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- Convenors:
-
Robin Rodd
(Duke Kunshan University)
Miguel Vatter (Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and Globalisation)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Vitality
- Location:
- NIKERI KC2.211
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
The management of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a proliferation of new borders and sensoring technologies giving rise to debate on the conflicts between right to health and right to mobility. This panel interrogates the subjectivities associated with new forms of health bordering and sensoring.
Long Abstract:
The management of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a proliferation of new controls and borders giving rise to a politicized discussion on the conflicts between right to health and right to mobility. From the administration of vaccine mandates, to track and trace apps that disable entry to venues or urban zones, to city-wide lockdowns and sealed international borders, countries have developed various strategies to contain COVID-19 by restricting movement. More recently, China has introduced ‘closed loop management’ of entire cities and the mass deportation of covid-19 positive cases to quarantine camps. These new procedures mean that borders can no longer be imagined as unidimensional political structures dividing states, are increasingly justified in public health terms, and exist in nested hierarchies from the microscopic to the planetary. Mobility for many is now contingent on passing through several borders that exist in overlapping jurisdictions, requiring the ongoing updating of multiple biolegitimacy platforms. While many of these policies and technologies have been critically received by citizens throughout the world, the the bio-digital infrastructure for regulating human movement and measuring the legitimacy of one’s health and political status remains prevalent. This panel seeks to interrogate the convergence of the technosphere (sensoring technologies and biolegitimacy apps) and the zoosphere (COVID-19 and other population health dynamics). What terms of debate, dissent and justification exist around globally diverse experiences of health bordering? What new subjectivities have emerged alongside these new forms of bordering and sensoring? And how do these intersect with existing socioeconomic cleavages?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 November, 2022, -Paper long abstract:
By planetary politics is usually meant today a conception of politics that can address the ecological crisis of the Anthropo-cene and associated -cenes (e.g. Capitalocene, etc.) from a perspective that acknowledges the agency of the Earth system and all of its non-human actants. At the same time, a planetary conception of politics often understands the Earth as the One Home for all living and non-living beings. As Carl Schmitt once said, the conception of the “home”, and all the orders that it comports, lies at the root of western jurisprudence. In this paper I suggest some ways in which to think together the concept of Earth as Home, as putative basis for a new “law” of the Earth, with the quite distinct idea of planetary habitability found in Earth system sciences by working through the biological and bio-political conceptions of “habitat”.
Paper short abstract:
Interrogating the hunger deaths that have resulted in India due to people's exclusion from food subsidies due to issues related to Aadhaar- India's universal biometric ID system- this paper examines the necropolitical effects of linking biometric authentication to welfare distribution.
Paper long abstract:
Aadhaar, India's biometric ID system has long been articulated as a tool that brings countless marginalized Indians into the purview of the government by giving them legitimate and universal identification. Since its initiation in 2010, it has rapidly been linked to over 300 public welfare schemes and policies, most notably the Public Distribution System (PDS), India's nationwide infrastructure that sells food-grains at heavily subsidized prices to qualifying families. While Aadhaar has been lauded as an objective and accurate technological intervention, this paper contextualizes Aadhaar in a longer legacy of neoliberal reforms in India seeking to curtail welfare spending. This paper critically reviews several types of texts and discourses that have been made about Aadhar from stakeholders with diverse interest to empirically analyze divergences between political discourses about Aadhaar and some of India's most marginalized people's lived experiences with it. In analyzing these divergences, the article employs Joseph Pugliese's framework of 'infrastructural normativities' to interrogate the normativities of body, class and ability that shape Aadhaar as a 'regime of truth'. Aadhaar's truth-telling regime categorizes those unable to conform to said normativities as 'error', excluding them from government services and benefits they are entitled to. The paper builds on this conception of exclusion by focusing on the occurrence of starvation deaths as a result of exclusion from or due to Aadhaar. Employing Achille Mbembe's 'necropolitics', the paper demonstrates how as a securitizing technology, Aadhaar casts marginalized people as 'excess' populations invisible to the state, relegated to the status of the 'living dead.'
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a case study of the use of remote biometric monitoring during the pandemic, this presentation describes the "becoming granular" of biopolitics: the use of automated systems to intervene in customized, targeted interventions in the physical environment.
Paper long abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for facial recognition technology and other forms of biometric monitoring to expand into new markets. One anticipated result is the wholesale reconfiguration of shared and public space enabled by the automated identification and tracking of individuals in real time. Drawing on data from several industry trade shows, this article considers the forms of ‘environmental’ governance envisioned by those developing and deploying the technology for the purposes of security, risk management, and profit. We argue that the ‘contactless culture’ that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic anticipates the normalization a form of granular or mass customized biopolitics: the ability to operate on the population and the individual simultaneously via automated forms of passive identification. This form of governance relies not just on machinic recognition, but on the real-time reconfiguration of physical space via automated access controls and the channeling of both people and information.
Paper short abstract:
A critical account of China’s dynamic zero Covid19 policies. Instead of lockdown or freedom, the normalization of biobordering in China creates new qualities of social life and new forms of social death. Normalization of biobordering not a singular policy but experiments in total human management.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides a critical account of the implementation of China’s ‘dynamic zero Covid-19’ policies with a particular focus on the Shanghai lockdown of March-May 2022. Other than Shanghai, China’s zero tolerance for COVID-19 has required few city-wide lockdowns since the initial outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020. Instead, China has kept case numbers low through a combination of sealed borders, regular mass testing, the implementation of evolving digital track and trace programs and rapid-response mobility restrictions targeted to the inhabitants of neighbourhoods, streets, or residences. However, the total lockdown of Shanghai, and the internment of covid positive patients in makeshift concentration camps, produced widespread dissent that threw China’s COVID-19 policy into critical relief. I argue that we should not consider China’s policy in terms of a contestation between political dogma or economic rationality, as it is often framed, but as a terrain of experimentation for developing new bio-technological response systems for the complete management of human populations. China’s a singular commitment to digitally managed biobordering, with Shanghai as an extreme case, belies great regional and temporal variation. Collectively, regional experiments in covid biobordering have legitimised new forms of enclosure whether they are enacted or not. In this way, it no longer makes sense to think of lockdowns or freedom of mobility in digital terms – as either or – but in terms of an infinite array of analog possibilities – greater or lesser unfreedom, that simultaneously create new qualities of social life and new forms of social death.