Governing the Wild: Databases, Algorithms, and Population Models as Biopolitics

Governing the resilience of neoliberalism through biopolitics

Neoliberalism is widely regarded as the main culprit for the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. However, despite this abysmal failure, neoliberalism has not merely survived the crisis, but actually 'thrived'. How is it possible to account for the resilience of neoliberalism? Existing scholarship has answered this question either by focusing on the distinctive qualities of neoliberalism (such as...

Epigenetic Biopolitics: Race, Population, and Environmental Health

Reading the US government’s current warning and advice regarding fish consumption, one would have little hint that race might be important in this environmental health matter. Issued jointly by the EPA and FDA, the advice aims to protect fetuses and young children from the harm that even low doses of methylmercury can cause to brain development (US FDA and US EPA 2004). Because fish is the main...

Bad girls and biopolitics: abortion, popular fiction, and population control.

Docile bodies: transnational research ethics as biopolitics.

This essay explores the claim that bioethics has become a mode of biopolitics. It seeks to illuminate one of the myriad of ways that bioethics joins other institutionalized discursive practices in the task of producing, organizing, and managing the bodies-of policing and controlling populations-in order to empower larger institutional agents. The focus of this analysis is the contemporary pract...

The New Empirical Biopolitics

Political science traditionally has either ignored biology in favor of purely environmental explanations for political phenomena or merely ruminated about the likely role of biology, leaving data-based research on biopolitics in dangerously short supply. Currently, attention to the apparent genetic basis for political and social orientations holds the greatest promise of advancing empirical bio...