Biopolitics Today

3-0-9 units · Graduate

Examines the concept of biopolitics and its contemporary impacts on the study of science and technology. Readings draw from, and place in conversation, an interdisciplinary set of literatures on the politics of qualification, quantification, observation, and standardization of human life. Studies the emergence of biopolitics as an object of theory, arguments around its analytic salience, and its possible potential as an application of critique for STS today. Topics survey nodes of biopolitics — such as bodies, difference, citizenship, security, and territory — and evaluate these areas in relation to contemporary modes of governance, correction, inscription, and exclusion.