Biopolitical Approach Research Articles

Bio-Politics and Cultural Rubric on the Prevention of Corruption of Village Funds in Wonogiri Regency

Corruption prevention in Indonesian villages is generally limited to the formal and informal dichotomy. To bridge this dichotomy, this research uses a bio-political approach and a cultural framework as a representation of the formal and informal. This research aims to explore bio-politics and cultural frameworks in preventing corruption in village funds in Sendang Village, Wonogiri. Using phenomenological qualitative research methods and triangulation, the results show that Sendang Village in Wonogiri has become a prime example of transparency and accountability prior to the recommendation from Transparency International Indonesia (TII) in 2023. Sendang Village also issued various regulations and utilized inherent and extrinsic village values to build massive corruption prevention practices. Despite the dynamics and issues arising from the simultaneous application of the bio-political and cultural frameworks, corruption prevention efforts in Sendang Village continue to be built consistently. The research has implications for bridging the dichotomy between formal and informal corruption prevention in the village. In addition, this research also provides an in-depth description and different perspectives in the research of corruption prevention at the village level.

SOCIAL ANALYSIS, VOLUME 13, 2023, SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL OF SAPIENTIA HUNGARIAN UNIVERSITY OF TRANSYLVANIA

Volume 13 of 2023 of the journal Social Analysis contains several contributions on sociology in Romania and Hungary at different moments of evolution during the twentieth century. The first four articles deal with aspects of the activity of the Bucharest Sociological School, while four other contributions concern sociology in Hungary. In several articles there are comparisons between the two sociological movements or references to broader developments in Central and Eastern Europe. If about Romanian sociology we receive only information related to the Monographic School, regarding Hungary the articles have a much wider area: from nationalist sociological concerns at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the reorganization of sociology after the Revolution of 1956 and reaching biopolitical approaches with echoes in contemporary Hungary.

Food, bodies, health (risks): the biopolitics of organic materiality testing in the context of diet-associated health risk management practices

This article analyses the apparatus of practices dedicated to reducing long-term diet-associated health risks so as to question how risk is framed and worked upon in everyday risk governance contexts. In 2020–2021, I conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with public & environmental health researchers and programme managers at both federal (Canada) and provincial (Quebec) levels, as well as with clinical practitioners (clinical physician, dietician). I also used these interviews and the information provided by my interviewees to gather a corpus of materials comprised of clinical protocols, empirical guidelines, governmental screening programmes, and more. In the analysis, I contrast testing practices dedicated to preventing and controlling chronic conditions associated with food ingestion such as type 2 diabetes, with others dedicated to predicting and preventing health conditions associated with the ingestion of pesticides and contaminants. I use Foucauldian discourse analysis methods as well as Sheila Jasanoff’s (1999) “songlines of risk” in her analysis of environmental risk assessment practices to analyse how the risk mitigation practices under study integrate different approaches to risk and thus different ways of caring for health and bodies. This leads me to a discussion on the biopolitical approach to risk and health that informs these practices and the apparatus they constitute, contributing to orienting where the onus of the responsibility lies when it comes to managing or preventing diet-associated health conditions. I argue that the apparatus plays a role in invisibilizing the environmental factors in disease causation and reinforcing the individualisation of health (responsibility) rather than its collectivisation.

Ethical Citizenship and Contested Notions of Aging During the COVID-19 State of Emergency in Latvia

COVID-19 governance and its related forms of risk perception produced tensions between emergent and pre-existing understandings and practices of aging. This has resulted both in novel forms of biopolitical control and creative forms of resistance and practices of intergenerational care. This paper uses the concept of ethical citizenship to explain how older adults saw their role in the collective project of defeating COVID-19 despite partly being excluded from it. The research is based on a qualitative research-based learning project that was carried out in Latvia in 2020 at the time of the first pandemic- related state of emergency. We argue that the biopolitical approaches of successful aging and the designation of risk groups were ambiguously intertwined with the relational practices of aging while both processes were linked to the broader post-socialist socioeconomic context. We focus on care relations in the daily lives of older adults during the state of emergency to illustrate how the seemingly irrational opposition to state-imposed restrictions was the result of the socio-economic and relational realities of elderly people. We argue that the recognition of relations of mutual care and support is necessary to improve the lives of current and future older adults.

The Impact of China’s Biopolitical Approach to COVID-19 on Pets

Using the frameworks of biopower and uses and gratification theory, this article examines the treatment of pets in China during the COVID-19 outbreak and the role of social media in fulfilling users’ social needs by facilitating discussions on associated animal welfare issues and mobilizing animal advocates to take action. The analysis focuses on how social media comments on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, have influenced public discourse surrounding the biopolitical governance of animals emphasized by the zero-COVID policy, which has helped maintain a strong sense of national consciousness in post-socialist China. The study centres on an isolated case of the killing of a corgi by a health worker in Shanghai and how it was perceived on social media. The findings suggest that much of the animosity demonstrated on Weibo towards the killing is centred around biopower, or the biopolitical governance of humans and animals that has more broadly prioritized human life over animal welfare in China’s approach to COVID-19. In this way, social media has played a crucial role in mobilizing animal advocates to take a more prominent role in the emergency management of pets. The study concludes that China should consider adopting a standard operating procedure for pet care and rescue that includes pets in its humans-first disaster response and relief measures to develop a better and healthier national consciousness, fulfil the social needs of its citizens who value animal welfare, and strengthen its sense of national consciousness.

The reductionism of genopolitics in the context of the relationships between biology and political science

The past two decades have seen an increase in the use of theories, data, assumptions and methods of the biological sciences in studying political phenomena. One of the approaches that combine biology with political science is genopolitics. The goal of the study was to analyse the basic ontological, methodological and epistemological assumptions for the reductionism of genopolitics. The results show that genopolitics assumes methodological reductionism but rejects ontological and epistemological reductionism. The key consequences of the findings are the irreducibility of political science to biology and the complementarity of genopolitical explanations and political science explanations based on culturalism. If my findings prove to be correct, they give rise to the formation of a hypothesis regarding the anti-reductionist orientation of the contemporary links between political science and biology. An important step towards confirming or falsifying such a hypothesis will be exploring the reductionism of contemporary biopolitical approaches such as neuropolitics or evolutionary political psychology.

Governing pandemic fatigue: an International Relations case of experiential biopolitics

The Covid-19 pandemic has made evident that living through a protracted global biopolitical emergency requires new theoretical reflections to make sense of what it means to govern life in a global context. As a central reference in the study of global health in International Relations (IR), biopolitical approaches have privileged a molecular-informational understanding of life as their object of governance. However, the phenomenon of global pandemic fatigue calls for a new problematisation. Experiential biopolitics is proposed here as an approach from which to recognise a limitation of biopolitical emergency governance that has resulted in a generalised feeling of exhaustion among populations subject to prolonged emergency measures. This reformulated biopolitical gaze understands human life, not only as a biological substance, but through its reflexive capacity to nurture lived experience, highlighting the entanglement of pandemic experiences and infection dynamics. The article explores experiential biopolitics through the WHO’s problematisation of pandemic fatigue. It analyses how assessing pandemic experience through behavioural insights studies enables a reflexive visibility of the pandemic event by drawing together biological and experiential variables. Subsequently, it interrogates theories of risk perception as a cornerstone in imagining the pandemic subject as a fundamentally experiential being.

Coloniality and Racism in the Spanish Deportation System: Exceptional Practices and Violence During Deportation to Morocco

Proponents of biopolitical approaches to migration have recently been accused of epistemological racism by those who advocate postcolonial perspectives. This article aims to contribute to the postcolonial understanding of the Spanish deportation system by focusing on its connections with racism, exception, and violence. It does so by relying on Fanon’s anti-colonial ideas, together with Mbembe’s biopolitical developments and the concept of coloniality. It analyses the deportation system as implemented in Spain and shows that it is within a legal materiality that results in racialised violence, exception and the production of death. The case of Morocco and six direct testimonies of deported nationals are studied. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the deportation system as implemented in Spain is intertwined with coloniality, exception and violence, and often produces the death of racialised groups.

Degradation of the Body in Idealist–Dualist Philosophy

There is no corporal philosophy at the level of other philosophical subdisciplines. A research line has begun whose ultimate goal is to determine whether a somatic philosophy can be built. From a pragmatist and biopolitical approach, the present study investigated why it has not been possible to develop grounded somatic philosophy. As an answer, the “idealist–dualist episteme” is described, which encompasses invariants in the history of idealist philosophy at the ontological, gnoseological, ethical–political, and pedagogical levels. These constants reflect somatophobia, as well as an ontological and gnoseological disregard of the body, which has led to the irrelevance of the body and corporeality in philosophy until the arrival of the “bodily turn”. The critique of this prevailing idealism and dualism will enable a review of current approaches based on these positions, such as embodiment, enactivism, embodied cognition, or embodied artificial intelligence. It opens up a new philosophical line with a universalis scope that is open to the eclectic construction of a pragmatic corporal philosophy that takes into account Chinese, Japanese, or African philosophies.

Biopolitical Aspect of Contemporary Urban Media Architecture

This article is devoted to the study of problems that may occur within the framework of biopolitical approach implementation in the context of contemporary urban management. Considerable emphasis is made upon the study of the media phenomenon development, formation of media architecture infrastructure as an approach of the biopolitics of emotions. The aim of the study is to form a consistent comprehensive understanding of the current trends in the practical implementation of the biopolitical approach methodology while analyzing the specifics of the mediatized space in contemporary city.
 The article analyzes particularities of nowaday communication in a virtual environment, its impact on the psyche of a moden person, and also raises the problems of contemporary media which has not only acquired the character of abstract information transmitted in distribution, but is embodied in the certain structural specifics of buildings, that has given rise to the development of such a phenomenon as media architecture. The result of the study is an analysis of the problems and prospects of the tendencies of the development of a modern city from the point of a biopolitical approach to urban management in the context of the (trans)formation of the media architectural infrastructure. The main problems, as the study shows, are caused by the lack of proper regulation of urban planning policy implementations from the standpoint of providing a comfortable environment for the life of the urban population.
 This article is intended for specialists in political science, as well as for researchers whose studies are devoted to the digital biopolitical aspect of modern urban governance.

Considering Sidewalls as an Architectural Ground: Parasitic Architecture Approaches in Design Studio

Approaches mimicking nature constitute a biopolitical specific area in architecture. Today, what is called parasitic architecture is also accepted as one of these biopolitical approaches. Parasitic architecture follows the path of parasitism in nature in terms of biomimicry. And parasitism is accepted as one of the symbiotic lifeforms, others being commensalism and mutualism. They all consist of the biological relationship between distinct organisms where parasitism specially defines duality between a harming parasite and a vulnerable host. Talking in architectural terms, here the parasitism defines an additional structure that can only exist via clinging to a preexisting one. These clinging mechanisms or reflexes can be listed as “sticking”, “climbing”, “holding”, “fixing”, etc. This study aims to evaluate the architectural parasitism phenomena as a case study for the design studio. As known, the design studio is the backbone of architectural education, which is carried on with unique themes each semester. Hence, such a theme was programmed in İstanbul Topkapı University, Interior Architecture and Environmental Design department in the 2021-2022 Spring Semester, to handle the surrounding idle walls in an ad hoc way as hosting structures for parasitic design ideas of the students. As a result of the works, the idle walls were converted into fruitful public backgrounds for creating a large variety of design ideas with distinct functions and structures as well.

The biogeopolitics of cities: a critical enquiry across Jerusalem, Phnom Penh, Toronto

ABSTRACT Dwelling on a disciplinary threshold between urban planning and urban health, we take a comparative historical perspective on the urban development of three cities – Jerusalem, Phnom Penh and Toronto – highlighting how the evolution of their socio-spatial fabrics has been shaped by decisively biopolitical approaches. In line with current studies, we remark how the will to control the cities’ territories and populations has intertwined with policy concerns over urban health, and discourses on the need to isolate urban environments – artificially or rhetorically constructed as unhealthy. We propose, however, a shift toward the concept of urban biogeopolitics – noticing how the present-day Covid-19 outbreak has exposed the limits of biopolitical analyses, and of their dichotomic understanding of inner vs. outer forms of power and control. Biogeopolitics becomes therefore a powerful conceptual lens to explain how past crises and the current one have transcended the boundaries of what we are accustomed to understand as urban realm. How do biogeopolitical discourses and technologies become instrumental in the control of urban territories and their populations? How, in other words, are urban planning and urban health affected by regional and trans-local forces?

The importance of relationality: A note on co-determinism, multispecies relationships and implications for COVID-19.

The paper aims to highlight the importance of subjective, objective and intersubjective domains when engaging in public education and research on wicked problems such as violence, poverty, climate change, loss of habitat and pandemics. The case is made that critical systemic thinking and practice—underpinned by a meta Design of Inquiring Systems—could help to foster a more relational response to the convergent social, economic and environmental policy challenges that pose ‘existential risks’. This paper explores the implications of ‘mismeasuring our lives’ by not understanding relationality. It reflects on the factors that are linked with the ‘unravelling’ of well‐being, in order to prevent and restore the multispecies relationships that have been forgotten. This requires a bio‐political approach to reframing not only economics but our relationships with one another and with nature. ‘Power and knowledge are linked’ and nowhere is Foucault's linkage more marked than in the biopolitical determination of what species are valued and why. Taxonomies are constructs based on values that need to be carefully considered in terms of the consequences of policy decisions.

Globalization/Human Safety: A Biopolitical Approach

Biopolitics focuses on the impact of globalization on the well-being of the individual and society as a whole. Accordingly, issues of human security and the threats posed by the process of globalization, as well as the transition from a disciplinary regime to a regime of governance at the global level, which, based on democratic values and liberal norms, are raised. That is why the problem of social justice and equality is solved. The issue of human safety within global governance should be emphasized. It is about a sense of security as a basic human need. Moreover, it is about the global security necessary for the survival and reproduction of humanity as a whole. As well as the study of potential socio-political consequences of the development of biotechnology and genetic engineering in the global dimension. This huge set of issues must be concretized, systematized, and logically structured through the analysis of the impact of globalization on the state of the individual, its relationship with the concept of bios; introduction at the international level of the doctrines of social justice, protection of human and civil rights at the global level; study of potential socio-political consequences of the development of biotechnology in the global dimension; introduction of new biopolitical models of power, governance and international relations; analysis of the theory of global evolution.

A Military-Green Biopolitics: The Brazilian Amazon Between Security and Development

Since the 1960s, the Brazilian defense policy toward the Amazon has been oriented by the security/development binomen. This was simultaneously a directive for the Brazilian authoritarian regime and for US defense doctrine for the Americas. We argue in this paper that despite the structural influence of US hemispherical security and defense strategy, the formulation of an Amazonian defense strategy by the Brazilian military responded to peculiarities attached to local military historical practices regarding civilizational values, concepts of security and development, and geopolitical targets. We claim that Brazilian defense strategy towards the Amazon is a local manifestation of a biopolitical approach to both the forest and its natural resources and to its population. It is our goal to point out that the local version for the duality security/development has been a manifestation of a set of technologies of government in a biopolitical strategy.

Envejecimiento Positivo para Chile: ¿Una vejez sin Estado?

The article proposes to analyze and verify the validity of some of the postulates of the American economist, Milton Friedman, and their relationship with public policy, specifically in the case of Chile, and aging policies. From a sociohistorical and biopolitical approach to the treatment that old age has had at the public level, Friedman's postulates are analyzed, and how they promote the construction of an active-successful subject, as the only person responsible for their future. Finally, reflections are shared that could contribute to re-elaborate and discuss the proposals of positive-active aging for Chile, and Latin America.

The Democratic Biopolitics of PrEP

PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a relatively new drug-based HIV prevention technique and an important means to lower the HIV risk of gay men who are especially vulnerable to HIV. From the perspective of biopolitics, PrEP inscribes itself in a larger trend of medicalization and the rise of pharmapower. This article reconstructs and evaluates contemporary literature on biopolitical theory as it applies to PrEP, by bringing it in a dialogue with a mapping of the political debate on PrEP. As PrEP changes sexual norms and subjectification, for example condom use and its meaning for gay subjectivity, it is highly contested. The article shows that the debate on PrEP can be best described with the concepts ‘sexual-somatic ethics’ and ‘democratic biopolitics’, which I develop based on the biopolitical approach of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow. In contrast, interpretations of PrEP which are following governmentality studies or Italian Theory amount to either farfetched or trivial positions on PrEP, when seen in light of the political debate. Furthermore, the article is a contribution to the scholarship on gay subjectivity, highlighting how homophobia and homonormativity haunts gay sex even in liberal environments, and how PrEP can serve as an entry point for the destigmatization of gay sexuality and transformation of gay subjectivity. ‘Biopolitical democratization’ entails making explicit how medical technology and health care relates to sexual subjectification and ethics, to strengthen the voice of (potential) PrEP users in health politics, and to renegotiate the profit and power of Big Pharma.

‘The continuation of sovereign capture by other means’: biopolitical tattooing and the shared logic of the exception and securitisation

ABSTRACTCarl Schmitt’s description of the sovereign decision has played an important role in works of securitization theory and biopolitical approaches to security studies. While analysis of the securitization of an isolated referent object may be clearly different from the analysis of a generalized state of exception as in the concentration camp, both processes tend toward the same end. When securitization is iterative rather than isolated, it creeps across society and could potentially move all political activity into the realm of security. This problem of “securitization creep” highlights the danger of analyzing security in isolation or in limited iterations. By turning to Giorgio Agamben’s paradigm of biopolitical tattooing, this article analyzes the danger of securitization creep and its relation to the state of exception. While sometimes regarded as a pessimistic thinker, Agamben’s affirmation of the agency of the citizenry in his call to reject biopolitical tattooing also bears resemblance to the ability of the audience to reject a securitizing move. Not only are securitization and biopolitics in the state of exception related historiographically to the work of Schmitt, but also in the capacity of the citizenry to ameliorate political futures by rejecting sovereign overreach.

Governing Dementia: A Historical Investigation of the Power of States and Professionals in the Conceptualization of Dementia in China.

This study intends to understand how Chinese states and healthcare professionals interact with each other in adopting biomedical concepts within the context of globalization of mental health. The conceptualization of dementia as a stigmatized mental disorder in China serves as a salient case to examine interactions between states and professionals as well as the interrelationships between different healthcare professionals in producing knowledge. By engaging the biopolitical approach, this project explores the historically-contingent conceptualizations of dementia, namely dementia as a vague and stigmatized condition in imperial China, dementia as biosocial deviance in Republican China, dementia as a product of capitalism during Mao-era China, and dementia as a stigmatized mental illness in contemporary China. These dynamics indicate that Chinese professionals have been largely influenced by state ideologies in assimilating biomedical concepts. Through the historical analysis of state-professional interactions in conceptualizing dementia, this study provides an avenue to understand how biomedical concepts transfer within the global context can be read as a site of power struggle between ethnomedicine and biomedicine, between various competing forms of healthcare professionals, and between indigenous sovereignty and governmentality. Moreover, the study of conceptualizing dementia in China sheds light on the larger sociopolitical processes of governmentality in China.

Survival angst: Reading Hothead Paisan in the Trump era

ABSTRACTThis essay considers Diane DiMassa's 1990s comic book series Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist alongside the recent rise and visibility of White supremacist movements following the 2016 United States election. While Hothead's acts of queer revenge primarily target White heterosexual cismen, several issues feature Hothead taking aim at neo-Nazis and the KKK. Exploring the way in which Hothead's relationship to debility and capacity is mediated by her gender, sexuality, and race, the essay argues that a biopolitical approach, including the recent scholarly turn to the non-human, can provide a useful framework for approaching interlocking systems of violence and oppression that go beyond traditional intersectional models of resistance.