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This paper critiques recent developments in educational discourse through an analysis of two UK Government White Papers and three specific problems. We argue that the latter herald forms of 'biocreep'. Echoing the analysis of such phenomena in the work of Michel Foucault, this gradual extension of 'biopolitics' into the field of education is a tendency which has accelerated with the Coronavirus pandemic and raises many questions for policy analysis. First, we show how the White Papers' approach to life and its related assumptions embody an attempt to further entrench the techniques of biopolitical population management in secondary and further education settings. Second, our analysis of the two Papers shows not just a deepening discursive shift towards ways of instrumentalising educational processes, but also identifies a triple problem of political assemblage: primo, this shift relies on the assemblage of a 'problematic subject'; secondo, it simultaneously assembles the problem of value extraction; and tertio, it obscures the problem of desire or unruliness of the assemblages created. Just as discursive practices of instrumentation, administration and evacuation try to manage these assemblages, they remain unable to contain the three problems they enshrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large segments of Austria-Hungary’s population were affected by an escalating food shortage during World War I, leading to widespread undernourishment, particularly in urban areas. This paper argues that this impending crisis significantly empowered scientific experts. Operating between civil society and the imperial state, these experts multiplied and strengthened their connections to both spheres during the war, emerging as major producers of policy advice. This was true even in the realm of biopolitics, where decisions were made about whom to let live and whom to let die. Focusing on eugenics and its scientific proponents, this paper traces their growing interactions with voluntary associations providing food aid and civil administration at central, municipal, and local levels. Spanning four distinct urbanized contexts in the Habsburg Empire – Vienna, Budapest, Northern Bohemia, and Prague – the analysis reveals that eugenic ideas increasingly permeated discussions about food provisioning during the war in each of these locations. By the conflict’s end, eugenics had become a pivotal discourse framing public debate on the hunger crisis, depicting it in racialized terms as an intergenerational biological threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with exploring legal atmospheres during colonial expansionism and the early period of confederation of British Columbia. By describing the theatrical and performative aspects of legal colonialism, the archival documents from this time represent interesting, yet oft-overlooked, significances that attention to sensory and affective experiences captures. Examining "affective atmospheres" disclosed in such colonial settings reveals ways that the colonial regime promulgated its influence in non-rational, non-legal manners. As well, drawing out the material conditions of topography shows how the environment acts more than just a backdrop for the staging of legal expansionism, as it acts also as a constitutive force in the development of colonial legal arrangements. At the same time, the colonial regime was forgetful of these same contextual, topographical, and atmospheric origins of law insofar as it promulgated myths of the universality, objectivity, and superiority of English law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades, intersex studies has achieved increasing development as a field of critical knowledge, in tight collaboration with discourses developed by intersex activism and human rights bodies. This paper proposes a self-reflexive review of epistemological perspectives in intersex studies within broader discursive fields, through a thematic analysis and comparative framing analysis. This analysis is based on a narrative literature review of academic contributions, activist declarations, and documents issued by human rights bodies conducted over the last decade as a work-in-progress project. Furthermore, it includes results of a scoping review of recent knowledge production in intersex studies carried out in Scopus within the subject area 'social sciences'. This paper focuses on the analysis of the following epistemological perspectives: human rights frameworks, legal perspectives and citizenship theories, reflections on biopolitics, medicalization and iatrogenesis, sociology of diagnosis framework, depathologization perspective, respectful health care models, and reflections on epistemological, methodological, and ethical aspects. The literature review raises questions about the existence of specific intersex epistemologies in intersex studies, their interrelation with discourses contributed by intersex activism and human rights bodies, and the opportunities for a contribution of theory making in intersex studies to the human rights protection of intersex people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tabayyun is the property of Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Relaciones Internacionales (1699-3950) is the property of Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, International Relations Studies Group (GERI) Law Faculty and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

New arrangements of power are emerging in response to the turbulence generated by the quest to improve life and render it productive. This paper specifies such arrangements by developing the concept of metabolic politics: an apparatus that shifts from discipline to power regulating material, bodily, and environmental transformations. The dominant function of metabolic politics is to render the transformative capacities of living bodies and the circulatory dynamics of materials into object‐targets of governance. Through a comparative analysis of regulating pollution from industrial poultry units in Britain and India, the paper identifies logics of a metabolic politics and distinguishes these from the biopolitics of populations. Metabolic politics entails interventions targeting a milieu rather than deviant populations; its actions are directed at transformative capacities of bodies in addition to improving their productivity; its modes of governance operates via regulation and not just discipline; and its techniques of operation proceed through modulation instead of enclosure. Metabolic politics is a transversal form of power. It is situated and historically contingent, rather than uniform and universal. As a response to crises generated by the industrialisation and cheapening of life, metabolic politics furnishes vital insights into the administration and governance of the contemporary living and material world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The picturebook Tales from the Inner City (2018), created by Shaun Tan, encompasses various surreal mysteries about humans and animals. His stories represent a sociopolitical intervention, beyond the conventional purpose of animal/object representation serving humanistic allegories and show animals as autonomous beings finding their long-ignored place in the world. These imaged stories stretch literature's ability at interactions between humans and animals. Tan's experiment with new styles of reading calls for a reconfigured rhetoric. An interdisciplinary approach of ecocriticism and biopolitics creates sufficient grounds to examine the boundaries of what is human/animal. It questions the centrality of humans in literature. This article uses the biopolitical readings of Mario Ortiz-Robles as he moves beyond allegorical readings of animal tropes, the companion species of Donna Haraway as she observes animal/human relations, and Frank Serafini's methods at interpreting visual aspects of picturebooks. This paper looks at the selected tales – 'Fox', 'Eagle', 'Hippo', 'Lungfish', and 'Frog' to examine how Shaun Tan transforms humans in body and dreams through forceful encounters with animals, thus repositioning the power dynamic in human/animal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientists and policy‐makers promote 'Nature‐based Solutions' to the interconnected challenges associated with the Anthropocene. Often these involve the strategic use of ecosystem engineers: animals, plants, and microbes with disproportionate ecological agency capable of regional or even planetary‐scale niche construction. This environmental mode of biopolitics is promoted as biomimicry: restoring, rewilding, or rewetting diverse ecological systems. This paper critically examines the multispecies relations promised by this model through a focus on beaver in Britain over the last 12,000 years. It begins with beaver making Britain hospitable for early settlers and agriculturalists as they returned after the last ice age. It traces the subsequent demise of beaver due to hunting and land use change, and then follows the recent return of beaver as tools for natural flood management and nature recovery. It attends to situations in which these multispecies world‐making projects go awry in the weird ecologies of the Anthropocene. This story of beaver helps situate enthusiasms for proactive ecosystem engineering in deeper time. It highlights the beguiling potential of Nature‐based Solutions while cautioning against tendencies towards anthropocentrism, an apolitical mononaturalism, and an ecomodernist hubris. The paper combines concepts from archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and geography into a new framework for theorising multispecies acts of worlding and weirding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we prompt a re-reading of Assistive Technology (AT) as a media system that organizes disability in the framework of digital health-care and the platform society. Drawing on disability media studies and organization studies, we investigate how the arrival of big tech and digital platforms in the field of AT reconfigures ways to account for, classify and potentially discriminate against disability. We argue that this new configuration can be explained as a shift from a biopolitical model – oriented toward disability normalization – to an ethopolitical model, oriented toward optimization and health enhancement. In the conclusions, we put forward the concept of ethopolitical media and discuss the implications of this for wider debates in media and cultural studies which deal with the relationship between media, health, and self-care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to critically examine Allan Moore's Watchmen in terms of its elements that could be utilised for critical power thinking and the critique of fanatic and/or apolitical self-proclaimed saviours of society. The first part of the paper attempts to read Rorschach through the prism of critical criminology, as he represents the novel's most distinct expression of revenge and retribution, which, eventually, is linked to fascist-like practices. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the reading of Veidt's macabre plan and his set of advice for self-care in terms of a twofold biopolitical strategy that entails both the thanatopolitical effect of killing millions for the sake of life itself and preaching the need for the latter's optimisation to achieve individual and collective happiness. In the end, Watchmen is a 'superhero neo-noir' critique to both worldviews, since its point of departure is the critique of superheroes overall, as 'nothing works' and therefore 'nothing ever ends' if the structural reasons behind unfairness and oppression remain untouched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China and around the world, the global spread of COVID-19 has made wearing a facemask more than a pragmatic or aesthetic individual-level issue: it has instilled in people deontic value. In Chinese anti-epidemic narratives, the semiotic ideology of wearing a facemask has been closely related to collectivism, patriotism and, to a certain degree, nationalism. The facemask not only serves as a protective biomedical device but also as a cultural, political and spatial sign of the line of defence against disorders of the natural system, to establish the order of the social system. This paper argues from the perspective of semiotics and life politics that such mask narratives have effectively helped China prevent the large-scale spread of the epidemic across the nation and have served as a means of collective psychotherapy, paradoxically transforming individual separation into collective spiritual cohesion. Previous semiotic studies of disaster have not paid much attention to plagues or disaster governance discourse, between which biomedicine plays an important role. Thus, this paper aims to shed light on how biomedicine works with politics in coding and decoding the relationship between the natural system of the plague and the social system of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper situates the massacre of Dalit refugees of Marichjhapi Island (1978-79) in West Bengal, India through a multidisciplinary reading of Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide (2004) along with local history, vernacular literature, reports and experiential narratives. The refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh who settled on the island of Marichjhapi at Sundarbans (currently one of the most ecologically endangered places on Earth) were forcefully evicted by the government citing ecological issues. Utilizing a framework that incorporates both ecocriticism and postcolonial theory, this paper reads the vulnerable humans and non-humans, especially the island's unique ecosystem and fauna as victims of anthropocentrism and biopolitics, propelled by ecological and political factors acting together. Taking up from Ghosh's own interventions on ecological thought and the Sundarbans, the paper further delves into the concept of "the disaster unconscious" in postcolonial literature as suggested by Pallavi Rastogi through a close reading of The Hungry Tide. It describes the co-constitution of precarious lives (both human and non-human) and fragile environments during disaster as what Blanchot would call "outside of temporality" marking the 'necroeconomy' of the nation-state, as conceptualized by Achille Mbembe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish 'a journal' in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of 'transactions' itself and creating spaces in the journal for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers. In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish 'a journal' at the current moment, and set out a renewed vision as to how Transactions of the Insittute of British Geographers might provide space for more collective approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of 'transactions' itself and creating spaces in the journals for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This dialogue (trilogue) is an attempt to critically discuss the technoscientific convergence that is taking place with biodigital technologies in the postdigital condition. In this discussion, Sarah Hayes, Petar Jandrić and Michael A. Peters examine the nature of the convergences, their applications for bioeconomic sustainability and associated ecopedagogies. The dialogue paper raises issues of definition and places the technological convergence ('nano-bio-info-cogno') – of new systems biology and digital technologies at the nano level – in an evolutionary context to speculate, on the basis of the latest research, future possibilities. The paper also reviews these developments within familiar landscapes of posthumanism and postmodernism, raises the question of political bioeconomy and the role of postdigital education within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the reception of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality in Roberto Esposito's thought by taking into account the Italian translation of Foucault's lectures of 1977 and 1978 at the Collège de France. First, the different contexts of reception of these lectures are presented, in particular the Anglo-Saxon studies of governmentality and the crisis of Italian Marxism in the late 1970s. Secondly, Foucault's position in his courses of these years is analyzed from the perspective of the opposition between Machiavellianism and anti-Machiavellianism, precisely in view of the Italian reception. Finally, this paper analyses the reception of the notion of governmentality by Roberto Esposito in his 1980 work La politica e la storia. The paper shows the importance of this early reception of Foucault's lessons regarding the formation of the Italian biopolitical current and its specificities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the lost stories of the precarious lives of thousands of migrant women from the community that the Indian government officially calls Displaced Persons of Pakistanoccupied Jammu and Kashmir (DPs of PoJK). We examine the stories of those who survived the painful migration that followed tribal raids in the western parts of the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, which ceased to exist after its accession with the Union of India on October 26, 1947. Drawing on the concept of precarity as propounded by Judith Butler, this paper critically examines the torturous experiences of women in Kulvir Gupta's autobiography, Embers the Beginning and Embers the End of Mirpur (2018). The paper also employs Agamben's conception of "camp" to analyze the unlawful and inhumane treatment these women received in migrant camps such as Kalghar and Alibegh. It shows how their life was relegated to "bare lives" while being differentially subjected to gender-based violence amidst the territorial conquest in the region. This paper concludes that these migrant women from Mirpur and the entire western region of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir were highly vulnerable to sexual exploitation in the contemporary political order of the region. This paper, being the first of its kind on the select migrant group, attempts to voice the pains and struggles of these courageous migrant women of whom only a few are alive today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, as in most of the Global North, disability has historically been regarded as a deficit, requiring clinical intervention, professional oversight, and special schooling. This ideology, referred to as ableism, is linked with settler colonialism and the matrix of oppression that upholds racial capitalism. The aims of this paper are twofold: First, we examine the correlation among normative whiteness, racialized exploitation, and the depiction of disabled Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) as disposable others. Second, we employ a joint biopolitical and settler colonial analysis to re-examine US special education drawing on our experiences as disabled, critical disability studies scholars—two of whom are negatively racialized and two of whom are queer. Finally, we draw upon the principles of Disability Justice and Access-Centered Pedagogy to formulate recommendations for an alternative to segregated education for all students, centering the experiences of those disproportionately impacted by systemic oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global COVID‐19 pandemic challenged the world—how it functions, how people move in the social worlds and how government/government services and people interact. Health services, operating under the principles of new public management, have undertaken rapid changes to service delivery and models of care. What has become apparent is the mechanisms within which contemporary health services operate and how services are not prioritising the person at the centre of care. Person‐centred care (PCC) is the philosophical premise upon which models of health care are developed and implemented. Given the strain that COVID‐19 has placed on the health services and the people who deliver the care, it is essential to explore the tensions that exist in this space. This article suggests that before the pandemic, PCC was largely rhetoric, and rendered invisible during the pandemic. The paper presents an investigation into the role of PCC in these challenging times, adopting a Foucauldian lens, specifically governmentality and biopolitics, to examine the policies, priorities and practical implications as health services pivoted and adapted to changing and acute demands. Specifically, this paper draws on the Australian experience, including shifting nursing workforce priorities and additional challenges resulting from public health directives such as lockdowns and limitations. The findings from this exploration open a space for discussion around the rhetoric of PCC, the status of nurses and that which has been lost to the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By tracing roughly 200 years of the formation of American school subjects, this paper complicates some of the self-evidence for calls to adapt school subjects according to complex health concerns, more recently amplified by COVID-19. To do so, the paper diagrams a counter-memory of three key amalgams of health related to the makings of school mathematics and reading-as-literacy: balancing mind–body-spirit-matter-nation networks, scientizing a hygiene of instruction for 'ethnic' minds, and reconfiguring bio-psycho-social adjustment – all pursued as problems of duration, intensity, and distance from differently dynamic and/or racializing norms. Throughout, we draw attention to how both universalizing and ethno-specific orthodoxies and their proposed alternatives have produced school subjects as self-evident strategic sites for addressing health concerns that invite underappreciated dangers today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three contemporary stories focusing on pregnancy and abortion, by contemporary Chinese women writers Zhong Ling (Taiwan), Tang Min (China), and Xi Xi (HK), in light of current feminist intervention into Michel Foucault's theory of biopolitics. In particular, the paper turns to Elizabeth Grosz' notion of corporal feminism and Julia Kristeva's conceptual explorations on her theory of the abject in order to propose a notion of female creativity that is grounded within women's bodily experiences and a notion of subjectivity that takes maternity as its epistemological model. The paper concludes with an extension of corporeal feminism to women's writing in the area of cultural translation as mastering what Mary Zournasi has called "the art of foreignness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relies on the social and legal perspective not only to better understand how norms are created and change through interactions among agents, but also to shed light on how norms are internalized in social practice. The article is organized as follows. Initially the article explores the basic assumption that deontic operators acquire their meaning via social conventions generating "personal rules" having a "mental content" which belongs to a wider "normative mind", a mind that obviously encompasses all sorts of choices. The article then describes the different types of personal rules, distinguishing social, moral, and legal rules across the normative mind, focusing on social rules within institutions, conceived as sets of rules in equilibrium. The core of this study puts to the test the taxonomy of personal (social, moral, and legal) rules within the normative mind by exploring a situation of "dense normativity" addressed by a 2021 Lancet paper concerning findings about "tight–loose cultures" during the Covid-19 crisis, and, for the sake of explanation, focuses on one of the main normative constraints that epitomizes the challenge of the Covid-19 crisis to "tight–loose" cultures: the "wear-mask rule". These observations can be extended to other normative constraints of that crisis, but in essence they parse the interplay between the different types of personal rules, which not only are social, but also moral and legal, drawing conclusions that complement the findings of the Lancet paper with some critical observations. The article critically concludes with remarks about the co-existence of different normative systems of personal rules in a context of biopolitics and suggests that individual morality appears to be the core of normativity to address collective threats such as those caused by the Covid-19 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature informed by biopolitical theory has shown how global education for sustainable development differentiates between populations by assigning different roles, responsibilities, and lifestyles to rich and poor. Taking these arguments as a point of departure, this paper first identifies three different 'problems' pertaining to biopolitical differentiation within this literature and then elaborates on potential didactical responses to such problematic differentiation. The suggested didactical responses draw on Judith Butler's theories of vulnerability, Jacques Rancière's ideas of a presupposition of equality, and Michel Foucault's writing on ethics and self-formation. The paper contributes to previous research on biopolitical differentiation in education for sustainable development by suggesting potential didactical responses to the problematics put forth in these works. It also contributes to previous literature on how Butler's, Rancière's and Foucault's theories are relevant to education by relocating the arguments to the context of global implementation of education for sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss how the earthquake risk is exploited by 'disaster capitalism', in order to convert Istanbul to a massive construction site. The shock of the 1999 Marmara Earthquake has been effectively used by the neoliberal market and government as 'a shock therapy' to implement a construction‐led development model for Turkey and to favour the construction sector by introducing new incentives, exceptional rights and interventions, which otherwise might be challenged. The current Turkish government justify the ongoing massive urban transformation and new mass housing projects as an improvement of the housing stock to make residential buildings stronger and more resilient to earthquakes. However, areas actually under earthquake risk do not match the areas that are officially declared under disaster risk by the government. The Disaster Law #6306 that granted the government the absolute right to expropriate land based on the justification of 'protecting residents against earthquakes and other natural disasters' was applied in a selective way to seize valuable land in Istanbul. In the paper I explore how the disaster was quickly converted to an opportunity for economic growth. To do that I introduce stories of three different neighbourhoods in Istanbul, namely Moda, Tozkoparan and Fikirtepe, each of which experience the ongoing massive urban transformation differently based on the land value of the neighbourhoods, class position of the residents, and residents' capacity to organise in order to protect their rights. I describe, how disaster capitalism is lived and experienced differently in these three neighbourhoods. Although the massive construction projects are indifferent to life's sustainability, those projects are justified as interventions in terms of public health and safety through making housing resilient to earthquakes. I critically discuss how in each case biopolitics presents disaster capitalism's massive urban transformation projects as a manifestation of liveliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I consider the “white replacement”, “white genocide”, and “Eurabia” conspiracy theories and the cycles of violence they have inspired, including mass murders in Norway, New Zealand, and the United States. Working from Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and “race struggle”, I investigate how these events enact a form of “networked violence” that combines offline and online actions to enact a distributed strategy of biopolitical control in an effort to discipline and control the bodies of people of colour, migrants, and in particular Muslims. Based in historical and ideological analysis of the three theories and their network logics, the paper aims to extend Foucault’s theories of “race struggle” and governmentality by demonstrating how right-wing extremist strategies of biopolitical control are now digitally networked and use online platforms to predicate and enact alternative systems of governmentality based in race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tiger conservation in India has been driven for the most part by a philosophy that prioritizes the need for inviolate tiger reserves free of human beings. Such reserves, it is argued, provide much needed territory to 'care' for the tiger. In this paper, we examine the biopolitics of tiger conservation in India and argue that the current approach to tiger conservation amplifies the nature‐culture divide and ignores other imaginations of tiger conservation that are more cognizant of human—non‐human entanglements in protected area landscapes. The paper argues that tiger conservation has been a mix of sovereign, disciplinary and neoliberal environmentalities, all built on a certain 'truth' about tigers. The paper raises questions and concerns about the 'truth' discourse that underlies tiger conservation and also argues that tiger conservation has marginalized the environmentalism of the poor. It makes the case for more debate and discussion about tiger truths and suggests the need for a more than human approach to tiger conservation that recognizes the adverse consequences of fortress conservation as well as its limits in caring for the tiger in more than human geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of "life" with its political force, at the center of social and political campaigns around the world with the demand of "life", and this has made the necessity of analyzing the political agency of "life" in the political science inevitable. In order to analyze the political agency of life in our time, the hypothesis of this paper is that with we encounter an ontological turn that "Economy" should become a political phenomenon. This is not through an interpretation of economics as the knowledge of maintaining "balance" in the performance of an "economic enterprise" which is dominant in conventional (mainstream) economics; And it is not achieved with an understanding that considers economy and politics as two areas independent of each other, the superstructure or infrastructure of a social order; Rather, it requires the analysis of how the "person" is politicized through the economization of his approach to "the culture of the self". An analysis that is finally an area of political knowledge that has been able to include the economic issue within its scope, that is, it considers the economic drive as the guiding factor of governing "self" which is a part of the general regime of governance. We have proposed a form of "critique of political economy" that will be able to interpret the realm of general economic categories as the realm around which the struggle for the production/reproduction of individual and social life takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Jurídica Cesumar: Mestrado is the property of Revista Juridica Cesumar - Mestrado and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper provides a comparative reading of the female protagonists in two Sri Lankan films, focusing on how the female body becomes a contentious site of gendered violence, subject to state and male surveillance and containment. Through a close analysis of Prasanna Jayakody's 28 (2014) and Asoka Handagama's Asandhimitta (2019), this paper attempts to reveal how Sri Lankan cinema violently reconfigures the female body as a site of negotiation for articulation of victimhood and desire and becomes a potential space for the inscription of feminist issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how authority and governmentality were enacted through digital technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the proliferation of track and trace apps, as well as digital vaccine passports, the contemporary 'biocitizen' became someone who was at once participatory and sacrificial for the 'greater good'. Advancing a notion of sensory power (Isin and Ruppert, 2020) and app-enabled 'biopolitical authority' as a novel form of governmentality, this paper explores how the tracking and monitoring of individual bodies renders them 'sense-able beings' through the devices, apps, and platforms that they engage with. Drawing on a discourseoriented analysis of UK-based government visuals and news reports surrounding the promotion (and controversies) of tracking apps and vaccine passports, we demonstrate that partaking in society as a 'good' biocitizen meant allowing COVID-19 technologies to pre-empt and influence bodily movements on both a micro and macro scale. As such we argue that COVID-19 technologies, ranging from tracking apps to vaccine passports, became 'pre-emptive' technologies that codified human bodies and their infectious status through alerts and notifications, which in turn, validated and reified a sense of belonging as a good and healthy 'biocitizen'. This paper will unpack these themes to propose ways in which sensory power was deployed to organise and structure societies, first at a responsibilised individual level, and then as a societal collective, throughout the pandemic. In doing so, this paper seeks to address the varying forms of control that came out of the pandemic, as well as the social implications that they then had on biocitizenship and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the new global policy framework for implementing education for sustainable development (ESD) – ESD for 2030 – was launched officially. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, this paper explores biopolitical elements in ESD for 2030. The paper contributes to previous research on ESD policy by employing a biopolitical perspective, and by highlighting problematic aspects of the framework's will to include and to adapt to different contexts. The analysis brings attention to the framework's notions of life and to how different human populations are separated. Furthermore, the analysis of the framework demonstrates how notions of transformative pedagogy, community, and the individual, assume the functions of biopolitical techniques. The findings point to a biopolitical differentiation where rich and poor populations are assumed to need different educational interventions, adapted to their socio-economic contexts, in the global educational policy quest for sustainable development. Ultimately, we consider the potential of Foucauldian ethics as an affirmative alternative to the current mode of biopolitical differentiation in global ESD policy [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to shed some light on current biopolitics of food and environmental security by analyzing the strategy of Integrated pest management (IPM). IPM is an ecological form of pest management that emerged in the United States in the 1950s in response to the pesticide crisis and now informs numerous pesticide legislations around the world. The paper analyzes IPM as a governmental hinge that aims to reconcile the conflicting goals of food security and environmental security. To this end, the paper makes three intertwined arguments. First, through an examination of scientific texts from the field of economic entomology, the paper shows how biological and chemical pest control methods are produced as two conflicting materialities that must be mediated. In a second step, the text shows how economically defined thresholds and cost-benefit analyzes are used to level the difference between these two materialities and make them commensurable. Finally, it elaborates how IPM aims primarily at transforming farmers' practices. The use of chemicals in agriculture is to be reduced by transforming farmers into calculating subjects. Overall, the article aims to show how IPM, as an important element of contemporary ecological governmentality, seeks to realize positive environmental effects in the quantitative medium of economics and science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The following paper draws attention to a lesser-studied subject in Critical Adoption Studies: foster care. I argue that this lack of attentiveness towards systems of care and the experiences of fostered children mirror a societal trend in which traditional ideals of the biological family and more recent post-biological ideals in the form of adoptive practices have created an ideological construct in which foster subjectivities are seen as identity-less. That is, the two poles of "biological family" and "adoptive family" support a particular normativity centered on a nuclear family ideal which then excludes foster families/children from membership--stereotyping foster care as inherently incapable of providing children a full and meaningful life. Ultimately, this ideological system prefers adoption, presenting it as the solution to all experiences of fostered and orphaned children. And nowhere is this ideology more present than in our society's most revered cultural productions--where orphans and foster children are continuously disparaged or misrepresented. My target for analysis in this paper will be the monumental Star Wars franchise, and in particular its three main trilogies, The Skywalker Saga. I will show how its most recent trilogy (2015-2019) embodies the transition from a biocentric normativity excluding all nonbiological families, to a status quo which has normalized adoptive-family making. Alongside a traditional biological familial ideal, adoptive families are regarded as a conventional family, and are thus capable of offering otherwise down-and-out children with meaningful lives and full identities. As this new ideological structure (what I refer to below as the ideological dyad) becomes more entrenched in our culture, little room is left for an alternative understanding for how the systemic issues associated with a system like foster care might be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Krotz (2018) argues that the interest in different societies and therefore, the variety of forms of organizing human life are shared by, what seem to be distinctive forms of knowledge, anthropology and utopia. According to him, the category of alterity is what brings them closer and makes them complement each other. This paper looks into the similarities between the dystopian literary genre and cultural anthropology. It does so, by looking at some of the contemporary problems that cultural anthropology treatsand the themes of dystopian literature. The origins of the dystopian novel go back to around 1880s, marked by the strong intervention of sciences in human life. Most of these dystopian novels, talk about the perils of technology, technocracy and its controlling power. It is interesting to analyze then, that much of the contemporary problems that anthropology deals with in the 21st century, fall within the realm of dystopian literature. The rising trend of new dystopian novels can offer foundations for a vision, whereby dystopian literature can serve as a warehouse of topics from which social anthropology can borrow in its active engagement with contemporary global issues and the new human condition. Comparing the motives of dystopian literature, its questioning of the moral and human aspects of war, science, violence, technology, etc, with the most recent issues that contemporary cultural anthropology deals with will be the primary focus of this paper. The aim to show the strengths of this interdisciplinarity for a critical grasp of the contemporary human condition, underpins this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the role of precarity theory in bringing new perspectives to public mental health. The paper draws on a qualitative, participatory research study carried out in Glasgow that illuminates the entangled and complex relations between the social, bio-political, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions that produce mental health and ill health. Through the accounts of Sassy Queen, Tony, Simba, John, and Rhianna, we explore the attrition of everyday lives that are lived in constant states of crisis, the forms of precarity that it precipitates, and how this plays out for them concerning how they talk about and experience 'mental health'. Their experience provides an alternative vantage point to understanding mental distress to those which are made possible through recourse to prevalent social determinant and behavioural models of public health. The paper concludes that the operations of the political as everyday biopolitics must become more visible within public health, and this requires interdisciplinary and narrative approaches to fully understand the border zone between macro-level politics and the biopolitics of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2020–2021 farmers' movement in India, the central government argued that its temporary internet shutdowns in specific areas associated with the protest aimed to prevent law and order violations. Scholars have analyzed internet shutdowns as a method to control speech, which amounts to an infringement on the freedom of speech and expression. Additional studies have pointed out that such shutdowns directly interfere with the right to assembly. This paper adds to the existing scholarship by positing that internet shutdowns during mass protest movements interfere with a fundamental democracy-related value of the right to assembly, which, to borrow Salát's phrase, is "the formation of political will and opinion." Drawing on Foucault's concept of biopolitics, the paper argues that shutdowns associated with collective protest should also be understood as an interference in the formation of political will and opinion by trying to manage the circulation of information and control a particular behavior, that is, dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous-led activism against proposed oil pipelines has relied heavily on social media, as in the #NoDAPL campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This paper explores affective engagement in online activism, including the Standing Rock 'check-in' campaign on Facebook. Moving beyond dichotomous understandings of embodied vs digital activism, Cannupa Hanska Luger's Mirror Shields Project employs digital media in order to support direct action at Standing Rock. Patricia Clough draws a direct link between affect and technoscientific understandings of the body in her concept of biomediated bodies. This helps explain how physical and digital activism are linked: the digital and the physical cannot be understood as independent of each other, since online engagement always has an embodied aspect as well. Luger's Mirror Shields Project functions as a form of alterlife, in resistance to biopower, recognizing historical and ongoing harms while also creating new possibilities for resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent wave of protests in Iran following the tragic death of Mahsa Jina Amini has sparked discussions about the sudden and unforeseen nature of these events. This paper explores the interconnected nature of women's movements in Iran over the past 45 years, demonstrating that these movements are linked and culminate in the Women, Life, Freedom uprising. By examining various initiatives ranging from the online campaign One Million Signatures in the 1980s, to the collective and collaborative actions of The Girls of the Street Revolution, our objective is to provide a comprehensive understanding of women's rights issues in Iran and shed light on the formation of the Women, Life, Freedom movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with the lived accounts of emergency and critical care medical interventions in which an unhoused person is brought to the emergency department in cardiac arrest. The case is a dramatised representation of the extent to which biopolitical forces via reduction to bare life through biopolitical and necropolitical operations are prominent influences in nursing and medical care. This paper draws on the scholarship of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe to offer a theoretical analysis of the power dynamics that influence the health care and death care of patients who are caught in the auspices of a neoliberal capitalist healthcare apparatus. This paper offers analysis of the overt displays of biopower over those individuals cast aside as generally unworthy of access to healthcare in a postcolonial capitalist system, in addition to the ways in which humans are reduced to 'bare life' in their dying days. We analyse this case study through Agamben's description of thanatopolitics, a 'regime of death', and the technologies that accompany the dying process, particularly in that of the homo sacer. Additionally, this paper illustrates the ways in which necropolitics and biopower are integral to understanding how the most advanced and expensive medical interventions make visible the political values of the healthcare system and how nurses and healthcare functions in these deathworlds. The purpose of this paper is to develop a greater understanding of biopolitical and necropolitical operations in acute and critical care environments, and to offer guidance to nurses in these spaces as they work to uphold ethical duties in a system that increasingly dehumanises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]