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An original, comprehensive interpretation of Michel Foucault's analysis of biopolitics – situating biopolitics in the context of embodied histories of subjectivity, affective investments and structures of experience. Going beyond lamentation at the horrors of biopolitical domination, the book develops a positive-critique of biopolitical experience.
Could the vitality of embodied experience create a foundation for a new form of revolutionary authority? The Life of the City is a bold and innovative reassessment of the early urban avant-garde movements that sought to re-imagine and reinvent the experiential life of the city. Constructing a ground-breaking theoretical analysis of the relationships between biological life, urban culture, and modern forms of biopolitical ’experiential authority’, Julian Brigstocke traces the failed attempts of Parisian radicals to turn the ’crisis of authority’ in late nineteenth-century Paris into an opportunity to invent new forms of urban commons. The most comprehensive account to date of the spat...
Across the globe, political movements opposing privatisation, enclosures, and other spatial controls are coalescing towards the idea of the ‘commons’. As a result, struggles over the commons and common life are now coming to the forefront of both political activism and scholarly enquiry. This book advances academic debates concerning the spatialities of the commons and draws out the diverse materialities, temporalities, and experiences of practices of commoning. Part one, "Materialising the Commons" focuses on the performance of new geographical imaginations in spatial and material practices of commoning. Part two, "Spaces of Commoning", explores the importance of the turn from ‘common...
Sixty years ago, an upsurge of social movements protested the ecological harms of industrial capitalism. In subsequent decades, environmentalism consolidated into forms of management and business strategy that aimed to tackle ecological degradation while enabling new forms of green economic growth. However, the focus on spaces and species to be protected saw questions of human work and histories of colonialism pushed out of view. This book traces a counter-history of modern environmentalism from the 1960s to the present day. It focuses on claims concerning land, labour and social reproduction arising at important moments in the history of environmentalism made by feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, workers’ and agrarian movements. Many of these movements did not consider themselves ‘environmental,’ and yet they offer vital ways forward in the face of escalating ecological damage and social injustice.
The European Union (EU) Commission champions a 'migrant-centred' approach to border security and 'irregular' migration management: it claims not only to observe human rights, but also to use surveillance to enhance the humanitarian protection of 'endangered' lives on land and at sea. Yet research presented by Non-Governmental Organizations and 'irregular' migrants' own testimonies reveal systemic border violence, dehumanization in spaces of detention, and exposure to death via abandonment in hostile environments. This book turns to conceptual resources found in biopolitical theory in order to move diagnoses of Europe's border crisis beyond that of a 'gap' between the policy 'rhetoric' of hum...
In a twenty-first century which celebrates freedom and equality while also beginning to question the lax attitudes and methods which have triumphed since the late Sixties, reflecting on the concept of authority is as necessary as ever. What role does, and should, authority play in political, social, and academic organization? Should one plead for stricter or more flexible authority? Where does the frontier between authority and authoritarianism lie? In examining these, and other related questions, this volume, postulating the interconnectedness between authority and discourse, also discusses the rhetorical strategies whereby authority is constructed, manifested, and resisted. Pertaining to subjects as various as politics, culture, literature, history, and pedagogy, the twenty chapters which constitute this book offer an interdisciplinary, yet thematically coherent, coverage of the question under discussion, and encompass a wide historical and spatial scope, which ranges from the Islamic Middle Ages to twenty-first century America, passing through nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, India, and North Africa on the way.
Feminist scholarship is sometimes dismissed as not quite ‘proper’ knowledge – it’s too political or subjective, many argue. But what are the boundaries of ‘proper’ knowledge? Who defines them, and how are they changing? How do feminists negotiate them? And how does this boundary-work affect women’s and gender studies, and its scholars’ and students’ lives? These are the questions tackled by this ground-breaking ethnography of academia inspired by feminist epistemology, Foucault, and science and technology studies. Drawing on data collected over a decade in Portugal and the UK, US and Scandinavia, this title explores different spaces of academic work and sociability, conside...
This book draws on a wide range of fields, theories and thinkers to provide a complete introduction to the study of gender. Each entry presents a critical definition of its subjects, examining origins, usage and major contributors. Presented in A-Z format, it explores those terms most central to gender studies including: Agency, The body, Class, Disability, Femininities, Gender and development, Men, masculinity and masculinities, New reproductive technologies, Power and Representation.
This book examines three consecutive famines in Cambodia during the 1970s, exploring both continuities and discontinuities of all three. Cambodia experienced these consecutive famines against the backdrop of four distinct governments: the Kingdom of Cambodia (1953-1970), the U.S.-supported Khmer Republic (1970-1975), the communist Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), and the Vietnamese-controlled People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979-1989). Famine in Cambodia documents how state-induced famine constituted a form of sovereign violence and operated against the backdrop of sweeping historical transformations of Cambodian society. It also highlights how state-induced famines should not be solely fra...
However hopeless we often feel, we are creatures of hope. This collection of short accessible essays explores the ways in which hope is bound up with power in worlds that are composed through imagination, transformation and feeling. Hope is the most precious ingredient of power. The essays do not assume hope to be inherently good or emancipatory. Rather they reflect on how hope can both support and obstruct us in our efforts to make lives more livable, or futures more just. The essays draw on social research, philosophy, literature, music and film to show how hope might re-enchant writing and politics for a post-hopeful age. This is a book for those who want to remain hopeful but find it har...