*Apologies for Cross-Postings
Call for Papers Western Political Science Association (WPSA) *2014 ANNUAL MEETING** April 17 – April 19, 2014 – Sheraton Seattle Hotel Seattle, Washington* Environmental Political Theory Section *Biopolitical Disaster* *Organizers:** * Jennifer Lawrence,* Virginia Tech, Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought * *and* Sarah Marie Wiebe*, University of Victoria, Department of Political Science and Institute for Studies and Innovation in Community-University Engagement* *Panel Abstract:* We live in a crude time where the exception increasingly becomes the norm. >From disastrous environmental catastrophes like the recent oil spill in Lac Mégantic (2013) to the BP Deepwater Horizon spill (2010) in New Orleans, such exceptional occurrences appear as incidental to modern political life. To investigate the routinization of environmental catastrophe, we seek to invite paper submissions to participate in a panel on “Biopolitical Disaster”. As such, we will examine the ruinous consequences resulting from the (de)regulation of subjects through technologies of power. Inspired by the works of biopolitical theorists (i.e. Agamben, Arendt, Banu, Darier, Foucault, Kristeva, Luke etc.) we take up Foucault’s conception of biopower in this panel to address the deployment of power for the control of populations, territories and bodies. While biopower is often used as a framework of analysis for issues related to public health, this panel also seeks to highlight linkages between the devastating costs and consequences of environmental disaster in an age of climate change and extensive transformation of natural resources for capital accumulation. Many critical questions arise for environmental political theorists to address: · How might the question of biopolitical disaster be normalized for the purpose of policy transformation? · How do we theorize the role of the state and corporations in the production of disasters? What/Where are the spaces of resistance to manufactured biopolitical disaster? And how might they impact future policy directions? · In what ways do bodies mobilize, contend with and confront disaster? · What forms of agency emerge and how is agency both shaped and constrained by environmental catastrophe? · How might individuals reconcile their participation in the system of manufactured environmental disaster? · How might the conception of biopolitical disaster inform scholarship on environmental theory and governance? Keeping in mind the above questions, this panel envisions a critical discussion that makes links between biopower, environmental catastrophe and disaster. Possible paper topics might include, but are not limited to the following: · The political and societal production of biopolitical disaster; · Environmental disaster and impacts upon marginalized and/or displaced communities; · Biopolitical disasters in the age of climate change and the possibility of climate change as a space of resistance; · The question of agency related to disaster-affected people, and the manufacturing of disaster, and its role in environmental politics; · The role of the state/corporations in the production of biopolitical disasters. Potential participants should send their abstract (no more than 250 words) to Jenn Lawrence ([email protected]) and Sarah Marie Wiebe ([email protected]) by *Wednesday, September 11, 2013*. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
