Circulating Approaches to Biopolitics in the Anthropocene
Christine Schenk; Juliet Fall. University of Geneva, Switzerland
Biopolitics, as a term and as an idea, has captured the imagination of many social scientists, appearing to promise no less than to bridge scholarship on
power, space and vibrant, material life. Geographers have specifically seized upon Michel Foucault’s use of the term biopolitics to think about the practices of governance; or have made productive use of Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical approaches to write about
bare life and states of exception; or have drawn from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s
Empire to think about new multitudes, often in constructive dialogue with other concepts such as territory, governmentality or biopower. Other authors, such as Thomas Lemke in Germany, or Roberto Esposito and Paolo
Virno in Italy have enjoyed more limited international success within geography, not least because of varied availability of English-language translations. Each of these distinct and shifting understandings of biopolitics has emerged in a different context
and time, responding to specifically-situated debates. Each offers a different takes on the term biopolitics and could contribute to thinking through what the Anthropocene might shape up to be as an idea, an epoch and a place.
The aim of this session is to continue to take the diversity of these situated approaches seriously, while simultaneously exploring whether and how they might provide tools for thinking about the bios on the scale of the Anthropocene.
We are specifically interested in papers that resonate with the question of ‘how should we live’ (Castree 2014, The Anthropocene and Geography III: Future
Directions), reaching out to forms of affirmative biopolitics (Hannah 2011; Blencowe 2012) and biopolitical solidarity (Hannah 2011; Rutherford S &P 2013) that lead to new forms of social and spatial justice.
We therefore seek contributions that:
· -- critically
interrogate the variety of theoretical strands on biopolitics in the French, Italian and German traditions,
· -- offer
historically and contextually situated histories of the idea of biopolitics, and empirical explorations of these,
· -- link
up to contemporary writing on biosecurity and governance,
· -- engage
with notion of truth-seeking in terms of a planetary biopolitics that reconfigures the government of the living (such as within Foucault’s writing on
aléthurgie).
· -- think
through the spatialities and materialities of planetary biopolitics in the Anthropocene,
· -- explore
conceptually and/or empirically biopolitical regimes of governing more-than-human populations on a planetary scale
· -- consider
the biopolitical predicaments of a unpredictable and volatile earth.
P Please send your proposed abstract (about 250 words) to Christine Schenk ([log in to unmask]) or Juliet Fall ([log in to unmask]) before the 11th February.