looks on what is happening to time in the era of catastrophic risk and how subjects adjust to their own dividual-ization in the biopolitical assemblage of preemptive temporality, drawing on the work of Sarah Lochlann Jain. She argues that living in prognosis is a way of moving, albeit one that problematizes attempts to move through linear time. A critical glimpse into a new and emerging turn in approaches to the governance of traumatic memory has been offered.

The article examines the possibilities for transcending neo-liberal individuality and the fixed construction of the feminine identity by engaging the force of the active, moving body. It discusses to develop a movement practice informed both by social theory and the principles of anatomical and biomechanical analysis. It explores if it is possible to practice movement differently beyond the biopolitics of neo-liberalism.

The authors engage with three emerging debates germane to contemporary biopolitics. The first one is about how to advance the critical interrogation of the biopolitics of human movement. Secondly, how and in what ways might they move about and against regimes and systems of biopolitical subjectivity. Lastly, how might moving methods of writing, representation, and performance bring light to contemporary biopolitical struggles, contestations, and power relations.

The author seeks to question his relationship with my his father's shadow,a relationship founded upon an invented daddy co-created by a collection of coaches, friends, cousins, teachers, researchers, his father, and the present-day media. He evaluates his privilege as a middle-class American male struggling to deal with the expectations of those around him. He offers a critical perspective into and interrogation of his maturation into a particular gendered and classed subject position.

The article discusses the complexity of the presence of the researcher's body in the context of conducting research on and within biopolitical governance. The author body-narratives derived from two separate studies, both of which explore biopolitics and draw on an embodied methodology, are presented. The narratives point toward the corporeal contradictions of being located within a culture of reading and critiquing bodies while realizing the presence of ones own physicality.

The article explores on the "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign, a performance of security as a site of biopolitics. It seeks to explore on questions, such as, how do bodies respond to it, how do they incorporate that logic into their own movement, and how do they challenge it. Also, question on what does the movement of the campaign and the bodies that move along with it suggest for current debates within biopolitics regarding security.