Paper short abstract:

My paper explores how policymaking processes in the EU pool expertise to foster and regulate markets and provide non-market entities (like human plasma) for capital accumulation. It analyzes consequent shifts between ideas of gift and commodity and related moral discourses that tint EU policymaking.

Paper long abstract:

„Blood is national, plasma is global” (Farrugia, 2009). Blood management has been historically imagined as state/national affair, outside market spheres, governed by solidarity and gift relations between citizens (Titmuss, 1970). However, its precious component – plasma – circulates in global markets and is primarily used as raw material for pharmaceutical manufacturing for which the European Union relies heavily on US import. Post-pandemic crisis management and subsequent healthcare-related legislative revisions provided an opportunity for the EU to (re)make its markets, foster competitiveness and increase ‘self-sufficiency’ by transforming national and European plasma collection systems.

This project explores how the EU with its vast bureaucratic apparatus pools and consolidates knowledge from the international plasma field (from state, non-profit, commercial actors, national medical experts and EU policymakers alike) to produce policies that simultaneously enable and regulate national and European markets by making available certain entities outside the market (like human bodies and their substances) for extraction and capital accumulation (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2017). These policies also complicate the status of blood plasma as gift and/or commodity, while help (re)produce the Union as a unified market but also as a biopolitical and moral community. Through participant observation and interviews with involved experts and policymakers, it is also revealed that despite being imagined as a supranational entity, the EU is haunted by the idea and perceived responsibilities of the state (e.g. managing bodily donations, securing healthcare) while regulating and fostering markets (Oksala, 2017) and filling them with moral sentiments and arguments about care (Muehlebach, 2012).

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the mediation of different theoretical understandings of creativity as a concept informed by cultural creative practice. Examining its life in Indonesia’s traditional textile industry, it looks at how creative industry development initiatives intersect with local creativity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to unravel the hierarchies in defining creativity through Western-dominated ideas of art and innovation (Fahmi, McCann & Koster, 2017) and how they can be reconciled with local creativity. I explore creativity as it is interpreted as an entrepreneurial quality in Indonesia’s craft sector (Global Business Guide, 2018), as the state interacts with the creative landscape of traditional textile communities. Inspired by the Balinese concept of taksu - roughly translated as ‘a calling or natural talent’- this paper discusses the impact of Western ideas of creativity within a context where it can be understood and experienced differently.

Examining local creativity in the context of women traditional textile weavers in Indonesia, I explore the intersection where governmental development initiatives engage with local communities and traditional markets. Indonesia’s framework for economic development in the creative industries was adapted and defined by the UK creative sector blueprint (Pangestu and Nirwandar, 2014). The impact of applying this Western framework can be explored in traditional weaving communities that have participated in government creative development programmes.

This had a significant impact in the country bringing attention to regional potential for development (Fahmi, 2017), particularly local riches and cultural arts within the context of tourism, one of Indonesia’s leading economic sectors (Setiawan and Suwarningdyah, 2014; Rakib, 2017). The value put on traditional products transformed traditional textile weaving from a cultural practice to ‘economic development’ in Indonesia’s rural regions. This has since brought a perspective shift from home-based labour to creative entrepreneurship (Aziz, 2017).

Paper short abstract:

Using a World Bank irrigation system completed in 1974 in Southern Romania as an ethnographic entry point, this paper works with the notion of “irrigation citizenship” to understand the social-ecological transformations of a large scale irrigation in the context of rapid post-socialist change.

Paper long abstract:

While irrigation citizenship reflected the property regime over land during state-socialism, post-1990 processes of land restitution and land privatization, as well collapse of the vertically integrated economy that accompanied the network of the canals, pumps and pipes, transformed the economic and material basis of irrigation citizenship. The state sovereignty over the irrigation system’s territory was replaced by a multitude of landholders who own parts of the formerly integrated system, a process that makes the concept of splintering often used to understand transformations of infrastructures particularly useful. While not abandoned, but unable to integrate economically and hydrologically any longer the territory and the residents, the irrigation system now hosts three political-economic and ecology fixes: independent vertical irrigation by small landholders, land grabbing next to the canals, and water grabbing by large agro-industrial business. This study joins other studies which suggest that a long term analysis on infrastructure systems yields unique insights over their changing political and word-making rationalities. Seeking to inject a temporal dimension into the analysis of large scale irrigation systems, I analyze how the rapid and radical transformation of the property relations, political, and economic foundations of the local environment have transformed the local citizenship previously formed around the irrigation system. How, this paper asks, does an irrigation system designed for state-socialist political economy change? How are its material components unbundled, circulated and in what new hydro-social and economic fixes do they become embedded? What local political forms does it create and how do these change?

Paper short abstract:

How is the Kigali startup ecosystem financed and legislated when it comes to Rwanda's international development partners? Who are the key actors helping startups and entrepreneurs to realise not only their ambitions, but the state's ambitions in terms of investment and pan-African entrerpreneurship?

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kigali, Rwanda and Stockholm, Sweden, following the emerging “impact” entrepreneurship ecosystem in Kigali and its influence and support from Swedish actors in the development sector. “Impact” ventures can be defined as startups that address at least one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals but in reality the term itself holds various connotations within the Kigali start-up ecosystem and its actors, such as investors and development agencies. Since 2009, the Rwandan government has fashioned the country as ‘Africa’s first entrepreneurial state’ and a "proof of concept" country (Honeyman, 2016). Rwanda and Sweden have a longstanding cooperation in development, and research and capacity building. Entrepreneurship and innovation appears to be the next "frontier". Policies and legislation in Rwanda for investment, intellectual property, and data protection are being put in place to support the startup ecosystem. How do Rwandan policies towards the "proof of concept" African entrepreneurial state play out on the ground, and do they contribute to the making a pan-African entrepreneurial state? And secondly, what does this mean for transnational collaborations that were previously characterised predominantly by foreign aid and development initiatives? This presentation will draw on ethnographic research with lawyers, startups, and entrepreneurship support organisations and investors working towards making the ecosystem a key element in investment into Rwanda. The presentation will centre around the temporalities of impact, how optimism, particularly Afro-optimism and tech-optimism, is maintained, or compromised, with the life cycles of startups.

Paper long abstract:

Under the title of this paper, we would like to address some of the most notorious transformations in the field of social assistance in Catalonia. At a time when, in the name of the so-called economic crisis, the argument of social rights has been dismantled, social assistance mechanisms are increasingly reorganised as instruments of containment, reform and control of those sectors that seem to be outside the norm. On the basis of an ethnographic study conducted between 2020 and 2023, we propose to adress the forms taken by a type of violence that, inscribed in the rhetoric of inclusion, is exercised on people who turn to social assistance institutions. Institutions that attend to individuals and groups that fall into the (deteriorated) categories previously constructed by the field of social intervention: homeless, unaccompanied immigrant minors, drug addicts, mentally ill, etc., and which exercise a series of more or less subtle forms of coercion with a normalising purpose that, in the final analysis, operates as a device of social control. In this sense, and following the analysis initiated by Wacquant, we will raise some considerations about the prison dimension of the practices in the so-called field of social intervention, framing the analysis in the contemporary modalities of misery management by the State.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on Foucault's 'The Birth of Biopolitics,' this study explores its impact on neoliberalism, framing critical discourse. Using Barcelona's 22@ urban plan as a case study, it uncovers complexities in linking urban development to ICT-related economic activity.

Paper long abstract:

This article critically examines Michel Foucault's seminal course, 'The Birth of Biopolitics,' delivered at the College de France between 1978 and 1979. It delves into the intricate landscape of Foucault's engagement with neoliberalism, elucidating the intellectual and political dynamics of the late 20th century. The analysis establishes 'The Birth of Biopolitics' as a cornerstone, revitalizing critical economic discourse and transcending traditional ideological dichotomies.

Beyond theoretical realms, the study broadens its focus to the outcomes of the 22@ urban plan in Barcelona, providing an illustrative example of the entrepreneurial state. This case study unveils the complexities and resistance encountered in correlating urban development with ICT-related economic activity. By intertwining Foucault's insights with the practical nuances of a contemporary entrepreneurial state, the research contributes to a nuanced understanding of the interplay between the state, market, and societal dynamics.

The examination of neoliberal governance and the entrepreneurial state becomes a microcosm, offering rich insights into the challenges and opportunities inherent in contemporary capitalism. Moving beyond Foucault's theoretical framework, the study explores the evolving role of the state in shaping public policy and market dynamics. The Barcelona case study serves as a valuable lens for comprehending the intricacies of neoliberalism and its impact on public policy production processes within the complex landscape of contemporary capitalism.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on how rural residents have been shaped into platform-based entrepreneurial subjects by the tourist gaze in the process of platformization in the Chinese countryside and contends the government constructs a bridge between political ambitions and the aspirations of rural people.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on how rural residents have been shaped into platform-based entrepreneurial subjects by the tourist gaze in the process of platformization in the Chinese countryside. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the tourist gaze, mass tourism in modern society emerges the tourist gaze, seeking the “out of the ordinary,” a “departure” from the routine and everyday (Urry and Larsen, 2011). The platform-based entrepreneurship in rural China has been encouraged in the context of “rural vitalization”. Therefore, the online entrepreneurial subject in the Chinese countryside, making use of the tourist gaze, has been constructed by the government a connectedness between political action and personal conduct, through its way of equating the happiness of its individual subjects with the state’s strength (Burchell et. al, 1991; Foucault et al. 2007).

This paper argues that: 1) governments, collaborated with platform giants, launched a series of mechanisms for manufacturing the entrepreneurial subject; 2) the local peasants and return migrants engage in e-commerce of agricultural products based on advocating the tourist gaze authorized by discourses such as health on the platform; 3) a large number of rural residents exhibit the rural authenticity on the platform for the expectation to become the entrepreneurial-subject that policies required, so as to make profits. In conclusion, this paper contends that the new platform-based entrepreneurial-subject is building during rural platformization in China. Accompanying new discourses of the tourist gaze such as rural vitalization, the government tacitly constructs a bridge between its political ambitions and the aspirations of rural people.

Paper short abstract:

This paper answers whether a Brazilian state project to create a giant corporation has changed the local development reality by contrasting social indicators and private documents. This study presents public-private power dynamics, cross-border relations, and implications in a social context.

Paper long abstract:

A Brazilian multinational company, JBS became a global market leader in the meat sector and the world’s largest food company in income in the last decade (2013-2023). This is a result of a state project from the 2000s to create a ‘national champion’, rolled out in coalition with a family shareholder, foreign states, and the global financial market. In 2024, the Brazilian government owns 20% of the company, mainly via assets controlled by its Development Bank (BNDES). As this public institution is a member of the corporation’s board of directors, it therefore participates in the company’s decision-making. This research method was built on three primary data sources: corporate documents, government data systems, and interviews. This paper draws upon corporate ownership, profits, and executives’ wages to map governance, income distribution, and social development. The evidence shows increased hunger and poverty in Brazil in the last decade, whilst the company’s administrators’ wages increased by 2,000%. Additionally, the evidence reveals a significant social disparity within the company. The low quality of JBS’ jobs reflects a broader social picture of Brazil’s income inequality and capital concentration. This study highlights disparities that represent challenges for effective national development and presents empirical data about a complex state-corporation relationship.