Biopolitics & the Body: Life, Power, Knowledge

(Cross-listed as STS 152.) Theories and ethnographies of biopolitics and biopower. What happens when biological life (including that of humans) becomes a site for power and management? Reading of conceptual and ethnographic texts at the intersection of science, medicine, the state, and capital. Topics include neoliberal governmentality, hegemony of interventionist biotechnologies, bioethics, biosecurity and management of risk, biocapitalism, necropolitics, logics of social abandonment and disposability, political rights, and projects of biological and social enhancement.