Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Ana-Maria Cirstea
(Durham University)
Elisabeth Kirtsoglou (Durham University)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 7 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how novel forms of biopolitical governance during the SARS-COVII pandemic were facilitated by AI and new technologies of control and surveillance, giving rise to cultures of resistance and countercultures of disbelief, mistrust and conspiracy.
Long Abstract:
In the context of managing the SARS-Cov II pandemic, technologies of governance proliferated and created new pathways of social control and surveillance. Digital contact-tracing was accompanied by other advanced technologies like thermal cameras and sensors, drones, and facial recognition. Once destined for military use and carceral surveillance, these technologies became mundane dispositifs that distinguished healthy from unhealthy bodies routinely forcing them to confess their symptoms. As public spaces were subjected to technopolitical control in an effort to contain the virus, AI facilitated the surveillance and securitisation of cyberspace in a similar effort to contain misinformation on Covid19. Algorithmic governance however, was soon found to extend itself beyond the management of the pandemic when data collected through China’s mandatory Alipay and Wechat Health Code was shared with local police. The ownership and blueprint of similar technologies of tracking and tracing often straddled between the state and private contractors, challenging democratic rules and norms of data protection. The implication of advanced technologies and AI in biopolitical governance rallied public imagination, created scepticism and eventually produced novel forms of discursive and practical resistance as well as countercultures of conspiracy and denial.
This panel invites papers from anthropologists, scientists, artists, and practitioners on the different uses and representations of technology during global health emergencies. It welcomes contributions that reflect on the imbrication of the biopolitical and the technopolitical, with an emphasis on emerging narratives and practices of resistance as well as countercultural articulations of disbelief, mistrust and denial.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 7 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Those disagreements about the truth and nature of Covid that I examine here serve as a test to evaluate the rationality of local arguments, their contested status as either conspiratorial or alienated consciousness, and the position of the anthropological author in the auto-reflexive dialectic.
Paper long abstract:
I had been trying, for years, to reconcile two seemingly opposing goals: (a) the analytical authority of disagreeing (sometimes) with one’s fieldwork interlocutors and (b) my concern about overstepping my analytic authority—which may result in opinionated or de-rationalising interpretations. I have found some solutions, which I will share with you in this paper. They are developed within a framework of a self-interrogative critique--a Marxism with a small ‘m’—which turns the lens of the critical analysis towards an author’s own consent with hegemony, as much as that of her ‘research subjects’. I will rely here on two concepts with a Marxist—or for others, Hegelian—resonance: ‘consciousness’ and ‘alienation’. In their dynamic articulation they provide solutions to the problem I outlined above; that is, they pave a way for disagreeing (analytically) with Others, but in a non de-rationalising manner. I evaluate and test the contemporary relevance of these conceptual synergies, by focusing on the anti-vaccination views of my family. The resulting experiment outlines a dialectical method for reconfiguring the idea of ‘falsity’, but with ethical respect for the contextual parameters that premise the falsity of Others. My examination of arguments about vaccination does not aim to contribute to any particular regional literature. The Covid-problematic, which I treat here as a global concern, serves as a test to evaluate a set of related problems addressed by this essay: the rationality of local arguments, their contested status as either conspiratorial or ‘false/alienated consciousness’, and the position of the anthropological author in the auto-reflexive dialectic.
Paper short abstract:
My paper examines religious prophesies and eschatological narratives during the Covid-19 pandemic and demonstrates how prophesies acquired an important role in formulating idiosyncratic - but often exclusionist - narratives of resistance to biopolitical and technopolitical governmentalities.
Paper long abstract:
My paper examines religious prophesies and eschatological narratives in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing from fieldwork in Greece, I demonstrate how prophesies acquired an important role in formulating an idiosyncratic narrative of resistance to biopolitical governmentalities. I found that Orthodox Christian prophesies provided discursive tools to social actors who wished to dispute the notion of the securitised body and to formulate a more generalised critique towards neoliberal citizenship and its technologies of population management. Prophesies became narrative seeds in new ‘conspiracist scenarios’ about the pandemic, the ‘New World Order’ and ‘global governance’ systems. As means of gazing at the present through a vision of the future that presents itself as both near and unavoidable, the circulation of eschatological discourses, signals a deep and profound dissatisfaction with the biopolitisation of citizenship, the normalisation of surveillance, the accelerated financialisation of economic life and an increased suspicion over the efficacy of vaccinations, that is intimately connected to the loss of trust to institutions, state agents and even civil society.
The paper examines how the circulation of conspiratorial political aetiologies and prophesies about the sinister plans of the Antichrist against the pious, created a fertile breeding ground for neonationalist ideas and for ultra-right wing politicoreligious radicalisation. My analysis serves to discuss how discourses of resistance to technopolitical governance do not always support inclusive visions of citizenship.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that post-COVID-19 datafication processes matters insofar as these emerging digital citizenship regimes have resulted in nation-state space rescaling, challenging its heretofore privileged position as the only natural platform for the monopoly of technopolitical and sensory power.
Paper long abstract:
This paper shows how five emerging digital citizenship regimes are rescaling European nation-states through a taxonomy: (i) the globalised/generalisable regime called pandemic citizenship that clarifies how post-COVID-19 datafication processes have amplified the emergence of four digital citizenship regimes in six city-regions; (ii) algorithmic citizenship (Tallinn); (iii) liquid citizenship (Barcelona/Amsterdam); (iv) metropolitan citizenship (Cardiff); and (v) stateless citizenship (Barcelona/Glasgow/Bilbao). I argue that this phenomenon should matter to us insofar as these emerging digital citizenship regimes have resulted in nation-state space rescaling, challenging its heretofore privileged position as the only natural platform for the monopoly of technopolitical and sensory power.