ESRC Seminar - Contemporary Biopolitical Security - Keele University
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Research Institute for Social Sciences

ESRC Seminar - Contemporary Biopolitical Security


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November 2008 – February 2011

Coordinator: Dr Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Keele University

Co-hosted by the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University and the Biopolitics of Security Network

Workshops:


Workshop One : The Biopolitics of Mobilities and Circulations (keynote speaker: Prof Mark Salter, University of Ottawa), 27-28 November 2008

Workshop Two : The Biopolitics of Resilience (Keynote speaker: Prof Pat O’Malley, University of Sydney), 18-19 June 2009

Workshop Three : The Biopolitics of Value(s) (Keynote speaker: Prof Peter Burgess, PRIO and editor of Security Dialogue), 19-20 January 2010

Workshop Four : Problematising Danger (Keynote speaker: Prof Marieke de Goede, University of Amsterdam), 21-22 February 2011
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/02/problematising-danger/

Aims and Objectives

This seminar series has aimed to foster debate, research and networking opportunities on the problem-space that results from posing questions on what does it mean to secure ‘life’ and ‘forms of life’ in the 21st century.

Its general objective has been to provide the material funds to enable meetings and collective-thinking opportunity for intellectuals working on the area of the biopolitics of security. Biopolitics, broadly speaking, is the politics of life itself. It is a concept related to the power relations and forms of knowledge that brought together constitute what life and forms of life are to be. The immediate political relevance of this intellectual problem is that only when ‘life’ and ‘forms of life’ are specifically defined decisions and strategies on how to govern, promote, and protect them can be made. Biopolitical research is all about investigating the ways in which conceptions of life are made to be and the strategies devised to ‘make live’.

Biopolitics is a concept coined and initially developed by Michel Foucault in France in the 1970s. Foucault’s original formulations, however, have been advanced consequently in the English-speaking academic world, particularly in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and parts of the United States. A whole new body of theory inspired in the work of Foucault began to fertilise social sciences from the 1980s onwards under the rubric of ‘governmentality’. This work has had significant impact in policy-making and widened the scope for inter-disciplinary social research. In this century, the publication of the translations of Foucault’s lecture series of the mid 1970s Society Must be Defended, and Security, Territory, Population have re-ignited intellectual debate and empowered younger intellectual generations to develop new theoretical tools and policy-relevant instruments.

Biopolitics of security is already a theoretical elaboration on the Foucauldian idea of biopolitics. It refers specifically to the analysis of the security strategies that derive from biopolitical conceptions of life. Foucault understood life as a function of classification processes, ‘speciation’ as he called it. Biopolitics of security is concerned with analysing how life is classified as species and as such protected and promoted. In simple terms, then, biopolitics of security studies the ways in which ‘life’ and forms of life are the result of classification processes aimed at protecting and promoting life as species.

Specific objectives of the seminar series have been:

  • To promote inter-disciplinary research on the biopolitics of security amongst research students, early-career academics, and senior researchers in dialogue with policy-makers.
  • Advance collective knowledge on the biopolitics of security by analysing emerging regimes of classification of life, developments in biometrics and surveillance, and the latest trends in the implementation of rationalities of risk within contemporary (global) governance.
  • Facilitate the dissemination and development of novel and creative ideas on the biopolitics of security, particularly of early-career academics working in the United Kingdom.

Seminar Series

The context and content of the seminar series is generally enframed by the following questions:
What political rationalities and general theories of politics emerge when life rather than sovereign territoriality becomes the referent object of power? (Foucault, Dillon, Campbell, Rabinow)

What happens to power relations when power takes life as its referent object (Foucault, Dean)? What mechanisms and technologies are deployed by power relations that take life as their field of formation (Dillon)? What mechanisms and micro practices of governmental regulation emerge when the basic biological features of the human species become the object of political strategisation (Foucault)?

But how has the life of populations changed since Foucault first interrogated biopower (Agamben, Edkins, Mills)? What is the status, for example, of population science today (Fries)? How indeed has our understanding of what it is to be a living thing changed in the wake of the molecular and the digital revolutions (Rose, Novas, Hayles, Dillon)?
What new technologies have emerged around the new life sciences and the population science of the 21st century (Barry, Mills) ? How have these changed the field of formation of biopolitical power relations? What new political rationalities have they introduced (Dean, Duffield)? What new micro practices of power do they employ (Cooper, Lobo-Guerrero, )? How have they re-engineered more traditional biopolitical micro practices of power; such as those employed, for example, by medicine, surveillance, urban planning or insurance (De Goede, Rose, Lobo-Guerrero, Adey?
In Sécurité, Territoire, Population Foucault concludes that biopolitics simply is a dispositif de sécurité. As a dispositif de sécurité biopolitics secures by instantiating a general economy of the contingent throughout all the processes of re-productive circulation which impinge upon species existence as a whole. How has this dispositif de sécurité been developing throughout the last century in particular? How has the contingent developed? What kind of freedom does the biopolitics of security instantiate and regulate?