New Congress in February!

After few days disconnected due to an important task I carried out for the Open University of Catalonia, I come back to Anthropology of the Bios talking about the 2^nd Congress of Critical Social Psychology that will be held in Barcelona, from February 12^th to February 14^th. This congress is titled “Affect, Embodiment and Politics” (registration is still open for everyone), where my research group will expose two communications about our current line of research.

For this, the current post is about one of this communications, particularly the one I will espose, whose name is “The new Management of Biorisk and the Biopower’ shift: from the Institutionalized body to the Interspecie Body”. Although the communication will be in Spanish, you can check the Prezi’ slides I am going to use here

For this work, we will begin talking about the current situation of our society in several realms: technology, society, outbreaks… whose assemblage is so different from that pointed out by Foucault in the 80’s which he never could observer because his death. After this introduction we will present two new concepts: interspecies-body and cinepolitics (I wrote one post talking about cinepolitics). Both interspecies-body and cinepolitics are linked at the basis of this new techno-scientific panorama drawn in the first part, where when a new outbreak is emerged, management and surveillance are carried out over the movement of a plural or heterogeneous body made by the union of animals, bacteria, viruses and humans. Is so difficult cutting of the link between all of them, and is observed that peril or risk is no longer one animal (a sheep or a flock of sheep for instance) but the jump to the human or to a whole farm (cows, horses, pigs…).

The next step in our communication is to compare this conception with the Foucaultian view of body: let live-make die to make live-let die, and his conception of a close and finalized body, passing from institution (school, jail, madhouse…) to institution. To finish, we will show some examples extracted from several European documents, including images and some text (you can check it in the last slides.

What is your opinion about that? We need some people in order to discuss our research and enrich our empirical material. 

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Castgen