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While fidelity is a crucial aspect of Jacques Derrida's thinking as it pertains to issues of faith, ethics, and responsibility, this key position in deconstructionist discourse has hardly yet been brought to light. Less still have the biopolitical resonances of Derrida's work, with its careful attention to the terms and stakes of life particularly in his later writing, been considered as a deconstructionist practice of fidelity and infidelity in its own right. In pursuing these threads, this essay argues that thinking a deconstructionist ethics through fidelity and biopolitics makes possible the crafting of a new philosophical weave for catching our responsibilities to others – to the very otherness of life itself – that Derridean hospitality opens up. Taken together in this way, a deconstructionist fidelity to life otherwise, to a biopolitics to come, makes possible an infidelity to political order as we know it that explodes the limitations of biopolitical theory. In squinting, blinking, tearing up, and listening, the borders of life are blurred in an ambivalent ethics of a transness within which life itself is made to waver and arrive anew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on examining biopolitics and survival games within the context of neoliberalism, particularly in the films "Parasite" and the series "Squid Game." Topics include the impact of neoliberal ideology on the classification of individuals as "surplus" or "bare lives," the representation of biopolitics in the works, and the call for viewers to critically reflect on societal issues related to human existence, vulnerability, and interdependency.

This article is a personal reflection on the author's relationship with Everett Mendelsohn, an historian of science and a peacenik. The author recounts how they first met Mendelsohn and how he became a mentor figure in their life. Mendelsohn's emphasis on dialogue and peace in Israeli politics had a profound impact on the author's perspective. The author also highlights Mendelsohn's teaching style, his support in publishing the author's dissertation, and their continued friendship over the years. The article concludes with a heartfelt tribute to Mendelsohn as a mentor, pacifist, and friend. [Extracted from the article]

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

Gigatown (2013–2014) was a joint initiative between the telecommunications company Chorus and the New Zealand government to award a town 'The fastest internet in the Southern Hemisphere' through a social media competition. Gigatown involved the production, by participating towns, of social media content that demonstrated the economic and other benefits of ultra-fast broadband and gigabit connectivity. This paper argues that the competition's logics are biopolitical in the valorization of citizenship as tied to social media and information and communications technologies (ICT) proficiency. Focusing on the South Island city of Dunedin, and drawing on the conceptual framework of somatechnics for understanding the embodied relationship between governance and technology, I show how the competition somatechnically positions residents as consumer-citizens whose social media proficiency and digital labour facilitate their participation in policy planning and development. In order to meet infrastructural planning priorities for the penetration of ultra-fast broadband into business and consumer domains, the competition incited and relied on residents' civic love and volunteer labour for their city's future. Such labour is 'spaced-off' as de-materialized and de-territorialized, construed as something done for fun in spare time, which left some participants experiencing burnout in their somatechnical embodiment of active digital citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

An interview with José Machado Pais, the 6th Director of Análise Social, is presented. He reflects on the foundational principles of the journal and emphasizing the importance of maintaining quality standards through ethical editorial policies. Machado Pais envisions the future relevance of Análise Social, highlighting potential areas of exploration such as bioethics, biopolitics, and public health.

Historically, governmental responses to homelessness in Canada have defaulted to the most basic of services such as food and shelter. Even under exceptional circumstances, such as the current coronavirus pandemic, governments still demonstrate reluctance to guarantee permanent, adequate and affordable housing to all. In this policy review we argue that this pattern suggests that reticence is an apt term for describing homelessness responses in Canada and that this condition is rooted in the continued dominance of liberalism in Canadian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research proves the connection between religion and social attitudes toward biopolitical topics. The purpose of our analyses was to deepen reflection on these connections. We explored the internal pluralization of religiosity and ideological self-placement and their significance for orientations toward abortion, in vitro fertilization, and homosexuality, subjects of intensive political debate engaging the Catholic Church. Our analysis, based on a nationally representative sample of Catholics in Poland, leads to the conclusion that, despite high indicators of religiosity, the capacity of the Roman Catholic Church to form a consistent cognitive perspective among its followers is limited. Even among Catholics who present fully institutionalized religiosity (~25%), only half agree with the Church's teaching on biopolitical themes. These findings are discussed in the context of the importance of intra-religious pluralism for understanding the ideological role of religion in countries with high levels of belonging to one, dominant form of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members of the Rohingya ethnos must navigate the Myanmar state's "blunt biopolitics"—a mode of regulation that neither protects nor intensively knows, but rather uses violence to govern, the populations rather than individuals it takes as its object. As classic resistance is ineffective against the excessive sovereign force activated in blunt biopolitics, Rohingya communities across Asia enact strategies of refusal—what this article theorizes as methods for navigating regimes of biopolitical governmentality. As Rohingya refuse literal erasure to persist as a population, that Rohingya identity has become an amorphous object as members manuever between rejection of and assent to their symbolic effacement. They reformulate the ethnic category's contours, both consciously/directly (in response to changing dynamics that their refusal has generated) and indirectly: not only as they enter and exit the ethnos, mimicking spatial peregrinations amid mass expulsion, but also in terms of disjunctive affiliations in which people simultaneously inhabit positions of identification with and refusal of "Rohingya." Refusal hence opens up a consideration of the collective refusing subject that acknowledges that it is simultaneously hypostatized (qua collective actor) while also malleable (qua its ever-mutating constituents and self-conceptions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty as an object of study in India continues to be the domain of economists, statisticians and demographers. The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSS) serves as the main instrument of data collection to measure poverty relative to economic indicators. In this paper we draw on strengths-based research undertaken in an Indian village to foreground alternative ways of conceptualising and practising data collection when measuring poverty. Explored through an analytics of biopolitics, asset-mapping exercises with young people and women revealed new subjectivities that emerged via illustrative meaning-making and dialogue. This approach to poverty measurement facilitated methods and produced outcomes that were less calculated and predefined than the NSS, and encouraged participation, even questioning of the status quo, in the 'doing' of the methodology itself. A strengths orientation to poverty opens up radical possibilities, particularly in India where the state-sanctioned self--governing body, the Gram Sabhas, has a mandate to provide for the most marginalised groups. And while this governing body is not free from power imbalances, the potential it offers, when combined with strengths-based approaches (SBA) that value people for the expertise they already have, demands renewed attention in practitioner and policy debates in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the transformations of the hacienda system in the Peruvian highlands during the second half of the twentieth century through the novel Todas las sangres written by José María Arguedas. Departing from Michel Foucault's work and his distinction between sovereign power and biopolitics, the article analyses different social formations that evolve from the hacienda system through processes of transculturation. By analyzing fragments of the novel where the biopolitical project that hides behind one of these social formations is revealed, the goal of the article is to discover how Arguedas articulates an ideological critique toward the implementation of foreign models of productivity in the Peruvian highlands through an ending that leaves in suspense the role of local communities and their epistemologies in the political and economic renewal of Peru. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following essay makes a critical analysis of the discourses/practices of modernity from the perspective of biopolitics around abnormality, science (as technoscience) and the possibilities of community that exist in the relationships of the marginalized. Taking as referents the films Freaks and The Shape of Water. Showing how cinema plays and proposes critical elements of these practices/discourses of modernity. Within this abnormality, we will consider monstrosity as metaphor and corporeal reality, and women as borderline and marginal bodies of the cast (in Rancière's terms). An analysis that plays with the contingency of the social crisis we are going through worldwide, as well as the social and corporal fragments, but which, nevertheless, in their entrails make possible other forms of relationships, other fabrics and possibilities of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

While in modernity childhood was increasingly invested with emotional and intellectual energy, it also became a site of scrutiny and intervention, so that philosophers, scientists, and humanitarians pursued the improvement of humanity and the human condition through management of 'the child'. In the first half of the twentieth century, such attention settled on children deemed to present both problems and opportunities for the improvement of the race, as eugenics came to dominate discussions of human progress. This article examines the significance of childhood as a resource for human futures and technologies of 'eugenics' insofar as they target children: specifically, the development of intelligence testing, institutions of separation, and involuntary sterilization in the United States and Canada. In these discourses and technologies of eugenics, childhood appears as a reserve of human potential which, appropriately regulated, may be harnessed to 'build a better future'. The article also considers the perspective of survivors of these practices who experienced their childhood and future possibilities as having been expropriated from them by the state. By considering these governmental and personal registers side by side, the article sheds light on the perceived social utility of childhood, as well as the particular character of loss experienced by those whose childhoods were subject to state intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biopolitics occupies a central role in contemporary debates over new political and governance strategies around the world. Based on the Hobbesian assumption of a "mutual relation between protection and obedience" the sovereign power of modern states seems to be founded with the purpose of the preservation and protection of life. But what happens if we look at the present pandemic, whereby governments are struggling against an "invisible enemy" to pursue this end, facing at the same time the problem of keeping up with the growth that sustains the wealth of our economies? Through the discussion of four contemporary, and often antagonistic, takes on biopolitics – Foucault's understanding of biopower; Agamben's critique of the logic of sovereignty; Esposito's concept of immunitas; and Mbembe's necropolitics – the aim of my paper will be to shed light on the theoretical implications of the pandemic for the foundations of political authority and the definition of modern sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses of health and disease pervade More's Utopia. The text insistently plays upon the ambiguities of salus, a term with a wide semantic range including spiritual salvation, the physical health of the individual body, and the wider welfare of the commonwealth. More's text draws on this network of metaphors of health, disease and medicine to transfigure forms of Christian pastoral government in a radical experiment in state governmentality. The Utopian hospital is a microcosm of the Utopian project, yet its prominence in the spatial structure of the ideal republic reveals tensions between individual and collective forms of care. More's text can be productively put into dialogue with Foucault's analysis of the Christian pastorate as a significant precursor to liberal governmentality and modern medical institutions. More and Foucault illuminate the long pastoral legacy of medical institutions, including the hospital as a governmental space with utopian and dystopian possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about a practice of "frank-talking" associated with Steve Biko and the BC movement of the 1970s. It sets out a reading of a short fragment titled "On Death" (found at the end of I Write What I Like) through the lens of the (coincidental) connection between Biko's Frank-talk and Foucault's lectures on parrhesia. Through an intentional mispronunciation of the concept of parrhesia, I re-member Biko's statement "On Death," and the scene of the interrogation that it describes, as an exemplary instance of Biko's frank-talk and one which I show can usefully be read as a modern modality of parrhesia. With Biko, the "parrhesiatic" statement disrupts the white supremacist (bio)political order for the ways it comes to be articulated as a practical expression of Biko's sense of his own equality as a Black subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay we take stock of the shortcomings, successes, and promises of 'biopolitics' to understand and frame global health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global history of populations' politics of life and health to situate present and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue for an affirmative biopolitics, that at once de-securitizes current approaches to our biosocial condition and expands the politics of the human estate to other molar and molecular dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is about the influence of genes on political attitudes and behavior in the subfield of biopolitics. Genopolitics arose as a critique of the political science approach which was deemed insufficient to explain political attitudes and behavior both theoretically and methodologically. To find the origins of political attitudes and behavior, interdisciplinary studies are needed. It is genes that can explain the origin of individual preferences on which all rational choices are based. The method used in this study was a literature review to see the development of genopolitics, debates, and criticisms related to political attitudes and behavior from the point of view of political science and genopolitics. The literature used was derived from books, journals, magazines, and news on the internet. Regarding voter turnout, 32 different social factors can only be explained by 31% by differences in political behavior, while the remaining 69% of differences can be explained by genetic differences. This study concludes that genopolitics as a new approach used to see political attitudes and behavior can be applied in Indonesia to answer and complete the survey-based study of political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Con el objetivo de evidenciar la forma en que la diversidad sociodemográfica ha resignificado el proceso de desarrollo territorial y origina líneas de fuga que trascienden la hegemonía de los poderes económicos-políticos-ambientales en los Llanos-Orientales, se realiza una metodología experimental que combina análisis situacionales, la genealogía, y la reconstrucción histórica de fenómenos sociales a través de 87 entrevistas a líderes sociales entre el 2019-2021. Los resultados muestran un territorio de activa conexión cultural que favorecen la lucha contra hegemónica dentro de las metáforas de "el mito del Estado nación" y "la imposibilidad de generar alternativas". El análisis expone la existencia de rebeliones de conducta a través de resistencias cotidianas creativas, políticas y culturales, que favorecen el poder de la confianza, la solidaridad, la cooperación, el afecto, así como los liderazgos colectivos. Se concluye que el poder central no tiene la capacidad de capturar estas resistencias ya que no tiene la potencia analítica para percibir la reconfiguración del espíritu humano ni las variaciones del tejido social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the construction of Lamu Port as a focal point of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in Kenya, this article explores how megainfrastructures are entangled with processes of life-making and -unmaking, thus producing specific subject dispositions within a state's infrastructural biopolitics as infrastructure-based capacitation and control of national populations. Analyzing sociopolitical effects of state-led megaprojects, civil society mobilization, and livelihoods of artisanal fishermen, the article develops a theoretical account of a politics of disavowal—a tacit denial of a state-admitted responsibility and support to vulnerable populations that, despite formal inclusion into the state's development visions, are rendered constitutively absent within biopolitical spatialities of life advanced by the state. Thereby, the article triangulates the binary of bio- and necropolitics standardly deployed in multiple theorizations of (re)production of liberal capitalist life in geographical and interdisciplinary literatures on biopolitics, necropolitics, or politics of infrastructure. It specifically foregrounds how governance of vulnerable, expendable populations does not oscillate between intentional life- and death-making, flourishing and effacement, bio and necro but unfolds as a politics of disavowal—a confluence of formal recognition and material neglect by the state, expressed as a dialectic of presence and absence, inclusion and neglect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In art, fermentation can be understood metaphorically as a representation of transformation. However, as a biocultural phenomenon within a posthuman framework, it manifests a complex lattice of multispecies relationships, microbiopolitics, and metaphorical figurations that are adopted in works of art and biology as medium and content. In this article, the authors analyze artworks and projects that utilize fermentation by artists such as WhiteFeather Hunter, Amor Muñoz, Anna Dumitriu, and others. These works explore fermentation in the creation of biomaterials, its role in foods like cheese, and its status as a metaphorical figuration in hybrid mechanisms that give center stage to fermentation as a biocultural artifact embodying a nature-culture continuum in a microbial postanthropocentric framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capture‐recapture, a method devised for estimating wildlife population sizes using technologies like bird banding, has been repurposed for use with "rare and elusive" human populations. Capture‐recapture is implemented to count "key populations," groups that constitute a small portion of the general population but are at high risk of HIV infection, including men who have sex with men. Drawing on ethnographic work in Malawi, I excavate mundane and oblique forms of capture (of labor, value, and viral material) and recapture (producing captive experimental populations) through which key populations come into being. Moving beyond the critical register of dehumanization (counting men as if they were animals) illuminates how efforts to count, care for, and keep track of key populations are mediated by relations of capture and elusion that are simultaneously predatory and capacitating, and entanglements that exceed the confines of a peculiar population‐size estimate method. [quantification, population, capture, global health, biopolitics, data, Malawi, Africa] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policies such as urban redensification, rather than mere technical interventions addressing concrete problems, work as a power mechanism. Analyzing the visibility of the politics of life - biopolitics - and of death - necropolitics - in Mexico City derived from the COVID-19 pandemic will allow an understanding of this. In addition, it will allow revealing the paradox that the same policy, redensification, is a failure as a public policy and, simultaneously, a success as a policy of life and death. Starting from sociology and based on a genealogical methodology, data on the effects of urban redensification and the pandemic in Mexico City were analyzed, to subsequently intertwine them and recognize a relationship between them. Special attention was paid to the period of non-compulsory confinement and two neighboring districts of Mexico City: Iztapalapa and Benito Juárez. Thus recognizing a class configuration of space linked to urban design that influenced the localized consequences of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an ethnography of parakeets and other denizens in London, this article expounds the concept of the feral and foregrounds its purchase for an anthropological inquiry into urban life. Ecological, cultural, and political connotations of ferality impinge upon evaluations of what counts and is allowed to flourish as metropolitan nature. Ferality is constructed through nativist and racial taxonomies which promote a biopolitics of eradicating parakeets. At the same time, parakeets trigger new 'recombinant' ecological associations when they enter into relations with other avian life. They also foster affective alignments with people that create possibilities for a more just politics of dwelling. The feral recasts London's metropolitan nature as postcolonial and opens up novel ways of doing urban anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on medicine, biopolitics, and racial politics in New Orleans, Louisiana during the Spanish period in the late 18th century. Topics include ideas that defined medicine and public health in New Orleans, reason for employing people of African descent in New Orleans hospitals, and legal cases which suggest what made West African medical cultures legitimate to a variety of observers.

In recent years, the issue of reproduction has been increasingly thematized in Hungarian political discourse. This has not only occurred at the discursive level, but the government has also introduced new policies regarding reproduction and family life, thus new regulations have been introduced concerning the medical practice of IVF and other ART which have affected practices associated with infertility. The article aims to discuss the ways that policies and discourses shape the views of women struggling with infertility. The medical and political discourse seems to emphasize the responsibility of women in relation to fertility-related issues, despite the fact that the problem also affects men. Furthermore, with the increased surveillance of women undergoing assisted reproductive treatment, the importance of the latter's self-reflexivity, discipline, and responsibility is emphasized. To discuss these issues, the article uses a multi-method approach. The primary data source is in-depth narrative interviews with IVF participants, supplemented by the analysis of political discourses about childbearing and infertility which help in the examination of how different policies and discourses shape individual experiences and desires. I argue that recent policies on IVF and related medical discourses and practices can potentially emphasize the responsibility of women. Women who cannot or do not want to reproduce may be presented as selfish or treated with pity, and these notions are intensified due to the government's explicit pronatalist agenda, which only supports those who conform to conservative heteronormative reproductive standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations" focuses on the neglected cognitive biopolitics in post-Reconstruction debates over African American progress and full democratic citizenship, in order to trace an unmarked African American neurodiverse disability history, or the antiableist imagining of neurological, cognitive, and psychological variations that existed before and persisted alongside the emergence of modern evolutionary- and hereditary-based diagnostic categories of intelligence. At the same time, "Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations" argues for the importance of an abjected Blackness in the critical genealogy of modern neurodiversity, which has largely been associated with recent movements to recognize people with autism or ADHD and has focused on the middle-class white child. Through an examination of Pauline Hopkins's essay series for the Colored American Magazine, "Famous Women of the Negro Race" (1901–2), this essay first recovers Hopkins's ambivalent relation to the compulsory neurotypicality of racial uplift politics. "Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations" then turns to Hopkins's novel Contending Forces (1900) to foreground how her fiction is interrupted by scenes of neurodiverse Afro-fabulation that do not simply refute claims of Black inferiority through a representational politics of counterfacts, but fabulate, exaggerate, and deliberately foreground eccentric, excessive, and "irrational" ways of knowing that have their roots in diasporic epistemologies. Ultimately, "Neurodiverse Afro-Fabulations" raises questions about the way an engagement with a history of Black neurodiversity affects how we think about the political, especially as antiblackness and cognitive disability have often served as overlapping technologies in the formation of a white liberal humanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article posits that recent reparative responses to the opioid crisis are consistent with a longer history of reparative hermeneutics conditioned by the drug wars in the Americas, ones that attempt to repair but often reinforce the biopolitical logics produced by the artificial divide between licit and illicit drugs, a distinction that facilitates both racial and imperialist policing and racial capitalist profiteering. The humanities' postcritical reorientation, and particularly the turn toward the reparative, is underwritten by such relations between state, capital, and drug policy. To investigate the reverberations of such contemporary political and academic investments in drug-war-fueled repair, the article focuses on a recent wave of black fiction and film that reenvisions the 1980s War on Drugs in the era of the opioid epidemic, with particular attention to Barry Jenkins's film Moonlight (2016) and James Hannaham's novel Delicious Foods (2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since becoming the largest refugee-hosting country in the world following the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011, Turkey's border policy has been increasingly characterised by the use of sophisticated security technologies. Turkey's south-eastern border with Syria has been continuously upgraded with walls and fences incorporating advanced security technology. The border with Greece has witnessed a similar bordering process particularly under pressure from the European Union. Drawing on critical border studies and adopting a Foucauldian lens, this article explores these bordering processes, taking security technology as a heterogonous ensemble of practices that consists of discourses, regulations, institutions, threat perceptions, scientific knowledge etc. Finally, the article comes to two important conclusions. First, it suggests that the detection, filtering and prevention of 'illegal' border crossings, smuggling and terrorism are the key reasons advanced for the adoption of technologically intensive border control practices. On the other hand, a more 'humanitarian discourse', namely 'saving the lives of migrants' is also at play. Second, these security technologies are now increasingly embodied in practices of 'inclusion'/'exclusion' that distinguish 'risky' (i.e. illegitimate) from 'safe' (i.e. legitimate) mobilities and that create spaces where inequality and injustice are experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration policies globally are characterised by a growth in the use of detention. These dynamics have also been noted in the United States of America, where, increasingly, the private immigration detention infrastructure is the most developed in the world. Like other total institutions, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities depend on controlling human bodies. This article, which explains how nation-state sovereignty is created by means of surveillance technologies, draws upon the narratives of 26 Mexicans, deported under the administrations of Presidents Bush and Obama and interviewed in four waves of research between 2012 and 2019 in their hometown. The article describes the lived experience of biopolitical interventions on detainees' bodies and explains the disciplining role of restricting or limiting access to ICTs. The article uses Agamben's notion of bare life. It describes how biopolitical interventions and disciplines dehumanise precarious migrants and contribute to their governmentality long after their deportation when they abstain from re-entering the United States. The article complicates the notion of bare life by demonstrating that the use of biometrics (fingerprints) not only dehumanises people but also identifies their bodies and thus rehumanise them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying and tracking community structures in complex networks are one of the cornerstones of network studies, spanning multiple disciplines, from statistics to machine learning to social sciences, and involving even a broader range of application areas, from biology to politics to blockchain. This survey paper aims to provide an overview of some most popular approaches in statistical network community detection as well as the newly emerging research directions such as community extraction with higher‐order features and community discovery in multilayer and multiscale networks. Our goal is to offer a unified view at methodological interconnections and the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary data science applications of network community analysis. This article is categorized under:Data: Types and Structure > Graph and Network DataStatistical Learning and Exploratory Methods of the Data Sciences > Clustering and Classification [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the context of violence in Mexico driven by the War on Drugs (2006-2012), and the spread of repertoires of high lethality and corporal punishment, a series of interpretations have focused their study based on the drifts of biopolitics -- necropolitical and thanatopolitics. The article discusses these interpretations, proposing that the use of this conceptual framework gains heuristic capacity to understand contemporary phenomena of bare life production, if this category is understood beyond sovereignty and is linked to studies on labor and capital accumulation. The article proposes to understand biopolitics as a differentiated device according to specific historical contexts, which is crossed by the concrete forms of the capital-labor contradiction. It argues that the production of expendable lives can be understood by the precariousness of labor and the dynamics of capital accumulation, which generate profit even with death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This research note addresses a gap in the public administration literature by arguing that a political Darwinism was present in the intellectual origins of American administrative theory. By examining the arguments of Woodrow Wilson, this article demonstrates that Darwinism complemented the German political thought that contributed to the establishment of America's administrative state. The application of Darwinian evolutionary biology to politics was a vital element of Wilson's reconceptualization of the state as a living organism. Darwinism was a key rhetorical tool employed by Wilson in his argument against the Constitution's separation of powers. This note finds that Darwinism was present in the early stages of public administration theory in Wilson's argumentation and persists today in the public administration literature. It concludes by sketching out an agenda for further research on Darwinism's influence on public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance research involving food frequently focuses the 'political economy of food sovereignty' where political action involves providing visibility to power differentials in righting injustices and/or celebrating differences. Alimentary and gustatory processes of eating are often assumed as 'naturally' given and rarely put under a critical biopolitical lens. This essay, which zigzags between three food performances and three interdisciplinary concepts, attempts to reconfigure normative conceptions of the biopolitical; by interrogating instead the politics of biology away from transcendental conditions and anthropogenic definitions that lead to a radical insufficiency of justice to cater for difference. Firstly, Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life in his biopolitics is argued to be itself ontologically political, through performances of eating that decentre the human in definitions of biological life. This reveals and complicates biology's implicit technicity as that which demarcates what is human life from what is not. Secondly, food performances conjure the 'enteric imagination' that bring into focus the entanglements of instinctual and ethical life. These performances, with concrete coordinative connections between eating and hearing make porous the epistemological domains between individuality and communality, organic and inorganic, life and death, towards a richer idea of biopolitics as 'lived-intuition.' Lastly, the essay outlines Gilles Deleuze's 'becoming-minor' as a creative and affirmative politics, arriving not as the result of majoritarian agreement nor counter-hegemonic movements, but rather the aggregation of a myriad of molecular, minor events where inventions and conjugations of specific, unforeseen and autonomous modes of becoming exist. Focusing on the politics of biology in this way provides alternatives to idealistic definitions of life whose exigencies can be seen not only in relation in their binary opposition to death, but moves towards a positive one, immanent to multiple modalities of being. The biopolitics of eating does not oppose but stays with the inarticulable but nevertheless real sensoria, providing a surface for experimentation that produces abstractions, concepts, disciplines, gestures and alimentary processes, towards a biopolitics of food that acknowledges that the biological is in itself already political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the science fiction television series "Orphan Black" and how it radicalizes white femininity. The author discusses actress Tatiana Maslany's portrayal of several characters who learn they are clones, explores the theme of biopolitics and biopower, and examines the message of feminist resistance.

Drawing on field research across four years, this article examines a climate change adaptation project in the Cambodian highlands. It examines the logic and rationality of making vulnerable groups resilient in the context of climate change. It shows how adaption projects tend to understand vulnerability as the result of a series of external threats that arise due to global climate change and are expressed primarily as lost income. Using the example of Knaing village in Mondolkiri province this article shows that when it comes to vulnerability, it is often unhelpful to separate between capitalist relations, state territorialization and climate change. Economic, political, and cultural relations that people in the village find themselves imbedded in are co-produced through the interaction of climatic forces, the expansion of capitalist relations and state territorialization. This article thus tries to sketch out a conception of vulnerability based on villager's changing agricultural practices and livelihood trajectories in the context of the expansion of Economic Land Concessions, logging of surrounding forests, and settlement of adjacent lands and state conservation efforts. [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]

This article critically engages with Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049, focusing on the relationship between colonial logics and biological engineering that understands the natural world as property. First, it discusses the connections between the film and the shifting status of biopolitics becoming thanatopolitics, prompted by advances in synthetic biology. It argues that the film's preoccupation with the reproductive capacity of its replicants retraces a racialized (post) colonialism and reconfigured slavery, or the voluntary labour of the occupied – as normalized in synthetic biology and the ongoing processes of devaluing of some lives over others for socioeconomic reasons. Second, and relatedly, the film reveals how deeply the thanatopolitics of a biopolitical economy is rooted in an intensification of racialized and colonial logics. The film thus doubles as a medium in which to grasp the centrality of colonial and racial logics to the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital, and the ways in which it continues to shape the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically analyses the novelty of the legal personhood of nature and, in particular, whether it signals cracks in the anthropocentrism of Western law. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito, it contributes to the theorisation of environmental personhood by focusing on the biopolitical nature of personhood itself. It does so by engaging in a critical examination of the attribution of legal personality to the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand as the most detailed and sophisticated legislative example to date of legally personifying a natural thing. Working through three key conceptual terms in Foucault's and Esposito's work (population, personhood and immunisation), we demonstrate the way in which a biopolitical analysis raises questions about whether ascribing legal personhood to nature addresses anthropocentrism and its effects. We draw attention to the risk of ascribing legal personhood to nature, which is that, instead of signalling an ontological shift in the Western anthropocentric understandings of environment, it operates within and reinforces the dominant legal worldview – unless, that is, the granting of personhood to nature calls into question the dominant paradigm of personhood itself. The article concludes by suggesting alternative ways of developing human understandings of, and relationship with, nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by introducing Bradley's master concept of unbearable life and its underpinning structure and logic of nihilopolitics through the ancient Roman figure of damnatio memoriae. It then gives an overview of how both unbearable life and nihilopolitics are reflected in and supported by Bradley's close readings of different political theological figures, stretching from Foucault (the unbearable), passing through Augustine (Cacus), Shakespeare (Macbeth), Robespierre (the already dead), Hobbes (the religious martyr) and Schmitt (the katechon), to Benjamin (the undead and the past to come). The article concludes by briefly outlining a possible dialogue between Bradley's master concepts of unbearable life and nihilopolitics and the psychoanalytic concepts of the superego and the death drive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection of essays seeks to theorize the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic in international relations (IR). The contributions are driven by questions such as: How can theorizing help us understand these unsettled times? What kind of crisis is this? What shapes its politics? What remains the same and what has been unsettled or unsettling? In addressing such questions, each of the participants considers what we may already know about the pandemic as well as what might be ignored or missed. Collectively, the forum pushes at the interdisciplinary boundaries of IR theorizing itself and, in so doing, the participants hope to engender meaningful understandings of a world in crisis and encourage expansive ways of thinking about the times that lie beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a diagnostic lens to make sense of the still baffling development of a 'humanitarian marketplace'. Ambivalently hybrid initiatives such as volunteer tourism, corporate social responsibility or even fair trade do not strictly obey a distributive logic of market exchange, social reciprocity or philanthropic giving. They engender a type of 'economy' that must be apprehended in its own terms. The article argues that the large-scale collaborative effects of such a dispersed market can be theorized without resorting to the classical biopolitical move of simplified agency/holistic reification. The argument proceeds counterintuitively, by appropriating the notion of symbiosis as redefined by contemporary biology, contending through historical contextualization and conceptual work that nature itself offers the best example to grasp spontaneous collaboration among unrelated human beings as a non-automatically balanced and intrinsically political affair that calls for critical management through an ex post facto interventionist policy of selective cultivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since COVID-19, we have witnessed a rise in hate crimes and xenoracism globally. Some commentators on COVID-related racism claim that this hate is apolitical. We question this claim, and in this paper, we strive to reveal the underlying politics especially around the ramifications and impact of this hate on racialized (im)migrants and the multiculturalism ideal. Drawing from Foucault's construct of biopolitics and using Canada as a case study, we wonder how Canadian multiculturalism, which is a source of national pride, has been politically constructed to serve white settler hegemony from its inception to the present. We link political debates around the emergence of a multiculturalism policy in 1971 to the recent debates on multiculturalism and immigration during the 2015 and 2019 federal elections, and the current COVID-19 related national border policies in 2020. Our critical analysis illustrates how immigrants and racialized minorities have been systemically positioned in our legislation as a site to demonstrate the politics of governance, often scapegoated for national unrest and questioned on the legitimacy of their belonging and contribution to the nation. Meanwhile, the very ideal of multiculturalism in Canada has been evoked as the centre of biopolitics to govern 'Others' and all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article explores the social and subjective dimensions of the biological clock and its implications for reproductive time through a qualitative study based on 40 life story interviews of women from Santiago de Chile. Although the narrative of the biological clock has become a prevalent frame for addressing reproductive time in the context of late childbearing, age-related infertility, and the use of assisted reproductive technologies, few studies engage in an in-depth analysis of the biological clock—its boundaries, dynamics, and the particular ways in which it shapes women's views and experiences of reproductive time. The present article aims to advance current knowledge on the intersection of time, reproduction, and biopolitics by arguing that the biological clock regulates reproductive time by shaping the boundaries and dynamics of female fertility through the clock. By determining reproductive time as quantitative, standardised, linear, and irreversible and by outlining the passing of time through pressure, risk, and burden, the biological clock determines when it is possible and desirable to have children and regulates reproduction, gender, and the female life course. These findings highlight the importance of critically addressing the narrative of the biological clock and its implications for women's views and experiences of reproductive time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as a starting point the ontological differentiation between animal and human as a fundamental mechanism of biopolitical violence, I analyze the ambiguity of the imaginaries of flesh and animality in the contexts of revolutionary Cuba and Venezuela. I demonstrate how the dynamics of power marked by an ontological division between human and not human, often ascribed to neoliberalism, paradoxically operate in socialist regimes. I examine several instances of visual arts, performance, literature, and public demonstrations, to reveal, on the one hand, sacrificial state power over the population’s bodies and, on the other, examples of disobedience against the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]