Biopolitical Approach Research Articles

Біополітична парадигма як основа формування політологічного контексту моделі мовної політики України.

The biopolitical paradigm is studied as the basis for the formation of the political context of the model of language policy. It is noted that the biopolitical paradigm is based on such concepts as behaviorism, neobechhevorizm and postbiheviorizm, which are used to study the behavior of subjects of language policy, understanding of language policy as a problem, its analysis and evaluation of the language and political situation that is positively or negatively affects the formation of the linguistic environment, the community, its development and the state as a whole. It is stated that the biopolitical approach made it possible to focus on the political culture and symbolic behavior of politicians who develop linguistic bills, programs, complex measures, make suggestions during their discussion and make the necessary decisions that one way or another influence the implementation of language policy, quality of life and community behavior. An attempt has been made to prove that behavioral, non-ihivorous and post-bayhevorist theories are the basis of the formation of a biopolitical which allows us to plunge into the essence of language policy as a model, to analyze its essence, content, meaning and development. It is argued that the biopolitical paradigm is based on a behavioral research method that reflects inter-governmental relations, the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian authorities, as well as between them and the Ukrainian community. The definition of the concept of paradigm, which the author understands as a set of cognitive principles and techniques that reflect the linguistic-political reality and language-political problem, which, in our understanding, is the political context of language policy as a model that is investigated with the help of post-bestialism, that is, , behavioral direction. It analyzes the behavior of the Russian authorities, which interferes in Ukraine's internal affairs, and pro-Russian-minded politicians, which it uses to implement its plans and protect its own interests.

UPAYA PEMERINTAH DALAM MEMPERBAIKI KUALITAS KESEHATAN IBU DI KABUPATEN TUBAN

The state to be responsible in providing health services to the community as a decisive factor for the sustainability of human life. This study aims to discuss the efforts of the Tuban Regency government in improving the quality of maternal health through of reduction of maternal mortality rate (MMR). Located in Tuban Regency, using in-dept interview method and documentation in collecting data with informants from Tuban District Health Office, with bio-political approach to build argumentation. This qualitative descriptive study found that maternal mortality rate in Tuban Regency in 2011- 2015 is still quite high, between 10-24 people every year. In response to these conditions, the district government of Tuban through the Health Office conducted a series of handling programs, such as the integrated of ante natal care, pregnant women's classes, P4K Program, PMT in pregnant women, accompaniment hight risk pregnancy, referral stabilization, MKIA program, Grandma's foster program, jampersal program, health reproductive counseling and EMAS programs. In the bio-political approach, the policies adopted by the Tuban Regency government are the forms of health regulation and intervention by the government to reduce the maternal mortality rate. Keywords: Maternal mortality rate, bio-politics, policy.

Conservation, biopolitics, and the governance of life and death

AbstractThe politics of environmental conservation has long been a key concern for human and environmental geographers. Recently, geographers have begun to employ Foucauldian insights on biopower and biopolitics to understand conservation's changing agendas, techniques, and logics, focusing on the specific ways in which non‐human nature is ordered, ranked, and promoted. This review examines how four domains of conservation—endangered species management, conservation breeding and genetics, protected areas, and rewilding—have been conceptualized as biopolitical. In each domain, different sets of scientific practices and understandings produce valuations of life that appear natural, universal, and technically derived even as they are particular and normative. Thus, we find that there is not a single “conservation biopolitics” but instead an entanglement of overlapping and contradictory logics and techniques. At its best, the Foucauldian biopolitical approach can help to parse the range of possible logics and techniques that constitute conservation and to expand who is authorized to take part in debates and decisions about what life should be protected, how, why, and for whom.

The Dishwater Menace: Healthy Drinking Spaces and the Public Good in Post-Prohibition Ontario.

This paper examines inter-bureaucracy tension, negotiation, and resolution in the case of the oversight of beverage room sanitation in Ontario in the 1930s and 1940s. Both the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) and various public health authorities claimed authority over the health status of public drinking spaces. But the LCBO had legislative priority. The ensuing debates regarding health and cleanliness linked issues of beverage room glass sanitation to a biopolitical approach to public drinking. Developing a more scientifically sophisticated approach to beverage glass cleaning required a balancing of administrative priorities. Perfect sanitation was expensive and complicated, and the LCBO's mandate demanded attention to the financial viability of beverage rooms. The LCBO needed to forge a trade off between safety and viability, while maintaining a public drinking system that dissuaded illegal drinking. The subsequent compromise in beverage room glass sanitation tied contemporary chemical sanitizers to the challenging economics of depression-era beverage room management.

Punishment, Race, and the Organization of U.S. Immigration Exclusion

Although the punitive character of the U.S. immigration enforcement regime has been noted, less research has inquired into the productivity of punishment beyond detention and deportation, the particular rationale of punishment, and the way in which punitive enforcement shapes (rather than targets) race. By analyzing antimigrant rhetoric and the practices of immigration enforcement, I argue that punishment is best understood as a violent material reassertion of the narrative of the United States as a nation of laws. My biopolitical approach to immigration innovates by (1) conceptualizing the process through which race becomes a biopolitical divide, (2) noting that the construction of race also shapes the meaning of whiteness, and (3) showing the particular ways in which sovereignty, discipline, and biopower are combined in the U.S. immigration enforcement regime. I illustrate these claims by examining policies and practices that characterize contemporary immigration enforcement and find that punishment fulfills functions of regeneration, discipline, or moralization, among others, and treats different subpopulations of migrants differently. Even inclusionary interventions involve processes of subjectification among the beneficiaries. I conclude by examining the implications of this framework for understanding the current political stalemate.

A Legislação Aparente na Construção de uma Constitucionalização Simbólica e seus Efeitos na Proteção ao Meio Ambiente

The development of a democratic state requires beyond recovery, the effectiveness of fundamental rights in the present Constitutional Charter. In this context, it is proposed to discuss and analyze the normative positivist system, from a biopolitical approach and the microphysics of power, seeking to uncover a possible ideological influence on legislative processes. The aim is also based on the concept of symbolic legislation, examine some of the content of legislation that lead to inefficiency or distortion of results normatively proposed, aiming only to serve ideological purposes well defined. Search in that context, analyzing the speeches of lawmaking and the results achieved normative, defining a concept of law apparent, to verify the use of law as an instrument to support the interests of a ruling class, through a process of universalization and apparent abstract ideas, which camouflage the concrete existence of particular goals of a particular class. The apparent use of such legislation through a biopolitical process may be understood as a way of calming a social order to conduct the maintenance of appropriate interests. The production of an apparent law that integrates and constitutes a legal infra, ultimately influence the applicability of constitutional norms, often functioning as a processing agent interpreting the Constitution. Finally, check that this apparent law produces direct effects and hinders protection actions to the environment.

Exploring the Security/Facilitation Nexus: Foucault at the ‘Smart’ Border

This article critically engages the ongoing efforts of establishing a Registered Traveller Programme (RTP), as part of the Smart Borders Package, at the EU level. As the RTP seeks to flexibilise border management through the notions of risk and trustworthiness, the article suggests that a Foucauldian account of biopolitics can serve as a capable analytical tool. A biopolitical approach conceptualises the RTP's aims of business facilitation and border protection not as contradictory concepts, but rather as mutually constitutive and reinforcing elements. Thus, it helps to understand the current efforts to render the border “smart” in an attempt to govern security and the economy under a common framework—a framework, however, that commands critical investigation when it comes to the applied sorting mechanisms at the border.

From Schmitt to Foucault: Inquiring the Relationship between Exception and Democracy

This article examines the debated relationship between liberal- democratic politics and states of exception in conditions of emergency. After Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, it is often maintained that today we live in a situation of perennial exceptionalism, where emergency measures have become a regular practice even by governments we name ‘democratic’. In these circumstances, exception is deemed to threaten democracy and hinder individual and collective political agency. Yet, such interpretation remains rigidly focused on the expanded governmental powers ushered by the exception. The article first unpacks how the relationship between exception and democracy has been differently addressed by juridical and biopolitical approaches. Then, it attempts an alternative heuristic: it discusses possibilities of democratic associative practices in emergency by looking at the notion of resistance that Michel Foucault links with power. This route remains unexplored in the literature on the concept of the exception.

Limitations in the bioethical analysis of medicalisation: The case of love drugs

A number of articles concerning the idea of ‘love drugs’ have recently appeared in the bioethical literature. While, as yet, the idea is little more than science fiction, such drugs have been positioned as ‘neurotechnologies’ that will offer us the opportunity to enhance our marriages. Following a classically liberal approach, the strategy has been, first, to argue that there is no reason individuals should be prevented from using such drugs if they wish to use them, and, second, to adduce reasons why individuals might be morally motivated to do so. This work has been followed by a paper that considered whether such drugs will ‘medicalise’ love and, if so, whether any (bio)ethical implications follow from their potential to do so. In response, this article argues that traditional forms of bioethical analysis are ill placed to fully grasp the moral dimension of medicalisation. Using the concepts of biomedicalisation, theraputicisation and moralisation I attempt to show that bioethical scholarship can be considered part of these social processes, and, properly understood, they imply that our social, cultural and political norms, such as those that inform our conception of love and intimacy, are subject to change. As a result a more biopolitical approach is to be recommended.

Uma certa latitude: Georges Canguilhem, biopolítica e vida como errância

AbstractThis article aims to discuss the possibility of a bio-political approach that wouldn't be just the description of disciplinary mechanisms of bodies' administration and the calculating administration of life, but that could provide the ground for a social criticism of contemporary capitalism. This bio-political approach is derived from Georges Canguilhem's vitalism with its discussions about vital normativity, the relationship between normal and pathological and the characteristic errancy of vital activity. At the end, we will see how the inner process of the concept of life could appear as a major strategy for the reorientation of critical thought and a theory on the concept of norms.

The Bio-Politics of Bees

Everywhere, honeybees and other insect pollinators are dwindling and dying, in a slowly but relentlessly unfolding crisis that has come to be known as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” This article draws upon theoretical currents from animal studies, environmental sociology and ecofeminism in order to explore the aetiology and significance of this crisis, an animal-techno-ecological assemblage of forbidding complexity and intense controversy. It is argued that the critical animal studies concept of the “animal-industrial complex” offers a potentially fruitful framework for grasping CCD, but that it ultimately rests upon notions of nonhuman animal subjectivity and objectification which do not translate persuasively to eusocial invertebrates such as honeybees. The article therefore develops a bio-political reading of the animal-industrial complex which reworks its conceptual underpinnings such as to render coherent the notion of an “apis-industrial complex.” This bio-political approach is articulated through a critical discussion of the relationship between the industrial organization of agricultural production and the vital materiality of complex living systems.

War without end? Military humanitarianism and the limits of biopolitical approaches to security in Central America and the Caribbean

In 2008, the U.S. Southern Command launched Operation Continuing Promise as an ongoing mission to provide humanitarian aid and assistance to vulnerable populations in the Caribbean and Latin America. Conceived as a means of fostering regional security, the Operation's humanitarian aim was designed to improve regional security by ensuring life against the risk of a range of disasters. Much as that mission reflects biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism that emphasize the ability to protect life as the basis for sovereignty, closer attention to the timing and location of SOUTHCOM's efforts offers a more contextual understanding. That approach is developed here through an analysis of Operation Continuing Promise's stop in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, contrasting SOUTHCOM's focus on biophysical vulnerability with intended recipients' sense of their condition as a historical and political outcome. That contrast frames a contextual understanding of Operation Continuing Promise, placing it within broader efforts to construct Puerto Cabezas as vulnerable. That approach also points up the limits of biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism, suggesting the ways in which vulnerability is never merely a biological condition. The narrow humanitarian focus of Operation Continuing Promise can therefore be assessed in terms of its inability to address political and historical factors shaping vulnerability. So long as vulnerability persists, the potential for intervention persists indefinitely, making humanitarianism into a means of waging war without end.

The risks and the promotion of self-control on nutritional health: morality, biopolitics and parrhesiastic critique

This paper deals with proposals for self-care by means of self-control in the promotion of nutritional health, especially in the quest to avoid weight gain and the consumption of food that does not meet 'healthy food' guidelines. These initiatives present themselves as self-care strategies that are legitimated and enshrined in the context of nutritional heath, linked with moralistic modes on the current ways of leading our lives. The study's critical standpoint adopts a biopolitical approach and 'cynical parrhesia' as an argumentative line of reasoning, which is in line with Cynicism as a philosophical doctrine, subsequently developed by Michel Foucault in his studies on care of the self.

Negotiating a healthy body in old age: preventive home visits and biopolitics

The study discussed in this article sheds light on how a specific publichealth policy, the preventive home visit (PHV) aimed at senior citizens, is implemented at the local level in Denmark. Empirically the article calls attention to what is actually going on in a preventive practice, based on participant observations, interviews and ten years#&8217; worth of visitation records. Theoretically, the article applies a Foucauldian biopolitical approach that understands the visits as an implementation of the active ageing scheme, as the notion of prevention is practised as a continuous process, which is utilised to train people#&8217;s gazes and sensitivity, and teach them to recognise ‘activity’ as closely linked to future well-being and longevity. An important finding is that the intervention is not normalising in a deterministic way but rather negotiable. Even though the home visitors represent a health regimen where activity is interpreted as bodily exercise, they try to avoid the tendency to prescribe for older people. Rather than prevention in the strict sense, it seems to be a health promotion strategy that encourages older people to articulate their needs. The meeting between the health visitor and the older person is characterised by conversations and negotiations about health, autonomy and bodily experiences.

Dispatches from the Greek lab: Metaphors, strategies and debt in the European crisis

This field note is a first attempt to reflect on the choreography of the European crisis from a psychosocial perspective. It focuses on the situation as it has been unfolding in one of the debtor countries of the South, namely Greece. After mapping a variety of metaphors, repertoires and strategies used to energise blame and guilt and thus legitimise the neoliberal policies implemented, it elaborates on the multiple functions of debt, articulating a biopolitical approach with Freudian and Lacanian theorisations of the superego. It also inscribes within this framework the current mutations in political domination.

The Body As Medium in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities

This essay glosses an attempt to capture communication in the Arab uprisings through the prism of the human body. Such an approach to communication and revolution entails several challenges and opportunities. Challenges include tension between biopolitical approaches and a perspective that considers the body as an instrument of practice, the tendency in scholarship that restricts discussions of the body to discussions of gender and sexuality, and not politics at large, and the glossing over of issues of social class and geographic location, all crucial when considering the body as an instrument of communication. Opportunities afforded by using the body as a focal point include a fuller consideration of human agency that eschews technological determinism when studying power and resistance, a historically grounded analytical approach that preempts an uncritical dalliance with presentism, the body being in effect the “oldest medium,” and an analytical advantage whereby the body functions as a heuristic eye of the needle through which all empirical materials, and theoretical considerations are filtered, considered and interpreted.

Governance Strategies for Living Technologies: Bridging the Gap between Stimulating and Regulating Technoscience

The life sciences present a politically and ethically sensitive area of technology development. NBIC convergence-the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information and cognitive technology-presents an increased interaction between the biological and physical sciences. As a result the bio-debate is no longer dominated by biotechnology, but driven by NBIC convergence. NBIC convergence enables two bioengineering megatrends: "biology becoming technology" and "technology becoming biology." The notion of living technologies captures the latter megatrend. Accordingly, living technology presents a politically and ethically sensitive area. This implies that governments sooner or later are faced with the challenge of both promoting and regulating the development of living technology. This article describes four current political models to deal with innovation promotion and risk regulation. Based on two specific developments in the field of living technologies-(psycho)physiological computing and synthetic biology-we reflect on appropriate governance strategies for living technologies. We conclude that recent pleas for anticipatory and deliberative governance tend to neglect the need for anticipatory regulation as a key factor in guiding the development of the life sciences from a societal perspective. In particular, when it is expected that a certain living technology will radically challenge current regulatory systems, one should opt for just such a more active biopolitical approach.

Lunar Cemetery: Global Heterotopia and the Biopolitics of Death

The burial of human remains on the Moon conjures up the idea of a lunar cemetery. This paper reviews related artistic projects and practices and situates the concept of the lunar cemetery in relation to Michel Foucault's articulation of the notions of heterotopia and biopolitics to explore the implications of perceiving the Moon as a globally shared space populated by the dead. The author also suggests that the possibility of a cemetery on the Moon reveals peculiar biopolitical approaches toward lunar space, in which death is used to uphold its heterotopic potential and support the envisioning of prospects for humanity's future beyond the globe.

Die biopolitische Produktion „lebensunwerter“ Subjekte im Rahmen der „Aktion T4“ – Eine Re-Lektüre von ‚Ich klage an‘

The history of the Nazi “euthanasia programme” named “Aktion T4” has been examined from a biopolitical perspective for some time. However, these studies have not focused on the analytics of biopolitical practices of subjectivization as an essential element of the Foucaultian concept. The use of such a theoretical approach can be used in combination with new and substantial empirical research results. The Heidelberg DFG research programme evaluated the “T4” medical records statistically in order to conclusively determine which features had significant importance for selection by the “T4” experts. The inability to work or having an incurable mental illness were the criteria by which psychiatrists and “T4” experts subjectivized patients as “lives not worth living”. Considering these new results and a biopolitical approach as starting point, it is time to reconsider the Nazi “euthanasia” propaganda movie “Ichklagean” (“I Accuse”, 1941). When scholars began to study the production process of the movie in the 1980s, they looked at the narrative and the movie characters from an instrumental perspective. In other words, they examined how the “T4” protagonists and filmmakers sought to create a film which affected the viewers’ opinion in a specific way intentionally influenced by them. According to that line of thought, the character Hanna was neglected because she was considered to be the morally inoffensive disguise of the intended propaganda massage. However, two works from the 1990s which were gender history-oriented finally focused on Hanna and the way the film narrative turns her into a subject “not worth living”. Based on these considerations, this article states its thesis. The criteria of the film to subjectivize Hanna share many basic characteristics with those of the subjectivization process of the “T4” victims. To prove this statement, the analytics of the movie are combined with the results of the DFG project. Through the combination of both types of sources, the examination of the subjetivization process of the “T4” victims is expanded upon through the incorporation of discursive and imaginative procedures. For this reason, the film is analysed from a narratological and aesthetic perspective. The article starts with a description of the spatial structure of the narrative, which serves to establish an ideal of a “life worth living”. Subsequently, the analysis focuses on the staging of Hanna’s body and her self-description - both mean to show Hanna’s regression from the norm of a “life worth living”. Then, the case of Hanna is contextualized by the “T4” subjects. Due to the fact that incurable illness was a necessary feature of the victims, Hanna’s husband’s search for a cure for multiple sclerosis is also examined. The final part of the article deals with the research controversies regarding the importance of racial hygiene for the “euthanasia programme”. Even in regard to this last question, which is also important in order to understand the subjectivization of the “T4” victims, the film offers interesting answers.

Embracing intellectual humility: A response to the biopolitics forum

T he study of politics depends upon a variety of perspectives and approaches. The political informs all aspects of our private and public lives. Understanding power, hierarchy and government requires not only an examination of biological, evolutionary processes but also an examination of cultural norms and power dynamics. In our paper, ‘‘The competing meanings of ‘biopolitics’ in political science: Biological and postmodern approaches to politics,’’ we distinguished between two different uses of the term biopolitics. We pointed to the different meanings and provenances of the term for those political scientists indebted to the life sciences and for those indebted to Foucauldian postmodern hermeneutics. We argued that the scientific biopolitical tradition loses little or nothing in relinquishing the use of the term to postmodernists. In this paper, we begin not by distinguishing the two traditions, as we did in the earlier paper, but rather by recognizing the importance of both approaches to a rich, complex, multifaceted investigation of the political. Both scientific and postmodern biopolitics continue to thrive within the study of politics. As Rebecca Hannagan demonstrates in her response to our piece on biopolitics, scholars adopting a scientific biopolitical approach abound, impacting the discipline of political science. She notes, ‘‘Political psychology has been expanding to encompass biological approaches for some time . . . The logical progression of the subfield is to incorporate the theoretical and methodological advances made in biology, neurobiology and psychology to the study of political attitudes and behaviors.’’ Articles examining the relationship between politics and biology, evolution, genetics, and neuroscience continue to increase their numbers in mainstream political science journals. For example, Peter Hatemi and colleagues recently published a paper in the Journal of Politics that examined the impact of both genetic and environmental variables on political attitudes, and Kevin Smith and colleagues last year published ‘‘Biology, Ideology, and Epistemology: How Do We Know Political Attitudes are Inherited and Why Should We Care?’’ in the American Journal of Political Science. At the same time, the study of politics is incomplete without postmodern approaches to power, context and language. As Amy Fletcher explains in her commentary on our paper, postmodernism teaches us to realize that the meanings we attribute to facts can and do vary according to ideology, culture, standpoint and historical context. We share with Fletcher the conviction that if we throw ourselves off the roof of a building, we doi: 10.2990/32_1_99