237 research outputs found
Imaginaries of connectivity: the creation of novel spaces of governance/ edited by Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Suvi Alt and Maarten Meijer.
No full textIncludes bibliographical references and index."This edited collection addresses the problem of how the creation of novel spaces of governance relates to imaginaries of connectivity in time. While connectivity seems almost ubiquitous today, it has been imagined and practiced in various ways and to varying political effects in different historical and geographical contexts"--Introduction / Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Suvi Alt and Maarten Meijer -- Novelty and the creation of the New World in XVI C Spain / Luis Lobo-Guerrero -- Faciality and the digital politics of identity : at face value / Carina Huessy -- After ports were linked : paradoxes of transpacific connectivity in the nineteenth century / Sujin Eom -- Zones at sea and the properties of connectivity : (a)roundness, (imm)unity and liquidity / Barry J. Ryan -- From Tian Xia to sovereignty : the shift of the Chinese imaginary of connectivity in the nineteenth century / Ariel Shangguan -- 'Making up Germans' : colonialism, cartography and imaginaries of 'Germandom' / Zeynep Gülsah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis -- Friedrich's 'Germany' : landscape painting as imaginary and experience of connectivity / Benjamin Tallis -- Cultivating disconnection : imaginaries of rurality in the Catalan Pyrenees / Camila del Mármol -- Organisms, nodes and networks / Paolo Palladino -- Conclusions / Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Suvi Alt and Maarten Meijer -- Epilogue : only connect / Peter Adey.1 online resource (x, 254 pages)
The indeterminacy of the human of biopower : competing problematics of human security / Suvi Alt.
No full textThis study examines the concept of human security from two different biopolitical perspectives. Although the works of both Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben offer ground for reading the discourse of human security as limiting the life lived by its subjects, this study will not seek to conflate their works - as is often done in contemporary social sciences and International Relations - but instead seeks to differentiate between a Foucauldian and an Agambenite critique of human security, and between a Foucauldian and an Agambenite account of biopolitics and biopower. Importantly, this study examines also the implications of the different problematics of human security that emerge from Agamben and Foucault's accounts of biopolitics in terms of a discussion of the different accounts of the possibility of political agency that they entail. The empirical material used in this study consists mainly of the 2003 Human Security Now report by the Commission on Human Security, Survival, Livelyhood and Dignity.
Through Agamben's work, the discourse of human security can be read as constituting 'bare life'; the human of which is essentially a desubjectified subject. For Agamben, the human has been captured by (bio)sovereign power, and the discourse of human security can be read as contributing to this (bio)sovereign subjection. A Foucauldian problematic of human security, in contrast, offers an account of the human of human security as both the object and subject of power. Human security can be seen as working through various techniques of power both on the level of the individual and on the level of the population. The framework for the deployment of the techniques of the self and techniques of domination is provided by (neo)liberalism. Whereas Foucault understands resistance as being internal to power, Agamben deems it necessary to escape the power that captures life. Agamben's work entails a rethinking of both politics and ontology as his understanding of political liberation is based on a rethinking of the concept of potentiality.
Whereas Foucault's account of power offers a more detailed and differentiated critique of human security, Agamben's metaphysical account of power sees human security as part of the transhistorical workings of power that pervade our whole understanding of life and politics. While Foucault allows for the strategic use of the discourse of rights, Agamben rejects all normative discourse. A Foucauldian critique of human security recognises that the discourse of human security can be reshaped through problematisation and competition between different discourses. An Agambenite critique of human security does not consider it possible to reshape the discourse of human security as it is predicated on the same concepts - the human, the citizen, rights, law, identity - that mark the subjection of life by power. Whereas Foucault's understanding of political agency is grounded on the conditions of the contemporary world, Agamben gestures towards rethinking 'the human' beyond those conditions
Spatializing the Environmental Apocalypse
Get PDFDepictions of life in the Anthropocene often envision a future of environmental catastrophe where natural resources have been depleted and the Earth has been ravaged by storms and drought, finally turning into uninhabitable wasteland. The term ‘environmental apocalypse’ has been coined to highlight the similarities between the current environmental condition and biblical descriptions of the end of the world. This chapter shows that notions of environmental apocalypse are strongly related to a modernist understanding of linear time. Through an engagement with postcolonial theology, this chapter argues that a more politicized understanding of the environmental apocalypse comes about when the end of the world is conceived as variably distributed across geographical, social, and material divides in the present. To highlight the importance of spatializing the environmental apocalypse, this chapter introduces examples from the field of biodiversity preservation, specifically, the politics of seeds
Farmer Suicides and the Function of Death in Neoliberal Biopolitics
Get PDFThe farmer suicides that have taken place in India since the 1990s constitute the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. While existing research largely focuses on explaining the causes that lead farmers to take their own lives, this paper examines the biopolitical governing function that the suicides have. The paper argues that the farmer suicides have functioned to legitimate intervention into the lives of those who remain by either treating them as subjects with mental health problems or educating them on how to embrace a neoliberal entrepreneurial mentality. The farmer suicides arguably also function to dispose of a population that has become surplus in the contemporary developmental vision of the Indian state. Furthermore, the paper contests biopolitical theorization that views suicide or death as resistance to biopower, arguing that it fails to recognize both the particularity of biopolitics in a context where the presence of death is ubiquitous and the way in which the death of some may reinforce the biopolitical governing of life of others. The farmer suicides express rather than contest the devaluation of ‘unproductive’ lives in neoliberal capitalism
Environmental apocalypse and space: the lost dimension of the end of the world
Get PDFApocalyptic discourses continue to be central to environmental movements, media representations and even establishment accounts of environmental politics. At the same time, ecological thinkers increasingly argue that the apocalypse is already here: We are already living at the end of the world. My aim is to problematise predominant notions of time and space in these discourses and, in doing so, to begin to chart the contribution of postcolonial theology to environmental political thought. I argue that conceptions of environmental apocalypse remain wedded to a particular modern, Western interpretation of the Christian apocalyptic tradition that privileges a linear notion of time over spatial analysis. Recovering space as the lost dimension of the end of the world contests received notions of environmental apocalypse and it calls for challenging the social, political, and material relations of power that constitute its place, thereby contributing to more equal and just environmental politics
Correction to:Feminisms in the nordic region
No full textCorrection to: Chapter 7 in: S. Keskinen et al. (eds.), Feminisms in the Nordic Region, Gender and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53464-6_7 Chapter 9 in: S. Keskinen et al. (eds.), Feminisms in the Nordic Region, Gender and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53464-6_9 Chapters 7 and 9 were previously published as non-open access. They have now been changed to open access under a CC BY 4.0 license and the copyright holder to ‘The Author(s)’. The book has also been updated with this change.</p
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