Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence

Persistence through change: marketisation and demand management in the electricity industry

© 2014 Dr. Sangeetha Chandra-ShekeranThis thesis examines policies and utility practices on electricity demand management in Victoria, Australia. It asks how they have changed through the process of marketisation, and what have been the main influences that have shaped these changes. In the last 25 years the electricity industry in Victoria has travelled further along the market liberalisation path than many other jurisdictions in Australia and overseas, moving from a state-owned and vertically integrated monopoly to a disaggregated, privatised industry with a competitive wholesale and retail market. Despite these market-oriented restructuring efforts, demand-led solutions to electricity planning and coordination have remained elusive. The challenges to enabling demand management policies and associated practices in the Victorian context are not adequately explained by the “splintering urbanism” argument, which predicts a new logic of marketised network management that will result in a shift away from a supply-oriented to a demand-focused approach (Graham and Marvin, 2001). The major restructuring efforts also do not cohere with the literature on large socio-technical systems, which has emphasised “technological momentum” and institutional reproduction over time (Hughes, 1983). This thesis brings together work within historical institutionalism that highlights incremental change in institutional transformation (Streeck and Thelen, 2005; Thelen and Mahoney, 2010) and critical geography perspectives on the variegated and contradictory outcomes of neoliberalisation (Brenner et al., 2010). The thesis shows that market-oriented neoliberal logics gained hegemony through a gradual and incremental process that was subject to periods of acceleration and intensification but evolved along a continuum. With the intensification of neoliberalisation there was a re-emergence of Keynesian, social-redistributive goals and socio-spatially specific constructions of the “essential” nature of electricity provision. These market-constraining discourses manifest in discrete conflicts within State (sub-national) government and regulatory decision making processes. The tension between market-enabling and market-constraining logics has led to a stalemate, which limits the possibilities of full commodification for demand-led approaches on the one hand, but also fails to effectively socialise the benefits of demand management through a centralised planning mechanism on the other hand. By bringing together theories of incremental institutional change and geographic scale this analysis demonstrates how neoliberalisation, as a political project, has the capacity to reframe ideology relatively quickly, but underlying processes of socio-spatial rescaling and material change can be much slower to respond resulting in ongoing institutional and interest-based conflict

Feminism and the flat law theory

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