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The article examines vampires as "outsiders" using critical theorist Michel Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and governmentality to analyze their portrayal in over 30 Anglophone films. Topics include the vampire's relationship with history, the regulation of behavior within governance, and the role of screenwriting practices in shaping the genre.

The article examines the mutual relations between education, biopolitics and authority. The objective is to deconstruct authority in relation to three biopolitical issues: abortion, sexual orientation, and IVF. This deconstruction is performed by analysis of the manifestations and strategies of authority employed in Polish textbooks for four subjects at secondary school: social studies, family life education, ethics, and religion. This provided an answer to the question both about the significance of biopolitical issues in the education process and about the role of authority in their construction. The main rhetorical practices for the construction of authority were science, using the strategy of "stating facts"; law, with the strategy of "establishing order"; and religion, whose strategy is "initiating opposition". In the article, I conduct a qualitative analysis of each of the three rhetorical practices and make conclusions on the role of authority in the process of teaching biopolitical issues in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I shall outline a thought experiment aimed at reversing the relationship between bíos and zoē established by the anthropological machine. Giorgio Agamben resorts to the notion of "anthropological machine" to define the mechanism that produces the qualified life of human beings (bíos), through the inclusive exclusion of their biological life (zoē). My experiment does not render the exclusionary logic of the anthropological machine inoperative, but reverses the hierarchy it establishes between bíos and zoē. The result is what I shall call the machine of biologism, or simply the biological machine. If the anthropological machine establishes its perimeters of exclusion/inclusion on the grounds of bíos, the biological machine resorts to zoē. Thus, the biological machine does not operate according to the anthropological difference, which deems the human being as essentially not an animal, but according to what I shall define as the biological difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to the genocidal actions taking place in Gaza, the Israeli military also conducts large-scale assaults in the West Bank that destroy individuals' homes and communities, and invades Palestinian homes one home and garden at a time. While there are 250 of these invasions per month, they receive little scrutiny. Most of these invasions occur across the 19 refugee camps in the occupied Palestinian territories, where home is viewed as a gendered and temporal space: transient, penetrable, and violable. To analyze home invasion through a feminist lens, interviews were conducted with ten women-identifying refugees who described it as one of many forms of collective punishment that Palestinians experience that determines ability or debility as well as who may live and who may/must die. Interview participants saw home invasion as a type of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence that affects neighbors, kin, and communities and is mitigated through the collective support of women. Work on this article started well before the devastating and horrific events that unfolded after October 7, 2023. The article's scrutiny of the militarized infrastructure across the West Bank brings important context to the state violence in Gaza, and lays bare the vulnerabilities of the West Bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pandemic revealed the workings of biopower in relation to people with disabilities. In focusing on lives worth living, decisions were made based on metrics about the quality of life of various groups. Ultimately, the pandemic revealed the power structure lurking behind a rhetoric of "care and compassion." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deconstruction occupies an "eccentric" place in the varied field of biopolitics, as it radicalizes the indissoluble knot that binds life to power. On the basis of Foucauldian analysis, Derrida reflects on the "deviation" of biopolitics, which turns into bio-thanato-politics, that is to say, politics over life (bios) and death (thanatos). Life and death are not opposite, rather, they are inseparable, as one has inscribed the other within itself. Derrida's bio-thanato-politics, as a deconstruction of the concept of life and its relationship with the power, which is always the power of life and death, is not a different declination of biopolitics, but its radicalization. Beyond the biopolitical alternative between a power over life and a power of life, Derrida thinks a bio-thanato-politics, namely, a politics of the survival. Surviving well together, indeed, is the essential character of his democracy to-come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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 explores how China's propaganda system operates as an aspect of governance, especially how propagandists understand the public opinion they seek to influence. Understanding the concept of yuqing (public opinion conditions) is crucial for understanding propaganda in China. Yuqing is considered akin to the medical condition of public opinion (yulun). Hence, propaganda is treatment that the state provides to an organic social body of public opinion, which is subject to constant monitoring and treatment. The party-state is keen on establishing standards and norms about what a healthy and clean society should be. Thus, this paper argues that the propaganda system does not contribute to responsive authoritarianism by collecting grassroots information, but instead prioritizes cleansing public discourse in accordance with party-state logic. Furthermore, contrary to the belief that authoritarian propaganda focuses on demobilizing collective resistance and forcing compliance, China's propaganda system disciplines the public by actively constructing discursive norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extractivism of resources that guarantee the continuity of life in dignified conditions accompanies the concentration of capital in a few hands; it means the alienated reification of reality, in favor of maintaining class privileges. These injustices use racist biopolitical mechanisms in order to classify and segregate populations as a correlate of the social division of labor that structures capitalist rapacity. Situation that causes the breakdown of democratic ways of coexistence. Subverting this provision deserves to destructure the mechanisms of population subjection by regulating fair human relations; calls for the collective appropriation of the right to manifest culture as self-care. Therefore, the research analyzes racism as a characteristic alienation of contemporary counterdemocracies; Next, it advocates ethically mediating community relations by taking advantage of the emancipatory capacity of humanizing pedagogies. It is a bibliographical study, of a diachronic nature, which is organized according to the deductive rationalist approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The quarantine hotel is one of several political instruments used to control the spread of Covid-19 in diverse countries, from Norway to China. I apply discourse analysis to map the discursive struggle to define the quarantine hotel in Norway. The government and other key political actors channel a biopolitical discourse constituting the quarantine hotel as necessary to protect the Norwegian population from imported contagion. This discourse's meaning is contested by a juridical counter-discourse articulated by lawyers and travellers, which constitutes the quarantine hotel as imprisonment/internment and a breach of rights. Travellers tend to combine this with a biopolitical counter-discourse, dismissing the quarantine hotel's biopolitical properties, strengthening the juridical critique. These discourses are important resources in a transnational, ongoing struggle, where the prize is the legitimacy of the politics of Covid-19, and the very ordering of the post-pandemic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article continues a debate on the ecological paradigm shift and its impact on art and art history. It explores the concept of Environmentality, a biopolitical governance model that regulates relational milieus of both human and nonhuman entities, as introduced by Michel Foucault and expanded by Thomas Lemke. Florian Sprenger emphasizes the importance of historicizing the concept of circulation in biopolitics, which manages bodies, populations, and environments.

Copyright of Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale is the property of Berghahn Books 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 paper traces the meaning of technology in Arendt and Foucault's work, their historical analyses of technology, and the way that their notions of technology's role in modernity influence their historical methods. I argue that whilst the two political thinkers approach the idea of technology from different perspectives, there is also substantial overlap in the way that they conceive of technology – often critically – as a wide-ranging set of practices of power interlocked with particular modes of knowledge. This helps to properly situate some aspects of their work that converge, for instance their analyses of what Foucault calls 'biopolitics'. But their different conceptions of the historical character of technology, and its relationship to modernity, also create divergence: their concepts of 'technology' suggest different ways of thinking through the nature of historical continuity and discontinuity and the degree of access that we have to meaningful histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the three major novels George Gissing published between 1889 and 1893: The Nether World, New Grub Street, and The Odd Women. These Long Depression novels, as they could be called, demonstrate the constant pressure exerted by the need to earn money to hold starvation at bay, to achieve an always precarious subsistence or survival. Gissing depicts circular, inescapable patterns in which one writes to earn money in order to survive just long enough to write more to buy more—never enough—food. His novels insistently ponder, and seem to try to literalize in reflexive ways, the question of what it means to "live on" one's writing as a late nineteenth‐century author. In so doing, this article suggests, these novels participate in the transformation of hunger from a troubling Malthusian fact of nature to be managed by political economy into both a biopolitical tool of the state, seen as a positive good in its spur to labor, as well as a central topos of an emerging modernist style of fiction that reflects, draws attention to, and critiques those biopolitical mechanisms. Notwithstanding his criticisms of a society that leaves artists hungry, Gissing seemed to personally believe that his own experiences of having "looked starvation in the face," having passed through "circumstances of hunger" and converted them into art, were part of what gave his work value and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the durability of high post-mortem examination rates in Israel between the 1950s-1980s. Previous studies overlooked the issue of medical authority and the social history of autopsy, focusing on policy, technological development, and conflict between science and religion. By contrast, our analysis brings together the medical interest in unlimited research of dead bodies and the power relations between doctors and subaltern groups in Israel. Based on the Israeli State Archives, the Hebrew University Archives, and the daily press, we argue that medical biopolitical aspirations and the public shaped the history of postmortem examinations in Israel. High rates were embedded in the medical construction of doubt regarding the cause of death that only physicians could resolve by autopsy. Civilian protests led to a temporary decrease in the 1960s, while political and medical intervention brought about a gradual resurgence in post-mortem rates in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes two Catalan novels, Albert Sánchez Piñol's Victus: Barcelona 1714 (2012) and Martí Domínguez's L'esperit del temps (2019), in light of the concept of immunity developed by the Italian theorist Roberto Esposito. It is argued that the two works share an affinity by demonstrating the material relevance of Esposito's concepts, especially with reference to the skin as the basis for biopolitics. Victus links the rending of skin to textuality but simultaneously uses the breaking open of the body to highlight community as an assemblage of diverse material actors and agents. L'esperit del temps situates Nazi thanatopolitics at the intersection of biology and law, emphasizing how a politics of death relies on what kinds of matter, such as the phenotype of skin, are fetishized, pathologized, and subjected to human-centered techniques of power. Domínguez returns to the Second World War to comment on more contemporary concerns regarding bioethics and the increasingly mainstream presence of extremist politics in Europe. Opening the discussion with the reflections on skin of Donna Haraway and Jean-Luc Nancy, the article closes by engaging with Haraway's work on companionship and the "illicit fusion" of beings, particularly in the historical period referred to as the "Chthulucene," in which kinship and multispecies assemblages are viewed as tools for survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent research in cultural studies that has observed "the emergence of biopolitics in the Americas," this article proposes a new aspect to the early modern experience of eating. Rather than simply a vehicle for pollution, eating appears in the 1555 captivity of the Hessian adventurer and autobiographer Hans Staden by Tupinambá in Brazil as a flashpoint for techniques of coercive self-governance. Working as an arquebusier on early Portuguese sugar plantations, Staden witnessed the dangerous sweetness of early modern capitalism. Yet Staden's keen sensitivity to the political economy of cassava root flour, a commodity on which he himself depended, also suggests he witnessed his own unhappy conscription into a regime that required him to discipline himself in order to survive. Staden's frustrated memories showcase biopower's surprisingly intimate, personal, reach, revising our understanding of modernity as altogether distinct from the feudal past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the article is to show how the necropoder contributes to the study of organizations in Mexico. It starts from developing and contributing to the Foucaultian conceptions of biopoder and biopolitics, for this purpose various authors are used. The analysis focuses on the violence exerted by organizations in Mexico, the production of subjectivity, discourses and institutional power practices. Power is analyzed as a relationship of strength and strength relations that are exercised at the microphysical level in organizations; But it is also necessary and prudent to perform a macrophysic power, from this the methodology is the analysis of discourse and institutional practices from a genalogical horizon. In both analytical levels the effects of necropoder exercise are shown. Here I centers in addition to the discussion of the necropoder, in what I have called genocide, homo demens, reification and subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text constitutes a reflection from Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, beginning from the genealogical writings of the author in which he raises the development of social medicine and society’s medicalization processes to make a contrast with the social and political situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide. The aim of the writing is to propose a critical look at the biopower exercise which is justified from fear and what it causes as a social teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores how Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) presents a State controlled systematic manipulation and psychological conditioning of individuals through Hypnopaedia and Soma. This paper adopts a comparative analysis, comparing the aforementioned means of mass conditioning used in the novel with the techniques used by the realworld capitalist states. It further delves into the nature of physical and mental manipulation of mass subjects in fiction compared with the reality. The analysis is conducted in lieu of Foucauldian notion of biopower, which characterizes the exertion of political power over populations, effectively reducing them to mere instruments of social control. The findings reveal that the rapid development and scientific progress observed in the modern world has made it possible for the states to use the fictional means of mass conditioning in the real world. The subconscious conditioning through mass media and the pervasive use of psychotropics are the real-world manifestations of Huxley's prophecies. Hence, it implies a trajectory towards the dystopia that he has predicted in his dystopian science fiction novel Brave New World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Folklor / Edebiyat is the property of Cyprus International University 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 early Republican period of Turkey (1923–1945), the newly established state provided a biopolitical agenda for developing modern and secular life in order to break the Ottoman heritage religious-traditional social structure. Thereupon, sports, as an indicator of modernization, took an important place in the biopolitics of the regime. Sports spaces were instrumentalized as a medium where biopower infiltrated to build a modern life. In order to effectively accomplish the modern life-building project, the Republican Regime invited international modernist architects to insert sports spaces into the social realm in urban, rural, and industrial areas. Accordingly, this paper explores sports-related spaces as a biopolitical agenda of the Republican Regime in the discourse of planning the city of Ankara and rural and industrial areas. Exploring history through the lens of sports reveals how the city of Ankara and rural and industrial areas formed a spatialized approach to the Republican Regime as a biopower to develop modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks whether we can identify a vitalistic undertow in Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy that would make sense for contemporary political and constitutional theory as well. The arguments are presented by contrasting Nietzsche's philosophy with the social theory of Herbert Spencer. After an introduction, the first main part discusses Spencer and his so-called 'organic analogy' in which he draws parallels between natural organisms and the body politic. Spencer's social theory is a paradigmatic example of vitalism and organic state theory and, as a counterpoint, can help tease out Nietzsche's vitalism as well. The article then examines Nietzsche's admittedly fragmentary encounters with Spencer and his flirtations with vitalism and organic state theory. In the conclusions, the reconstructed narrative about Nietzsche's vitalism is linked with Nietzsche's main philosophical works in the hope of provisionally extracting a Nietzschean 'constitutional theory' from his notion of will to power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on early modern state-building in Europe has focused on war as its main driver and therefore on states' relationships with men. Feminist scholars have critiqued the Weberian conceptions this literature relies on as being gender biased. I suggest an alternative theoretical starting point for theories of early modern state-building: the political imperatives created by the demographic fluctuations of the Malthusian trap. Harnessing Foucault's concept of biopower and its application to the construction of gender, I argue that population fluctuations incentivized demographic regulation, in particular of childbearing, in order to keep birth rates high and maternal and infant mortality low, implying that early modern European states were constituted through the construction and maintenance of gender regimes. I propose strategies for empirical investigation and argue that a more accurate account of early modern European state-building needs to incorporate demographic regulation and therefore requires gender to be at its center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discourse of care undergirded colonial political rationality during the era of Indian indenture-ship in the Caribbean. In this essay the voyage of the Salsette from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1858 serves as an entry point into a broader conversation on the repeated archival invocation of care toward coolies during their passage to the plantation colonies. Care, which is synonymous with neither affect nor benevolence, refers to a series of techniques aimed at managing bodies traded for profit. Analyzing the apparatuses through which care for indentured servants was administered, the essay illuminates the racialized and caste-based knowledge systems that were mobilized to "make live" the reserve of potential labor force aboard. Concomitantly, it reads the colonial archive for moments in which indentured servants register their presence through their responses to being or refusal to be cared for and considers the stakes of such refusal for the colonial capitalist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito's biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito's framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment—is essential for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction situates our approach to the nexus between citizenship, beauty politics and the state, highlighting how embodied aesthetics constitute a central dimension of state-subject relations. We propose 'aesthetic citizenship' to describe embodied aesthetics as a biopolitical field of self-making and a site of disciplining, educating and manufacturing 'proper' citizens through visual and sometimes surgical technologies of surveillance and recognition. In this introduction, we analyse how norms of bodily appearance are related to and shaped by state-led processes of citizenship, first in relation to ideas of nationhood and representation, and secondly in relation to what could be termed the biopolitics of beauty and aesthetic governance. Foregrounding affective, multisensorial and embodied aesthetics, this introduction probes a crucial, yet often overlooked lens with which to zoom in on the dynamics between state images and practices in their interrelatedness and as they are embedded in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip K. Dick's science fiction classic Do Androids Dream of Electrics Sheep? and its adaptation movie Blade Runner by Ridley Scott feature a devastated earth where bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalks authentic human replicants, designed for a short term highly flexible labor power. A group of these androids infiltrate to the earth of the productive apparatus which manufactured them, trying to persuade their maker to re-program their genetic makeup. Biopolitics as conceived by Roberto Esposito is apt at exploiting the reserves of sense present in Dick's critical scenario, and managing the mixing of languages of politics and biology, which originally were kept apart in the dystopic dimension of the novel and in the political philosophy tradition. Discarding the frontal approach to the categories of politics, Esposito urges to interrogate the categories of politics obliquely, thus entering the hidden layers of their meaning, fostering an innovative coexistence of opposites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging with issues of categorisation, human supremacy, and (the lack of) empathy, in this article I read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021), André Alexis's Fifteen Dogs (2015), and Alice Hatcher's The Wonder That Was Ours (2018); novels that I argue are connected by their interrogation of biopolitically produced and policed boundaries between human and nonhuman beings, and by their focus on inter-creatural empathy and care. Through the lens of critical posthumanism, Agambenian biopolitics, and care ethics, I explore how these texts interrogate boundaries between animals, humans and techno-creatures, and I contend that they provide nonhuman and marginalised human characters with a (narrative) voice in order to challenge and undermine anthropocentric conceptions of subjectivity, agency and community. Mapping the novels' portrayal of inter-creatural care relationships, I argue that affirming vulnerability potentially leads to the recognition of a "strange kinship" between human and nonhuman characters; and it is my ultimate claim that these texts turn proximity and porosity into productive and often transgressive inter-creatural entanglements, thereby disrupting processes of exclusionary differentiation, and opening the way to an imaginative exploration of new ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The science fiction writer Han Song's trilogy Hospital, published between 2016 and 2018 in China, presents an eerie world of eternal pain within futuristic hospitals. With Michael Berry's translation coming out from January 2023, this work by one of the most well-known writers of contemporary Chinese science fiction is made available to an English readership. This article interrogates the nature of this pain which articulates not an impending risk of death but the patients' inability to die. Through a process of datafication and digitalization, the patients are converted into streams of algorithmic codes and dehumanized as digital "profiles" to be collected, deposited, and re-accessed. These "profiles" become sophisticated enough to develop their own agency that replaces the patients as the targets of biopolitics, indicating an ontological transition that disempowers human beings and subjectivizes the meta-being of the patients' digital "changelings." I argue that this ontological transition signals a historical change in governmentality, epistemology, and political economy, gesturing towards new methods for the governance and commodification of populations in a discourse of patior ergo sum — I suffer, therefore I am. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Sexuality has long been central to ethnographic constructions of exotic difference, an index critically demarcating the borders of European Modernity and its negative and positive Others, and underpinning both extra-European colonial domination and modern biopolitical regimes of subjectivity, citizenship, and society. Representations of Eastern European sexuality, however, were also crucial to both Western and Eastern imaginings of modern "European" selves, politics, and societies, and their boundaries of belonging. Yet while recent scholarship has drawn attention to reemerging European orientalisms and sexuality's salience in postsocialist politics, particularly in relation to recent postsocialist homophobias, little scholarly attention has been paid to the significance of these histories of European sexual difference for the biopolitical character of current borders of postsocialist difference. In this article I combine postcolonial theories of sexuality, geographies of European belonging, and postsocialist studies of sexual politics to analyze popular, political, and scholarly discourses surrounding sexual politics and homophobia in Hungary. Melding historical debates about Hungarian belonging, discursive analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that dominant interpretations of these events constitute postsocialist homophobia as a particularly consequential "problem" reinscribing deeply rooted, and profoundly biopolitical, borders between Europe's East and West. These readings not only naturalize an imagined West as a space of proper sexual citizenship and tolerance, masking its persistent heteronormativity; they also render Hungary a time–space of complex, ambiguous sexual-political resistance, essentializing its inhabitants as inevitable sexual others of Western Modernity: for some failures of proper sexual citizenship; for others avatars of alternative, sexually-traditional Europeanness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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