Biopolitical Dimensions Research Articles

BREAKING SILENCE, SHAPING HISTORY: UNVEILING MARGINALIZED FEMALE WAR-CRIME SURVIVORS’ VOICES

This paper is the synopsis of an ongoing qualitative research project on an intersectional and biopolitical analysis of selected war memoirs written by marginalized female war crime survivors. The primary object of this research is to explore the layers of subjectivity as expressed through the memoirs by women who, in different corners of the world, were subjected to different forms of war crimes during the late twentieth and the twenty-first century. The research paper aims to find whether these life-writings should be recognized only as chronicles of their silent sufferings or as bold proclamations of their resistance against the biopolitical oppressions they were exposed to. In order to do so, a theoretical framework comprising intersectionality and biopolitics will be used according to which the selected memoirs will be critically analyzed. The proposed research will follow a research methodology that is descriptive, correlational, analytical, and exploratory in approach. The primary findings reveal the historical trajectory of women's autobiographical writings related to war and conflicts, identifying the scarcity of such narratives that underscores the challenges faced by survivors in documenting their experiences. The expected outcome is to offer a counter-narrative to official war stories, demonstrating the efficacy of testimonial life-writings from marginalized individuals as human rights activism tools, with potential implications for policy-making, advocacy against sexual violence in conflict zones, and contributing evidence for prevention, justice, and support initiatives, while also highlighting ethical challenges and paving the way for further studies on the intersectional and biopolitical dimensions of sexual violence.

The biopolitics of algorithmic governmentality: How the US military imagines war in the age of neurobiology and artificial intelligence

With the objective to predict and pre-empt the emergence of political violence, the US Department of Defence (DoD) has devoted increasing attention to the intersection between neurobiology and artificial intelligence. Concepts such as ‘cognitive biotechnologies’, ‘digital biosecurity’ and large-scale collection of ‘neurodata’ herald a future in which neurobiological intervention on a global scale is believed to come of age. This article analyses how the relationship between neurobiology and AI – between the human and the machine – is conceived, made possible, and acted upon within the SMA programme, an interdisciplinary research programme sponsored by the DoD. By showcasing the close intersection between the computer sciences and the neurosciences within the US military, the article questions descriptions of algorithmic governmentality as decentring the human, and as juxtaposed to biopolitical techniques to regulate processes of subjectivity. The article shows that within US military discourse, new biotechnologies are seen to engender algorithmic governmentality a biopolitical dimension, capable of monitoring and regulating emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and subjectivity on population level, particularly targeting the minds and brains of ‘vulnerable’ populations in the global South.

Platform urbanisation, infrastructures and techno-politics: The turn towards urban citizenship

This article analyses how digital platforms challenge and redefine the way in which urban forms of citizenship are shaped. What we call ‘platform urbanisation’ accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when digital platforms penetrated with increasing rapidity into every aspect of urban life. While these digital platforms have facilitated new possibilities for engagement, access to services, efficiency in processing data, and customising responses to people online and offline, they also pose political challenges related to inequality, privacy, exclusion and social polarisation. Developing a techno-political urban environment built upon inclusion, equality, and respect for the rights of users, necessitates leveraging the potential of digital platforms to empower citizens and acknowledging and incorporating the political nature of this new urban environment. Furthermore, the intersection between the political influence of platforms on the governance of citizens and everyday life has a biopolitical dimension, since the power of platforms is exercised through policies and practices that affect individuals and collectivities. The article clarifies two essential facets of platform urbanisation: (1) the political nature of such a process, which requires a reframing of citizenship and (2) the role of both material and immaterial infrastructures in this process, which serve thus to constitute it as a new biopolitical territory. This conceptual expansion allows us to interpret digital platforms as an inextricable merging of political rationality, administrative techniques and technology.

HISTORY OF THE BODY AND BIOPOLITICS IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERALISM

The article is a reflection on the book ‘Companion to Beauty Politics edited by M. Craig and published by Routledge. This collective monograph is interesting not just for its analysis of intersectionality (the inextricable intertwining of race, class and gender politics), but also for its identification of the biopolitical dimension of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, which views people as human capital that must be effectively managed in order to maintain its hegemony. The main goal of aesthetic politics in the era of neoliberalism is the commercialization of body care labor and the expansion of aesthetic consumption for profit. Like medicine, education, sports and culture, aesthetic representations have become a business under neoliberalism, not just managed from above, but an example of maximum internalization a fusion of management and consumption at the level of individual subjectivation strategies.

The Geopolitics of Infrastructure and the Unmaking of an Island: The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge

ABSTRACT The completion of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge marks not only a record-setting achievement in engineering, but also a materialisation of ongoing efforts by the People’s Republic of China to engage in cooperative projects aimed at expanding and deepening integrative connections with the semi-autonomous Special Administrative Regions of Macau and Hong Kong. This paper explores the colonial and post-colonial social construction of Hong Kong as a political-economic island, and the implications this carries into the tensions and open conflicts that have unfolded under the One Country, Two Systems agreement. Using the bridge as a case, it critically examines the geopolitical and biopolitical dimensions of infrastructure as a practice of subnational (de)bordering. The case renders visible a contemporary moment where infrastructure occupies a central position at the conjuncture of technology, advanced governmentality and shifting geographies of sovereignty in the People’s Republic of China, within subnational city-regional development plans, as well as internationally in projects, such as the geographically expansive Belt and Road Initiative. A close examination of the Bridge project highlights the constructed and contested nature of borders, as well as the complex identities and ideologies that define them.

The sickle and the garlic chives: Volatility in the Chinese stock market

AbstractThis essay explores the meaning that volatility assumes in the Chinese stock market context. Drawing on discussions from ‘mom and pop’ online forums, it argues investors operate in a relational position with the Chinese state regulators that both sustain and threaten their market activities. Chinese stock markets are known to be the most volatile in the world. To face the state's arbitrary intervention in the market, investors must constantly juggle the options of either leaning on and trusting the regulators’ capacity to protect and rescue their stocks or engaging in risky margin trading and short-selling activities. This contradictory behavior is reflected in the popular self-mocking meme that keeps circulating in investors online forums, the one of the jiucai (meaning ‘garlic chives’). The investors often use it with irony to describe their own tendency to throw cash into the markets again and again, hoping to regain the money they lost in previous investments, never learning a lesson. Linking the financial with the biopolitical dimension, the essay takes the jiucai meme to show the extent to which volatility points to the production of new subjects whose resilience involves the adoption of practices of speculation to conjure a future for themselves that is reborn multiple times.

The role of literature in intercultural language education

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

“Hominids with an Infected Brain” Engage in Viral Debate: Agamben and Žižek on the Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic on Human Relationships

“Hominids with an Infected Brain” Engage in Viral Debate: Agamben and Žižek on the Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic on Human Relationships

Police

This paper tackles the politics of social control involved in the task of the police, by approaching police as a state institution that operates through and upon movement, and which seeks to transform the political aspect of movement (which Randy Martin defines as ‘mobilization’) into social demobilization. I argue that police performance is a choreographed performance, and focus on how police benefit from choreography as a language of control. Following Jacques Rancière’s distinction of politics and police, I recognize the biopolitical dimension of police by focusing on how police manufactures social consensus by using choreographed movement to repress spontaneous movement. I draw on Randy Martin and André Lepecki in order to argue that movement plays, therefore, a central role in the performance of police: movement appearing to be both the source of police power and their main target. We must look at the professionalized production of acquiescent patterns of movement as a conscious operation of power aiming for demobilization and for the transformation of public spaces of dialogue and dispute into spaces of mobility and circulation. I engage critically with the well-known paper ‘Choreopolice and choreopolitics; or, the task of the dancer’ by Lepecki, which defines police as a biopolitical logic of relentless circulation while leaving aside other considerations of police that might as well be informed by the scope of performance research: provided that we consider police a practice of the bodies, what are the body techniques that police deploy? How are they embodied? I build upon Erin Manning’s concept of ecology of movements to describe the interplay of police officers and protesters as an interface, and to observe how police usually perform on the level of atmosphere distortion in order to overwhelm and disperse protesters.

Przekraczając horyzont inności: narracja drugoosobowa w fabularnych grach cyfrowych jako problem biopolityczny

This article focuses on an analysis of the function of the second-person narrative in digital fic­tional games. It combines two research fields: game narratology and biopolitical philosophy. The article begins with a brief discussion of the assumed understanding of the second-person narrative and the second person address in the latest research by Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell. Then, through selected examples of games, situations of using a second-person narrative are presented in two formulas: in the case of Disco Elysium crossing the horizon of otherness is explored, and in the case of The Stanley Parable and Control a hostile takeover is discussed. The theoretical framework for the discussed issues is a biopolitical reflection on the construc­tion of a modern subject through the thought of Michel Foucault and the relationship of the individual to the community in the philosophy of Roberto Esposito. In the text, the latest research on the cooperative, enactive nature of the second-person narrative is referred to, and the game studies research on the biopolitics of avatars. Therefore, the narrative theory is com­bined with the issues of contemporary reflection on the limits of subjectivity in digital games. The thesis being put forward here is that the second-person narrative in the perspective of crossing the horizon of otherness makes it possible to negate the neoliberal patterns of sub­jectivity constructed in games, because it requires empathy, cooperation with another subject, recognition of the boundaries set by another. On the other hand, the perspective of hostile takeover reveals situations of abusing the subjectivity of another or a player, which results from the creation of a narrative situation indicating a lack of respect for personal boundar­ies. Therefore, the second-person narrative is interpreted here in digital games as one of the problems of contemporary reflection on the biopolitical dimension of subjectivity in games. This article presents the results of NCN OPUS 22 grant no 2021/43/B/HS2/01017, titled Mapping game biopoli­tics: immunological paradigms in video games.

The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice by Kenneth R. Olwig (review)

Book Reviews 137 The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice BY KENNETH R. OLWIG London: Routledge, 2019 REVIEWED BY TIMM SCHÖNFELDER Landscape is more than spatial scenery that meets the eye: it is an anthropogenic artefact, an intellectual construct, a mirror of culture; it even has its own language.1 This broadness is reflected in the compilation of nine authoritative essays by the geographer and professor of landscape architecture Kenneth R. Olwig that were published during the past quarter of a century and are now molded into a more coherent whole. In this regard, the present volume can be considered the pinnacle of Olwig’s intellectual oeuvre. In a fervent foreword, the anthropologist Tim Ingold sets the tone when he urges the reader to shed the contemporary notion of what he terms “topophobia”—­ a lack of bond betweenpeopleandplaces—­andtoreinstatephilologyasacentralfield of interest after it was “relegated by techno-­ science to the margins of scholarship” (xv). To achieve this, the essays deal with an eclectic set of themes ranging from Ptolemy’s notion of “choros” as something similar to today’s understanding of landscape, to the humanistic geographer Yi-­Fu Tuan’s concept of “topophilia,” which is hailed as a guiding ideal for much of Olwig’s work. The articles are bound together by an introduction that quickly transcendsthegeometricallimitationsoflandscape ,ontologicallyquestioning whether these can be representative of the world itself at all (3). The first chapter thus delves right into the etymologies of “landscape” and its historical implications in the Nordic countries and England with detours through Italy and the German lands. In a cursory, highly associative manner Olwig fathoms the respective cultural implications. Central is the idea that the concept of landscape is more than the mere scenicrepresentationofspaceitcametobeknownasinRenaissance art and culture.2 Rather, the Nordic variants of the word, like the Swedish landskap, are used to denote natural regions with their own polity that were then gradually subjected to a monarchic state, not least through the surveying and mapping of their territory (see also chapter two). ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 13 / ISSUE 2 / 2021 138 At times, Olwig’s philological musings appear rather stretched, as when he associates the German word Grundgesetz (the “basic/­ fundamental law” of 1949, which until today serves as Germany’s constitution ) with a biopolitical dimension of “ground” as in “soil” (41).3 In cases like this, his use of literature is selective. This culminates in a problematic assessment of Nazi ideology as being motivated by a specific understanding of landscape. Statements like “there can be no doubt that the modern German conception of Landschaft was implicated in the promotion of blood-­ and-­ soil fascist ideology” (42) neglect important literature on the topic.4 Such generalizations are owed to the author’s sweeping tour de force approach. The reviewer would have preferred more guidance through the theoretical thickets by way of a clear, chronologically ordered argument. This is not helped by the occasional seeming inconsistency, as in the claim that the U.S. “inherited the British scenic idea of landscape” as a former colony while also being “very much the inheritor of German romantic ideas concerning the relation of culture to nature as expressed in the physical landscape” (45), which, in turn, showed parallels to “fascist landscapes” in the “attempt to cleanse geography of its environmentalist taint by making it a science of space” (42). This truly is a lot of ground to cover for one essay. The ensuing chapters, however, try to disentangle this inspired jumble. The second article, “Landscape, Place, and the State of Progress,” identifies a switch since the Renaissance from the idea of circuitous development to linear progress towards utopia. For Olwig, there is a “darker, Faustian side” to it that he identifies as the “dialectic of modernity ,” which “opposes cosmic dreams of a utopian future to the topian exigencies of present and past”: to advance, the path had to be cleared of traditional elements (52). This materialized in courteous theatre as well as in Shakespeare’s popular plays, and in the new architecture of parks where landscape was symbolic for cultural and social progress (64). “Choros, place, and the spatialization of landscape” traces important theoretical threads within geography...

Biopolitical dimensions of Ruling n. 13/2021 by the Brazilian Ministry of Health: impacts on rights and on the fight against the stigmatization of certain groups of women.

Biopolitical dimensions of Ruling n. 13/2021 by the Brazilian Ministry of Health: impacts on rights and on the fight against the stigmatization of certain groups of women.

We “Other Victorians”? Novelistic Remains, Therapeutic Devices, Contemporary Televisual Dramas

Abstract In reference to the work of Michel Foucault and to residual Victorian novelistic features, this essay explores the biopolitical dimension of contemporary televisual dramas, focusing on the popular crime genre as seen in The Sopranos (1999–2007), Breaking Bad (2008–2013), and The Fall (2013–2016). Emphasizing the confessional context of criminality and policing, we demonstrate how such shows rely on the conventions of modern psychological discourse in depicting criminals, thus foregrounding what Eva Illouz in Saving the Modern Soul (2008) has called the “therapeutic emotional style.” By updating aspects of D. A. Miller's conception of the policing plot in The Novel and the Police (1988), we argue that confession in contemporary televisual dramas exemplifies a cultural transition from power as force to power as communication. The ascendance of communicative power pathologizes aspects of masculinity and introduces a new dramatic/narrative device: the therapeutic couplet.

Our COVID Conjuncture: Critical Essays on the Pandemic

On the second weekend of March 2020, just before the Canada-wide lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic was made official, we realized that we needed to take a snapshot of rapid changes that were unfolding around us The biopolitical dimensions of public health and governmental responses to the pandemic were already clear, so we contacted Canadian-based scholars working in field of biopolitics to contribute short, rapid-response essays on the first, early stage of the pandemic The first volume, COVID-19 Essays, was written in the middle of March 2020, at exactly the moment when pandemic measures were being operationalized and the new pandemic discourse took on dramatic intensity in Canada The short essays published then reflect the pandemic moment in which they appeared

Affective and biopolitical dimensions of hope: From critical hope to anti-colonial hope in pedagogy

The central question driving this paper is: How can educators theorize and cultivate hope’s radical and transformative dynamism in a way that takes into consideration anti-colonial aims? This paper examines the contribution of pedagogies of anti-colonial hope to expand discussions of critical hope and its pedagogical relevance. It is argued that the notion of anti-colonial hope can be fruitful for enriching the aims of anti-colonial praxis to challenge colonial structures and practices in contemporary conditions of coloniality present in many parts of the world. In particular, the paper demonstrates the importance of attending the affective and biopolitical dimensions of anti-colonial hope and its pedagogical implications, including the dangers of continuous reproduction and sustenance of colonial structures and practices through education. This analysis contributes to the conversation on how pedagogies are tied to the practices through which aspirations and hopes are generated, distributed, reproduced, sustained and/or transformed.

A “Sodomized” Postcolony? Narrating Algeria’s Cultural Impasse in Belkacem Meghzouchene’s The overcoat of Virginia

ABSTRACT Drawing on an unorthodox approach to desire, Belkacem Meghzouchene’s second novel, The overcoat of Virginia (2013), finds that opposition activists are probably more frustrating than the regime they contest. Specifying “a lack-based” desire, the trope of sodomy in the novel articulates the ways in which the Algerian postcolonial ruling elites allegedly embezzle the country’s resources without any sensible logic except “pure grab”, a predatory habit. This article argues that, while building on desire for understanding a postcolony such as Algeria can be insightful, reducing it to sexual assault is indicative of an impoverished intellectuality marked by a paucity of abstraction. Expressions of desire, once inhibited through disciplining the body via a recourse to an alienating temporality such as Islamism (even when not explicit), cannot be counted as insurrectional. Measured against the task of “revamping history”, the one outlined by the opposition activists in the novel, the “perverted-desire-as-sodomy argument” leads to a submissive regime of truth. Still, Meghzouchene’s characters’ conservative outlook encourages readers not to overlook the biopolitical dimension of the postcolonial state, but warns against populist discourse that confuses scandalizing with activism.

Biopolítica e normatividade: duas abordagens filosóficas acerca da pandemia da Covid-19 a partir de Agamben e Habermas

Este artigo analisa o problema da pandemia da Covid-19 do ponto de vista filosófico a partir das contribuições de Agamben e Habermas. Agamben aborda a dimensão biopolítica da pandemia e sugere que o isolamento social é uma estratégia política de exceção com vistas a limitar a liberdade das pessoas. Nesse sentido, ele fala em “invenção epidêmica”. Habermas aborda a Covid-19 do ponto de vista normativo ponderando que as questões devem ser refletidas a partir da perspectiva ética da dignidade humana, e do ponto de vista político da solidariedade. A minha hipótese é a de que Agamben acerta em alguns pontos a sua análise, mas tem limites porque não leva em consideração a dimensão biológica da letalidade da Covid-19. A análise de Habermas é mais condizente com uma abordagem realista do vírus porque subscreve as orientações científicas da Organização Mundial da Saúde e reivindica o papel normativo dos direitos humanos nas decisões ético-políticas em decisões que buscam atenuar os impactos da pandemia.

Bare Lives in the Shadow of Empires: Jesus, Comfort Women, and Theology of Resistance

This article delves into the biopolitical dimension of Jesus and Korean comfort women by engaging with the insight yet to be gleaned from Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life. Seen through this biopolitical prism, Jesus in the passion narratives of the Gospels can be understood as a paradigmatic bare life in his sheer ambiguity, which swings back and forth between terrestrial and celestial dominions. Similarly, Korean comfort women, albeit in a different historical and sociocultural context, can also be viewed as bare lives under ruthless Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). My contention here is that, through the process of theological thinking, the reconfiguration of Jesus as a subversive bare life offers fresh insight into the agency of Korean comfort women in the sense that their bare lives have so far resisted the unjust world in their search of human rights and dignity. In spite of his tribulations between the Jewish and Roman authorities, Jesus unsettles these sovereign powers in such an ambiguous space. In a similar fashion, Korean comfort women have broadcast the atrocious brutality of Japanese colonial rule in the ambiguous zone beyond the juridical realms—Korean, Japanese, or otherwise—at the national and international levels. The foremost point to remember is that a commemoration of Jesus’ life as the most paradigmatic example of bare life can inspire Korean comfort women to deal with their agony in assuming bare life in the unswerving hope of justice yet to be served through divine intervention in the terrestrial sovereignty in liminal space and time.

‘A Peaceful Path to’ Healthy Bodies: The Biopolitics of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City

Recent renewed discussions of the garden city as a “developmental model for the present and foreseeable future” (Stern, Fishman, & Tilove, 2013) have prompted us to reflect upon its endurance as an agent of spatial and urban reform. Looking to extend the established garden city literature, we argue the history of Ebenezer Howard’s community model should be reexamined as a cultural history of body and environmental politics. In this commentary, we explicate how Howard’s garden city model served as a spatial vehicle for installing the biopolitical agendas of Victorian reformers keen to “civilize” working class bodies in the service of British industrial and imperial power. This entails a brief examination of the biopolitical dimensions of garden city history, keying on the prescribed restructuring of urban life and the concomitant “regeneration” of working class bodies within and through garden city designs. Our aim is to challenge scholars, planners, and policymakers of the garden city <em>present</em>, to consider the ways the garden city was historically planned to reproduce the cultural, spatial, and biopolitical relations of Western capitalism.

Humanitära överväganden i asylprocessen Balansövningar i spänningsfältet mellan solidaritet och ojämlikhet

Humanitarian considerations in the Swedish asylum process. A study of the migration authorities’ balancing act between solidarity and inequality Medical certi cates are becoming increasingly important as a basis for asylum assessments. Using examples from 24 asylum decisions concerning children and their families, the present article discusses how the Swedish Migration Agency and the Migration Courts in Sweden make use of medical certi cates. e common denominator for the decisions was that the children had been waiting for long periods in Sweden for their case to be assessed, and that they were not considered in need of political protection but instead the question was whether they should be granted a residence permit because of distressing circumstances. e study’s practical knowledge about humanitarian considerations is analysed through the notions of bio-legitimation and bio- inequalities (Fassin 2009), which provide for an understanding of how meaning and value are att- ributed to children’s lives and health conditions in the Swedish asylum process. Previous studies of the management of migration, focusing on bio-political dimensions, have discussed the form of the exercise of power, and scholars interested in governmentality have highlighted the state admi- nistration as the unit of analysis. is study aims to provide an additional qualitative perspective in the eld of humanitarianism in the welfare state. Furthermore, the article seeks to introduce the above concepts of bio-legitimation and bio-inequalities in a Swedish context. e analysis of asylum cases shows that humanitarian considerations were entirely focused on formalities and that the child’s actual well-being was subordinate when their humanitarian reasons were investi- gated by the migration authorities and courts. is brought with it both a de-politicization and the fact that no substantial assessment of individual children’s health conditions came about. e growing political interest in children’s health in the asylum process paradoxically means greater limitation in how to appear as persons before the law.