Claire Blencowe, 2016

​GeoHumanities - part of the Forum on Attunement

This article embarks on adventures in search of antifascist aesthetics—an excursion born of despair at the increasingly racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim poison of our political ground. It asks whether ecological attunement can provide a counter to such capitalist sorcery and barbarism. The article draws on feminist philosophy of science, new materialism, and ecofeminism. What, it asks these guides, can ecological attunement offer to the task of composing antifascist, anticapitalist political subjectivity or shattering the reality principle of the “no alternative”? Among the responses to that question are certain ideas that we might call theological figurations—figures that open onto the theological task of questioning the value of values, and the political task of mustering spirit. Centering on an attempt to think with Stengers, the article turns to three such figures: the enchantress, the witch, and the intrusion of Gaia. It asks how these figures might succeed and fail in speaking to a popular politics that could lift our despair.

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Authority & Political Technologies 2016: Biopolitical Matters
What is biopolitics today? What are its discontents? Is there life after biopolitics?

University of Warwick, June 13-14
This event is free but online registration is essential. Deadline for registration June 6th

Key Notes
Kathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary: Geopower: biopolitics and matter after life
Celia Lury, Warwick: Better than you: a topological imaginary
Didier Fassin, Princeton IAS: The Rise - and Fall? - of Carceral Society
Organizers Claire Blencowe, Amy Hinterberger & Illan Wall

Papers

• Aécio Amaral: Recombination oriented biopower: On technoscientific objects of potential life
• Angela Last: The anti-totalitarian and anti-colonial experiments of cosmic materialism
• David Reubi: A Genealogy of Epidemiological Reason: Biopolitics, Surveillance and Global Health
• Oliver Davis: Prison and the senses
• Julia Bennett: Whose place is this anyway? A tale of a hill, a heath and some big weeds
• Julian Brigstocke: Exhausted Futures
• Kathryn Medien: Foucault in Tunisia: Biopolitical Critique as Anti-Imperial Praxis
• Kevin S Jobe: Agents of Disease: Neoliberal Agency, Biosecurity and the Legalization of Homeless Encampments
• Laura Hille: Biohacking as a Technology of Cybernetic Biopolitics
• Matthew Cooper: Governmentality and the bio-political regulation in the UK's benefit system since 2010 and in the 1930s.
• Michael S. Darke: National commemoration without nation: The affective production of spirituality without spirit
• Naomi Millner: Community Forestry a Film
• Nick Vaughan-Williams: Rereading Europe's boder and migration crisis: Deconstructive biopolitics and the affirmative potential of the autoimmune
• Rosemary Segurado & Marcelo Burgos Pimentel dos Santos: Occupy public spaces and the making of the common: Students political action in São Paulo public schools
• Stephen James Connelly: 'I must have a body, it's a moral necessity, a requirement'
• Thomas Clément Mercier: Resisting the Present: Biopolitics in the Face of the Event

Special Panel: Racialised (in)securities: race and migration in ‘post-racial’ global politics
Chaired by Hidefumi Nishiyama

• Gurminder K Bhambra: ‘These people can’t stop talking about race’: Migration Studies, Migration, and Race
• Hannah Jones: Dissonant Belongings: queering home, race and nation
• Maurice Stierl: Of Slave Traders, Trojan Horses of Ebola, and Humanitarian Saviours: EUrope’s Racialised Border Violence in the Mediterranean Sea

Authority & Political Technologies, IAS, Social Theory Centre, Sociology, Law – University of Warwick