Technology: Servant or Master of the Online Teacher?

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Museum-Cemetery: (Infra)Structural Violence Against Human Remains

In this paper, I investigate Polish memorial sites and museums established at former Nazi extermination camps, defined by the presence of human remains of their Jewish victims, through a conceptual prism of museum-cemetery. Museum-cemetery is construed here as a concept (an analytic category), a practice, and a dynamic cultural/political space, extending to include the burial sites curated by the memorial institutions. In my reading, museum-cemetery is a transformative and politically productive infrastructure that instantiates a material and spatial articulation of hierarchies and social norms as well as one of structural violence, and a complex politics of dead bodies. Acknowledging that not only living bodies but also those of the dead are subject to sovereign power, through various social and material practices, I argue that museums and memorial sites partake in the production and undoing of the dead. But they are also carriers of necroviolence: violence against human remains. Analysing the post-war history of Polish sites of memory at former Nazi extermination camps and the practices and infrastructural transformations that arise around them – including robbery of the dead, archaeological research, work on commemoration, musealization – I discuss the forms of necroviolence that affect dead bodies, from immediate physical violence to violence of abandonment.In this paper, I investigate Polish memorial sites and museums established at former Nazi extermination camps, defined by the presence of human remains of their Jewish victims, through a conceptual prism of museum-cemetery. Museum-cemetery is construed here as a concept (an analytic category), a practice, and a dynamic cultural/political space, extending to include the burial sites curated by the memorial institutions. In my reading, museum-cemetery is a transformative and politically productive infrastructure that instantiates a material and spatial articulation of hierarchies and social norms as well as one of structural violence, and a complex politics of dead bodies. Acknowledging that not only living bodies but also those of the dead are subject to sovereign power, through various social and material practices, I argue that museums and memorial sites partake in the production and undoing of the dead. But they are also carriers of necroviolence: violence against human remains. Analysing the post-war history of Polish sites of memory at former Nazi extermination camps and the practices and infrastructural transformations that arise around them – including robbery of the dead, archaeological research, work on commemoration, musealization – I discuss the forms of necroviolence that affect dead bodies, from immediate physical violence to violence of abandonment

Mapping HIV-related figures of risk in Europe’s blood donation regime

Grasping blood donation as contested grounds for enacting notions of belonging, responsibility and citizenship, this article analyses the role of donor deferral policies in the emergence of a European blood donation regime. We demonstrate how shifts in the moral economy of blood donation that followed from the outbreak of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic led to the prioritisation of donor deferral policies in efforts to enhance blood safety across Europe. We propose the notion "figures of risk" - condensed figurations of those understood to pose risks of HIV infection to themselves and to others - to describe the categories of persons implicated in changing European donor restriction policies. We explore how the Council of Europe’s annually revised Guide to the preparation, use and quality assurance of blood components, first published in 1992, came to legitimise and sustain increasingly contested deferral practices, which have produced shifting groups of persons as European ‘figures of risk’. Qualitative analyses of the Guide’s 19 editions reveal 3 dimensions through which these figures have become increasingly stabilised over time: in terms of their ontology, temporality and risk-related exceptionality. We conclude by asking how collectivising figurations of donors, framed through literature on ‘profiling’, shape notions of European citizenship

Retracing Violence, Reshaping the Gaze, and Challenging the Collection. An Interview by Zuzanna Dziuban with Margit Berner, Curator of the Anthropological Collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna

Interview with Margit Berner, Curator of the Anthropological Collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, by Zuzanna Dziuban Interview with Margit Berner, Curator of the Anthropological Collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, by Zuzanna Dziuban&nbsp