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This article attempts to further develop the positionality of place through aggregated effects of vision construction by different positioned actants. We attempt to integrate two concepts: the feminist positionality that stresses the subjects' situatedness in networks and their relational power of vision constructions in host places and the networking behavior of brokers with their exclusive connections to small world clusters, as argued by international relations network analysis. Our attempts at the bodily level of situated and subjective vision construction aim to address two challenges: first, how to address the entanglement of geopolitics and biopolitics, and second, how do encounters account for the power of a place premised on its areal resources through the behavior of brokers. The institutionalization of special economic zone development in Cambodia, from the introduction of new norms to law-making and planning, is chosen as a case for its dynamic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author analyzes Estonia as a case study to explore two interrelated research questions – how exceptions are produced and reversed through the mechanisms of sovereignty and governmentality projected onto geo- and biopolitical domains, and how the new practices of exceptionalization and de-exceptionalization contribute to the emergence of a new spatial order at Europe's eastern margins? Three types of policies unfolded in Estonia as reactions to the Russian war against Ukraine are identified. First, the Estonian government introduced extraordinary measures based on the logic of national interests, which left much space for discretionary power to define risks, threats, and dangers. Secondly, some policy domains were intentionally de-exceptionalized for the sake of their better integration into Estonian normative space and as a reaction to the effects of the war. Third, in some cases there were exceptions from exceptions, which meant certain steps back toward normalization of the previously taken exceptional measures. The theoretical frame of the article consists of two nodal concepts – sovereignty and governmentality to be projected onto geo- and biopolitics treated as spheres in which sovereign and governmental powers operate and expose their political qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russo-Ukrainian War has produced a myriad of necropolitical discourses regarding the justification of death and the subjugation of lives to potential death. Contemporary necropolitical scholarship has primarily focused on the civilian, subaltern dimension of this paradigm in a wider context, yet in this war, combatants from the opposing armed forces are the individuals most consistently embedded in these conditions of potential death. How, then, is the potential death of the combatant justified and legitimized? Through a critical engagement with the concept of the border as the front, this article will explore how the subjugation of Ukrainian and Russian combatants to the conditions of potential death is discursively justified through a framework of the necropolitical logics of survival and martyrdom. Through these logics, two competing necropolitical regimes of truth have arisen, nevertheless leading to the same conclusion – the mobilized bodies of the combatants at the front – yet promising different versions of a life beyond death itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), which recounts the culmination of the Haitian revolution against French colonialism (1791–1804), evokes a nostalgia for colonial order even though colonialism would remain in the Caribbean for decades. The epistolary novel's narrator, an American visiting Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti), yearns for the "paradise" that she imagines has been destroyed by the revolution, aligning Sansay with Paul Gilroy's notion of postcolonial melancholia. More insidiously, in Secret History, the longing for the reinstatement of the colonial system in Saint Domingue positions people of African descent outside "frames of recognition," as Judith Butler in Frames of War conceptualizes the way in which biopolitical forces constitute personhood. I argue that for Sansay, the norms that constitute a living being as recognizable as a life are the ideologies of Romantic settler colonialism, as well as American exceptionalism. As such, within Secret History, Sansay reifies a stratified racial and national hierarchy while also actively denying the state violence that sustains it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how digital platforms are implicated in the neoliberalization of conservation by turning nature and protected areas into tourism commodities. We mobilize Ash et al.'s (2018) heuristic of unit, vibration, and tone to analyze TripAdvisor's interfaces for contributing, exploring, and reviewing nature-based points of interest in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile. We contend that digital tourism platforms express what we term digital environmental biopower, which designates these platforms' capacities to enlist digital users as agents who engage in biopolitical practices such as classifying, scoring, and raking natural areas as objects whose value is reliant on their tourism attributes. We argue that these digital modulations both sustain and are sustained by an environmental biopolitical regime in which "pristine" natural areas are "made to live" or "allowed to die" in the global digitally mediated (eco)tourism marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of medicalisation began around the end of the 18th century (1) due to the emergence of the bourgeoisie and its values, which included the right to be healthy and carry out one's everyday skills, actions which in turn entailed the creation of a state's wealth. In this period, biopolitics was established, a new form of power administration. This made use of medicine to create behaviour that was useful for social activity, shifting the focus from the administration of the law to bringing subjects back within norms through therapeutic action (2). This stemmed from the fact that the key issue in governing a population is to maintain the workforce and to establish, through health, modes of behaviour that are valuable in its preservation. Genetic engineering and new forms of biomedicine have changed the paradigm of medicalisation into biomedicalisation, marking a shift from medical control over external nature to the control and transformation of inner nature. Through this optimisation, man regains a natural mode of expression within social norms. Clin Ter 2024; 175 (5):262-264 doi: 10.7417/CT.2024.5128 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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]

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]

The COVID-19 pandemic propelled many countries into a "state of exception," under which several regular governance norms were suspended and emergency regulations were enacted. China was no exception. After its initial domestic vacillation, China implemented rigorous measures to control its borders and employed digital technologies, such as health codes and intelligent gate magnets, to streamline inbound travel management. These measures were in place until the end of 2022. Drawing on 30 in-depth semi-structured interviews and public and social media posts, this study examines the multifaceted role of digital governance in the management of inbound travelers during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Digital governance facilitated and streamlined the quarantining of inbound travelers. Meanwhile, the use of digital measures was entangled with the institutional logic of China's local governance, which sometimes had to reconcile contradictory goals. Theoretically, the paper enriches our understanding of not only the idiosyncrasies of Chinese digital governance but also of techno-biopolitics under a COVID-19-induced tentative state of exception, which sheds light on a possible future in which digital technologies are deeply integrated into the institutional logic of governance in an increasingly turbulent world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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]

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

Copyright of Journal of Modern Turkish History Studies / Cumhuriyet Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi (CTAD) is the property of Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article reads the fantasy behind depictions of sterility in sf film and television, focusing in particular on Blade Runner 2049, Orphan Black, and Children of Men. Historically contextualized by climate change on the one hand and the extractive logic of racial biocapitalism on the other, sterility apocalypses are a part of an emergent biopolitics of reproduction that seek to enclose the living labor of the body – not just at the level of the cell or the tissue, but at the source of generativity itself, here metonymized by sexual reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 lockdowns instituted a new kind of normal for many in China in the past three years. From Wuhan to Shanghai, urban lockdowns (封城 fengcheng) have become synonymous with the state's draconian COVID control measures enforced upon the whole of society, which caused many forms of loss and suffering. However, after the early days of COVID control in Shanghai in April 2022, the term "lockdown" vanished from official discourse, replaced surreptitiously by a neologism— jingmo (静默), meaning "to silence." What did it mean, then, for millions to live in a state of "silence" when the official policy denied the existence of a lockdown? Was jingmo merely another word for lockdown, or did it imply something different? This article reflects on the changes that took place from enforcing lockdowns in Wuhan to administering "silence" in Shanghai, and examines how China's zero-COVID control brings different biopolitics to life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How were lockdowns implemented, experienced, and perceived under China's zero-COVID regime? How do we make sense of its sudden collapse after three years of its hegemonic presence dominating Chinese lives? What does it tell us about the zero-COVID regime's inherent inconsistencies and sociopolitical contradictions as expressed in everyday life? This essay serves as the introduction to the Currents section, a compilation of seven research articles that delve into the lived experiences of individuals in different cities under China's zero-COVID regime, particularly during and after the 2022 Shanghai lockdown. By exploring the diverse ways in which individuals navigated through everyday political fickleness, irresolvable contradictions, falsehood and absurdities that turned life around, this essay argues that people often simultaneously upheld zero-COVID and circumvented it in creative ways. While many supported beliefs and practices in line with China's top-down narrative of nationalistic sacrifice and "positive energy," others forged alternative interpretations and took on acts of disengagement and disobedience. [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

China underwent a major change in population policies, from "more is better" during the 1950s-70s to the one-child policy that began in the early 1980s and ended in 2016. With reference to Agamben's and Foucault's theories of biopolitics, this article considers population policies as biopolitical mechanisms that subject individuals to national interest. Mo Yan is one of the contemporary Chinese writers who reflect on the sacrifice of individual rights and freedom for the common good, which is problematic in that it leads to objectification and politicization of female bodies and collective guilt on the part of executors and supporters of the policy. Resistance against collectivism, represented by Wang Dan in Mo Yan's novel Frog (Wa, 2012), is a recurring theme in contemporary Chinese literature. While the Western literary tradition frequently celebrates individualism, some works like Emile Zola's Fruitfulness (Fécondité, 1899) show concerns for extreme individualism that causes social alienation, self-centeredness, and personal guilt. Through a comparative reading of Frog and Fruitfulness from the perspectives of biopolitics, gender, and ethics, I argue that Frog, as a representative work of contemporary Chinese rural literature, engages in a dialogue with Fruitfulness and enriches world literature by providing a critical insight on population crisis and exploring tensions between individualism and collectivism and between public and private spheres, serving as a reference for reconsidering current demographic issues around the globe. [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]

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 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]

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]

The article analyzes the sociodemographic diversity in the Eastern Plains of Colombia and how it has generated resistance against economic, political, and environmental powers. It is based on interviews with social leaders and shows the existence of creative, political, and cultural everyday resistances. The lack of national cohesion and the influence of regional identities on Colombian nationalism are highlighted. It also addresses the importance of making heteronomous memories and everyday resistances visible in the construction of the nation. The article mentions the importance of memory and political struggle in the Colombian context, as well as the need to identify and address problems from a strong political position. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Revista de Filosofía (0185-3481) is the property of Universidad Iberoamericana Cuidad de Mexico and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, a new health policy emerged in the Papal States. Institutions, rules, and procedures changed in order to guarantee a more careful control of the territory and the movements of the population. In this transformation, it is possible to notice a reformulation of the relationship between public health and state security. Within a renewal of state institutions in the name of the rejection of revolutionary ideology, health mobilization becomes one of the decisive factors in the evolution of relations between government and subjects. These latter were called to take an active role, in terms of defending their own interests and those of the community, transforming health ruling into a process of permanent self-regulation of the population for the purposes of state security. In this way the transition from an emergency defense of «public safety», typical of the ancient regime, to a permanent promotion of public health, specific of «biological modernity» regimes, started to be accomplished. [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]

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]

The COVID-19 pandemic as a global threat caused the introduction of different biopolitical measures accompanied by discourses on otherness, including xenophobic, racist, nationalist, or new orientalist discourses. The aim of this research is to map discourses on otherness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our general hypothesis is that, despite the differences in social and cultural contexts, discourses on otherness generated during the pandemic legitimized biopolitical actions and/or measures in addition to exacerbating social, political and cultural differences. The research is based on a semi-systematic approach to literature review using Situational Analysis and Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse. In conclusion, we discuss the impact of discourse studies in the context of the global emergency. [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]

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]

This article aims at investigating two narratives about historical moments of sociopolitical, economic, and cultural crisis represented through literary descriptions of epidemics. I will focus on the subtext of the plague in one of the foundational texts of the Western canon, the Decameron, paying particular attention to the metaphor of contagion as a phenomenon allowing for the renegotiations of biopolitical borders in the Florentine society of the Trecento. Building on images of contamination as vehicles of contagion, I am interested in interrogating the roots and scope of the reconsideration of traditional norms and accustomed practices that Giovanni Bocaccio frames in biopolitical terms in the description of the 1348 plague in Florence. I will also take into consideration Philip Roth's 2010 novel Nemesis, which is set against the background of the polio outbreak in Newark in 1944. Nemesis depicts a prophylactic measure identical to the country retreat that famously frames the main narrative in the Decameron, yet in Roth's novel it represents a failed attempt to escape contagion. Another narrative trait that Nemesis shares with the Decameron is the context: a society on the verge of essential transformations in the political, cultural, and economic realm. Indeed, mercantile Florence of the Trecento was on the brink of a new era, the Early Modern period, likewise 1944 USA was involved in WWII, fighting for the geopolitical supremacy over a new world order (the Cold War) and shaping a new socio-economic model: neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is little consensus on the precise reasons Japan managed to maintain a relatively low number of Covid cases overall in 2020, the Japanese government was quick to publicize their approach as a success, calling it the 'Japan Model'. Drawing on interviews with physicians working in Tokyo area hospitals during the pandemic as well as Japanese and English language media, we argue that this promotion is an example of the way nation branding is a form of biopower. Although physicians ultimately critiqued the government for its failure to implement clear public health policies, they simultaneously relied on its promotion of Japan's superior culture to rationalize publicized epidemiological successes. This paper argues that as branding works to metapragmatically frame, and then activate, messages already in public circulation, it coopts individuals to independently take up branding practices, symbolically displacing those messages from government programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to situate the anxieties engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic within the framework of the Anthropocene to analyse the multi-faceted ramifications of human and nonhuman interaction. By connecting this ongoing global crisis of human health with the politics of climate change, it attempts to read the forgotten agency of the nonhuman microbe in the light of the rude disruption of the traditional understandings of biopolitics (where bare life has taken centre stage) and the difficulties it has brought in bridging the rift between abstract and concrete information, leading to the scapegoating of victims. It ends with the suggestion of preparation for greener futures by imagining human health within planetary health instead of an anxious wait for a return to pre-pandemic times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]