Biopolitical Reflection on Human Safety: Ukrainian and Belarus Experience

Biopolitical reflection is seen as a way of understanding the specifics of being “bios politicos.” It’s means as the understanding the transformational processes in bios and involve the appropriate political reaction, and internal changes “bios politicos,” its self-realization as a subject and object of policy, able to initiate profound transformations of politics and power in biopolitics and biopower. The concept of “bios politicos,” his life, freedom and safety are in the focus of scientific analysis. The key question: сan “bios politicos” exist and function effectively in conditions of danger, in conditions where every word, every action that is unacceptable to the disciplinary authorities can lead to punishment or even death? The aim is to prove that politics and power in the 21st century in Europe cannot and should not exist in a disciplinary form. Their transformation is possible due to the activity of a person as a conscious subject of social and political activity. The complex nature of the scientific problem involves the use of appropriate methods that combine different types of systems analyses: system-structural analysis, system-functional, system-historical analysis, as well as the method of rational reconstruction and prognostic method. The key hypothesis is that today Ukraine is very close (or seeks to get closer) to the implementation of the concepts of biopolitics and biopower. 2014 is certainly an illustration of the “bios politicos” resistance to disciplinary action, despite disciplinary techniques, including the threat of death. Belarusian society, after the 2020 presidential election, has shown such a high level of consolidation and awareness, non-acceptance of disciplinary techniques in the form of threats, violence, and punishment, that we can assume the beginning of transformational change. It is biopolitics and biopower today that is the response of the conscious subject – “bios politicos” to the crisis of disciplinary power, its techniques of domination, control, and violence. Biopolitics and biopower allow “bios politicos” to exist and develop freely in their country, to realize their knowledge and aspirations, to be realized in all spheres of life knowing that the main task of the state is to protect his life and freedom.

Witnessing Violence, Witnessing as Violence: Police Torture and Power in Twentieth-Century India

Police custodial violence was a normal occurrence in the southern Indian province of Madras through the twentieth century, across the colonial and postcolonial periods alike. While governmental authorities attributed torture to individual deviants and the press attributed the practice to a lack of government will in punishing offenders, this article locates police impunity in broader structures of power that permeated society. Specifically, it shows how the deployment of seemingly objective forms of evidence in adjudicating cases of torture—the testimony of respectable persons, medical expertise, and police writing—discounted the voices of victims of violence, reaffirming instead policing’s alignment with class, caste, and gendered authority. Equally, the very act of witnessing produced some subjects as socially privileged by virtue of their respectable status, their expertise, or their literacy, further separating them from bodies that were vulnerable to state violence. Police sovereign power within the station was thus constituted in conjunction with disciplinary power across society.

Disciplinary Power, Surveillance, and the Docile Body in Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea

Power in contemporary society is a prominent feature in literary works, especially in postmodernist literary works. Mark Dunn is an American novelist who deals with the subject of power prominently in his works, especially his first novel Ella Minnow Pea (2001). While previous studies on Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea focused on aspects of violence, sexuality, and psychological aspects of power, this study concentrates on disciplinary aspects of power, such as surveillance, which is used to subjugate subjects without the use of violence to transform them into productive, docile bodies. The study explores Ella Minnow Pea through Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, surveillance, and docile body. In Foucault’s view, disciplinary power is used as a conversion method to force individuals into submission to authority characterised by conformity and obedience, or docility. The study examines power manipulation, disciplinary practices, and the effectiveness of surveillance as methods for converting people into productive docile bodies and how the novel achieved this result. In addition, it delves into the characters’ responses in the novel to these machinations, which ultimately reveal that the negative impacts of repressive disciplinary power contrast with the benefits anticipated by the authoritarian state. This study provides a valuable insight on the use of Foucauldian concepts in literary criticism as the concepts chosen for this analysis have not previously been applied to this text.

Power and Resistance: Digital-Free Tourism in a Connected World

Although digital-free tourism is growing in popularity, research in this area has not unpacked the complex power relations between humans and technology through a critical perspective. Building on Foucault’s analysis of power and resistance, we theorized technology as disciplinary power and conducted a collaborative autoethnography to explore how individuals resist the dominant discourse. Through a reflexive account, we theorize digital-free travel as a process of negotiating and rejecting the dominant discourse of technology, particularly through effective personal strategies of engaging in full disconnection, redefining punishments and rewards, recalling nostalgic memories, and constantly reflecting on embodied feelings and self-transformations in the power relations. Theoretically, this study contributes to understanding digital-free tourism through the lens of power and resistance; it also contributes to critical studies in technology and tourism. Methodologically, we emphasize the potential of applying collaborative autoethnography in analyzing embodied self-transformations. Practically, this study offers suggestions for digital-free tourism providers.

Isolating Madness: Photographs from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, 1887-1907

<p>Frederic Truby King (1858-1938) is an eminent figure in New Zealand history. His name continues to flourish in contemporary society, due in part to its affiliation with the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society. However, the general populace is still relatively unaware of the time that King spent employed as the medical superintendent of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, on the remote outskirts of Dunedin. The prevailing image of King during this period is of a single-minded physician, whose career was in a state of acceleration towards the establishment of Plunket. But historians like Barbara Brookes and Catherine Coleborne have rightly started to establish this epoch as significant in its own right. This thesis extends their work by engaging with previously unpublished casebook photographs of patients in King’s care, taken between 1887 and 1907, from the restricted Seacliff Lunatic Asylum archives. Through six case studies, this thesis draws connections between these photographs and the paradigms established by such internationally renowned photographers as Hugh W. Diamond and James Crichton-Browne. It then discusses some distinctive photographs that appear unique to this institutional environment, images that challenge our preconceived notions of psychiatric institutions and their functions. This visual history complicates, and sometimes even challenges, the argument about psychiatric institutions and disciplinary power proposed by Michel Foucault and John Tagg, by demonstrating the diverse forms of photography that can occur within a single institution. This study is part of a growing body of research on the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum archives. In using a largely untapped source of photographic history, this project will contribute to future research on similar topics.</p>

Isolating Madness: Photographs from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, 1887-1907

<p>Frederic Truby King (1858-1938) is an eminent figure in New Zealand history. His name continues to flourish in contemporary society, due in part to its affiliation with the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society. However, the general populace is still relatively unaware of the time that King spent employed as the medical superintendent of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, on the remote outskirts of Dunedin. The prevailing image of King during this period is of a single-minded physician, whose career was in a state of acceleration towards the establishment of Plunket. But historians like Barbara Brookes and Catherine Coleborne have rightly started to establish this epoch as significant in its own right. This thesis extends their work by engaging with previously unpublished casebook photographs of patients in King’s care, taken between 1887 and 1907, from the restricted Seacliff Lunatic Asylum archives. Through six case studies, this thesis draws connections between these photographs and the paradigms established by such internationally renowned photographers as Hugh W. Diamond and James Crichton-Browne. It then discusses some distinctive photographs that appear unique to this institutional environment, images that challenge our preconceived notions of psychiatric institutions and their functions. This visual history complicates, and sometimes even challenges, the argument about psychiatric institutions and disciplinary power proposed by Michel Foucault and John Tagg, by demonstrating the diverse forms of photography that can occur within a single institution. This study is part of a growing body of research on the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum archives. In using a largely untapped source of photographic history, this project will contribute to future research on similar topics.</p>

Does Power “Spread”? Foucault on the Generalization of Power

This essay critically analyzes a common metaphor in political theory, which figures the growth of power as a process of “spreading” or “diffusion.” It argues that narratives that cast the generalization of power as a movement of “spreading” often fail to furnish the specific type of historical evidence that they imply, such that these narratives are frequently received as richly suggestive yet ultimately unjustified. This essay develops an alternative way of conceptualizing the generalization of power, one that rests on rigorous yet speculative evidence of the sort that political theorists are best positioned to find: not proof of literal extension or application of existing powers to new domains, but accidental convergences, isomorphisms, and ideal combinations among disparate practices that introduce large powers into the world. To do this, the essay revisits Foucault’s narrative of the generalization of disciplinary power in modern Western societies, which is perhaps the clearest source for the familiarity of the figure of “spread” in contemporary political theory. It shows that Foucault’s incessant use of the “spread” metaphor naturally invites the dismissive reading that Discipline and Punish received in many quarters, for it implies a historical process that Foucault cannot justify. Yet I argue that in a brief self-criticism, Foucault provides the rudiments for a conception of power’s generalization far more useful and compelling than the metaphoric of “spread.” I suggest that this alternative, if developed, is not just the proper frame for interpreting Foucault’s narrative, but a promising practical resource for contemporary theorists of general powers.

The Biopolitics of Transformation to ERM Technologies

How risk management technologies are implemented in developing countries is largely under-researched. Using a perspective on bio-politics, this paper dissects how an infusion of risk management technologies permeates as a powerful managerial tool in governing subordinates. The notions of power/knowledge relations, disciplinary power, and governmentality enabled the authors to rehearse the Foucault's biopolitics perspective in an analysis of risk-based rationalities and risk management technologies. Qualitative case study research methods guided them to gather empirical evidence from a privately owned, Egyptian insurance firm. They found that risk management technologies are conjoined with institutional and discursive ramifications in a developing country where burgeoning neoliberal economic remedies are being diffused and adopted. Further, risk management technologies go hand in hand with this ensuing neoliberal agenda, making it inescapable for organisational managers in such a developing country to adopt these technologies for their survival and sustainability.

‘Why am I still imprisoned in your eyes?’: Re-visioning ‘leftover women’ and the female gaze in Send Me to the Clouds

This article studies how a recent Chinese women’s film Send Me to the Clouds (2019) explores different ways of looking as innovative cinematic strategies of constructing and empowering the precarious female subject against a postsocialist patriarchal ideology that dominates gendered narratives and audio-visual codes of the mainstream Chinese cinema. The film is centred upon a 30-year-old ‘leftover woman’ Sheng Nan’s distressful life experiences and her anger at the prevailing sexism and ageism. Rather than being tamed or domesticated, throughout the film the angry and restless woman is shown to be constantly on the motion, making every effort to experiment with alternative looking relations that seek to destroy the voyeuristic pleasure and disciplinary power of the privileged male gaze, as well as to explore possibilities of creating a self-reflective and critical female gaze. A contextualized critical study of the female authorship and agency on and behind the screen will shed new light on how contemporary Chinese women filmmakers take on ‘concrete and various negotiations’ with the structure of domination and its representational system via ‘their socially and politically conditioned cinematic practice or performance’.