Call for papers

Sentient creatures: Transforming biopolitics and life matters
Conference hosted by the University of Oslo 15-17 September 2010

The concepts of biopower and biopolitcs, so eloquently and
significantly laid out by Michel Foucault, are quite possibly
insufficient to our understanding of past and contemporary living.
Just think about zoonoses including the ?swine flue? pandemic, and the
ways in which the production of facts about the human body have been
and continue to be built upon the observation and manipulation of
animals. These and similar examples suggest that two correctives or
re-emphases are required. First, studies of life and the living alert
us to the fact that biopolitics is not only about humans, in the form
of the human individual, or in the form of the human population, it is
rather about an assemblage of matters of life. Second, there is
neither a self evident or totalising human power over life, nor an
unproblematic politics of life. The relation between life and politics
needs both theoretical and empirical specificity. To expand slightly
on each of these:

First, even a narrow focus on the life of living humans immediately
takes in nonhumans and other than human lives. Securing life and
making life live is always more than human. Indeed, humans are and
always have been conditioned upon non-humans: as in laboratory
medicine, in our ways of producing and taking life - for food, and as
crucial entities in debates about who ?we? think ?we? are. Animals are
objects, but also subjects, symbols and signs.

Second, if lives are practised in many places and with many others,
then how do we start to understand the lives that are being and have
been made? Past work has tended to underline various practices of
control and technologies of knowledge and surveillance. Perhaps rather
than an overarching framework we need narratives and ethnographies of
the living, taking in the multi-sited, multi-logic and multiple ways
in which lives are and have been assembled, disassembled, practised
and possibly policed and politicised. Instead of asking only how is
and has control and knowledge been extended over life, we should also
look at the imperfect living practices which often defy orders, escape
detection, fail to produce or only loosely hang together.

An aim of this conference is to bring historically oriented narratives
and approaches together with contemporary studies, hence to bring ?the
archive? into an exchange with, for instance, ethnographic ways of
working. It is to link the ways in which we narrate the past now, with
ways of approaching and re-presenting the present. Thus our questions
will not only evolve around ?what´s going on?, ?what are these
transformations?, but also the question of method; how to do the work
? empirically as well as theoretically.

Possible topics for sessions and papers are:
Protecting, caring, conserving, killing, enhancing, ordering,
securing, displaying, naming, modeling ? lives

How do we understand current and past interventions in lives and
living processes?

Are current and past attempts to politicize biology,and to biologize
politics, or biopolitics, sufficient to understand who and what is at
stake?

How are practices as diverse as public health, health care,
agriculture, field and laboratory science, politics and war changing
lives and altering as those lives change?

The conference will take place at the Thorbjørnrud hotel outside Oslo.
The event is a ?joint venture? with CULTRANS
(http://www.cultrans.uio.no) and the projects ?Newcomers to the farm?,
?Animals as objects and animals as signs ? standardisation and
visualization of animals?, ?Nature and Science in Politics and
Everyday Practices? and the Research network ?DRUGS?.

If you want to take part in the conference: Send an abstract of about
400 words to [log in to unmask] presenting your research
interest and the paper you want to present at the conference. Deadline
March 15 2010. Deadline for a short version of the paper will be May
15. There will be a conference fee covering hotel and food expenses.

Organizing committee: Kristin Asdal, Christoph Gradmann, Steve
Hinchliffe, Marianne Lien, Kristina Skåden, Liv Emma Thorsen.