Steve
Sentient Creatures
Transforming biopolitics and life matters
Invitation and call for papers to 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.
Papers are invited on any aspect of the conference theme
Protecting, caring, conserving, killing, enhancing, ordering, securing, displaying, naming, modeling and reproduction - 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, agri- and aquaculture, field and laboratory science, politics and administration changing lives and altering as those lives change?
Website and contact
Organizers
“Newcomers to the farm”, “Animals as objects and animals as signs – standardisation and visualization of animals”, “Nature and Science in Politics and Everyday Practices”,
the research network “DRUGS”.
Organizing committee: Kristin Asdal, Christoph Gradmann, Steve Hinchliffe, Marianne Lien, Kristina Skåden, Liv Emma Thorsen, Beate Trandem.
Steve Hinchliffe
Professor of Human Geography
School of Geography
University of Exeter
Biosecurity
Crepe
Sentient Creatures
