After Capital: Towards Alternative Worlds

Transcript of presentation given at Professor Couze Venn Memorial and Celebration, Goldsmiths, University of London, 22 May 2019. Part of a special issue of Subjectivity dedicated to the work of Couze Venn. Response to Couze Venn, After Capital (Sage, 2018)

Review Essay: Biopolitics 2.0 – Reclaiming the Power of Life in the Anthropocene

Biopolitics was once the preserve of critical Foucauldian-influenced theorists. This is no longer the case. The rise of new materialisms, networked and object-oriented ontologies and demands for the ‘renaturalization of politics’ (Grosz, 2011; Sharp, 2011) have turned the political into the biopolitical in much of radical contemporary political theory. Here, the biopolitical is often in tension with the Foucauldian discourses of the last few decades, affirming alternative possibilities rather than merely critiquing regimes of power (Malabou, 2008; Kirby, 2011; Taussig, 2018). One factor in this shift has been the impact of anthropogenic climate change and global warming on the contemporary political imagination, increasingly refracted through conceptualizations of the Anthropocene (Tsing, 2015; Cohen et al, 2016; Chandler, 2018). A second factor has been that the life sciences no longer appear to support understandings of deterministic differences but rather to cast evolution in sympoietic and entangled ways, making biology appear as no longer essentialising but as increasingly importable into politics, in ways which disrupt modernist or liberal conceptions of the culture/nature divide (Haraway, 2016). Two important but very different engagements, which reflect these affirmative readings of biopolitics, are reviewed here, from the fields of postcolonial literature and gender and race in international politics

Prototyping Self in Silicon Valley, Deep Diversity as a Framework for Anthropological Inquiry

High-technology work fuels a dynamic global exchange from technopoles throughout the world, but especially between East and South Asia and the northern Californian region of Silicon Valley. This migration drives an expanded number of ancestral identities. Professional and activity-based identities flourish as Silicon Valley’s strong narrative of meritocracy loosens the grip of birth ascription on the creation of identities. These achieved identities proliferate as people experiment on their own sense of self. Traditional conceptual tools related to immigration, and even such contemporary approaches as Appadurai’s ethnoscapes, do not adequately illuminate the ethnographic data on Silicon Valley workers, families, and especially youth. The concept of deep diversity, first posed by philosopher Charles Taylor and reified by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, reinterprets the interactions of traditional ethnic identity categories, providing a powerful framework with which to think

Global Assemblages, Resilience, and Earth Stewardship in the Anthropocene

In this paper, we argue that the Anthropocene is an epoch characterized not only by the anthropogenic dominance of the Earth\u27s ecosystems but also by new forms of environmental governance and institutions. Echoing the literature in political ecology, we call these new forms of environmental governance “global assemblages”. Socioecological changes associated with global assemblages disproportionately impact poorer nations and communities along the development continuum, or the “Global South”, and others who depend on natural resources for subsistence. Although global assemblages are powerful mechanisms of socioecological change, we show how transnational networks of grassroots organizations are able to resist their negative social and environmental impacts, and thus foster socioecological resilience

Prevalence and Risk Factors of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Infection in Southern Chinese Women – A Population-Based Study

Background: Persistent high-risk type Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is recognized as a necessary cause of cervical cancer. This study aimed to compare the HPV prevalence and risk factors between women residing in Hong Kong (HK) and Guangzhou (GZ) region of China. Methodology/Principal Findings: A total of 1,570 and 1,369 women were recruited from HK and GZ, respectively. The cytology samples were collected and tested for HPV infection. The overall and type-specific HPV prevalence and the potential risk factors for acquisition of HPV infection were studied. Women with normal cytology in the GZ cohort had significantly higher HPV prevalence (10%) than those in the HK cohort (6.2%, p<0.001). The patterns of the age-specific HPV prevalence were also different between the two cohorts. In the HK cohort, women at the age of 20-29 years old had the highest prevalence and a second peak was observed in the age of ≥60 years old. In the GZ cohort, the highest HPV prevalence was also observed in 20-29 years old but declined as the age increased and a second peak was not seen. HPV16 and HPV52 were the most common high-risk types found in the HK and GZ cohorts, respectively. Age was the most consistently observed independent risk factor for HPV infection in the HK, while the number of sexual partners had association in the GZ cohort. Conclusions/Significance: Our study provides the current status and the epidemiological characteristics of HPV prevalence in Southern Chinese women. The results strongly suggested that population education and the effective cervical cancer screening would be vital in the prevention of cervical cancer. © 2011 Liu et al.published_or_final_versio

The Flip-Flop Trail and Fragile Globalisation

The flip-flop trail is an object biography. It follows the translocal journeys of a pair of plastic sandals, unpacking the lives and landscapes hidden in the plastic. An important shoe-infrastructure enabling human mobility, flip-flops work as an offbeat proxy for globalization too. They proffer empirical footings in translocally-connected worlds in which people and the social textures and terrains of their everyday lives come to the fore, in place of economic processes and commodity chains favoured in hegemonic versions of globalization. These reduce globalization’s complex social forms to the grand narratives of the logics of capital accumulation, implicitly naturalizing it, if critically, as inevitable, entrenched and robust. From the vantage point of the flip- flop trail, globalization looks rather different. It is more fragile and shifting, generating multiple forms of uncertainty in the lives and landscapes it simultaneously sustains and undermines

Toward conservational anthropology: addressing anthropocentric bias in anthropology

Anthropological literature addressing conservation and development often blames 'conservationists' as being neo-imperialist in their attempts to institute limits to commercial activities by imposing their post-materialist eco-ideology. The author argues that this view of conservationists is ironic in light of the fact that the very notion of 'development' is arguably an imposition of the (Western) elites. The anthropocentric bias in anthropology also permeates constructivist ethnographies of human-animal 'interactions,' which tend to emphasize the socio-cultural complexity and interconnectivity rather than the unequal and often extractive nature of this 'interaction.' Anthropocentrism is argued to be counteractive to reconciling conservationists' efforts at environmental protection with the traditional ontologies of the interdependency of human-nature relationship