New Biopolitics

New Biopolitics

An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Saturday, February 24, 2018

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Associate Professor of English & Gender and Women's Studies, Pomona College

 

 

Michel Foucault defines biopolitics as “this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge and apparatuses of security [or dispositifs] as its essential technical instrument.” Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, in turn, describe the “biopolitical turn” as “a proliferation of studies, claiming Foucault as an inspiration, on the relations between ‘life’ and ‘politics.’”

 

As scholars have further engaged with and complicated the concept of biopolitics, new trends have emerged from its lineage – from necropolitics to the global proliferations of surveillance to biomanufacturing.

 

To revisit and expand conceptions of biopolitics, the English Graduate Student Association at Georgetown University seeks proposals from various disciplines and theoretical approaches, with an emphasis on how the humanities and social sciences have approached this field. Some possible lines of inquiry include: How have body modifications like reading glasses and walking canes or scarification and subdermal implants redefined feeling and experience?  With Europe's recent court cases on the "right to be forgotten" in mind, how does the inability to have our presence die on the Internet extend our boundaries of life?  In what ways has literature or film redefined conception and birth with our society's focus on reproductive rights? Refuting traditional notions of the human-animal binary, how has technology reified and/or complicated our distinctions between the human and the other?

 

While certainly not comprehensive, papers addressing any of the following are welcome:

 

• The ontological turn

• Affect studies

• Ecological approaches/ the Anthropocene

• Law and literature

• Materialisms

• Temporality

• Digital humanities

• Boundaries of the human

• Pop culture

• Biotechnology

• Cyborg studies

 

For the conference, please submit your 300-word abstracts to newbiopolitics@gmail.com by December 15th, 2017, Submissions should include your proposed paper title as well as a short bio (100 words), giving your name, institutional affiliation, and department.