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The Confederated Colville Tribes collaborated with DroneSeed, a forestry drone start-up, to use drones to replant their tribal forest after a devastating fire. Using concepts from Bernard Stiegler to interrogate ethnographic data, this article argues that forestry drones are pharmaka: their biopolitics can be therapeutic, that is, negentropic, capable of reversing ecological simplification. Drone forestry is a type of arborescent governmentality, a tree-based computer-coded attempt to control the growth of a forest. For the Colville, this negentropy is also an act of sovereignty that protects culture and honors multispecies relationships. For DroneSeed, it is an experiment in negentropic geoengineering, an attempt to profitably leverage technologies and biological regeneration to sequester carbon and reduce global existential risk. Ultimately the project was not the success desired; the failure of technoliberal projects that blend ecological and economic liberalism shows that a more radical approach might be necessary to root carbon and slow capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heralding the self-brand of 'K-prevention' (nuanced with nationalistic pride in line with K-wave, K-pop, etc.), Korea has operated within two methods of articulation against COVID-19. One method involves granting the population relative freedom within the actual, physical realm, while the other method involves strengthening data surveillance within the virtual realm. This articulation of the actual and the virtual, and of freedom and surveillance, is at the core of Korea's biopolitical governmentality, which is currently intertwined not only with an infectious virus, but also with data technology. I would like to suggest a slight silver lining with respect to the possibility of overcoming this dilemma: a dilemma that involves physical survival under data colonialism on the one hand, and freedom from data colonialism on the other – both elements complicated by the potential risk of transmission. This may be a starting point toward digital democracy in the age of pandemics: social equality for life instead of augmenting the thanapolitical database; respect toward vulnerable singularities instead of deceitful exclusion; and sensitivity toward redressing embedded inequality instead of reinforcing stigmatization. We must, in other words, reinvent an ethics of vulnerability and a politics of dependency as guiding principles for living together in pandemic times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a genealogy of the recent operations of 'virus government' in the United States which followed the early twenty-first-century governmental discourse about and technologization of Homeland Security and a War on Terror. Through the genealogy, the essay asks what has and has not changed during the last twenty years of governmental and biopolitical response to public safety and social security as a personal responsibility. To understand and rethink that history, the essay proposes the usefulness of considering the COVID mask as a technology of virus government and as a Liberal object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the analysis of liberalism fills much of The Birth of Biopolitics, the focus of Foucault's discussion is on the dynamic, equivocal and enigmatic contemporary condition at the intersection of welfare governance, biopolitics and neo-liberalism of the late seventies. This article examines The Birth of Biopolitics as a prolongation of Security, Territoriality and Population by analyzing how Foucault frames liberalism in the wider historical context of governmentality. In Foucault's view, governmentality should be understood as a secular rationalization of the art of government. While the pastoral power of the Catholic Church was wielded against the backdrop of eschatology and the imminence of the end of worldly power, the early modern concept of reason of state brought with it the idea of an interminable history. Governmentality and reason of state spring from an undecided and precarious European balance of power between competing states. In order to measure up to external competition, individual states are required to develop a system of policing that collects detailed knowledge of the body politic. Insofar as the logic of the population as a collection of living beings comes to the fore as a primary target of government intervention, the imperatives of biopolitics and the politics of health arise. Liberalism forms an important modification of the double heritage of reason of state and biopolitics. This is a rationalization of government that, rather than breaking with the fundamental assumptions of governmentality, critically addresses the basic criteria for good government. Stressing the necessity for good government to acknowledge and incorporate the self-regulation of the population it governs, liberalism thus articulates a new kind of naturalness intrinsic to the population springing from the interaction between individuals motivated by self-interest. As a basic principle for its understanding of governing, liberalism embraces a natural history without any transcendental horizons, a secular and tragic natural history in which freedom can never be taken for granted insofar as its participants constantly constitute a danger for one another. It is also a mode of history in which the art of government is constantly called upon and forced to organize and secure the conditions for the exercise and development of freedom. For Foucault, thus, the liberal art of government is not a position to be affirmed or denied. Rather, the liberal art of government draws the outline of an experience of historicity that is an experience of an ongoing and unsettling, but also unending, crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Foucault introduced the 1978 lecture course Security, Territory, Population as a study of biopower, the reception of the lectures has largely focused on other concepts, such as governmentality, security, liberalism, and counter-conduct. This paper situates the lecture course within the larger context of Foucault's development of an analytics of power to explore in what sense Security, Territory, Population can be said to constitute a study of biopower. I argue that the 1978 course is best understood as a continuation-through-transformation of Foucault's earlier work. It revisits familiar material to supplement Foucault's microphysics of power, which he traced in institutions like prisons or asylums and with regard to its effects on the bodies of individuals, with a genealogy of practices of power that target the biological life of the population and give rise to the modern state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the well-being of the Swedish population has become a joint responsibility in the mission to shape desirable and proper citizens. This is done by studying an organisation called Generation Pep (GEN-PEP), which was established as a measure to foster a well-functioning population both now and in the future. The article draws on a post-structural and discursive theorisation inspired by the work of Michel Foucault and his concept of governmentality, with the specific aims of studying how GEN-PEP functions as a biopolitical strategy aimed at fostering a desirable population and identifying governing techniques mobilised within and through the project. The population is described as having failed to function well and that this should be remedied by creating measures that are indirectly aimed at children as future useful citizens. The measures are legitimised by highlighting the population's ill-health. As a result of 'experts' and national role models telling these truths, the governing reflects the idea that a power similar to sovereign power needs to be re-established, where e.g. philanthropists contribute to and enable the project's strategies and measures. The measures taken are described as a mutual responsibility, with parents being made especially responsible for correcting faults in accordance with the suggested solutions. GEN-PEP functions as a biopolitical strategy in which corporations, philanthropists and celebrities are encouraged to work together to improve the well-being of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Movimento (0104754X) is the property of Movimento, da Escola de Educacao, Fisica, Fisioterapia e Danca 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.)

This study critically examines whether BTS poses counterhegemony to the dominant Western popular culture as the literature claims. Investigating its recent hit music videos during the COVID-19 pandemic, I claim that BTS resuscitates the neoliberal hegemony in its seemingly empowering, positive messages and helps revive narratives of neoliberal biopolitics. Reviewing how hegemony becomes naturalized by cultural and psychological measures in broader political economic contexts, I reveal how BTS's positive messages in bright audio-visuality relegitimize neoliberal mantras that help manage the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem facing society today, which is only superficially defined in terms of 'postdemocracy' or exorcised as populism, is not the limits or defects of democracy, but, on the contrary, its completion in the figure of its opposite. One must be aware that the horizon has profoundly and irreversibly changed. At this point, what is at stake is no longer a simple reform of society's institutions; rather, we are faced with a socio-cultural transformation that runs much deeper than our entire political lexicon. Far from opposing the new significance assumed by biological life under the illusion of restoring our ancient vocabulary, we must place ourselves at the centre of political action – sufficiently responding to the pressing demands that come, to the dilemmas that unfold, to the needs that provoke ever greater masses of men and women – within the borders of the West or with those pressing to gain entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyse the discursive construction of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing as a development 'problem' in Plan's 'Because I'm a Girl' campaign. I draw on existing scholarship that configures teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns in the 'developed' world as a site of biopolitics that seeks to maximise the well-being of the population by governing adolescent girls' reproductive and sexual behaviours. Identifying Plan's campaign as part of a larger turn towards adolescent girls in development discourse and policy, I also draw on a growing body of scholarship that examines how campaigns targeting adolescent girls reinforce neo-liberal understandings of 'development' as achievable through the empowerment of individuals rather than through structural change. I argue that by discursively constructing adolescent pregnancy and parenthood as risky, Plan's campaign reinforces reproductive norms of delayed reproduction and sexual debut, according to which adolescent girls in the 'developing' world are expected to comply. The campaign's goal of 'empowerment' thus acts as a means of constructing adolescent girls as responsible reproductive decision makers who will break the 'cycle of poverty' by making rational reproductive and sexual choices. Thus, although Plan's 'Because I'm a Girl' campaign addressed important issues, including adolescent girls' right to reproductive autonomy, their focus on empowerment operates as a form of biopower that pursues the project of development through the regulation of girls' reproduction and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism is widely regarded as the main culprit for the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. However, despite this abysmal failure, neoliberalism has not merely survived the crisis, but actually ‘thrived’. How is it possible to account for the resilience of neoliberalism? Existing scholarship has answered this question either by focusing on the distinctive qualities of neoliberalism (such as adaptability, internal coherence and capacity to incorporate dissent) or on the biopolitical capacity of neoliberalism to produce resilient subjects. This article adopts a different perspective. Drawing on and partially challenging the perspective of Michel Foucault, I argue that neoliberalism and biopolitics should be considered two complementary governmental rationalities, and that biopolitical rationalities contribute to governing the uncertainties and risks stemming from the neoliberalization of life. Biopolitics, in other words, plays a key role in governing the resilience of neoliberalism. Through this conceptual lens, the article explores how biopolitical rationalities of care have been deployed to govern the neoliberal crisis of the Greek sovereign debt, which threatened the stability of the European banking system and, I shall argue, the neoliberal life, wealth and well-being of the European population. The article discusses how biopolitical racism is an essential component of the biopolitical governance of neoliberalism. Biopolitical racism displaces the sources of risk, dispossession and inequality from the neoliberal regime to ‘inferior’ populations, whose lack of compliance with neoliberal dictates is converted into a threat to our neoliberal survival. This threat deserves punishment and authorizes further dynamics of neoliberal dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes a popular meme that has spread rapidly among Chinese internet users in the last few years, 'garlic chives' (jiucai), as a self-mockery of the bio-economic subject in contemporary China. This metaphor refers to those ordinary Chinese people who are constantly lured to participate in all kinds of economic activities, but whose investments are destined to be consumed by the establishment. Through a close study of this popular meme and the social conditions from which it arises, this article demonstrates two main features of the Chinese economic subject that supports the state's economic sovereignty: the thriving of self-sufficient and rule-abiding individuals, and the quality of these individuals as hard working and capable of producing wealth on their own. This article offers a critique of PRC's post-socialist governmentality, and it provides insights about the relation between the biological and the political in our complicated world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to make a contribution to scholarship on the relation between Canguilhem and Foucault through the concept of milieu. It argues that Canguilhem's work on the milieu was inspired by Uexküll and became the eventual means by which Foucault was able to theorize biopower. For both Foucault and Canguilhem, culture is to be understood as an extension of biology, constituting a "semantic milieu." Though indebted to Canguilhem in this respect, Foucault's theorization of biopower breaks with his understanding of society. The essay exemplifies this via a discussion of regulation and cybernetics, where Canguilhem is found to oppose the very possibility of a cybernetic society and Foucault is said to allow for one via his notion of governmentality. While Canguilhem turns out to be committed to a more humanist ideal of free will, in his theorization of biopower and governmentality, Foucault turns out to be more interested in analyzing the way freedom is deployed in liberal societies as an instrument of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the connections between urban planning and a particular form of biopolitics. These connections are investigated by looking at the emergence of “enjoyment” as a planning concern in late 1960s Halifax, Nova Scotia. This new concern, the article suggests, emerged as a result of a political struggle involving activist groups, a newly formed state agency, and elements of the post-World War II political establishment. Wedded to this concern were two essential planning policies: the promotion of “amenity” (especially in the downtown) and the introduction of structured “citizen involvement” in planning decisions. Together, these two policies inaugurated a new form of planning and biopolitics. The promotion of amenity aimed to create a more enjoyable life through the alteration of prevailing conditions of life, while citizen involvement routed planning decisions – including the precise meaning of amenity – through “liberal” practices of government. Most importantly, the new policies were shaped by the enactment of normative divisions within the population, a characteristically biopolitical effect. The result of these divisions was a highly unequal process of citizen involvement and a correspondingly uneven terrain of enjoyment: a terrain whose development and use would provide enjoyment for “normative” populations, while leaving “pathological” populations unaffected or worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Veritas is the property of EDIPUCRS - Editora Universitaria da PUCRS 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.)

This article examines the technologies of power and subjectification in China's social credit system through a theoretically informed analysis of policy and legal documents as well as the narratives of social credit practitioners, including local officials and representatives of business partners. The ongoing project is a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, regulations, policies, and any number of programs aiming to govern social and economic activities through problematizing, assessing, and utilizing the "trustworthiness" of individuals, enterprises, organizations, and government agencies. Drawing on governmentality studies, the article explicates the operation of governmental and disciplinary-pastoral modalities of power in the project, which are interrelated in their logics and overlap in the tactics employed. Whereas the strategy of governmental/biopolitical power is centered on achieving effective economic governance and improving regulatory compliance through technological fixes, disciplinary-pastoral power aspires to shape individual behavior and the collective mores of a locality according to a mixture of market-oriented and socialist-traditional values. Social credit is envisioned to produce and channel homo economicus and homo moralis. However, the relationships between liberal and socialist subjectivities and between rationalization and moralization are by no means coherent. The assemblage of social credit government is characterized by contradictions and contestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Praxis Filosófica is the property of Universidad del Valle 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 article addresses the puzzling silence of the Foucaldian studies of biopolitics about Soviet socialism by revisiting Foucault’s own account of socialism in his 1970s work, particularly his 1975–6 course ‘Society Must Be Defended’. Foucault repeatedly denied the existence of an autonomous governmentality in socialism, demonstrating its dependence on the techniques of government developed in 19th-century western Europe. For Foucault Soviet socialism was fundamentally identical to its ideological antagonist in its biopolitical rationality, which he defined in terms of racism. This article challenges Foucault’s reading, demonstrating that his notion of racism is ill-suited to describe the governmental rationalities of Soviet socialism during both the formation and the consolidation of the Stalinist regime. While the Soviet project was paradigmatically biopolitical in its ambition to transform the forms of life of the population in line with the communist ideology, its biopolitics was fundamentally different from the security-oriented logic of racism, focusing instead on the exposure of the population to the violent transformation of their forms of life. Revisiting Foucault’s genealogy of racism, we argue that the point of descent of this biopolitics lies in the 19th-century split of the ‘counter-historical’ discourse of the struggle of the races into the discourses of state racism and class struggle. While Foucault’s genealogy focuses on the development of the former into liberal and totalitarian biopolitics as we know them, it leaves class struggle out of the history of biopolitics and is therefore unable to account for the biopolitical specificity of the Soviet project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2015, the Swedish government allocated 130 million SEK to Äga rum ('Taking Place'): a three-year program of arts projects across Sweden to address low voter turnout in certain housing areas, but which, in effect, target the immigrants. We argue--through a short account of Foucault's take on the state, biopolitics, race, and governmentalisation--that this is an example of contemporary state racism, which is best understood as an inextricable part of biopolitical governmentalisation through forms of veridiction. We further analyse a specific governmental program (Äga rum) and a specific project (anonymised) within that program which takes place in two Miljonprogrammet housing areas in Malmö. Although both the program and the project have clear political agendas of empowerment and anti-exclusion, we argue that they nevertheless end up producing racial divisions and what we call a 'racial archipelago.'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia: Questoes & Debates is the property of Universidade Federal do Parana 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.)

This brief comment is intended to provide some remarks on the possibility of placing the particular entanglements of 'bodies and minds' presented in this special issue of History of Education in a broader theoretical and interpretative framework resorting to Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality. In my opinion, this analytical tool may be very fruitful for the historiography of education and other 'government practices' if we want to overcome the troubling dichotomy of 'bodies and minds' and interpret the varieties of pedagogical articulations of the corporeal and the mental in their singularity and in the context of the historical evolution of educational concepts and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Praxis Filosófica is the property of Universidad del Valle 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.)

Foucault's account of the emergence of biopolitics in the late 18th century helps frame the political economy of 'improvements' as an environmental project linked to the well-being of the population. Since the 1970s, biopolitical concerns have shifted towards non-human populations and the reproduction of natural resources and ecosystems. This has become evident in the European fisheries, where after decades of exploitation greatly intensified since the 1960s, the extractive demands of the fishing industry have caught up with the reproductive capacities of most commercially targeted fish stocks. This contradiction has given rise to a new political economy of 'improvements' that seeks to sustain the biological health of commercially targeted fish populations while maintaining an economically profitable fishing industry. Central to this transition is the active role that fishers are expected to play in sustainably managing the fish stocks they exploit while adapting to 'green' market opportunities. Tradeable quota systems, eco-accreditation schemes and community-based resource management have all emerged as managerial strategies for inciting the active participation of fishers in this 'common' project of sustainable development. Drawing on Foucault's perspective of governmentality, this paper argues that these strategies represent distinct but overlapping apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality that are representative of broader tendencies within environmental governance today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the cultural inscription of urban space in China as a technology of government. Based on a three years of fieldwork, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation, the paper examines the case of one city's campaign to increase its "happiness index" by creating an ethnic culturally themed built environment. The paper examines the city's happiness campaign as a project of biopolitical urbanism, and finds that while urban Chinese governmentality bears some striking resemblances to liberal approaches that view the city as a machine for experimenting with, and producing, certain kinds of (governable) citizens and social relations, the happiness campaign should also be understood as a deliberate effort to reinforce state power at the local level. The happiness campaign, in other words, aims to reproduce a sovereign mode of state power even as it speaks a language of neoliberal governmentality. Thus, the colonization of culture by biopolitical urbanism in China today suggests a complex combination of disciplinary and discursive modalities of sovereign power rooted in the paternalistic legacies of Chinese statecraft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault extolled the Iranian revolution and, anticipating the havoc that his public intervention in favour of the revolution would create, he wrote: "I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong". Examining Foucault's (so unlikely) valorisation of certainty and the partisan affectivity it bestows upon knowledge and truth, I read his unusual engagement with the Iranian revolution against the grain. A major tendency is to approach Foucault's Iranian writings as aberration; against this tendency, I read them as an effect of Foucault's specific epistemic and utopian optics. Through a critical reading of neglected aspects of Foucault's comments on Iran, I argue that much nuance is missing when damning critiques fail to see why and how Foucault's interest in an active rather than folklore non-European political identity unveils deeper tensions of his own worldview and outlook on international politics and interrogates mainstream appraisals of Foucault's political philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses global capitalism in context with the concept of governmentality and biopower by referring to the article “History of Concepts and the Ontology of Actuality," by philosopher Roberto Esposito. Topics discussed include the literature on globalization, the book "The Politics of Life Itself" by Nikolas Rose, the liberal concepts of autonomy, sovereignty, and the need for knowledge of self and individual self-government.

Highlights • Variegated perspectives are required for conceptualizing governmentality. • Applying governmentality to Asian contexts extends Foucault's western analyses. • Governmentality framework delivers insightful analysis to Gross National Happiness. • Biopower embodying non-western spiritualities emerges in the Bhutan context. • Gross National Happiness is a governance model inclusive of neoliberal tendencies. Abstract This paper employs a "variegated governmentality" framework to analyse Bhutan's well-known Gross National Happiness (GNH) agenda. GNH is both a philosophy and form of governance that the Royal Government uses to guide national policymaking. While previous research frames GNH in terms of Foucault's early discussion of governmentality, it does so by establishing monolithic characterizations of governance rationalities and positioning them against one another. By contrast, we suggest that GNH can be more productively understood in terms of Foucault's more recently translated work as embodying multiple governance rationalities situated alongside each other and locally understood as complementary. From this perspective, recent promotion of neoliberalism within the country can be understood not as an intrusion of "western rationality" upon a distinct GNH but rather as a component of the complex bricolage that GNH has become. We suggest that this produces an indigenous form of biopower, which we term 'Buddhist Biopower', appealing to a combination of Bhutanese tradition and religious belief to legitimize the state's claim to govern in the interest of the population. A policy review of Bhutan's GNH Index and Eleventh Five Year Plan is conducted to illustrate this analysis. In this way, the paper brings together research concerning multiple governmentalities and variegated neoliberalization to illuminate the complex ways that biopower can be exercised in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the literature of author Antoine Volodine in relation to themes of biopolitical governmentality, care theory, and post-exoticism. Emphasis is given to topics such as political autonomy in literary forms, the aesthetic principle of fabulation, and literary polyphony in the context of the subjectivity of neo-capitalist production.

This paper develops a Foucauldian analytics of resistance in relation to components of a system of governance – a governmentality. Techniques of resistance that can transform a governmentality towards the development of a new politics of truth require the design of techniques of resistance to counter directly oppressive techniques of biopower and disciplinary power, in turn to produce new regimes of practices or counter-conduct that can engender a new mentality and set of discourses to convey it. Strategies of resistance towards transformative change in the governance of a population as well as of the self therefore require development following, and in relation to, an analytics of governance. I thread these points through a particular case, the problem of care for the infirm elderly in the United States, focusing specifically on nursing homes by critically synthesizing issues from inter-disciplinary literatures and casting them in terms of governmentalities. I frame the problems of eldercare broadly in terms of interrelated neoliberal and (western) scientific mentalities and associated discourses, and then examine the associated techniques of biopower, disciplinary power, and regimes of practices to identify roots of problems, explain failures of policies, and crucially, to frame the design of techniques of resistance to produce new regimes of counter-conduct. I suggest avenues of resistance in relation to existing governmentalities on the terrain of inter-firm relations and everyday life in nursing-home care, all currently entangled with government policies, economies of documentation, and dehumanizing scientific practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon Foucauldian theories of governmentality and biopower to examine the recent growth of greenhouse cultivation on the island of Jamaica. Greenhouse farming has been widely promoted as a means to enhance the efficiency, technological sophistication, and profitability of the island’s traditional small-scale farmers. Following Foucault, and drawing on a series of interviews with greenhouse growers, we read this intervention as form of governmentality acting on the conduct and attitudes of Jamaican farmers. As a form of governmentality, greenhouse farming also represents a new and distinctive regime of biopower, one that intervenes with greater precision into the metabolism between the natural processes of the rural population and the vital properties of growing plants. Viewed as a form of biopower, the greenhouse calls particular attention to the ways in which assemblages of materials and technologies enable new forms of control and surveillance over the life processes associated with crop cultivation, thereby generating new kinds of affective relations and agrarian subjectivities. This capital- and chemical-intensive biopolitics, we argue, threatens to re-engineer Jamaica’s agrarian milieu in ways that favor elite agricultural interests at the expense of long-standing traditional farming practices and the forms of socio-ecological metabolism upon which they are based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Foucault suggests that 'conduct' is not only something we do, but something that is done to us, as well as a behaviour or practice that is an effect of other forms of conduct. How is the conduct of the dance field - in the different ways that Foucault is referring to it - affected by, and affecting neoliberalism? What is dance's role in the contemporary neoliberal moment? These are the questions I unpick in this article. I do so, first, by using Foucault's thinking on neoliberalism and the relationship between conduct, biopolitics, and neoliberal governmentality in order to illustrate how bodies of individuals and that of society are affected by the neoliberal economy. Wendy Brown's work on neoliberalism, which builds on Foucault's thinking, is interweaved in this discussion to allow me to address neoliberalism's function and effects in the contemporary moment. Second, I examine some of the problems of the contemporary dance economy as I, and other scholar-practitioners, have identified them, and address their relationship to neoliberalism, conduct, governmentality, and biopolitics - how they result from conducts suggested by neoliberalism or helping it do its work by becoming conducts of the field. I propose ways we might address them, suggesting that it is urgent that we do so if we are to advance the field and resist neoliberalism. For this, I use examples from conversations that recently took place in the field, such as at PAF London (2015), Sadler's Wells Summer University (2015), and Resilience: Articulating Dance Knowledges in the 21st Century and Post Dance conferences (2015). I argue that dance has an important role to play in changing today's world, but needs to come to terms with what I refer to as its 'fears', assert itself, and take action. In many ways, this article constitutes a critique of the contemporary dance economy; a critique that, by showing the relation of our conduct to conducts imposed by larger economies, aspires at articulating our role as central to both advancing the field and effecting social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the interrelationship of law and life in human rights. It does this in order to theorize the normative status of contemporary biopower. To do this, the case law of Article 2 on the right to life of the European Convention on Human Rights is analysed. It argues that the juridical interpretation and application of the right to life produces a differentiated governmental management of life. It is established that: 1) Article 2 orients governmental techniques to lives in order to ensure that both deprivation and protection of lives is lawful; 2) A proper application of Article 2 grounds itself on a proper discrimination of lives which causes Article 2 to be applied universally but not uniformly to all juridical subjects; 3) The jurisprudence of Article 2 is theoretically appreciable only in a ‘politics of life’. Finally, the article ends with a plea to analyse other fundamental human rights in the context of ‘biopolitical governmentality’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critically examines the marketing strategy employed by Israeli sperm banks as sites for biopolitical governmentality of sperm consumers. The dataset comprise multiple sources which converge to provide evidence for the transfusion of militaristic Zionist ideology into sperm. The biopolitics of sperm marketing involves the naturalization of militaristic Zionism as a dogmatic basis for a “dividing practice” for the inclusion and exclusion of particular types of personified gametes in the symbolically constructed collective gene pool. The image of the military man is the idealized type of hegemonic masculinity in the Israeli nation-in-arms. The warrior-donor is both the supplier of the product and the core product itself, and his semen constitutes the materialistic carrier of his spiritual essence. Using Foucault's notion of biopolitical governmentality suggests why militaristic Zionism discourse has such potency in sperm marketing, and raises questions about contemporary “technologies of the self” as consumerist practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article attempts to think through the relationship between lethality and war through the object of tear gas from its invention to contemporary uses. First, I examine the way in which tear gas migrates from a zone of lethal/non-lethal conceptual indistinction, to one where the same rationalities operate but the intent of their use is opposed in relation to life and death. Second, from this biopolitical distinction, I trace its use in the governing of colonial populations and populations under occupation, and its recent weaponisation in “domestic” spaces. These contemporary uses of tear gas, I argue, can be seen as what Sloterdijk would call “atmosterror” which contribute to blurring the lines between war and peace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we offer a critical examination of Let's Move!, the comprehensive anti-obesity program initiated by the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, that aims to solve the problem of childhood obesity within a generation. We argue that Let's Move! is not just a campaign against obesity but is emblematic of the nature of (and assumptions underpinning) the health education of children in the contemporary United States. Drawing on the concept of ‘governmentality,’ we examine how Let's Move! functions as a biopolitical strategy (a solution to the problem of childhood obesity), framed by the political rationalities of neoliberalism. In particular, we identify and explore three interrelated bio-techniques mobilized within, and through, the Let's Move! campaign. First, in an effort to ‘responsibilize’ citizens, the initiative is framed as a social movement whereby all segments of society can (and should) be empowered to take collective action against childhood obesity. Second, an array of multi-sectoral partnerships, including corporate sponsors and non-profit organizations, are being mobilized, resulting in a range of initiatives underpinned by the rhetoric of consumer choice and responsibility as well as the outsourcing of physical education to private entities. Third, the adoption of standardized fitness testing techniques based on the logic of chronic disease epidemiology, and related notions of ‘risk,’ aim to produce the disciplined child-citizen who monitors his/her health goals with the aid of Web 2.0 technologies. In contextualizing Let's Move! in this way, we illustrate how, in line with the soft authoritarian imperatives of the neoliberal enabling state, the campaign functions as a national biopedagogy, working to empower every citizen to be an ‘active partner’ in the fight against childhood obesity, so as to optimize the health of the next generation and allow them, in the words of Michelle Obama, to ‘pursue their dreams.’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the present, human capital theory (HCT) and neuroscience reasoning are dominant frameworks in early childhood education and care (ECEC) worldwide. Popular since the 1960s, HCT has provided an economic understanding of human beings and offered strategies to manage the population with the promise of bringing improvements to nations. Neuroscience arguments added new ways to regulate human beings, and thus another ‘hopeful ethos’ and investment into the future. In this paper, we examine different positive, life-improving, and hopeful takes on early childhood as forms of biopolitical government, which are closely related to the enhancement of individual capacities and the shifting problems of the neoliberal state. Curiously, this process, grounded on biological fatalism and naturalizing arguments, has led to new class categorizations and ways of social discrimination. We hence argue that even though a ‘hopeful ethos’ is offered through the (bio)politicization of neurosciences, it has led to eugenic arguments by re-inscribing social and economic differences into differences in brain architecture. Finally, we aim to demonstrate that ECEC policy offers an example of how current policies govern through scientific evidence and softer forms of ‘government by example’, at the same time moving the government of population into the home, and with that privatizing and personalizing self-investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The craze for wellness programs and the healthism paradigm have led to a need to better understand their complexity and the desired result: the creation of utopian employees. This understanding can benefit from a theoretical discussion of governmentality and biopower that combines the perspectives of employer and employee in the framework of value pluralism. The employer perspective hinges on value monism, which prescribes that healthcare costs must be controlled. Employees would like to be healthy, but may be conflicted by organizational pressures. These pressures are highlighted by the discussion of value pluralism, which includes hierarchical obedience, productivity, fairness, privacy, and economics. The article differentiates utopian and nonutopian employees and discusses the workplace dystopias that can result from the adoption and implementation of wellness programs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• Presents a novel conceptual vocabulary for analyzing constitutive processes tied to governance, governmentality and biopower. • Highlights governance in motion in contrast to dominant institutional analyses that emphasize social structural designs. • Critically examines economistic environmental governance in terms of practices of assemblage. • Emphasizes political performativity of practices of assemblage in relation to distributed agency and institutional dynamics. This article critically explores the dynamic, constitutive processes that animate economistic conservation and sustainable development as an expression of governance-beyond-the-state. I focus attention on governance in motion—expanding logics, hybrid practices, diffuse networks, and shifting social technologies that incrementally reshape power dynamics and the institutional domains that enable and constrain them. While the majority of institutional approaches to environmental governance emphasize intentional designs rooted in collective choices, less attention has been focused on dynamic processes of assemblage resulting from differentially coordinated actions across interrelated networks. Building from Foucauldian perspectives on governmentality and biopower, I argue that processes of assemblage help to constitute new techniques of governance aligned with the language and practices of economics. I examine two business and biodiversity initiatives—the Natural Capital Finance Alliance and the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme—in terms of five practices of assemblage: authorizing knowledge, forging alignments, rendering technical, reassembling, and anti-politics. I highlight four dimensions of political performativity associated with business and biodiversity initiatives that exemplify environmental governance in motion: discursive amplification, organizational articulation, institutional re-shaping, and technical instrumentation. Governance in motion reflects the distributed power dynamics of diverse individuals and collectives in generating economistic techniques of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with civil society organizations active in the field of family policy and demographic issues in contemporary Russia. This article uses Michel Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and governmentality and later developments discussing technologies of citizenship. More specifically, using interviews, documents, and participant observations, so-called "daddy-schools" that have emerged in and around Saint Petersburg since 2008, are studied as a mode of governmentality. The analysis shows how the civic initiative studied attempted to empower fathers and how it has altered demographic discourses while approaching similar societal goals as the state does in its biopolitical strategies. Thus, the daddy-schools provide a complementary discourse concerning fatherhood while approaching the same perceived demographic crisis that the Russian state is challenged by. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In many cases, Middle East Studies and International Relations (IR) fail to provide an appropriate account of governance and power and the underlying dynamics of global political order. In order to overcome these shortcomings, I will highlight the conceptual compatibility between Foucauldian post-structuralist governmentality studies and world society theorization from the perspective of the Stanford School's sociological neo-institutionalism. On this basis, I will conceptualize governmentality as a globally diffused pattern of political ordering in world society. This global diffusion of governmentality, however, cannot be equated with global homogenization, because decoupling dynamics can lead to significant differences between a global norm and how it is translated into a local context. Hence, governmentality denotes a specific, universalistic configuration of governmental rationalities and technologies but also takes into account localizations of diversity. I will identify biopower, surveillance, and technologies of the self as core dimensions of modern governmentality and analyze their contribution to the establishment of political order in Palestine. In this sense, the examples of modern statistics, good governance, and refugee camp governance not only serve as empirical illustrations for the materialization of modern governmentality in Palestine. They also underline the embeddedness of Palestine into the structural horizon of world society. As a result, political order that comes into existence in Palestine needs to be understood as world-societal order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gilles Deleuze's Postscript on Control Societies lends itself readily - too readily, perhaps - to historical interpretations of control that accept the universalising claims of techno-science. Critical social and cultural theory tacitly confirms the terms of reference of techno-scientific concepts at the risk of sanctioning the speculative claims of a notional physics of the cultural world which makes it difficult to develop a critical reading of the emergence of the socio-technical mechanisms of control. This essay addresses that problem and points towards the importance of considering the history of engineering, particularly in its complex relations to management and to bureaucracy, for an account of the present. Understanding the incidence of these practices on the environment within which computing emerged helps provide a corrective to idealised readings of the history of digital technology and points in turn to crucial aspects of the relationship between control and governmentality, relating in particular to the important Deleuzoguattarian concept of machinic enslavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To argue that the future was (re-)invented in the 1970s and the 1980s might seem especially puzzling in light of arguments that the optimism associated with utilitarian, modernization, and socialist theories withered at the time amidst widespread debate over a variety of “crises.” Nonetheless, it was in this peculiar constellation that ideas of the future became fundamentally renegotiated. “New risks” were juxtaposed with prevailing older ideas of social security that were predicated on individual and collective risk management. Focusing on West Germany, this article examines the various technical and political debates over “gaps” in terms of the finances, demographics, and trust in the system of social policy, which helped to put technical and political diagnoses of “new risks” squarely on the political agenda. This demographic argument is of particular interest, as it dramatized the unintended side effects of older social policy and created new, dystopian future scenarios of total systemic breakdown. At times, however, these discussions about managing the risks associated with Germany's demographic future verged on the utopian. New concepts of governmentality and biopolitics prevailed in this context. Moreover, pragmatic and sometimes technocratic concepts of new “governance” (and thus risk management) were proposed by social scientists and politicians as a means to address anxieties about the demographic future, and new models of risk-taking and risk-managing individuals also flourished at the time. With their descriptive but also prescriptive features, these theories contributed to ongoing academic efforts to explain the present and the future in terms of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the late philosopher Michel Foucault's theory of law in relation to the extent to which his Foucauldian theory can be incorporated into legal policy as of 2014, and it mentions Foucault’s views regarding modernity and political activism. Positive jurisprudence and the development of legal policy are examined, as well as Foucault’s study of power and its impact on an individual human subject. Sovereignty, governmentality, and the concept of bio-power are also examined.

Drawing on Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, this article aims, firstly, to consolidate our understanding of Foucault's engagement with law by fleshing out his approach to law and by clarifying that he distinguishes between different kinds of law on the basis of the objectives that law serves and the regime of truth that it embodies. Secondly, using this understanding, the article proceeds to illustrate how the objectives and the regime of truth of the EU internal market law have been displaced in the last few decades. It is argued that this body of law has increasingly come to perform the tasks of law in neoliberal government as pointed out by Foucault in these lectures, namely of expanding the domain of market values and mechanisms, and of restricting the exercise of legitimate government by opposing the rule of law to planning. In this regard, particular attention is paid to the way in which justiciable rights function as a technology of neoliberal rule within the internal market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon Michel Foucault's approach to power and governmentality, this paper explores the internal logics and dynamics of software-mediated techniques used to regulate and manage urban systems. Our key questions are as follows: what power and regulatory dynamics do contemporary smart-city initiatives imply? And how do smart information technologies intervene in the governing of everyday life? Building on the Foucauldian distinction between apparatuses of discipline and apparatuses of security, the paper approaches these questions on three broad levels, namely: how contemporary 'governing through code' relates to its referent object (referentiality axis), to normalisation (normativity axis), and to space (spatiality axis). Empirically, the paper investigates two high-profile pilot projects in Switzerland in the field of smart electricity management, aimed at (1) the assessment of customer needs and behaviours with regard to novel smart metering solutions (iSMART), and (2) the elaboration of novel IT solutions in the field of smart electricity grids for optimised load management (Flexlast). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the AIDS epidemic reorganized the Indian state's relationship with women in prostitution. While sex workers previously faced legal regulations that criminalized and stigmatized them, they have now become important partners in the public health projects of the Indian state. As the HIV/AIDS epidemic became urgent, the Indian state and transnational HIV programs addressed sex workers as agents for inculcating behavioral change and providing systematic surveillance of the at-risk community. Using Michel Foucault's concept of biopower—a modern state's need to regulate and manage bodies—I show how these projects came into conflict with the earlier juridical regulations still in force. Such contradictions enabled sex workers to both push against the laws that were affecting their livelihoods and make claims on the Indian state to recognize them as a political community. These paradoxes and possibilities inform the incorporation and resistance of sex workers in state and transnational governance projects emerging in relation to HIV/AIDS. I argue not only that new subjectivities are being formed among Indian sex workers themselves by virtue of the new biopower projects of the state but also that the demands the epidemic has placed on the state result in internal contradictions for the Indian state that influence how the state responds to the sex workers' claims of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that the biopolitical stratification of human beings through the intersection of race, gender, and class is a central neoliberal governing technique to facilitate the global division and migration of labor. Also, the intersectional cultural contours of race, gender, and class provide a fundamental discursive repository for the justification of the globalizing process. These governing parameters are not simply the essential conduits to enable neoliberal globalization, but they are also crucial sites to normalize it. Focusing on the Asia-Pacific Rim in general and China in particular, the article attempts to unpack the different values laden with the discourses about Asia and Asian to illustrate how the intersection of race, gender, and class is invoked to facilitate and justify the transnational movement of capital and labor in this area. In an interlocking relationship with one another, these categories create a matrix of power that sustains the dominance of neoliberalism as the single world order. As the article suggests, within this matrix, any attempt to challenge one form of oppression without considering the overarching structure would reproduce other forms of domination and reinforce neoliberal global control on a different level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]