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This essay reflects on the concept of "hydropower" – the corrosive power of seawater to amalgamate Life and Nonlife in the context of migrant deaths in the waters of the Mediterranean. Through a focus on drowned bodies' dissolution and eventual sedimentation into their deep-sea surroundings, my approach interrelates the order of biopolitical violence enacted by Europe's restrictive migration policies and the thick time of the geophysical. The degradation of bodies under the influence of hydropower reveals residual ontologies marked by porousness between embodied forms of Life and their geophysical environments, putting significant pressure on the putatively watertight divide between Life and Nonlife in the Anthropocene. Parsed from the lens of residuality, hydropower reveals humans' full ontological coincidence with matter writ large, their endurance and solubility in geological life forces, but also the necessity to think agency in terms of human/inhuman continuity in excess of biopower's regimenting forces. Against the attempted biopolitical suppression of a certain form of humanity, the residual dwelling enacted by hydropower champions the inclusion of new constellations of matter in our political thought processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the twentieth century, the traditional South Korean folktale "Janghwa Hongryeon jeon" (The Story of Janghwa and Hongryeon) has been reiterated and reinterpreted in several textual narratives and filmic adaptations (Kim Kyu Hyun; Leung 173). The article examines two recent film reimaginings of this story—Kim Jee-woon's 2002 South Korean A Tale of Two Sisters, and The Guard Brothers' 2009 American remake, The Uninvited. Using poststructuralist and feminist disability theory, the argument is that Su-mi in Sisters and Anna in Uninvited are both subjected to the biopolitical apparatuses of control imposed by the societal norms of compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer 8). Su-mi and Anna seek deterritorialization from the diagnosis of mental illness by engaging in creative acts of multiplicity, or what Gilles Deleuze describes as becoming-other (44). Anna uses her hybridity to engage in transgressive acts which paradoxically stabilize the social order of the nuclear family. Although Anna's madness challenges the stability of normativity, her actions demonstrate that protecting the symbolic heteronormativity of the family trumps her emancipation. Conversely, Su-mi deterritorializes from subservience and resists the medicalization of her mind and body. Su-mi lacks the ethical response from those around her and thus fails to receive the care she requires. The lack of recognition or care from others ultimately leads to her re-institutionalization and the perpetuation of surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an unprecedent global crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic required policy actors to make sense of the event while simultaneously constructing an effective policy response. In this article, we focus on the onset of the crisis in Canada and ask: how was a crisis narrative constructed and to what extent did the features of the emergent narrative vary across political elites? We bring together the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) with Foucault's 'biopolitics of population' to explain the construction of an initial crisis narrative that is consistent with the economic rationale of neoliberal governmentalities. Using an original collection of 1,331 Hansard statements from Canadian Members of Parliament during the first wave (March to June 2020), we employ inductive content analysis to assess elements of narrative form. This article contributes to broader work seeking to understand how various actors construct narratives around the crisis and the consequences of such narrativization for policy responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this investigation we propose to delve into the concept of ecocide and its ethical-political implications, putting it in relation to Giorgio Agamben's concepts of sovereignty and state of exception. The concept of exception, in the legal and philosophical tradition, refers to the scope of people's lives and not to the damage caused to life in nature. However, starting from the assumption that there is an interdependence between human life and the life of nature, the purpose of this essay is to analyze the ethical-political unfoldments to which this interdependence leads us, having as its axis the concept of ecocide. For this analysis, we propose to explore the links between ecocide and state of exception, as two assimilated practices that reduce life to an ethical insignificance through a legal vacuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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]

This paper approaches the Women's Strike (2020-2021) from the participants' perspective. First, the author outlines the political and cultural context, emphasizing the contemporary debate about abortion in Poland. Then, the analysis of the protests, conducted in line with Butler, Czarnacka, Graff, Korolczuk, and Majewska, is combined with the author's research outcomes based on the multi-sited participant observation and semi-structured qualitative interviews with participants of the protests. The main argument is that reevaluating the outcomes of a social movement that did not achieve its goal necessitates expanding the meaning of social change beyond the completion of said goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a critical counter-reading of Michel de Certeau's classic text, The Practice of Everyday Life, this essay argues that today, in the age of neo-liberal biopolitics, it is death that is quotidian. While "life" itself now figures as the paratactical and memetic ruse of our dominant order, the essay problematizes conventional forms of tactical resistance, claiming that resistance is often complicitous and has been co-opted in advance. It is death that must henceforth inform our struggles to make (a) life in the ruins. Examples of racialized deaths suggest a rhetorical agency, and a rallying cry, for political protest and resistance beyond the tactics of a progressive embourgeoisement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exceptional forms of state power mobilized under COVID-19 have attracted scholarly attraction and created important insights on the pandemic politics. However, it seems that the current understanding tends to regard the states' responses as a zero-sum game between two powers only, a game in which liberal rule in varying degrees is traded for raw sovereign power. Inspired by the notion of biopower, this article aims to provide a more nuanced account of the various powers invoked to handle the pandemic. Based on the case of Denmark, it is argued that three forms of power were mobilized: sovereignty, discipline and security mechanisms. Yet, indirect security mechanisms informed by epidemiological knowledge and modelling have played a far more comprehensive role than the two other power mechanisms. In a complex interaction with epidemiological expertize, liberal governmentalities limited the mobilization of sovereignty and discipline and, instead, tended to endorse indirect security mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are renewed global efforts to make wildlife conservation the foundation for broad-based economic development. This article looks at these tendencies in the 'Kruger to Canyons' (K2C) biosphere region in South Africa, encompassing the Kruger National Park and adjacent settlement areas and reserves. Various forms of the wildlife economy have a long history in this region. However, it is increasingly posited as a preternatural means for creating jobs. We chronicle the growth of the wildlife economy from its apartheid heyday to the present, showing its fundamental dependence on the ecological and political fragmentation of space. More generally, these biopolitical divisions are part of a broad contestation of wildlife value, organised around changing regimes of protected area enclosure and the spacing of human and non-human life. Despite recent claims by the South African conservation industry that it is demolishing fences and increasing habitat connectivity, political territorialisation and ecological fragmentation continue to be important means of securing profit and reducing perceived risk. While the contradictions of this dynamic have now become acute through the emergence of the rhino-poaching crisis, the growth of that violent industry, we conclude, should not be seen as the negative inversion of a legal wildlife economy. Instead, both the legal and the illegal wildlife economies are manifestations of the same underlying problems: ill-conceived attempts at agrarian reform; the persistent influence of an older veterinary wildlife assemblage; the continued role of the rural poor as an enabling but unacknowledged buffer between development and wildlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a historical ethnography of how Brazil's post-dictatorial psychiatric reforms have shaped young people's lives, this paper builds on Eve Sedgwick's analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion to show that narrow applications of Foucault's biopower concept nurture forms of resistance to bio-reductionism centred primarily on epistemic deconstruction. To unsettle this hermeneutic, I put young people's theories of power into conversation with Georges Canguilhem's concept of the milieu and with feminist scholars' work on prefigurative politics. I introduce the concepts of threading and unthreading to consider how one subject of biopower, the child-like biobehavioural figure, was continuously being threaded within a specific milieu and in relation to another key figure: the elite angst-ridden 'storm-and-stress' adolescent. Young people's subsequent unthreading and reweaving politics, flourishing in co-construction with what I call the politicizing clinic, illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can incrementally change the patterning of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on contributors to a scholarly publication, highlighting their diverse research interests and forthcoming works. Topics include Tobias Barnett's exploration of the concept of 'milieu' in modern French thought, examining its intersections with colonialism and fascism. Andrew Benjamin's upcoming books on classical and Renaissance gestures and biopolitics are discussed, reflecting his research focus.

From its inception in the late nineteenth century, eugenics aimed to "improve" human beings. During its long, tortuous history, the movement spawned many different incarnations and had differing impacts on politics and policies. It was from the start a heterogeneous cultural force, manifested through local, national, regional, transnational and global initiatives, institutions, and individuals. Despite, or, perhaps, partly because of its slipperiness and indeterminacy, eugenics has managed to survive and thrive to this day. The longevity of the eugenic mindset is all the more striking, given its intimate association with the collapse of humanistic values and liberal democratic regimes in the early decades of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text examines from the hermeneutic method the lack of protection and exclusion of a certain part of the population by the modern State as a response to the mechanisms of preservation and satisfaction of another part of this human existence, manifesting itself as the reverse and the obverse of the management of organic life by political power, a situation that some authors have called biopolitics. The objective is to distinguish the mechanisms that lead to considering a certain part of the population expendable and therefore excusable, as well as the devices tending to their rejection, lack of protection, and elimination. The conclusions of these reflections will be approached from the migratory phenomenon, as a population group that personifies these expendable lives in modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By looking at colonization at white responses to Black population increase in the US, this essay argues that exile and other biopolitical mechanisms undo the logic of security by showing how the search for safety itself generates and amplifies insecurity. Framed against contemporary meditations on exile, the essay examines how whites presented the deportation of US Blacks to Liberia as a solution to a national security crisis. In response, Black activists and writers such as James Forten and Russell Parrott demonstrated how white concerns created insecurity among the US Black population. To offset the vulnerability of exile that other colonizationists mandated for Black people, the use of racial arithmetic in Freedom's Journal , the first African American newspaper, and by David Walker shows that security for Blacks can be achieved, at least rhetorically, by mobilizing biopower and exploiting arithmetical ratios of Blacks to whites. In a twist, however, the editor of Freedom's Journal , John Russwurm, emigrated to West Africa to publish the Liberia Herald whose columns reveal how in the exile's safe haven racial differences upheld by the US continued to have meaning. In exile, security and insecurity remained twined about each other in cycles of violence. Extermination is population security at its most absolute.... if the problem of security is the population's ceaseless potential for being born, reproducing, and dying, then, exile and colonization serve as technologies for radically altering the polity in the name of national interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson is an exercise in biopolitics that facilitates institutionalized white supremacy by subjugating pregnant people's bodies to government regulation to control reproduction. The population most likely to be controlled via this exercise of biopower is people of color because prohibitions on abortion exacerbate existing structural inequities and racism and guarantee that the poor and pregnant people of color will be forced to resort to more dangerous and desperate measures to end their pregnancies or find that they have no options at all while predominantly white and well-off pregnant people will continue to find ways to access safe abortions. As such, the justices in the Dobbs majority, to include their references to safe haven laws, are engaged in a racist exercise of biopower that puts the emotional, mental, physical and financial wellbeing of pregnant people of color and their families at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we discuss how the design of a higher education language course can challenge the power of sentimentality in the classroom. In particular, the paper analyses the role of literature in intercultural language education through the lens of affect theory, while focusing on minimizing sentimentality in the classroom, especially when the literary texts used confront students with trauma-related content involving human rights abuse, death and suffering, and trigger discomforting emotions in students such as sadness, anguish, fear and more. We suggest that it is important for educators and students in higher education to recognize the affective and biopolitical dimensions of literature teaching in intercultural language education. This is illustrated through the design of an English language course syllabus in an Argentinian higher education setting. The paper concludes with a discussion of the curricular and pedagogical implications for intercultural language education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of state racism and biopower, the author of the 26th Delphine Hanna Lecture presents several claims: (a) that the idea of the illegitimate outsider in Western world governments like the United States has largely been influenced by ancient Greek ideals, (b) that a host of policies and intentional actions by power brokers create derision and hierarchies between “old” and “new” immigrant groups, and (c) neoliberal ideology couched in actions that aim “to protect the state” is nothing more than a recoding of traditional racist rhetoric that expands systemic racism. The author identifies the capabilities approach, asset based community development, and framing movement and physical activity as issues of justice as critical strategies to ensure equal rights for all. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes how conspiratorial knowledge and bio-power were entangled in the Polish government's discourse to undermine the 2020 Women's Strike protests against the curbing of access to legal abortion. Theoretically, it uses Foucault's "bio-power" to conceptualize both the assault on reproductive rights and the securitization of ensuing protests based on "conspiratorial knowledge," which uses conspiracy theories as a heuristic device to understand social changes. Empirically, discourse analysis is deployed to interrogate a video-recorded speech by Jarosław Kaczyński, the country's de facto leader, posted on YouTube in response to the protests. First, the article exposes how the protests are recast as a conspiracy bent on the legal, biological, and moral destruction of the Polish nation. Second, it examines how a small sample of remediations of the video by oppositional media and women's rights activists refutes the conspiratorial knowledge it promulgated. Throughout, the article also identifies the "(quasi-)cognitive" and "affective" forms of epistemic capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years since the landmark Macpherson Report (1999) recognised London's Metropolitan Police as 'institutionally racist', senior police officers and politicians in Britain have regularly reduced racism in policing to a problem of the past. This article examines police as a state institution where the politics of racism not only persist but do so coterminous with those of war. In doing so, I argue that policing is a biopolitical institution, that deploys racism as a formal strategy of war in vigorous defence of Euro-modernity. I show how the legacy of the Macpherson Report speaks to post-racial logic, which interacts with liberal myths about policing as non-martial to obscure the police's racialised and militarised makeup. Challenging this hegemonic framing, I analyse how anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms share common ground, by producing racially coded populations as enemies of revered Euro-modern hallmarks like law and order and national security. I contend that this deeply embedded othering of race as anti-modern rationalises the police's martial credentials, thus making militarised policing a racialised endeavour. As such, I illustrate how police regulates race through biopolitical strategies of securitisation, pre-emption and disposability, to reveal racial police warfare as foundational to everyday socio-political life in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this wide-ranging conversation, Michael Hardt reflects on recent transformations within Empire. Several unique themes emerge concerning power and pedagogy as they intersect with subjectivity and global crisis. Drawing on the common in conjunction with the tradition of love in education uncovers a different path that attends to today's real political, ecological, and social needs. Finally, a focus on collectivity points to a possible strategy—collective intellectuality—for educators to revise traditional notions of leadership to encourage more ethical, democratic, and sustainable futures. Yet, what this looks like in practice remains for us to imagine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to contagion, competing and contradictory movements emerge that engender openness to new modes of life and reactionary defenses of old ones, that acknowledge mutual dependency and vulnerability and that heighten the policing and surveillance of borders. Through reading the Empire project, this article articulates these as struggles over measure that unfold on the terrain of sovereignty and biopolitical economy. We show that the passage from modern to imperial sovereignty hinges on the former's inability to adequately impose calculatory regimes, to which the latter's flexibility and fluidity responds. This accompanies the passage from industrial to biopolitical command, from regulation through the wage to rearbitration through extractivism. Having articulated the contemporary coordinates within which the multitude finds itself, we then propose an educational weapon for the struggle against sovereignty and capital: stupidity. Turning to Jean-François Lyotard, we demonstrate just how fundamentally the rule of Empire depends on the outside of measure for its continual reproduction, and how Empire frames the communicative networks of biopolitical labor, a framing from which Hardt and Negri haven't adequately broken. As the other of thought, as that which can't be articulated, commanded, or absorbed by capital, stupidity remains totally useless and unproductive for Empire, which is exactly where its potency lies for the multitude. By critically engaging stupidity, we can refrain from reducing the pandemic to a need for heightened immunity and enclosure achieved through articulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the productive capacity of emotion through the concept of emotional fundamentalism. Emotional fundamentalism combines several key concepts—fundamentalism, affective labor, biopolitics, and capitalism's contradictions—developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009) to describe the intensified attention to the body in education. I investigate the implications of the increased organizational and corporate interest in emotion using an ongoing socio-emotional learning study and the introduction of artificial intelligence aggression detectors in schools. Doing so demonstrates the tendency of Empire to manage emotions in order to ensure viable production by educating the body as data and human capital. However, though Empire depends on emotions as a resource, these same emotions display a creative unruliness that exposes potential avenues to reproduce the common and enact multitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Article, I explore how nearly continuous public rhetorical challenges to abortion in the political realm first led the public and the courts to turn away from a particular abortion procedure (intact dilation and extraction, also known as partial-birth abortion) which political agitators labeled as "barbaric" and then to view physicians who performed abortions not as legitimate professionals, but simply as "abortionists," and sometimes as evil "Frankensteins." "Abortionists" use no "medical judgment" and are unworthy of deference by state legislatures, Congress, or the courts when deciding how or when to perform an abortion. The concentration on the welfare of fetuses and the actions of physicians permitted the abortion debate to bypass discussion of both the rights and welfare of pregnant patients, including their right to health, and to virtually never mention that abortion restrictions primarily affect people in poverty who cannot afford to seek reproductive health care, including an abortion, by traveling to a nonrestrictive state. Understanding the power of extreme rhetoric, including the use of social media in political campaigns and the use and misuse of concrete terms such as murder, infanticide, brutality, and dismemberment, and abstract concepts such as "human dignity," can help us plot a post-Dobbs way forward. Perhaps the demise of Roe can lead to a birth of a new rhetoric on abortion, one that concentrates on the right to health of everyone, including the right to make reproductive decisions, and requires moving abortion back into the realm of contemporary medicine, complete with a meaningful doctor-patient relationship protected by privacy and financed in a way that is accessible to all pregnant patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abortion in New Zealand is at a critical juncture as the current government pursues its decriminalisation. Since colonisation, access to abortion has been regulated in myriad ways, from capital punishment and hard labour to the tacit collusion between women and doctors represented by the mental health exception enshrined in legislation in the 1970s. This article employs the Foucauldian concept of problematisation to identify how women and abortion have been framed in key historical texts, such as laws and government inquiries and the rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement. I argue that these shifting problematisations reveal abortion regulation as a critical site of the biopolitical governance of gender, positioning women in deliberate and particular ways as befitting their proper gendered subjectivity—as mothers, nurturers, nationbuilders, upholders of Christian morality. The corollary is women behaving badly, subverting their appropriate construction by seeking abortion. Thus, we meet women who are selfish, untrustworthy, murderous, unstable, victimised and vulnerable, but never a woman autonomous in her reproductive decision-making. On the eve of fundamental legislative and ideological reform, I question whether the proposed changes will really achieve a dissolution of the regime of reproductive control or whether they will merely reposition this control in a new site of gendered governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graffiti artists are frequently regarded as "liminal" figures, or people who exist on the outskirts of society. This paper looks at one aspect of their marginal status: legal liminality. I argue, using the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, that writers, like the homines sacri, live in a state of legal exception. As a result, they face uncontrollable violence and are denied fundamental rights. Though writers are subjected to abuse and intimidation, their particular circumstances also position them to challenge sovereign power in neoliberal cities. They can join a community without establishing an identity because of their ambiguous situation. As a result, they undermine the inclusion/exclusion dichotomy at the heart of biopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, in 'The Biopolitics of Pandemics,' Ed Cohen discusses the contradictions in medical, juridical, and popular thought that conceive of both disease and immunity as things that happen to individual bodies, belying our profound interconnectedness and interdependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the coronavirus pandemic and the Omicron variant once again forcing countries into lockdown (as of late 2021), this essay seeks to outline a Foucauldian critique of various legal measures taken by the Danish government to cope with COVID-19 during the first year and a half of the pandemic. The essay takes a critical look at the extra-legal measures employed by the Danish government, as the Danish politicians attempted to halt the spread of the, now almost forgotten, Cluster 5 COVID-19 variant. This situation will serve as a critical point from where to start using Foucault's writings on life and biopolitics in order to expose various legally problematic governmental decisions that became visible during the handling of COVID-19 in general and the Cluster 5 mutation in particular. Reframing the pandemic within Foucault's concept of biopolitics, this essay concludes that the state of exception has led to an increase in biopolitical logic, where some lives have come to matter more than others. As a critical counterpoint to this logic, the conclusion suggests that the notion of biocommunism could provide a suitable reconfiguration of communism. A reconfiguration that could mitigate some of the issues related to biopolitics is uncovered earlier in the essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-panopticism is aligned with the Foucauldian conception of power and illustrates its apparatuses and mechanisms, for instance the visibility of bodies under the gaze, the facility to mobilise power relations for political purposes, and the capacity to engage self -technologies where there is self-surveillance and surveillance of others. As a concept, it is a confluence of the disciplinary power of panoptic control and the ubiquitous security mechanism of biopower in action. Post-panopticism in the discipline provides a means to identify areas of lack in teacher and student populations. Post-panoptic surveillance in Australian schools is illustrated in this article around the use of data wall displays. Data walls are a collective mechanism that produces biopower through its alignment with panoptic disciplinary power in schools. These data assemblages are an example of a suite of technologies that profile student performance, mould teaching practices, and shape subjectivities of leaders, teachers, and students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Qibla, written by the female playwright Wan-Ting Shen, is the title of the Best Play of the 2015 Taiwan Literature Award. This play, directed by Dong-Ning Hsieh, Artistic Director of Voleur du Feu Theatre, had its premiere in 2017. In her play, Shen portrays the interaction between a live-in foreign caregiver called Nadie and a Granny who suffers from Alzheimer and lives in the countryside. The purpose of this paper is to examine the three major motifs ─ migration, runaway, and pilgrimage ─ that are central to the play's textuality and theatricality. The script and performance analysis of The Qibla are highlighted while a socio-economic and political background regarding the foreign migrant workers is provided so as to give the play a proper context. Since the three main characters, Nadie, Granny, and V-Rod, are all female subalterns who live on the margin of a society called the 'Ocean State,' this paper attempts to employ an anti-essentialist viewpoint derived from subaltern studies to investigate the social and biopolitical issues exposed in the play. In conjunction with this viewpoint, this paper intends to adopt the Brechtian reading to interrogate Hsieh's directing approach and Shen's dramaturgy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a series of ideas disturbing the conventional wisdom that decrees education an essential force in saving the world. Taking Morton's descriptions of hyperobjects seriously, we consider his radical idea that the world has ended amidst the eco-political depredations of the Anthropocene. Accordingly, we claim that education in modernity most properly belongs - materially and ideologically - with technological enframing and the rise of biopower. In other words, what is taken almost universally as the sacred realm of education is, in fact, a contributory factor in the global eco-ontological crisis. Morton describes global warming, plastics and nuclear arsenals as hyperobjects: viscous, nonlocal entities that exist in temporal and spatial planes vastly different from our own immediate worlds. They are the threatening, difficult to access entities that express the Anthropocene. While most will propose that education will be vital in combating looming ecological apocalypse, we consider that education is a hyperobject itself. Education, we opine, is aligned with the forces and conditions that have generated the present crisis. This is because education embodies the same qualities as the hyperobjects of modernity; according to any rigorous historical ontology, education as we know it must be seen as the most extensive expression of a dangerous biopower that is beyond control. If this position is to be taken seriously, education is not merely impotent in combatting ecological catastrophe, but is a key apparatus supporting the Anthropocene. Education is thus another element of the end of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do people rendered expendable through biopolitical categories do to survive them? When governments classify types of work according to ideologies of essentiality and excess, such as in response to crisis, they construct biopolitical categories that render some livelihoods untenable. Such a politics interacts with existing terrains of inequitable citizenship, pushing some to what feels like the precipice of expendability—a place from which they must skillfully negotiate permission to continue to make ends meet. On the borders of a protected forest in Tanzania, many sources of income have been outlawed in the name of biodiversity conservation. To cope, village residents navigate environmental regulations through their conversations with the enforcers of forest laws. In these conversations they co‐construct narratives in ways that manipulate the boundaries of regulatory categories. In doing so, village residents are creative legal and moral actors who can locate their prohibited activities—and themselves—in the realm of permissibility. [biopolitics, conservation, forests, rural, subsistence, enforcement, Tanzania] [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.

From a feminist literary studies perspective, in dialogue with the notions of biopolitics and biopower proposed by Michel Foucault (and later expanded by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) this work presents a reading of La familia del Comendador (1860), by Juana Paula Manso, as a means to problematize the critical tradition regarding Latin American modernity. By shedding light on the ideological tensions that emerge between biopowers (forms of control) and biopolitics (forms of resistance) through the passages walked by the characters, this text reveals how Manso envisioned an ideal of a liberal modernity-capitalism (in terms of gender, race, and economy) for the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze the television series The Handmaid’s Tale—created by Bruce Miller and based on the novel by Margaret Atwood—to show its critical power in the narratives of progress to warn on the fragility of our democracies and—as Giorgio Agamben argues—their contiguity with totalitarianisms. However, I also examine the way the third season seems to tone down the aforementioned criticisms through the development of what Fredric Jameson calls nostalgia for the present. Likewise, following Mariela Solana, I explore the political meanings of hope and nostalgia as affects whose meanings cannot be established a priori. Finally, I argue that in the series there is a strange, perverse coexistence of two ways of understanding nostalgia that explode the dichotomy between desires which, according to Sara Ahmed, redirect us towards social forms in which hopes and desires for radical change have already been placed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between community and reparations is crucial to deal with violence. In this regard, to repair means to stabilize the social, moral, and political bonds that were damaged because of violence. Therefore, testimony is of great importance: it constitutes a biopolitical and institutional act to guarantee the rights to truth, justice, and reparations. However, concepts such as community, reparations and testimony have taken a new meaning in contemporary French philosophy, especially in the works of Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Blanchot y Jean-Luc Nancy. This new meaning rejects the sovereign and biopolitical community. Taking into account such a change of perspective, this paper examines, from a philosophical standpoint, the aforementioned concepts found in Nancy's, Blanchot's and Lévinas's studies on community, vulnerability, and metaphor. On that basis, the following thesis is sustained: the use of metaphors of damage in the testimonies of violence constitutes a speech of the irreparable (the wounded vulnerability) that reveals and creates an anarchic community. [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]

It refers here to the field of cultural management in Mexico and Latin America, and the urgency of attracting epistemologies that have a political impact on practices and elaborations in the field. From the documentary analysis of proposals for professionalization discussion around the subject, the possibility of attracting logical frameworks to think and focus the community as the center of practical deployments from the communitas defined from the biopolitical vector in the manner of R. Esposito, together with a call for the production of knowledge that can overcome traditional discussions about culture, to give way to possible epistemologies that result in the praxis of the field of management as a fundamental contribution in the unfolding of the field. [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 provides a sustained investigation into ancient teichopolitics – the politics of constructing walls – and the question of whether the best city should be surrounded by walls. Plato's Laws adopts the Spartan view that walls have a negative effect on national character and argues that they should be 'left lying asleep and undisturbed in the ground' (Leg. 6.778d). Aristotle's Politics puts forward a series of objections to Plato and adopts the more pragmatic view that walls are necessary. Although both philosophers debate the status of walls and foreigners within the best city, they fail to draw the thoroughly modern connection between teichopolitics and immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States have adopted a range of policies to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Some, mainly democracies like New Zealand and South Korea, took quick health measures without curbing citizen rights. Others, especially those led by populists like Bolsonaro and Erdogan, denied the seriousness of the health crisis even as they curbed political and civil rights. El Salvador is virtually unique in its COVID-19 response, combining a strong rhetorical commitment to health measures with clear efforts to undermine democratic controls and rights. President Nayib Bukele adopted an early travel ban and publicly vilified those who broke curfew by sending them and all who tested positive to quarantine centers for 30 days. He derided and defied Constitutional Chamber decisions against such practices, ordered militarized actions, and crowded gang-affiliated prisoners together in humiliating ways that risked exposure to COVID-19. We examine how Bukele's policies conform to, and seemingly exemplify, Michel Foucault's theoretical concepts of biopolitics and disciplinary power. However, the Salvadoran case also challenges key features of Foucault's theory, suggesting the need to modify his Western assumptions about highly institutionalized states. Our analysis suggests that strong leaders can undercut citizen rights and agency, visible at the intersection of biopolitical social theory and democratic backsliding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Max Brook's World War Z: An Oral History of Zombie War, the zombie world introduces moments of crisis in the governing system of world powers. Although some have read these moments as being capable of shattering conventional governance systems, the present study sides with the pessimist critics who believe that even in such apocalyptic set of circumstances, governing systems would always regulate their governance through utilising biopolitical strategies. The study divides the novel's narrative progression into pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic phases so that governing bodies' unique biopolitical strategies could be analysed in each phase. Through utilising Sherryl Vint's conceptualisation on bio-politics and neo-liberalism, the study concludes that a series of militaristic, medical and economic miscalculations and stereotypes – which constitute the biopolitical phase of letting people die/making people live in the novel – regulate the governing bodies' dominance in the pre-apocalyptic phase, while in the apocalyptic and zombie phase, spatial striation and its dependence on safe/unsafe and inside/outside binaries – that comprise the biopolitical phase of making people die/letting people live – become the survival key for the remaining governing bodies. In the post-apocalyptic world, a more tamed and calibrated version of conventional governance and their governing problems would be perpetuated, and no genuine change or acknowledgement of governance complicity in the transpiration of the apocalypse would emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Esposito agrees with Weil's critique of rights as a privative discourse that is inherently exclusionary and endorses her prioritization of obligations over rights (Esposito, 2012a, p. 101; Weil, 1949/2002). In contrast to philosophical projects that define community in terms of a given property or identity, Esposito understands it in terms of a reciprocity that exposes individuals to alterity, destabilizes their identities, and blurs "the boundaries between what is proper to each individual and what belongs to everybody and hence to nobody" (Esposito, 2011, p. 22).[12] If "community" stands for the dissolution of identities and boundaries, for Esposito, "immunity" denotes the wide range of mechanisms mobilized to protect life in the face of this threat of dissolution. These subjects become thing-like in his philosophy to the extent that they do not manifest any kind of resistance to the operations of the I dispositif i of the person, as can be seen in Esposito's startling observation tying together the destinies of Roman slaves, those in the American South, and contemporary migrants striving to reach Europe: "Between a slave lashed to death in the provinces of the Roman Empire, in the Alabama of the nineteenth century, or today off the coast of Lampedusa, the most appalling event by far is the most recent one" (Esposito, 2015a, p. 33). In developing this point, Esposito partly builds on Foucault's argument that, starting with the 17 SP th sp century, we see a new episteme in which the bond between words and things is increasingly broken; in this new regime, each sign assumes its meaning in relation to its difference from other signs and not from its correspondence to the world (Esposito, 2015a, p. 75; Foucault, 1966/1973, pp. 46-77). [Extracted from the article]

This article is about the Indian man-eater tiger, through Jim Corbett's narratives, as an anthropocentric construct of animality in British India at the beginning of the twentieth century. During this transformative phase, the masculine idea of unrestricted sportsmanship against tigers struggles for its validity in the surge of game preservation. The paper argues, forthwith it is the hunting of a man-eater tiger that reinforces the British Crown's hegemony in the subcontinent by studying Corbett as a sort of metonym for imperial legitimacy that protected Indian populations from predation. The analysis sheds light on the politicisation of an animal's animality by highlighting a rare view of colonialism when the imperial power targets man–animal conflict via sharpening the biopolitical congeniality between the coloniser (the state) and the colonised human population. The paper advances on how the colonial and post-colonial state power unevenly exert the notion of conservation by infringing a tiger's identity from biopolitical to necropolitical subject when species (human and animal) share antagonistic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The guidelines for the future of the energy sector in Greece are largely determined by the relevant strategic decisions of the European Union. A key role in this context is played by the EU's Energy Union Strategy, which seeks to ensure secure, sustainable, competitive and affordable energy for EU citizens and businesses. Therefore, the radical transformation of the energy sector in Greece, as part of the European Union's strategy to achieve the long-term goal of climate neutrality by 2050, will require in the next few years significant investments for the just transition of the lignite-dependent regions, which will be disproportionately affected. In this paper, Greece's energy deficit is examined, as well as Just Transition Mechanism and its contribution to the ongoing green transition of the Greek energy sector. By attempting to identify the systemic inexpediencies of the energy sector in Greece, the aim of this paper is to paint a realistic picture of the country's lignite phase-out plan and the challenges it faces during the ongoing energy crisis. It is concluded that the green and just transition is a long process, which requires strategic planning and a policy framework with clear implementation objectives and timetables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, PPPs have been increasingly used to implement projects and provide public services. The governments have made the necessary legislative and financial efforts in order to promote PPPs, given the need to acquire know-how from the private sector and the advantages they bring to the public sector and the citizens. However, the use of PPPs should be carefully planned as, in addition to the wider social and economic impacts, failures and negative results have been observed. This article attempts to present the main characteristics of PPPs, cite their possible impacts and quote their critical success factors in order to make PPPs more beneficial for the involved parties and the citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research, in the context of o-governance, addresses the issue of the e-citizen and e-democracy at the age of covid-19 in Greece. As it is well known, pandemic has positive effects on digitalization in government. E-gate, such as "GOV.GR", give at the citizens the possibility to gain time and download useful documents for their work, education, travel etc. Many people at Greece visit GOV.GR and more use smartphones for entertainment, information, to visit facebook, instagram and other social media. But is the e-citizen in Greece ready for e-democracy? The page opengov.gr give the change to everyone to write their opinion about the laws and express their agreement or disagreement. After 12 years, are the Greek citizens ready for the next step...? The results of this research show that most people have a positive opinion for opengov.gr but rather prefer to write comments at mainly social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]