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Biopolitics

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Articles 1 - 15 of 15

Full-Text Articles in Law

“All Wrong In Point Of Political Economy”: Attempting To Salvage The Oikos From The Polis In Bleak House, Leah Casey Jun 2021

“All Wrong In Point Of Political Economy”: Attempting To Salvage The Oikos From The Polis In Bleak House, Leah Casey

Independent Student Projects and Publications

This paper proposes that Dickens’s Bleak House is symptomatic of a so-called social realm, in which neither oikos nor polis exists as a distinct, autonomous entity; therefore, neither can offer sanctuary or adequately discharge the historical role of the household – maintaining life. In this zone of indistinction, the symbolic structures of London’s law have become the city’s physical structures, leading to symptoms like Jo the outlaw, whose illness and death is attributed to the failure of both the polis and the oikos – the city’s legal housekeeping and the law-as-house, respectively ­– to maintain life. London’s law has become …


Wild Legalities: Animals And Settler Colonialism In Palestine/Israel, Irus Braverman May 2021

Wild Legalities: Animals And Settler Colonialism In Palestine/Israel, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

This article examines the underlying biopolitical premises of wildlife management in Palestine/Israel that make, remake, and unmake this region's settler colonial landscape. Drawing on interviews with Israeli nature officials and observations of their work, the article tells several animal stories that illuminate the hierarchies and slippages between wild and domestic, nature and culture, native and settler, and human and nonhuman life in Palestine/Israel. Animal bodies are especially apt technologies of settler colonialism, I show here. They naturalize and normalize settler modes of existence, while criminalizing native livelihoods and relations. Utilizing the terra nullius doctrine, creating biblical landscapes by reintroducing extirpated …


The Biopolitics Of Maskless Police, India Thusi Jan 2021

The Biopolitics Of Maskless Police, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Despite the recent movement against police violence, police officers have been endangering their communities by engaging in a new form of violence— policing while refusing to wear facial coverings to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Many states advise people to wear masks and to socially distance when in public spaces. However, police officers have frequently failed to comply with these guidelines as they interact with the public to enforce these COVID-19 laws. Police enforcement of COVID-19 laws is problematic for two reasons: (1) it provides a method for pathologizing marginalized communities as biological threats; (2) it creates a racialized pathway …


The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette Sep 2019

The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and …


The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction Of The Surveillance Economy, Julie E. Cohen Jun 2018

The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction Of The Surveillance Economy, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain — a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a …


Anticipating Endangerment: The Biopolitics Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman Mar 2017

Anticipating Endangerment: The Biopolitics Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of national and global lists of threatened and endangered species. This article draws on interviews with prominent list managers and observations of their assessments to explore the scientific practices of list-making in the context of species conservation. Delving into the complex calculations of risk and threat that take place in the process of ranking nonhuman species based on their probability of extinction, the article explores the threatened species list as a biopolitical technology of catastrophe governance. My focus on two prominent lists — the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and NatureServe’s …


Captive: Zoometric Operations In Gaza, Irus Braverman Jan 2017

Captive: Zoometric Operations In Gaza, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

“We are the only people in this world who are living under such total occupation. Israel sees us as being equal to our animals, and sometimes they even value us less than our animals.” This quote, from the founder of the Gaza Zoo, demonstrates both the significance and the complexities of human-animal relations in Gaza, especially at times of siege and war. My article draws on ethnographic encounters and investigative analysis to relay how Gaza’s spatial confinement generally, and the Israeli incursion into Gaza of summer 2014 in particular, has lent itself to a radicalized discursive interplay between the animalization …


Hyperlegality And Heightened Surveillance: The Case Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman Jul 2015

Hyperlegality And Heightened Surveillance: The Case Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

My contribution to the Debate "Thinking about Law and Surveillance" focuses on the project of governing nonhuman species through care, briefly pointing to how law and surveillance are interwoven in this context and to how conservation's biopolitical regimes are increasingly becoming more abstract, standardized, calculable, and algorithmic in scope. I argue that conservation’s focus on governing through care lends itself to heightened modes of surveillance and to hyperlegality - namely, to the intensified inspection and regulation of both governed and governing actors. I start with some preliminary explanations about my atypical use of the terms surveillance, law, and biopolitics.


Governing The Wild: Databases, Algorithms, And Population Models As Biopolitics, Irus Braverman Mar 2014

Governing The Wild: Databases, Algorithms, And Population Models As Biopolitics, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

This essay draws on interviews with conservation biologists to reflect on two interrelated aspects of the in situ – ex situ divide and its increasing integration: database systems and population management models. Specifically, I highlight those databases and software programs used by zoos in ex situ conservation settings, and the parallel, traditionally distinct, in situ databases and risk assessment models. I then explore the evolving technologies that integrate wild-captive databases and population models and, in particular, emerging metapopulation and meta-model approaches to small population management. My central argument is that, while still viewed by many as separate, the in situ …


Artifactualities: Biopolitics And Settler Colonial Liberalism, Michael R. Griffiths Jan 2014

Artifactualities: Biopolitics And Settler Colonial Liberalism, Michael R. Griffiths

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

How does one conceive the settler colony within the framework of a globalizing, transnational geopolitical order? An initial question that could function as a precondition to locating settler colonial space within the global late liberal order might proceed in the following phrasing: how are we to conceive nation-states made up predominantly of Europen-descended settlers?


Becker And Foucault On Crime And Punishment – A Conversation With Gary Becker, François Ewald, And Bernard Harcourt: The Second Session, Gary S. Becker, Francois Ewald, Bernard E. Harcourt Jan 2013

Becker And Foucault On Crime And Punishment – A Conversation With Gary Becker, François Ewald, And Bernard Harcourt: The Second Session, Gary S. Becker, Francois Ewald, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1979 lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault discussed and analyzed Gary Becker’s economic theory of crime and punishment, originally published in The Journal of Political Economy in 1968 under the title “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach.” In this historic, second encounter at the University of Chicago, Gary Becker responds to Foucault’s lectures and possible critical readings of his writings on crime and punishment, in conversation with Professors François Ewald (who was, at the time in 1979, Foucault’s assistant at the Collège and one of Foucault’s closest interlocutors) and Bernard Harcourt (a …


"Becker On Ewald On Foucault On Becker": American Neoliberalism And Michel Foucault's 1979 Birth Of Biopolitics Lectures, Gary S. Becker, Francois Ewald, Bernard E. Harcourt Jan 2012

"Becker On Ewald On Foucault On Becker": American Neoliberalism And Michel Foucault's 1979 Birth Of Biopolitics Lectures, Gary S. Becker, Francois Ewald, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of lectures delivered in 1979 at the Collège de France under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault conducted a close reading of Gary Becker’s writings on human capital and on crime and punishment, within the context of an elaboration and critique of American neoliberalism. Foucault was assisted at the time, at the Collège de France, by François Ewald. Since then, there has been ongoing debate over Foucault’s views about neoliberalism. In this historic meeting at the University of Chicago between Professors Becker and Ewald, Professor Ewald presents a framework to understand Foucault’s writings on Becker; …


Guantánamo Bodies: Law, Media, And Biopower, Cary Federman, Dave Holmes Oct 2011

Guantánamo Bodies: Law, Media, And Biopower, Cary Federman, Dave Holmes

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The idea of the Guantánamo detainee as a Muselmann, the lowest order of concentration camp inmates, contains within it important implications for the new understanding of sovereignty in the era of Guantánamo, in an age of exception. The purpose of this article is to explain the status of those who are detained at Guantánamo Bay. Stated broadly, in assessing that status, we will emphasize the connection between the altered meaning of sovereignty that has accompanied the placing of prisoners in an American penal colony in Cuba and the biopolitical status of the prisoners who reside there. More particularly, we …


Whie Closets, Jangling Nerves And Biopolitics Of The Public Secrety, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey Jan 2011

Whie Closets, Jangling Nerves And Biopolitics Of The Public Secrety, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Some of the white men in country towns who would specially discriminate against Aborigines by day, under the cover of darkness would slip out to the Aboriginal Reserve or fringe camp looking for sex with Aboriginal women . . . This ambivalence, the jangling coexistence within the same individuals of aversion and attraction, desire and repulsion, itself constitutes one of the raw nerves of race relations.


Book Review Of Bodies Of Difference: Experiences Of Disability And Institutional Advocacy In The Making Of Modern China, Michael Ashley Stein, Penelope J. S. Stein Jan 2006

Book Review Of Bodies Of Difference: Experiences Of Disability And Institutional Advocacy In The Making Of Modern China, Michael Ashley Stein, Penelope J. S. Stein

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.