Explore every episode of the podcast Necropolitics Covered

Loyd, J. M. (2009) ‘“A Microscopic Insurgent”: Militarization, Health, and Critical Geographies of Violence’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(5), pp. 863–873. doi: 10.1080/00045600903253478.

Abstract: Wars do not maim with bullets and bombs alone but cause economic and environmental destruction that leave enduring bodily harms. Preparations for war-making also cause negative health effects, from toxic waste to the redirection of social wealth from investment in social needs. The commonsense juxtaposition of exceptional war to normal peace makes it difficult to recognize processes of militarization, the violent continuities between war and peace, and geographic ties binding spaces of relative health with spaces of harms. This article advances a critical geographic analysis of violence to analyze the ways in which militarization and structural violence reinforce one another. A 2007 cholera epidemic in Iraq was militarized through material and discursive geographies of cholera and violence. Humanitarian claims to cure cholera rested on this dualistic geopolitical imagination, distorting the agents of violence and erasing the grave effects of peacetime and wartime structural violence. By situating cholera within a broader historical and geographic context that shows links between “wartime” and “peacetime” places also suffering premature deaths from the destruction or abandonment of necessary infrastructures, a critical human geography can contribute to struggles for peace and justice.

Souza Prado, G. A. (2020) ‘Coloniality and perspectivism in psychology: from damnation to ecosophical care relations’, International Review of Psychiatry, 32(4), pp. 320–326. doi: 10.1080/09540261.2020.1765747.

Abstract: Inspired by Amerindian peoples’ philosophy, this article aims to problematise the modern philosophical anthropology that underlies psychology as a social practice, and to use the Amerindian perspectivist philosophy proposed by Viveiros de Castro as a critique of Western values. Thus, we approach some of coloniality’s epistemological implications in the institution of subject-object and nature-culture separations that grounds psychology. On the one hand, there is a totalising unification, which operates alongside a transcendental subject that subjugates its object. Beginning from nature’s homogeneity, the differentiation and hierarchy of each being depends on its representations or its soul, expressed as a people’s culture or as an individual psychology. This spiritual-representational aspect is the very foundation of the colonialism and racism of damnation, and their purpose in perpetuating the miserable ways of life of those considered to be scum. On the other hand, in Amerindian cosmogony, humanity is a pronominal mode, a non-exclusive perspectivist position of mankind, built in each context of relations. It is based on this idea that we posit other bases and a new agenda for psychology as a social practice which can enable us to broaden our ways of living towards ecosophical care, as a way of resistance to coloniality.

Reid, J. (2010) ‘The Biopoliticization of Humanitarianism: From Saving Bare Life to Securing the Biohuman in Post-Interventionary Societies’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4(4), pp. 391–411. doi: 10.1080/17502971003700985.

Abstract: This article develops an analysis of a partial, albeit I argue very powerful, strand of contemporary humanitarianism. In analyzing an interdisciplinary literature combining theoretical and practice-based perspectives on humanitarianism, I trace the development of a shift in interest from classical humanitarian concerns for the saving of bare life of humanity to the securing of the biohuman. In the development of humanitarianism post-1989, concepts and theories of adaptation, deriving heavily from innovations in the life sciences, are being applied to determine why some societies are supposedly more prone to humanitarian disasters than others in the form of ‘adaptive failures’: how such societies can avert disasters from occurring in the forms of ‘adaptive responses’, as well as how they can recover from them when they do occur by learning ‘adaptive behaviors’. Theories of adaptation and other concepts relating to the evolutionary powers of the biohuman such as ‘information exchange’ and ‘resilience’ are also being applied to conceive the frameworks in which responses to disasters can best be organized. Within the domains and practices of humanitarianism a biologized conception of the human conceived in terms of evolutionary capacities and properties, and the idea of being able to deliver humanity from its various forms of insecurity through its promotion, has taken hold. The humanitarian emergency, as this article details, is today conceived as the primary locale for the transformation of ungovernable peoples into governable populations. Emergencies represent sites of global danger and disorder vested with renewed political significance because they occur where life is said not only to have failed to perform its adaptive functions in securing itself, but where the very failure of life to adapt is construed as a threat to the security of world order. Thus the failure of maladapted populations is said to threaten not only themselves, but the biopolitical foundations of global governance since their suffering produces economic dislocation as well potentially of political violence. Thus they become subject to the strategies of intervention through which global governance seeks to make populations more fit for liberal rule.

Zembylas, M. (2024) ‘Racism, white supremacy and Roberto Esposito’s biopolitics through the lens of Black affect studies: Implications for an affirmative educational biopolitics’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 56(4), pp. 358–370. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2023.2229552.

Abstract: The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito’s framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment—is essential for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics.

Pugliese, J. (2011) ‘The Reckoning of Possibles: Asylum Seekers, Justice and the Indigenisation of the Levinasian Third’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 34(1), pp. 23–42. doi: 10.1080/13200968.2011.10854451.

Abstract: In this essay, I focus on the death of an asylum seeker, Josefa Rauluni, at Villawood immigration detention centre, in order to address a series of critical questions concerning ethics, justice and non-negotiable responsibility. I contextualise this constellation of questions within a Levinasian framework of ethics as a first philosophy in order to suggest what needs to be done. I conclude the essay by transposing Levinas’ concept of the third, as the arbiter of justice that transcends the limitations of the self-other relation, to an Australian context preoccupied with the topics of refugees, hospitality, justice, ongoing colonial relations of power and Aboriginal sovereignty

Kekstaite, J. and Vukotić, V. (2025) ‘Grief Activism and Solidarity with Migrants Along the EU’s Eastern Migratory Route’, Geopolitics, pp. 1–25. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2025.2562293.

Abstract: The EU’s external border restricts the movement of unwanted individuals and subjects them to necropolitical governance. Such governance is sustained by epistemic and affective borders, determining whose lives and deaths are deemed meaningful. Maurice Stierl has proposed the concept of ‘grief activism’ as a form of transformative politics that can subvert such borders. In this paper, we further develop this framework in the specific context of Eastern EUrope, using Lithuania as a case in point. This research explores how the Lithuanian grassroots initiative Sienos Grupė (English: Border Group) engages with the lives and deaths of illegalised migrants and their relatives, invisibilised by the border regime. While research on grief activism has tended to focus on commemorations of migrant deaths, we argue that its scope should be expanded to engage with the entire ‘live-death continuum’ – including the ongoing erosion of conditions for a liveable life in an unequal world. This broader framing provides tools to situate violence against migrants historically and relationally, while seeking to foster alternative directions of affect and political engagement. Drawing on engaged ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2024), semi-structured interviews with members of Sienos Grupė, and an analysis of the group’s public communication, we examine how activists seek recognition for those excluded from dominant regimes of grievability.

Hokowhitu, B. (2012) ‘Producing Elite Indigenous Masculinities’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2(2), pp. 23–48. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648840.

Excerpt: This article asserts that elite indigenous tribal masculinity is a particular type of masculinity that has developed since colonisation, in part at least, mimicking dominant forms of invader/settler masculinity. While most commentators have outlined that the dominant forms of invader/settler masculinities were held to be inversely related to the mind of indigenous men, the productive nature of power imposed a different set of rules that challenged this dialectic so that aspects of invader/settler masculinity were necessarily imbibed into burgeoning post-contact indigenous masculine leaders. This masculinity has since been allocated disciplinary and authoritative power through notions of tradition and authenticity. Further, indigenous masculinity was often asserted as reflecting the collective will for liberation; in reality, elite indigenous masculinities have habitually served to exclude alternative forms of indigenous masculinity and indigenous women from leadership roles. Via a post-hegemonic analysis of indigenous masculinity, this article appraises the Janus-faced and ambivalent figure of the indigenous heterosexual patriarch; both oppressor and oppressed. The dialectics between hetero-patriarchal masculinity and feminism, and colonised/coloniser become complicated, as indigenous masculinities are both imbibed with privilege and denied it; both performing colonial hetero-patriarchy and resistant to it.

Kočović De Santo, M. (2026) ‘Ya Falastin: Networks of Resistance Against the Economy of Genocide’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 37(1), pp. 108–132. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2025.2607978.

Abstract: This work offers a radical ecological reading of Palestine as a more-than-human subject. What pedagogies emerge when we listen to olive roots, children's voices, poets addressing land as sentient witness? Using the Tree of Life and Death as a methodological metaphor, I trace how pluriversal relational pedagogies form counter-metabolism against capitalism's parasitic logic. The Tree framework structures analysis: roots hold pre-monotheistic ontologies where earth and body remain inseparable; branches express steadfastness, care, and reciprocity; mycorrhizal networks sustain life while sharing soil with Armillaria – capitalism feeding on death. I map three necro-economic patterns: epistemicide (killing the word “genocide”), economy of genocide ($225 billion through arms/tech/finance), and ecocide (one million olive trees as temporal annihilation). Palestinian voices persist as epistemologies. When poets address “Ya Falastin,” land becomes a listening subject – trees witness, roots remember, soil responds – these are not testimonies but theory. Counter-hegemonic processes that allow the forest of life to survive depend on unlearning growth ideology and cultivating global solidarities rooted in collective refusal.

Bernal, V. (2013) ‘Diaspora, Digital Media, and Death Counts: Eritreans and the Politics of Memorialisation’, African Studies, 72(2), pp. 246–264. doi: 10.1080/00020184.2013.812875.

Abstract: This article analyses a war memorial established on a website by Eritreans in diaspora as an example of how diasporas are transforming the ways national politics are conducted and understood. Establishing a war memorial is normally the prerogative and responsibility of the state. In performing this task the Eritrean diaspora makes visible the failure of the state to make public important national information and to hold itself accountable to the Eritrean people. The establishment of the memorial online by the diaspora, furthermore, works to de-centre the state, symbolically at least, as the embodiment of the nation and creates an opening for alternative visions of the nation and state-citizen relations. The Internet is making possible innovative forms of diaspora political engagement and activism that challenge conventional relations of citizenship and sovereignty.

Masini, T. (2024) ‘Where Do Animals Go When They Disappear? The animal spectre as a more-than-human epistemology in performance’, Performance Research, 29(7), pp. 100–109. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2024.2569240.

Abstract: This essay addresses the disappearance of non-domesticated animals as both material beings and spectral figures within contemporary aesthetic, ecological and political imaginaries. Through a posthumanist lens, I argue that animals rarely ‘leave' the scene of human representation; rather, they return as phantasmatic presences whose absence signals a form of haunting. Drawing on Critical Animal Studies and performance epistemologies, I interpret the vanishing animal not as a mere lack, but as a generative fault line that disrupts human-centered understandings of presence, visibility and embodiment. In this sense, disappearance becomes a performative event in which nonhuman life continues to act through ghostly remainders and traces. The text situates this spectrality within the broader context of animal exploitation, environmental crisis and the anthropocentric imaginary, suggesting that the disappearance of animals coincides with their transformation into symbols or commodities. Yet these spectral animals also carry the potential to destabilize anthropocentric epistemologies by interrupting the smooth functioning of representation. The essay explores this disruption as a form of 'bug': a generative error that exposes the fragility of human mastery, and renders visible the limits of anthropocentric systems of meaning-making. By treating the spectral animal as an active participant in performance and cultural production, I propose a rethinking of disappearance not as final erasure, but as a mode of critical thinking. Ultimately, the essay argues that the spectral animal forces us to inhabit a temporal and ethical space in which disappearance and survival are no longer opposites but intertwined processes. The haunting returns of animal life invite a different kind of perception: one that is attuned to the possibility that something continues to speak and resonate even when it is no longer materially present.

Lo, M. S. (2015) ‘Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(15), pp. 2672–2687. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1042894.

Abstract: This paper interrogates the structural conditions, macropolitics and governmentality of family ‘regroupement’ in France in an era of shifting immigration policies in Europe and the imaginative possibilities that Senegalese immigrants exercise to maintain family and kinship ties with those left behind. It argues that while the need to maintain ties from diasporic locations is mediated by policies, material and emotive transnational practices, the materiality of displacement as well as the state's politics of immigration render more elusive possibilities of maintaining family in situ. What tensions and creative strategies emerge? How is ‘home’, the primordial site of family structure, reimagined and reconstituted? Taking into account state's politics and immigrants’ entrapment within multiple spheres of power and their active agency as determinants, this paper uncovers how displacement gives rise to multiple ruptures while simultaneously motivating a search for active agency to reconstruct and reimagine kinship, family and conjugality across multiple temporalities and spatialities.

Paynter, E. (2025) ‘Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish’, Cultural Studies, 39(6), pp. 887–911. doi: 10.1080/09502386.2025.2538523.

Abstract: This article explores forms of haunting that shape lives and livelihoods in the Mediterranean, recognising the sea as a site of movement, labour, and death. The Mediterranean is now widely understood as a kind of deathscape, as people on the move from former European colonies risk and lose their lives en route to Europe. Yet the production of migrant death – its materiality and simultaneous spectacle and invisibility – is not simply a consequence of harsh border policies. Here, I trace how migrant death in the Mediterranean is a crucial part of the racialized mechanisms that maintain a precarious labour force within Europe and transform livelihoods across Mediterranean shores. Engaging the Black Mediterranean as a site of haunting, I centre the relationship between haunting and care in a reading of the 2018 documentary Strange Fish (dir. Giulia Bertoluzzi), which describes how the production of death in the Central Mediterranean has transformed the labour of fishermen in Zarzis, Tunisia, who have been rescuing migrants and burying the dead since the early 2000s. Writing as an ‘implicated subject’ (Rothberg) who has spent extended time in Italy with people who have survived the sea crossing, I read the film both in terms of the unfolding history it documents, as well as through the visual and sonic elements it employs to illustrate these entangled forms of care and labour. In solidarity with people on the move, I argue that, as necropolitical border regimes threaten to upend notions of the refugee and related issues of rights and justice, it is crucial to understand and engage death at sea not strictly as a migration issue, but as a quotidian reality entangled in questions of labour and social justice on all shores of the Mediterranean.

Abstract: This article analyses how hunger and guillotines, revolution and food, butchers and protests are connected in the Spanish collective imaginary during the current temporality of crisis (2008–2013), with the aim of establishing its cultural grammar. By examining different representations of the crisis by means of gastronomy – including examples of graffiti and slogans, cooking TV shows and horror movies – I will describe the existing tensions between practices of resistance and collective imaginations of violent political change. I will propose that the social circulation of food and food images is a decisive contributing factor in the symbolic landscape of the crisis, shaping divided political economies according to the role of the citizens, the state or the corporations in control and the management of the collective access to nutritional goods. Pig slaughter versus the supermarket of the gods: two political universes offer their opposing poetic poles. On one side we will find (i) the subaltern logic of the popular distribution of proteins acquired, thanks to a founding act of communal violence (the slaughter of the pig). On the other side we recognize (ii) disciplinary, hegemonic logics based on the masking of biopolitical links between nutrition, economy and society (the supermarket of gods).

Citation: Méndez, G. L. (2014) ‘The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain’s temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 15(1–2), pp. 241–271. doi: 10.1080/14636204.2014.935013.

Sargsyan, N. (2022) ‘The exigencies of the necropolitical: rehearsing livability through feminist performative storytelling’, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 32(3), pp. 289–305. doi: 10.1080/0740770X.2022.2360786.

Abstract: In this audio-textual performance woven as an Armenian fairy tale from ethnographic research, poetry, and songs, I employ the performative as part of a feminist aesthetic and pedagogical praxis. Through this feminist performative storytelling I affectively study and mourn the immobilizing effects of the densely interconnected processes of death-making whether it be through colonization, ecological extraction, militarization and war, or sex-selective abortions. Drawing on transnational feminist knowledge, I suture life-sustaining moments of respite and healing, however transient and quick, into this protracted study and mourning to practice living in the wake of ongoing catastrophes and crises.

Rowland, A. L. (2017) ‘Zoetropes: Turning Fetuses into Humans at the National Memorial for the Unborn’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 47(1), pp. 26–48. doi: 10.1080/02773945.2016.1238105.

Abstract: This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood.

Scaramuzzo, P. (2026) ‘Silence as erasure: incorporating party-and-play (PnP) and hookup app education into queered health curriculum’, International Journal of LGBTQ+ Youth Studies, pp. 1–18. doi: 10.1080/29968992.2026.2657861.

Abstract: The opioid and stimulant overdose crisis has increasingly intersected with queer sexual cultures, particularly through party-and-play (PnP) practices embedded within hookup, dating, and companionship apps (HUDCAs). While public health research has documented elevated risks associated with app-mediated, substance-involved sex, health education in secondary schooling has largely failed to address these realities. This conceptual article examines how curricular silence around HUDCAs and PnP functions as structural erasure, rendering queer adolescent youth – especially BIPOC queer youth – hyper-visible in risk surveillance yet invisible in curricular care. Drawing on Foucauldian analyses of power and silence, queer theory (QT), and critical race theory (CRT), the article argues that omission operates as a biopolitical mechanism that displaces sexual learning into unstructured digital spaces without guidance or harm-reduction support. Through historical parallels with HIV/AIDS education, the analysis demonstrates that educational discomfort has often preceded survivability-oriented intervention. The article concludes by proposing a queered, harm-reduction-centered framework for secondary school health education that integrates HUDCA literacy, PnP-informed harm reduction, and attention to racialized inequities, reframing education as anticipatory preparation rather than abandonment.

Agathangelou, A. M. and Killian, K. D. (2006) ‘Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement’, Globalizations, 3(4), pp. 459–483. doi: 10.1080/14747730601022453.

Abstract: Poetics, as an epistemological approach, articulates alternative imaginaries to those proffered by the neoliberal world order. With a long history of drawing upon various sites to further its aims (e.g. the academy, the international studies association, political parties, the state), the neoliberal world order has used its epistemologies to constitute a hegemony emphasizing the state as the primary actor of political life. Feminists and scholars in postcolonial IR, black studies, and ethnic studies have challenged this idea, arguing that there are differential epistemological economies in world politics. Larger questions at stake in these different sites/cites include self and collective knowledge of marginal peoples and the envisioning of alternative, oppositional histories of decolonization, struggle and contestation. Traditional disciplinary boundaries become sites/cites of contestation about the forging and making of alternatives as academics, grassroots organizers, and activists, through poetics, work together to creatively engage questions of economies, power, history, and subject-formations.

Bretherton, L. (2021) ‘Political Theology, Radical Democracy, and Virtue Ethics; or Alasdair MacIntyre and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Consciousness’, Political Theology, 22(7), pp. 627–649. doi: 10.1080/1462317X.2020.1867406.

Abstract: This essay analyses three concerns that arise at the intersection of ethics and politics through situating the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly his conception of the relationship between Christianity and Marxism, in the context of debates in the British New Left and drawing parallels and connections between these debates and the work of C. L. R. James and Black Marxism. The first concern is the modern suspension of ethics in the name of politics. The second is the relationship between structural and personal transformation. The third is how forms of social life exceed, but are always under pressure from, existing forms of political economy and how this concern shapes articulations of political agency outside of statist and property-based understandings of citizenship. I contend that addressing these concerns is a background condition for the emergence of a revolutionary consciousness.

Stojnić, A. (2017) ‘Only Cyborgs and Cockroaches’, Performance Research, 22(2), pp. 123–128. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2017.1315991.

Abstract: In 2013 a cyborg-cockroach which was advertised as “RoboRoach, the world's first commercially available cyborg” appeared at the market. RoboRoach is a live cockroach whose moves can be remotely controlled via a smartphone app, thanks to the electronic device that has been surgically applied to its body. It was promoted as a “science kit” for children. Two years later cyborg cockroach gained a completely new role. Teams of researchers, engineers and entomologists form renowned universities have been testing their possibilities to access areas that are difficult for humans to reach such as earthquake sites or nuclear disaster zones. From the smart toy, cyborg-cockroaches advanced to the rescue squads that could, for instance, be navigated to record and find human life in disaster zones. However, we can easily imagine, I will argue here, that the next (if not already present) iteration of the cyborg-cockroach will be for military purposes abused in the war machine, as well as another symptom of the mode of governmentality that Gilles Deleuze has defined as “the society of control”. Relating to the question of “turning animal” the above mentioned example offers the opportunity to investigate the unstable relations and problematic distinctions between humans, animals and machines, through the concept of cyborg. Here, I would like to introduce a decolonial perspective as well as the topic of necropolitics, into post-humanist debate, in order to question who has the position (the privilege?) to proclaim “the human” as obsolete and what is the politics that is revealed in such a theoretical and practical move. Who can turn the cockroach into remotely controlled cyborg and what does this “turning into” mean for humans and non humans alike?

K’Akumu, O. A. (2025) ‘Could the State Benefit from Aristophanic Comic Relief? Philosophical Perspectives on Carnal Politics in Postcolonial Uganda’, Journal of Homosexuality, 72(12), pp. 2441–2465. doi: 10.1080/00918369.2024.2431269.

Abstract: This article is a critical analysis of the anti-homosexuality legislation in Uganda, a state in East Africa. It primarily uses Plato’s political philosophy as expressed in Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium. Using the Aristophanic viewpoint, the study derived six analytical concepts that structure its findings, discussion and conclusion. These are: the origin and fall of man; all sexual orientations are valid whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; sexual cravings are natural phenomena whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; law encumbers natural feelings of love and should not be used to prohibit any aspect of sexual orientation; homosexual (man-man) relations generate greater political benefits than the rest; scientific knowledge can be used to justify Aristophanes mythological explanations of sexual orientation. These concepts have been transformed into analytical questions in the study regarding the morality, naturality and legality of homosexuality in Uganda. This has led to several conclusions: All sexual orientations are valid whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; Sexual cravings are natural phenomena whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; and Law encumbers natural feelings of love and should not be used to prohibit any aspect of sexual orientation.

Pavan Kumar, M. (2012) ‘“Pulp Orientalism”: Endosmotic banality, terra necro and “splintered” subjects in Dan Fesperman’s The Warlord’s Son ’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48(3), pp. 265–277. doi: 10.1080/17449855.2012.678710. Abstract: This essay draws attention to the much-neglected arena of Orientalism in pulp fiction. Although Orientalism in popular culture has received considerable attention, it is restricted to the representations of the Orient in science fiction, television, electronic media and Hollywood films. Following 9/11, pulp literature has emerged with a renewed force in American hard-boiled fiction, specifically in the genre of the “literary thriller” and the “international political thriller”. Unlike the Orientalism in canonic fiction, pulp Orientalism forges an endosmotic “style” of civilizational Othering by reducing Oriental topographies into death worlds (terra necro), while depicting its subjects as splintered, unstable and mutable. Drawing on the writings of Robert Irwin and Achille Mbembe, this essay attempts a conceptual exposition of pulp Orientalism through Dan Fesperman’s The Warlord’s Son.

Dasgupta, R. K. and Mahn, C. (2023) ‘Between visibility and elsewhere: South Asian queer creative cultures and resistance’, South Asian Diaspora, 15(1), pp. 1–16. doi: 10.1080/19438192.2022.2164429.

Abstract: This article draws on existing interviews and creative material from LGBTQ + South Asians who have lived and spent significant time in the UK as part of the Cross Border Queers project. It begins by considering creative forms of diasporic activism and creativity in the UK that have emerged from South Asian LGBTQ + communities and individuals. We discuss the ways in which South Asian LGBTQ + diasporic organising was formed through a sense of shared racial and class solidarity and especially under the umbrella of political Blackness. We then move on to the role played by cultural activism to see how artists have used culture as a way to advance social change and increase the visibility of South Asian LGBTQ + communities in the UK. We place different genres of visual culture, curation, performance and oral history to evoke how South Asian queer migrants articulate a distinct form of subjectivity and aesthetic practice.

Motyl, K. and Arghavan, M. (2018) ‘Writing against neocolonial necropolitics: literary responses by Iraqi/Arab writers to the US ‘War on Terror’’, European Journal of English Studies, 22(2), pp. 128–141. doi: 10.1080/13825577.2018.1478256.

Abstract: This essay demonstrates that texts by Iraqi/Arab writers conceive the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as an assault on both biological and cultural life. It argues that in occupied Iraq, the very act of writing constitutes a performative survival of neocolonial necropolitics. Thus, Philip Metres’ abu ghraib arias employs visual poetry to bear witness to the suffering of Iraqi civilians subjected to torture at Abu Ghraib prison, by rendering visible what was repressed owing to trauma or silenced in the official investigation. Meanwhile, other literary works express distress about the destruction of Iraq’s cultural archive, since the arts have constituted a precious repository of Iraqi self-knowledge and spiritual nourishment throughout the country’s history of foreign domination and political tyranny. Reflecting on the bomb attack on Baghdad’s ‘Street of the Booksellers’ in 2007, poet Dunya Mikhail delivers a powerful invocation of literature’s longevity even after its material manifestations have been erased. Sinan Antoon’s novel The Corpse Washer (2013) highlights the ubiquity of death in post-2003 Iraq and its paralysing effect on the creative faculties as it tells the story of Jawad, an aspiring sculptor who gives up his artistic ambitions to follow in his father’s footsteps as a corpse washer.

Hall, J. (2015) ‘Shared sorrow, shared abundance: Water-waste flows in Palestinian literature†’, Postcolonial Studies, 18(3), pp. 257–278. doi: 10.1080/13688790.2015.1105124.

Abstract: News following the 2014 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip warned of the possibly catastrophic costs to Palestinians facing a clean water shortage. This article will argue that within the context of the occupation of the Palestinian territories, literary representations of water and waste are bound up in justifications for and resistance to the Israeli state's exercise of necropolitical power. Representing water and, particularly, polluted water is vexed by questions of who is responsible for the management of water and the production of waste versus who is responsible for the inability, often exacerbated by water shortages, to remediate this waste. This article will examine how these questions are answered by one Israeli and three Palestinian contemporary authors: David Grossman, Anton Shammas, Sahar Khalifeh, and Taha Muhammad Ali.

McLean, K. (2011) ‘The biopolitics of needle exchange in the United States’, Critical Public Health, 21(1), pp. 71–79. doi: 10.1080/09581591003653124.

Abstract: Needle exchange began in the United States as a fragmented and illegal practice initiated by actors at the grassroots level; since the late 1980s, needle exchange has achieved increasing yet variable levels of institutional support across the country, receiving official sanction and funding from state and municipal governments. In turn, the practice(s) and discourse(s) of needle exchange have shifted significantly in many locales, becoming the purview of professional administration that advocates needle exchange as a necessary public health measure. This article is interested in the ways in which needle exchange has become implicated in and appropriated by networks of power seeking to discipline and regulate injection drug use. Drawing theoretically on Michel Foucault’s writings concerning biopower and governmentality, it will examine the proliferation of discourses, knowledges, and rules surrounding needle exchange in the United States. At the same time, this article will avoid a characterization of needle exchange that envisions the unilateral control of drug users by governmental power, illuminating instead both its negative and productive effects for drug users. Namely, it will explore how needle exchange creates both subjects of interest and subjects of resistance among drug users – that is to say, the governmentalization of needle exchange and its ‘clients’.

Nyberg Sørensen, N. and Huttunen, L. (2022) ‘Missing Migrants and the Politics of Disappearance in Armed Conflicts and Migratory Contexts’, Ethnos, 87(2), pp. 321–337. doi: 10.1080/00141844.2019.1697333. Abstract: In this article we set out to understand the issue of enforced or involuntary disappearance in two seemingly different situations: the missing persons produced by armed conflict and the missing migrants resulting from increasingly rigid migration policies focused on deterrence. Empirical examples from the Guatemalan and Bosnian genocides and from contemporary illegalised migration flows from Guatemala to North America and across the Mediterranean are provided. Special attention is given to differences and continuities in who the affected people and communities are, the politics behind their disappearances, and the use of biometric technologies across the cases presented. Contrary to criticism often voiced in relation to the use of biometric technologies for migration control purposes, forensic techniques are embraced almost unanimously by people searching for relatives who have disappeared in both conflict and migration situations.

Varley, E. (2019) ‘Monsoons and medicine: the biopolitics of crisis and state indifference in Gilgit-Baltistan’, South Asian History and Culture, 10(1), pp. 78–96. doi: 10.1080/19472498.2019.1576306.

Abstract: Through the medium of a hospital ethnography, this paper explores the debilitating impacts of the 2010 monsoon floods on Gilgit-Baltistan’s public health sector, and interrogates how its escalating harms coalesced with long-standing state neglects to generate medical precarity and loss, and spark debate concerning Pakistan’s responsiveness and commitments to this politically marginalized and remote region. In Gilgit Town, the region’s administrative capital, the state’s failure to adequately prepare for and offset the floods’ direct and indirect effects had catastrophic consequences for public sector hospitals, where healthcare providers worked without sufficient resources, treatment options were greatly diminished, and patients experienced significantly higher risks and worsened health outcomes. In providing ethnographic snapshots of the ways that the floods and disaster-related governance gaps shaped service provision at the region’s primary referral hospital, the paper centralizes healthcare providers’ accounts of the inadequacy of Pakistan’s response to the crisis, and their claims that the state’s failure to protect them from the floods’ worst effects was symptomatic of its historic lack of care for Gilgit-Baltistan and its peoples.

Sylvester, O. and Clark, A. (2025) ‘Pura vida for who? Slow violence against Indigenous land defenders in Costa Rica’, Local Environment, pp. 1–20. doi: 10.1080/13549839.2025.2596712.

Abstract: Land defense research has largely focused on direct violence – visible, immediate acts of aggression – while neglecting slow violence, an insidious form of harm that is gradual, cumulative, and often invisible. In Costa Rica, Indigenous land defenders have faced threats and assassinations, yet global narratives often overlook Costa Rica, in part because slow violence is hard to track and quantify and this violence is often overshadowed by the widespread promotion of the country’s support for human rights. This study examines slow violence against Indigenous land defenders in Costa Rica, arguing that it is both a distinct form of violence and a condition that increases vulnerability to direct attacks. Using qualitative methods, including document analysis and interviews with Indigenous land defenders, we examined how state inaction and structural racism perpetuate harm. Our findings show that only parts of Indigenous territories are officially recognised, and even those face ongoing settler occupation unaddressed by the state. Despite clear national laws and international obligations, the Costa Rican state has failed to protect Indigenous rights to autonomous governance, has ignored contamination and extraction on their lands, and has established biodiversity protection areas on stolen land. We argue that this slow violence sustains the myth of Costa Rican exceptionalism, masking the real threats faced by Indigenous defenders and undermining efforts to safeguard their rights. These findings can be used to confront the underlying systemic racism that perpetuates violent colonial legacies, facilitates direct violence, and limits Indigenous rights and autonomy.

McCarthy, G. (2010) ‘The climate change metanarrative, state of exception and China’s modernisation’, Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, 6(2), pp. 252–266. doi: 10.1080/19480881.2010.536675.

Abstract: Part one will argue that the climate change discourse has all the hallmarks of a new metanarrative. However, the emergence of this metanarrative was in contradiction to neoliberal theory of the environment. Therefore, in an effort to reconcile the two metanarratives, an economic discourse emerged that conceptualised climate change with the neoliberal market model. The economic merging of climate change and the market discourses proved politically unsustainable, as was evident at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. Part two places the contradictions between the climate change-come-neoliberal metanarrative into a global political context, arguing that neoliberalism has so marginalised many developing countries that their sovereignty is in question, with a state of exception always in play. As such, they are highly vulnerable to any global climate change solution imposed by the corporate market on them. Lastly, the paper will argue that China is unique in its response to climate change. It is a rapidly developing state with a unique history of modernisation that places it in a position to use non-market means to address climate change. What limits the Chinese state from doing so is the political instability that this would cause to the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy built on socialist–capitalist modernisation and by the vested interests tied to economic growth.

Benavides, A. (2022) ‘Spiritual Mining: Augustinian Images of Extraction in Colonial Peru’, The Art Bulletin, 104(4), pp. 46–69. doi: 10.1080/00043079.2022.2070393.

Abstract: Prints and paintings that celebrate the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity can be perceived as “spiritual mining” in light of an underlying extractive ethos that structured the colonial enterprise. This article discusses seventeenth-century artworks commissioned by the Augustinian Order in Peru, which equated evangelization with the mining of precious minerals. Analysis of the artworks paired with a close historical reading of the book of Job identifies an agenda that objectifies Indigenous souls as treasure in order to normalize gestational events in global capitalism—the extraction of mineral resources from American lands and exploitation of Indigenous labor.

Barac, M. (2007) ‘Transit Spaces: Thinking Urban Change in South Africa’, Home Cultures, 4(2), pp. 147–176. doi: 10.2752/174063107X209000.

Abstract: This work looks at aspects of urban development in post-apartheid South Africa. It concerns the tension between the symbolic town, represented by the “Rainbow Nation,” and the practical town: a topography conceived as a plan of action. Located in Khayelitsha township at Cape Town's metropolitan periphery, Victoria Mxenge's shack settlement provides an informal silhouette against which the journey from apartheid to the “Rainbow Nation” is staged. Understanding change on this scale and of this nature entails deciphering the city's transformational urban order. This task demands that we situate individual endeavors within a common world. As a reciprocity anchored to place, such a dialogue is most explicitly played out between the home and the town, between self and city. Domestic visual culture often appears to be at odds with official policies and professional practices that administer urban transformation. This research draws on field studies that have tracked changes to the environment at the scale of a neighborhood block, and in particular the concern for public space at the recently completed Bangiso Tandazo Link project. Conceived as a sign of change and a vehicle for its delivery, this “transit space” frames the larger question of the urban future: the prospect of a topography connecting township to town.

Pezzullo, P. C. (2024) ‘On Environmental Communication as a Care Discipline’, Environmental Communication, 18(1–2), pp. 1–7. doi: 10.1080/17524032.2023.2300361.

Abstract: This is a Special Issue opening essay. The theme of the Special Issue is Care, edited by the author in the inaugural issue of her three-year editorship of the journal. The author furthers her argument for redefining the field of environmental communication as not just a crisis discipline, but also a care discipline. She addresses limitations and possibilities of care as an ethic and discourse today. In conclusion, she turns attention to the aspirations of her editorship, this issue, and invites more research that reflects on the ethical considerations of the field.

Ahluwalia, P. (2004) ‘Empire or Imperialism: Implications for a “New” politics of resistance’, Social Identities, 10(5), pp. 629–645. doi: 10.1080/1350463042000294278.

Abstract: Globalisation raises questions about the capacity of the nation-state to function within the national interest. Hardt and Negri argue that nation-state sovereignty is in decline and that Empire -- a new supranational and deterritorialising form of sovereignty -- has superseded it. The question then arises, where does sovereignty reside if it is no longer existent within the nation-state. It is here that post-colonial theory may well provide insights as post-colonial subjects have had to confront these issues. The following questions are explored through a critical engagement with recent social theory. What is the relationship between the biological and political body within such a context? Furthermore, what are the implications of this for a politics of resistance?

Abstract: This article examines the challenges and opportunities of teaching an online university seminar on Death Rituals in the midst of several domestic and global crises, including: the COVID-19 pandemic; the massive uprising for Black Lives and against police homicides of unarmed Black individuals; and the climate crisis. In light of these ongoing emergencies, as well as increased cultural attention to their structural intersections, this article makes the case for radical inter and trans disciplinarity when teaching about death and dying. Specifically, the article calls for incorporating death positive and anti-racist pedagogies, while also making space for grief and ritual on both experiential and theoretical levels. The article first provides an overview of the dominant disciplinary frameworks for teaching about death and dying, followed by a description of the author’s personal stakes as well as the political context of the course. Next is a summary of the author’s guiding pedagogical, theoretical, and philosophical frameworks, with examples of how they were operationalized in the course’s design and delivery. The article concludes with a reflexive assessment of this class and provides suggestions for future teaching in death and dying.

Citation: Lerum, K. A. (2021) ‘Teaching death ritual during states of emergency: Centering death positivity, anti-racism, grief, & ritual’, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 20(1), pp. 40–62. doi: 10.1080/15505170.2021.1964114.

Monahan, T. (2015) ‘The Right to Hide? Anti-Surveillance Camouflage and the Aestheticization of Resistance’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 12(2), pp. 159–178. doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1006646.

Abstract: There has been a recent surge in artistic designs to conceal oneself from ambient surveillance in public places. These center on the masking of identity to undermine technological efforts to fix someone as a unique entity apart from the crowd. Ranging from fractal face paint and hairstyles, to realistic resin masks, to reflective underwear, anti-surveillance camouflage ostensibly allows people to hide in plain sight. These designs, however, enact an aestheticization of resistance premised on individual avoidance rather than meaningful challenge to the violent and discriminatory logics of surveillance societies.

Isaac, R. K. and Hall, M. C. (2025) ‘Resistance to settler colonialism in Palestine through tourism: the case of Kairos ‘Come and See’, Palestine’, Settler Colonial Studies, 15(4), pp. 706–725. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2025.2485532.

Abstract: Settler colonialism has been theorised as a form of oppression and domination distinct from other colonisation and imperialism processes. This paper aims to deconstruct settler colonialism domination by illuminating both the power of oppression and the power of resistance in Palestine and in the establishment by Israel of settler colonial tourismscapes. Building on Foucault’s examination of power and resistance, settler colonialism is theorised as a disciplinary, bio-power, and sovereign power, and the paper explores how different stakeholders resist the dominant settler discourse in a tourism context. Theoretically, this study contributes to understanding settler colonialism and tourism through the lens of power and resistance. The outcomes of the study find that Israel has contributed to the reorganisation of Palestine as a Jewish homeland and suppress stories of colonial brutality and oppression while selling imaginary geographies that normalise the presence of Jewish settlers in Palestine. Findings also shed some light on how Palestinian tourism initiatives, such as the Kairos Palestine in Bethlehem, produce spaces of constructed Palestinian visibility through tourism. This initiative highlights how alternative tours through the ‘Come and See’ experience might contribute to the re-articulation and reordering of venues, thereby forming a counter-discourse and resistance.

Bartley, S. (2017) ‘Hard labour and punitive welfare: the unemployed body at work in participatory performance’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 22(1), pp. 62–75. doi: 10.1080/13569783.2016.1263559.

Abstract: This article addresses the performance of labour in participatory arts projects and considers the implications of such activity on perceptions of the unemployed in the UK. Utilising a combination of biopolitical and necropolitical understandings of governance and drawing on two examples of theatre practice, Tangled Feet’s One Million (2013) and Helix Arts' MindFULL (2013), I propose that participatory performance deploys bodily strategies to disrupt the construction of the unemployed in political rhetoric. As such, in a context of austerity, I argue this arts practice can function to support the agency of participants in challenging policy and seeking to re-establish the status of subjecthood to their precarious bodies. Additionally, I posit that specificities of the unemployed as a participant group illuminate broader complexities around value exchange within participatory arts practice.

Rodríguez, L. C. (2020) ‘Inappropriate/d bodies: Reorganizing the terms of life and death’, Death Studies, 44(11), pp. 727–735. doi: 10.1080/07481187.2020.1771854.

Abstract: This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, (self-)reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts.

Willcock, S. (2019) ‘Guilt in the Archive: Photography and the Amritsar Massacre of 1919’, History of Photography, 43(1), pp. 47–59. doi: 10.1080/03087298.2019.1613791.

Abstract: What role should photographic evidence play in current debates about whether or not Britain should apologise for the historic crimes of empire? This article examines the photographs that emerged from the Amritsar Massacre of 13 April 1919, considering what such documents can tell us about the relationship between atrocity and the imperial project. Colonials working in both official and unofficial capacities turned to photography in their attempt to justify this bloody twentieth-century episode. Such photography addressed colonial debates concerning the scope of moral and legal, individual and collective, and British and Indian culpability for the Massacre. It is therefore important that we attend to such visual evidence at the Massacre’s centenary, as the United Kingdom is urged to apologise for the infamous slaughter of Indian men, women, and children.

Mavengano, E. (2026) ‘‘And now we are sisters’: fracture, trauma and the limits of female solidarity in On Black Sisters’ Street’, African Identities, pp. 1–13. doi: 10.1080/14725843.2026.2650399.

Abstract: In Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, African women confront the harsh realities of transnational sex work, forming fleeting connections in a world that continues to deny their presence. This study examines the novel’s nuanced inscriptions of trauma, fractured intimacies and the precarious solidarity that forms even amid systems of exploitation. I draw primarily on Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory while engaging Judith Butler’s notions of precarity and (un)grievable lives alongside African feminist epistemologies to analyse the intersecting structures of racial abjection, sexism, neoliberal class exploitation and restrictive migration regimes that shape the protagonists’ lives within transnational sites of disposability and erasure. I argue that the author strategically employs the narrative of abjection to present an intricate ethical terrain in which ambivalent, sometimes troubled, female bonds are formed within the claustrophobic, surveilled confines of transnational spaces. Although these alliances are profoundly fractured, they signify an essential yet fragile possibility of sisterhood created within zones of neglect, violence and anguish. Unigwe employs a non-linear plot, deferred memory and an affective lexicon of suffering to engender a radical narrative politics attentive to brokenness. I interpret the motifs of self-naming, migration and self-mourning as forms of feminist resistance to oppressive structures. This study therefore demonstrates that the novel depicts female bonding as a hard-won resource that enables survival and concurrently asserts an insurgent, transformative politics of becoming. From trauma’s fractures, the pulse of sisterhood flickers into view in Unigwe’s work.

Jones, M. (2013) ‘Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township’, Safundi, 14(2), pp. 209–224. doi: 10.1080/17533171.2013.776749.

Abstract: The paper limns modes of consumption and wastefulness in recent South African fiction about the township. It draws upon moves of aspiration and carelessness articulated in the youth practice I’khothane to think through the ways in which conspicuous destruction around car-use maps onto township socialities. Accordingly, it compares Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood and David Dinwoodie-Irving’s African Cookboy as texts utilizing scenes of consumption and destruction with a variety of effects. While commodity ownership and disposal enunciate identities that can unsettle the status quo, the article argues that aspiration alone cannot provide resources with which to shift structural inequalities persisting in South African cities.

Orum Hernández, G. and Barcelos, C. (2023) ‘Queer punishments: School safety and youth of color in the United States’, Equity & Excellence in Education, 56(1–2), pp. 87–99. doi: 10.1080/10665684.2022.2159897.

Abstract: Although educational research and policymaking in the United States has generally framed LGBTQ youth and youth of color as mutually exclusive groups, LGBTQ youth of color are increasingly included in discourses surrounding school safety. These discourses tend to position youth as vulnerable, at-risk subjects who are passive victims of interpersonal homophobia. Using the theoretical frameworks queer of color critique and queer necropolitics, and a situational analysis mapping strategy, we analyzed GLSEN’s 2019 National School Climate Survey report, breakout reports on LGBTQ youth of color, and related advocacy efforts. These frameworks helped us consider how school climate research and policymaking relies on carceral logics that center and uphold whiteness. The GLSEN reports function as a form of embedded science that mobilizes individual understandings of violence and queer investments in punishment. We offer queer of color critique as a strategy for researchers and policymakers to get unstuck on school safety.

Dingli, S. and Purewal, N. (2018) ‘Gendering (in)security: interrogating security logics within states of exception’, Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 3(2), pp. 153–163. doi: 10.1080/23802014.2018.1510295.

Abstract: This collection contributes to debates, which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. However, rather than focusing on the terms of the debate, it foregrounds the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, paying particular attention to the ‘state of exception’ and similar frameworks. In doing so, contributors to this collection trouble the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neo-colonial contexts, it provides an approach, which allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analyses of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation.

Kasim, M. (2025) ‘Demographic engineering and identity erasure: China’s securitization of the Uyghur population’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, pp. 1–21. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2025.2580516.

Abstract: This article analyses China’s governance of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as a case of demographic engineering, understood as a set of state-directed measures that reshape the reproductive, cultural, and spatial continuity of a population. Drawing on theories of biopolitics (Foucault), necropolitics (Mbembe), and securitization, the paper interprets a coordinated strategy of birth suppression, child separation, linguistic assimilation, and demographic restructuring. Using a qualitative case study design, it triangulates official statistics, state discourse, and international reports to map how these practices operate. The analysis demonstrates that the dismantling of Uyghur group continuity aligns with patterns identified in genocide scholarship, with some measures corresponding to acts listed in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. The article contributes conceptually by showing how modern authoritarian regimes employ technocratic and demographic instruments to preempt resistance and transform social identity, expanding theoretical debates on repression, population management, and slow forms of group destruction. 0

Lewicki, A. (2017) ‘‘The dead are coming’: acts of citizenship at Europe’s borders’, Citizenship Studies, 21(3), pp. 275–290. doi: 10.1080/13621025.2016.1252717.

Abstract: This article combines the research agenda of the acts of citizenship literature with reflections on emancipatory theatre. I examine the Centre for Political Beauty’s activity-based artwork ‘The dead are coming’ which problematizes the cruelties of the European border regime in symbolically charged spaces in the German public. Focusing particularly on the roles available to ‘actors’ and ‘spectators’, and the directionality of the message conveyed through the artwork, I examine how the performance subverts the ‘sites’ and ‘scales’ of citizenship. My analysis indicates that the artwork’s subversive potential emerges not only from the political vision conveyed by the artist collective, but also from the way in which others become involved in the performance. Acts of political beauty thus most extensively challenge instituted citizenship’s orientalist anchoring, reverse status-based role allocations and subvert the structural violence of borders when the performance enables the enactment of novel forms of political agency and solidarity.

Ghazal Aswad, N. (2024) ‘Unsafe Homecoming: Unraveling Environmental Injustice and Land Dispossession in the Syrian Refugee Crisis’, Environmental Communication, 18(1–2), pp. 35–42. doi: 10.1080/17524032.2023.2296831.

Abstract: This paper attends to the Syrian refugee crisis to argue that land dispossession is not only a political and humanitarian phenomenon, but one that cuts to the core of how we inhabit, experience, and belong on the land. Amid the forced repatriation of Syrian refugees to their country, activists used the hashtag #SyriaNotSafe to raise awareness about the detentions, disappearances, and torture of returnees. Beyond the immediate political persecution of refugees, this paper argues for crafting networked cultures of care attentive to the toxic environmental legacies of the Syrian conflict. Cultures of care must be sensitive to the affective relationships of interdependence between Syrians and their local ecosystems forged during the lifetime of revolutionary struggle. By shedding light on the toxicity of war, the weaponization of the environment, and the deliberate land dispossession by the Assad regime, the ability of Syrians to constitute acts of resistance in sympoiesis or “making with” the land is impacted. If we are to unite in acts of care for refugees, we must resist the inclination to imagine the necropolitical cultures in which we live as somehow distinct from the imperative for environmental justice and the ability to survive and thrive with the land.

Marchal, J. A. (2014) ‘Bio-necro-biblio-politics? Restaging feminist intersections and queer exceptions’, Culture and Religion, 15(2), pp. 166–176. doi: 10.1080/14755610.2014.911036.

Abstract: This response to Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) proposes that, although it might seem a bit far afield for scholars within biblical studies, a range of conceptual interventions from this work could make striking contributions to this sub-discipline. Through further interaction with both exceptionalisms and intersectionalities, this response demonstrates the way that feminist, postcolonial and queer interrogations of biblical argumentation can also intervene, extend or reorient practices within cultural studies. The recurrence of exceptionalism reframes religious groups’ claims to openness, while concerns over the deployment of intersectionality enable critical reflections on interdisciplinary projects such as religious studies and biblical studies as disciplines.

Scheer, S. et al. (2026) ‘Living in Stand-by Mode While Constructing Lived Citizenship’, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1080/15562948.2026.2665108.

Abstract: Refugee women can encounter a range of challenges in their new countries, including limited access to health services, education, and employment opportunities, factors that significantly shape and limit everyday lives and opportunities for social participation. This study aims to understand health and social participation in everyday life through dialogue with refugee women and the local organizations addressing applying an intersectional lens. Grounded in an intersectional framework, the study utilized a modified story dialogical method for the workshops. The findings are organized into three key themes: a) Importance of trust and solidarity in the women’s everyday, b) Experiencing othering – the pain of not being welcomed and c) “Stand-by mode”. The findings underscore how multiple intersectional dimensions, including legal status, socioeconomic position, ethnicity, and migration trajectories, interplay to determine whether participation in and access to health, work, and education are possible or not. Solidarity practices, emerge as strategies for navigating and resisting structural and systemic barriers.

Bhungalia, L. (2012) ‘Im/Mobilities in a ‘Hostile Territory’: Managing the Red Line’, Geopolitics, 17(2), pp. 256–275. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2011.554462.

Abstract: This article examines the biopolitical dimensions of conflict manifest in Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Exploring a managed relation between life and death largely unaddressed in Foucault’s conception of biopower, it contends that Israel’s “disengagement” can be seen as a more sophisticated, flexible form of engagement that does not disinvest in or abandon life, but actively regulates it. Close analysis of emerging tactics of population control in Gaza illustrate that neither a “pure” politics of life or death emerges; rather, a more complex management of the two is achieved through the modulation of crucial life-sustaining and life-eliminating flows into and out of the territory. This paper links biopolitical practices of mobility regulation to the ways in which life is enabled, constrained and denied for those in a territory designated as “hostile.” Thus, it directly connects the biopolitical dimensions of conflict to territory and the geopolitical violences of territoriality.

Jones, E. (2018) ‘A Posthuman-Xenofeminist Analysis of the Discourse on Autonomous Weapons Systems and Other Killing Machines’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 44(1), pp. 93–118. doi: 10.1080/13200968.2018.1465333.

Abstract: In this article, I critique the current debates surrounding autonomous weapons systems, using feminist posthuman theory to make sense of such systems – and the relation between human and machine – in terms of automation and autonomy. The dominant narratives about autonomous weapons tend to present them as exceptional; they are distinct from all the other kinds of human inventions that can kill. Further attention is required, not on autonomous weapons themselves but on the delegation of killing to a far broader range of technologies across the human–machine/autonomous–automated spectrum. While current attempts at legal regulation distinguish between civil and military technologies, such a distinction becomes impossible in light of the links between civil and military technologies and the killing potential of many technologies, including artificial intelligence.