martes, 5 de mayo de 2015

2014/2015 Course: an activities report

In this post, we want to give an overview of the activities we have done during the course that is ending. Although we still have some task to finish, now we can offer a complete report about the key events, papers and research we have done. Here is it in detail:

1) We started writing one paper for "Universitas Psychologica" Journal, a Colombian ISI journal. This paper was called "From Biopower to Kinepower in the European Union Security Devices". In we talked about how biosecurity has implemented a new regime of control in the contemporary world, where biopolitics in the Foucaultian sense has been abandoned in favor of a new regime: the  movement's control and surveillance. 

2) During the first months we also work on the communications for the II Congress of Critical Social Psychology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. We presented two communications called "From institutionalized body to interspecie body" and "We always have been Cyborg. Re-thinking embodiment". The first one was about a new kind to understand body as a interrelational body, where mosquitoes and human (for instance) was only one body linked by the new knowledge produced by bioscience and the new way of understand the life from biosecurity. The second one was about post-humanism, and we talk about how technology was present in our daily life from the birth of humankind, and not only from the last decades with the emergence of computers or another kind of technologies as DNA manipulation. In this vein, we hava try to answer to two main questions: Do we are truly evolving? and, in this case, there is some historical and taken-for-granted conceptions we have to change about it?

Furthermore, some of our staff participated as volunteers in the congress, guiding and moderating the communications.

3) Along this months, we have explore the role of citizenship as Early Warning System, as well as the concept of biosurveillance: is this kind of surveillance different in his nature from other kind of surveillance? What can people do when they see an odd man bleeding from this mouth and coughing? We have instigate some documents from the WHO and some "apps" and software as HealthMap.

4) In the end of 2014, we launched this blog by one of our staff, Enrique Baleriola. Two months later, the blog was linked with our final version of our webpage. The binomial Blog (Anthropology of the Bios) and webpage (POBICS) has an average of 150 monthly visits.

5) Portraits of Bios in the Contemporary Societies (POBICS) was constituted as research group as a branch of the new research group STS-b (Science and Technology Studies-Barcelona). Our research group aims to study the bios and life within the contemporary practices of biosciences in the path of biosecurity and biosurveillance.

6) We have published two papers: one in a Brazilian journal called "Subjectivity and Subjectifiers in Union European Technologies of Biosecurity" and other one in a Chilean journal called "Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics in the European Union Regimes of Biosecurity". 

7) We are finishing and sending more articles. For instance, one titled "New forms of inhabit the city: towards a conceptualization of biovigilant citizenship", "Biocapitalism and suspension of the norm: from the politic-legal paradigm to the emergence of the techno-scientific paradigm", or another one called "Images Regimes in Social Psychology" (we will offer an abstract about the last one in the next post). 

8) We received a great new when we achieved fund from the Spanish Government with the project called "Citizen Participation in Social Aproppiation of Knowledge and Technological Design Processes". This project has a duration of three years and we are involving in it now with new research.

9) We are also writing to ISI journals a new paper about the scenario-planning concept and another one about acceleration dispositifs in the last ebola outbreak.

10) We have held several seminaries about key Authors as Deleuze or Agamben, as well as key concepts and theories as Biopolitics, surveillance and new ways to understand the life, with the whole STS-b group and anyone who wanted to come. In fact, these seminaries are still actives.

11) Our students have collaborated in some teaching assignments, as guiding to pre-graduate students in their final dissertation, doing a peer-to-peer review for an ISI journal, or teaching to post-graduate students some issues as Images Analysis or writing some manuals.

12) Finally, the book about Biosecurity and Biopolitics in the 21th Century where we are editors and authors is about to be published . We will post about it when it would be published (but meanwhile you can see our chapter here).

And that is all. We think it has been a very productive course. We have learned many things and we want to follow this line next course. All of our staff hope you keep reading our post during this course and in the future!

Photo Credit: By ourselves at the 2nd Congress of Critical Social Psychology. 

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